The Empty Birdcage

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  “Then I can guess. First, if we omit those dozen people we have in common whom I would in no way be surprised about, along with another dozen so distant that their contacting you would not have been brought up so casually, plus another handful who had no means of doing so two weeks ago, I am left with but three candidates.”

  Douglas shook his head. “Mycroft, you must learn to recognize a turn of phrase when you hear one…”

  “And, since you prefaced your statement with ‘speaking of survival,’ and two of those three acquaintances have nothing whatever to tie them to that word, that leaves but one mutual acquaintance whose survival we ensured. Albeit one who is neither intimate enough, nor in dire straits enough, for an urgent report the moment you and I saw each other again. And that would be Deshi Hai Lin,” Mycroft concluded, naming the Chinese businessman whose life they had saved some six months previously.

  “Remarkable,” Douglas replied.

  “Not at all. Process of elimination. You told Mr. Lin you had no notion where I was?”

  “Yes, as indeed I had no notion.”

  “And how long before he wrote back with an entreaty that, should you locate me, he would dearly love to make contact, or some such turn of phrase?”

  “It was precisely that turn of phrase, and the following day. However, as it did not sound urgent, I only now recalled it.”

  So I put my friend’s life in peril to attract a shark, and captured a minnow, Mycroft thought bitterly. One who brings news that I have been dreading for months…

  As if on cue, they heard a voice behind them, calling out in a light Asian accent, its tone tremulous and slightly out of breath: “Mr. Holmes! I have found you at last!”

  4

  THE DIFFICULTY OF HAVING BUT ONE LARGE TELEGRAPH office in the whole of Cambridge was that the queues proved ever so long, the room in desperate need of air, and the petitioners sour and possessive of their seniority. As for the telegraph girls working the clanking machines, Sherlock allowed that they were skilled at their telegraphic literature, but he found them querulous. Not obliged to the public for their wages, they did not submit to ill treatment as a matter of course.

  Sherlock swept a lock of unruly black hair from his eyes and was at long last approaching the counter when the blasted machine ceased its labors altogether, gears grinding to a halt like an errant locomotive. It took a half hour until the thing was in working order.

  By the time Sherlock had dictated his telegram to Mycroft and was back on Bene’t Street, the afternoon crowd was staggering out of The Eagle in twos and threes, their discussions and quarrels all but spent, their last coarse jokes hanging in the air, and Sherlock well resenting the entire endeavor. Why should he be forced to beg for money from his brother, of all people? How very tedious.

  He opened the door of the pub, to an interior neither charming nor intimate. Instead, it was large and plain, all brick and wood, its colors inoffensive, and not a looking glass in sight. Since it was just past the lunch hour, only a handful of stragglers was left: one man of middle years noisily slurping his fish soup, and two soused Irishmen struggling mightily to remain upon their feet and conclude their game of darts.

  Passing the bar, Sherlock ordered a pint of bitter, then sat at the end of a long bench before a wooden table, as distant from the other three patrons as he could manage without drawing undue attention to himself.

  With the barman’s eyes on him, Sherlock took the smallest sip of beer that he could, for he had precious few coins left, and he wished to remain unmolested for some time. Then he wiped his lips with the back of his hand and set to work.

  He pulled the bundle of columns from his pocket, unbound them and laid them flat. He had collected fifteen columns in all: The Times, the Illustrated London News, and the Police Gazette, to be sure; but also the Courier, the Scotsman, the Manchester Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Western Mail, and a handful that were local to the areas where the murders had occurred. He had omitted only those that had clearly copied the details from their betters, or those whose speculations were so unsound that nothing of what they said thereafter could be trusted.

  Below the columns, he laid out a small, hand-colored map of Great Britain, courtesy of Gray’s, for he wished to follow the killings first in chronological and then in geographical order.

  All the dead had lived in the quiet periphery of larger towns. Their domiciles were, if not in bona fide isolation, then in areas lightly populated; with few neighbors or family members who could chance upon a would-be killer in the act.

  The first murder had been in Wales, near Swansea. Sherlock had already scoured newspapers to see if anything of import had taken place on or around that date but had come up short.

  From Wales, the killer had traveled nearly two hundred miles to Manchester; then an additional hundred and fifty miles further north to Newcastle upon Tyne, then to Glasgow, then south again to Plymouth. After a week’s-long quiet spell in mid-April, he’d resumed his butchery: first Blackpool, then Avoncliff (another two hundred miles and change), only to turn around and head northeast another two hundred and thirty-eight miles, to Kingston upon Hull.

  And at present was another lull, this one interminable, as the last killing had occurred on the 29th of April, and today was the 8th of May. Had it ceased for good? Logic said yes. But his instincts said the opposite. And although he did not wish for more deaths, he dearly hoped that he would be allowed to inspect at least one victim who had not already been interred, or cut to ribbons by some overly zealous small-town doctor.

