The Fearsome Firebird

by Lauren Oliver

  The only trouble came when Gil Kestrel wheeled out the famous Firebird for its inaugural performance. Pippa held her breath as the bird was uncovered and sat preening, seemingly unconscious of its audience, in the middle of the spotlight.

  “Behold.” Mr. Dumfrey’s voice resonated from a concealed portion of the backstage. “The one, the only, the last remaining bird of its species: Aviraris igneous, the Ethiopian Black-Billed Firebird!”

  The audience gasped as the bird raised its head and shook out its feathers, revealing more fully its remarkable plumage and colorful tail and the dark eyes that appeared to be staring sharply at everyone and everything in turn. Even Pippa found that she was holding her breath—the bird did look remarkable, like something out of an old fairy tale.

  Later, Pippa could not have said where Freckles came from. One second he wasn’t there and the Firebird was basking in the warm glow of the audience’s attention; the next second, the white furball was darting across the stage, fangs bared, claws extended, hissing.

  “No, Freckles, no!” Mr. Dumfrey shouted, plunging onto the stage, waving his arms frantically, as the audience roared with laughter and the Firebird began screeching bloody murder. “Stop him! Stop that beast!”

  “Oh, no you don’t.” Suddenly Lash appeared with a lasso circling overhead, expertly hooking Freckles around the tail and tugging the cat backward before he could reach the bird. Pippa exhaled as the Firebird, now squawking curses, was hauled quickly offstage, even as the audience shouted and clapped and stamped their feet, clearly believing that it was part of the show.

  Luckily, the performance got quickly back on track. Emily the Tattooed Wonder proved to be a sensation. Even Pippa was mesmerized by her presence, the way she glided silently into the spotlight, clutching her coat to her chin, and then in an instant disrobed—revealing nothing but a swimsuit and skin bursting with color. She did nothing but stand there and slowly revolve, and yet Pippa couldn’t tear her eyes away. It seemed to her that the vivid tattooed images were moving ever so slightly, that the horses might break free of Emily’s skin and gallop through the air and the fish might wriggle their way after them, that the American flag might start waving in the breeze and little George Washington might lay down his hatchet and start singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was beautiful and terrifying at once. When Emily retrieved her coat from the ground and put it back on, there was a sigh from the audience, and then a thunder of applause.

  “She’s a hit, a smash, an absolute triumph!” Mr. Dumfrey had materialized in the wings to watch Emily’s first performance, and he applauded loudly along with the audience. “I knew she would be. The crowd loves her.”

  Miss Fitch, who was watching, too, only sniffed. “Not much to it,” she said, and Pippa wondered whether the coolness of her attitude had anything to do with the fact that earlier, Lash had complimented Emily on the very realistic depiction of a rodeo cowboy riding a bucking bronco on her right forearm. “It’s practically indecent, if you ask me. A shame, too. She would have been a very pretty young woman. But now she’s painted up like an Easter egg.”

  “It’s the furthest thing from indecent,” Mr. Dumfrey said. “On the contrary. Her tattoos are highly educational. Have you looked closely at the scene pictured on her right shoulder? A magnificent depiction of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”

  Just then the albino twins took the stage, putting a firm end to the argument.

  After the performance, Pippa and Max scrubbed off their stage makeup and went to find Sam and Thomas. This was their opportunity to get to Sheepshead Bay and talk to Benny Mallett, and Pippa knew that they might very well be on their way to speak to a killer. But after coming face-to-face with Rattigan—twice—no killer could scare her.

  Rattigan was quite a different breed. He had made Pippa, Sam, Thomas, and Max into monsters—engineered them that way, worked them over in his laboratory like samples of experimental bacteria. But he was the real monster. Even now, she could sense him hovering somewhere just out of reach, like a person waiting backstage to make an entrance—taunting them, plotting his next move.

  But where was he? And what would he do next?

  There was still quite a crowd milling around the entry hall, many of them clustered around Emily, who was cheerfully signing autographs. Pippa spotted Rosie Bickers in the corner, near the giant stuffed Tasmanian emu, conversing earnestly with Mr. Dumfrey. Mr. Dumfrey had his arms around the Firebird cage, and every so often turned to coo in its direction, apparently trying to calm it after its disastrous appearance onstage. Judging from the way it screeched, flapped, and attempted to nip his nose off, he wasn’t having much success.

  Before they could make it to the door, Mr. Dumfrey turned and spotted them. “Sam! Thomas! Pippa! Max!” He jerked his chin toward the ceiling, and Pippa didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what it meant: in my office, now.

  “You know, that foul-tempered feather duster wasn’t part of the deal,” was the first thing Rosie said in Mr. Dumfrey’s office as he deposited the Firebird cage onto his desk with a heavy sigh.

  “Who you calling feather duster, scrub lug?” the bird screeched. He did have a point, Pippa thought: today, Rosie was wearing a blazer and a skirt that looked as if they’d been assembled from the kind of material used for scouring pots and pans.

  “He just needs a bit of training,” Sam said optimistically.

  Rosie jerked her chin in the children’s direction. “I never said yes to your kid wonders, either,” Rosie said. “I’m not here to play babysitter.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Max fired back, eyes flashing. “Well, we don’t need any help from a suited-up loudmouth like you, either.”

  Rosie turned to Max. Instead of seeming offended, she squinted at Max with renewed interest. “You don’t, do you?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “All right, Max, that’s enough,” Mr. Dumfrey said, even before Max could open her mouth. He was seated, as always, in his leather armchair. Rosie was perched on the edge of his desk, having shoved aside the full-scale replica skull of an adult habeascorpusaur, a dinosaur said to have existed all the way into the early Renaissance—at least, according to the sign that Mr. Dumfrey had written to accompany the model. “And Rosie, have some faith. I think you’ll find that information often comes from unexpected sources.”

  “So it does!” the Firebird crowed gleefully. “Pretty smart for a fat man!”

  Mr. Dumfrey rubbed his forehead. “I’m beginning to have fantasies,” he said wearily, “of a roasted bird for dinner. Not you, Cornelius,” he said, when Cornelius ruffled his feathers.

  That shut the Firebird up, at least temporarily.

  Rosie, obviously resigning herself to the children’s presence, removed her hat and gave her head a good scratching. “I did some digging. Turned up two locals who say your man Farnum wasn’t the last person to visit Erskine on the night he died.” She reached into her back pocket and produced a little notebook, like the kind Hardaway had his sergeants carry around for him. “Around ten thirty p.m.—give or take a quarter of an hour—a man slipped out the front door. Skinny, medium height, low-brimmed hat, scraggly mustache. Seemed jumpy.” She flipped closed the notebook and replaced it in a pocket.

  “Funny,” Pippa said slowly. The mention of the straggly mustache had set off alarm bells in her head. “That sounds kind of like the robber at the bank.”

  “What robber?” Rosie asked, and Pippa explained how she and the others had been witness to one of the recent bank robberies.

  “Bank robbery attempt,” Thomas clarified, swiveling around. He was standing in the corner next to Cornelius’s cage, pushing food pellets through the bars. “I got the money back, remember.”

  “Probably a coincidence,” Rosie said. “Lots of men have straggly mustaches. My second husband, for example. Looked like he had a clot of seaweed tacked to his upper lip. Half the time I was tempted to yank it clean off.”

  “Maybe,” Pippa said. But she wasn’
t convinced.

  Rattigan had been like a shadow, passing across their lives, darkening everything he touched. Could he be involved in Erskine’s death, too? But for what possible reason? It didn’t make any sense.

  “The cops will have to spring Farnum now.” Sam looked around the room hopefully. “We’ll prove Erskine was alive when he left. All we have to do is bring in your witnesses.”

  “Yeah, about that.” Rosie made a face. “Look, I’d trust my guys with my life. Never let me down and always give it to me straight. But the cops may not see it that way. One spent a few years in Sing Sing for forgery, and the other got called up for stealing apples off a grocery cart. It was Thanksgiving,” she added. “Nothing makes for a better pie than stolen apples.”

  Sam groaned. “Great,” he said. “Our star witnesses are a forger and a thief.”

  “Criminals!” the Firebird screeched. “Misfits! Losers!”

  Mr. Dumfrey hauled himself out of his chair, snatched a woven Navajo blanket from one of his many shelves, and tossed it unceremoniously over the Firebird’s cage, muffling the bird’s continued shrieks.