  Sherlock looked over the map again, tracing a finger from one murder to the other, as if on a pilgrimage. But, unlike ordinary pilgrims, the divinity he was pursuing was his own genius: a sort of prescience, combined with obsessive attention to detail, which seemed to reveal itself only if he focused with enough intensity and single-mindedness.

  The killer could not have been on foot: the timing of the murders did not allow it, nor did the extreme distances. So, on horseback? By rail? Each of the locations had access to trains, though some travelers would have to rely on more infrequent timetables and longer walks. Local transports tended to carry the same passengers over and over. Had someone noticed a stranger in their midst? Was he a stranger in their midst?

  The advantage of killing in unpopulated areas was certainly a lack of eyewitnesses. The disadvantage was that an unfamiliar figure on horseback or taking a stroll was sure to draw notice.

  A few locales were coal towns, such as Swansea, but most were not. Sherlock sought a pattern. Perhaps the killer’s trajectory had drawn a letter, number or symbol upon the map, but he found nothing so obvious as that.

  He scanned the victims’ Christian names, their surnames, their middle names (if given), searching for acronyms and other ‘coded’ messages, for he had found that he had a knack for those. Again, no pattern that he could see.

  None of the bodies had been mishandled. None had been found with so much as an untoward blemish upon them.

  Sherlock swallowed another small sip of bitter. His stomach grumbled low in return, but he ignored the complaint. Hunger was a daily affair, as were many of the body’s baser needs. Fasting sharpened his senses, and besides, he was not about to allow his gut to dictate terms of engagement. What else?

  The victims had all died if not alone, then with no one in sight—with the exception of number eight, Abigail Sykes. The ten-year-old girl from Kingston upon Hull had succumbed in the kitchen, less than fifteen feet from where her mother stood at the stove, preparing supper for the two of them and Abigail’s father, a local clerk whom they expected home within the hour.

  In the newspaper account, Mrs. Sykes recalled that Abigail had been standing at the kitchen table shelling a bowl of peas, that they had been singing ‘When the Corn is Waving, Annie Dear,’ for Mr. Sykes had recently purchased a broadside ballad from a traveling salesman and Abigail had been keen to memorize the ditty.

  “She crumpled like a stone, she did!” Mrs. Sykes
had announced in tears.

  But in fact, she hadn’t—and not merely because stones do not crumple. Instead, she had stared at her mother with wide, terrorized eyes. Then she had turned in the direction of the window behind her and collapsed. Her back had hit the table’s edge so hard that the wood had cracked upon impact. From there, she had slid to the ground. Investigators had found tiny splinters protruding from the skin of her neck.

  Sherlock stood up and turned so that his back was to the table. He squatted to the approximate height of a ten-year-old female. Then he turned again, and in slow motion hit the edge of the table. Could the weight of her little body have been enough to crack it?

  Perhaps a cheap wooden table, given age and rot, might have split in the manner described. And was her hair pulled off her neck, or did it hang loose? If hanging loose, would splinters have been able to pierce the skin as her neck brushed against the edge? So much that he did not know!

  “Confound it!” he blurted out.

  The man with the fish soup did not flinch, but the sudden noise prompted the older Irishman to make a wild throw of his dart. He let out a curse, and then glared at Sherlock with malicious little eyes.

  “Buggery!” he snarled. “Think yer the biggest toad in the puddle, do ye? I’ve gutted yer betters for less!”

  He stumbled forward, wielding the dart in his hand like a dagger.

  It was not often, in Sherlock’s brief life, that being young and reedy proved the advantage; for age, experience, and sturdiness surely had their merits. But not when those attributes were diluted by four drams of cheap rum and an equivalent number of beers.

  Sherlock stepped gingerly out of the old souse’s way, and the man went hurtling past him and into the wall.

  “There’s a rantallion!” his younger friend declared, staring at the scene with the dull, eager eyes of a born follower. “We’ll take him together, eh, Michael?”

  “You do,” Sherlock muttered, “and I’ll take out that bum right knee with one kick.”

  The younger man was instantly sidelined, but the older one became more enraged.

  “Why, you plague-sore whoreson, I’ll teach you what’s what!” he cried with a wild toss of his dart, which sank into a crack in the wall not two inches from Sherlock’s right eye.

  “An able wrist!” Sherlock called out to the older man. “But your last three fingers are rheumatic, as are all five of your left. And your left ear ails you. One good smack would set it ringing for a week.”

  The old rummy, fresh dart in hand, cocked his head like a puzzled dog, thereby proving Sherlock’s hunch about his ailing ear.

  “As for you,” Sherlock declared, turning to the younger man, “just you try to go home one more night with the makings of a brawl on you, and your missus will lock the front door for good.”