  “I’ve done more with less,” Rosie pointed out. “And if we go to trial, I’ll make sure everyone on the jury thinks those two men never leave church except to help old ladies across the street.”

  “We’re hoping it doesn’t come to that,” Mr. Dumfrey said, easing himself back into his chair. “Time is, unfortunately, not on General Farnum’s side. The sooner we can get him out, the better.” He turned to Pippa, his blue eyes bright behind his glasses, and Pippa had an uncomfortable shoving feeling deep in her mind, as if Mr. Dumfrey were trying to read her thoughts and not the other way around. Could that have been his secret talent, all those years ago? Was Mr. Dumfrey a mentalist, too? “Pippa, why don’t you tell Rosie Bickers what you found at Mr. Erskine’s apartment?”

  There was a moment of shocked silence, and for a second, Pippa was sure Mr. Dumfrey had read her thoughts. Thomas and Sam exchanged a look. Max busied herself carefully examining a pen cap she’d snatched from Dumfrey’s desk as if it were a precious artifact she’d never seen before.

  “We didn’t . . . ,” Pippa started. “I mean, why would you think we—?” She swallowed hard. “We’ve never even been to Chrystie Street.”

  “Philippa, please.” Mr. Dumfrey removed his glasses and set them down on his desk, leaning back in his chair with something approaching a smile. “I’ve known you since you were a child—I’ve known all of you, even if I lost track of our dear Mackenzie for a while.”

  Max made a face, no doubt because of the combination of dear and her full name.

  “You don’t think I know when you’ve been up to something?” Mr. Dumfrey continued. “The four of you have been skulking around and whispering in corners for days. It doesn’t take a brain like Monsieur Cabillaud’s to figure out you might have decided to help General Farnum on your own. Besides”—Mr. Dumfrey did smile now, and spread his hands widely—“you’ve just confirmed it.”

  Pippa’s face went hot. That, she thought, was Mr. Dumfrey’s true talent: even with no special magic, he always understood. Thomas nodded very slightly. She took a deep breath. “We did go to Ernie Erskine’s apartment,” she said. “We were looking for evidence.”

  Rosie crossed her arms. Pippa couldn’t tell if she looked mad or not. “How’d you get in? Didn’t the cops have a guard outside?”

  “Well, he was slightly . . . distracted,” Pippa said. She didn’t mention that Thomas had been the one to distract him by claiming to be searching for a fictional street address on the equally fictional Elmore Street and confusing the cop so entirely that by the end of the conversation he couldn’t even point in the direction of the East River. “And then Sam, um, noticed that the doorknob was broken.”

  “Things are often spontaneously breaking in Sam’s presence, I’ve found,” Mr. Dumfrey remarked.

  Rosie raised her eyebrows but said nothing. Pippa thought she looked ever so slightly impressed.

  Thomas cut in with the rest of the story: “We found boxes of a poison called Fleas-B-Gone. But all of the bottles were empty. Erskine must have been out of the poison.” He proceeded to explain about the threatening letter they’d found on the blotter, how Erskine had seemingly been interrupted in the middle of writing it, and how Sam had put together that Benny was Benny Mallett, who manufactured Fleas-B-Gone from his storefront in Sheepshead Bay.

  When he was finished, Rosie was silent for a moment.

  “Might be something to it,” she grunted at last, as if she didn’t like to admit it. “Got a full caseload and enough paperwork to start my own newspaper. I’ll get down to Sheepshead Bay when I can,” she added, rising from the desk and sticking her hat back on her head.

  “Actually,” Thomas said, scrunching his nose, “we were thinking of going to see Benny Mallett this afternoon.”

  Pippa held her breath. It was a gamble. Mr. Dumfrey had previously forbidden them from getting involved in police business, and he’d been touchier than ever since Rattigan had escaped their capture. Of course, even if he forbade them from seeing Mallett, they would go. Still, she didn’t like lying to Mr. Dumfrey.

  Rosie paused in the act of crossing to the door. She swiveled to face them again. “You may be extraordinary,” she said softly, “but it looks like your hearing is below average. I said I’ll handle it. Murder’s no business for children, extraordinary or not, and I won’t—”

  “Oh, let them go, Rosie,” Mr. Dumfrey said with a little sigh. “They’ll go anyway, whether we give our permission or not.”

  Rosie stood there for a moment, examining each of the children in turn. Pippa found she couldn’t even begin to make progress into Rosie’s mind. It was particularly well guarded—sharp and spiky and angular. Reading it was like trying to grab a porcupine bare-handed. She knew she should be offended by Rosie’s attitude—Rosie obviously didn’t think much of them—but she actually found Rosie’s blunt speech refreshing.

  “Fine,” she said at last. “But don’t expect me to come and clean up the mess if you make a bungle of things.” And with that, she turned and barreled out into the hall, moving like a linebacker with his gaze fixed on the end zone.

  As soon as the door had swung shut behind her, Mr. Dumfrey’s expression turned serious. He leaned forward, clasping his hands on the desk.

  “Rosie’s right about one thing,” he said. “As I’ve told you before, this isn’t a game. Mallett may be dangerous. He is dangerous, if he killed Erskine. I’m trusting you to tread carefully.”

  “Why are you trusting us at all?” Pippa asked.

  Mr. Dumfrey sighed and stood up, moving toward the narrow window, which looked out over the small courtyard toward the dingy gray faces of the buildings on the opposite side of the street. Absentmindedly, he stuck a finger in Cornelius’s cage, and the bird gave it an affectionate nibble. For a long moment, Mr. Dumfrey was quiet.

  Finally, he spoke. “Years ago, when I set out to find you—you four, the last of the children my brother kidnapped, or stole, or bought for his experiments”—it was rare to see Mr. Dumfrey angry, but he practically spat the word—“I swore that I would keep you safe. That I would protect you.”

  A shiver went down Pippa’s neck, as if a ghost had breathed on her from behind. “The last of the children?” she repeated. “Does that mean . . . ?”

  Mr. Dumfrey didn’t turn around. But she could see his shoulders sag. “There were others, yes,” he said softly. “Dozens. Maybe more.”

  Pippa felt as if an invisible hand were pressing on her chest. Suddenly, she could hardly breathe. She thought of the nightmares she’d had since she was a child, of a long hallway filled with cages, and a child in every one. Not nightmares, she knew now. Memories.

  She’d always believed they were the only ones. Or maybe she’d hoped they were.

  “Mr. Dumfrey,” Sam ventured, “Rattigan knew my parents’ names. He knew all sorts of things about them. He must
have had some connection to the people he chose—”

  “If he did, I don’t know of one,” said Mr. Dumfrey shortly, “as I’ve told you before.”

  Pippa swallowed. “But why us?” Pippa persisted. “Why any of us? There must be a reason.”

  Mr. Dumfrey hesitated for only a fraction of a second. And yet in that pause, Pippa wedged herself quickly, seamlessly, into his mind and felt it seize like a muscle, or an animal in front of headlights. “There was no reason,” he said quickly. “It was random.”

  She withdrew quickly from his thoughts, bringing a hand to her chest. It felt as if she’d inhaled ice. Mr. Dumfrey had just lied to them. She was sure of it.

  “But that doesn’t make sense.” Thomas was frowning. “Why would he have gone to all the trouble to get rid of Sam’s parents if—”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t know.” Mr. Dumfrey thumped the windowsill so hard with a fist that the glass pane rattled. “I don’t know why he picked any of you.”

  “Wait a second,” Max said. “You said there were dozens of others. So what happened to them?”

  Mr. Dumfrey sighed and brought up a hand to rub his eyes beneath his glasses. He was still turned to the window. Pippa could see his reflection, slivered by the panes.

  “His so-called work was dangerous. Playing with blood and brains. Splicing animal parts into humans, and strangers into one another, and more. Playing God.” Now Mr. Dumfrey’s voice had an edge Pippa had never heard before—a raw, wounded quality, like someone in physical pain. “He treated humans like lab rats. And like rats, they died.” Mr. Dumfrey’s voice broke a little and he cleared his throat. “That’s why I vowed to find the four of you, even if it took a lifetime. I was hoping you would never have to know about Rattigan and his experiments, never have to know about the past. I failed.”

  “You didn’t—” Thomas started to protest.