  The younger man stared at Sherlock, amazed. “Boy’s a witch!” he announced in a hissing whisper.

  “Not in the least. But we would all be better served if I returned to my pursuits and allowed you to return to yours.”

  The rummy lurched another half step forward and was just taking aim in the general direction of Sherlock’s other eye when the barman called out: “Enough, you old muckspout.”

  His inflection was equitable and slightly bored, as if he would serve the man a drink or smack him out the door; it was all the same to him. “Ye’ve had yer fun, now behave or be gone,” he added in his resonant baritone.

  The old man’s mood was still bitter, but the younger man grabbed his friend’s wrist. “Leave it be, Michael,” he murmured, no doubt spooked by the combination of Sherlock’s prophesying and the barman’s bulging muscles.

  The two went back to their game more jittery than when they’d begun, muttering their grievances but keeping it between themselves. Sherlock returned to his crime columns, no worse for wear, frequently checking his watch to see how long before he could head back to the telegraph office for Mycroft’s response.

  5

  MYCROFT SAT MUTE AND NUMB AT A LITTLE TURKISH café located outside the Ottoman–Turkish exhibition halls, dutifully sipping lukewarm coffee mixed with cardamom and sugar. Above his head, the swifts had vanished. The pretty May morning with its soft, hopeful sun had dissipated, leaving in its wake creeping clouds and a pettifogging chill that penetrated the bones.

  Across the round wrought-iron table, Douglas appraised him with quiet concern, his own cup untouched.

  Sometime before, Han businessman Deshi Hai Lin, impeccable in a traditional silk tángzhuāng the color of brick, had bowed before them, face creased with anxiety. “Mr. Douglas, Mr. Holmes,” he had said in greeting. “I am well aware that already I owe you my life, but I did not know where else to turn…”

  His slight Mandarin accent had thickened a bit, most likely from nerves, and his voice quavered. Looming behind him were the two good-natured dullards who had once guarded his beautiful daughter Ai Lin.

  The moment that Mycroft saw them, he knew that his hunch had been correct. “Are your son and daughter well?” he’d inquired as a courtesy.

  Though he had steadied himself against the reply, he could not quell his profound sense of loss when Lin replied, “Thank you, yes. My dearest daughter Ai Lin is engaged to be married…”

  “Mycroft? Rain appears imminent.”

  Douglas was leaning across the table in a bid to gain his attention. Snapping back to reality, Mycroft met Douglas’s eye.

  “Rain,” Douglas repeated for lack of better, with a glance skyward to prove it was indeed a prospective drenching and not his friend’s mood that troubled him. “I can forego a tour of the Japanese gardens. Perhaps we would be better to be indoors, exploring the Palace of Fine Arts…”

  “Nonsense,” Mycroft replied as genially as he could. “No need to be chased off by a few clouds. It shall not rain, and I shall be good as new in a moment. Drink your cocoa.”

  “It is not cocoa, it is coffee, and I drank it.”

  “When?”

  “A half hour ago, while it was still hot.”

  Douglas tilted the cup so that Mycroft could view the inside.

  “Have we been here so long as that?” Mycroft marveled as he stared into Douglas’s empty cup.

  “Give or take a sigh or two,” Douglas replied as Mycroft, to his consternation, let out another.

  “And there you have it!” Mycroft declared, rising. “I have become a cliché. The jilted suitor, with the possible exception that I was never jilted, nor was I ever her suitor, which makes me twice the buffoon.”

  “You are hardly a buffoon for falling in love,” Douglas countered, rising as well, and pulling out Mycroft’s chair quickly enough so that any prying eyes would see the tall black man performing some task or other for his keep.

  “Nor are you a buffoon because you have chosen not to pursue her,” he continued, snatching Mycroft’s black leather gloves from the table and handing them to him with servant-like efficiency. “For a match like that would surely cause heartache.”

  Mycroft had predicted Deshi Hai Lin’s enquiry from the moment he had guessed his name. That too was a matter of elimination. Lin would not seek him out to remedy a setback with his business, for Mycroft’s knowledge of the shipping trade, in which Lin was a principal, was scant. And neither would he wish to consult Mycroft regarding his health. No, the only reason a proud man like Lin would lower himself to ask for aid—especially so close on the heels of their other affair—was that one of his children had fallen into some sort of a predicament. But Lin’s son studied with Sherlock at Cambridge, and Mycroft had heard nothing untoward, which meant that it was his daughter Ai Lin who concerned him. But if it were she who was imperiled, her father’s request to Douglas would have been much more desperate.

  Ai Lin, at twenty-two, was of marrying age. And since her father would not need Mycroft to go over the financial constructs of a match, much less some issue of customs and mores, Mycroft had assumed it was some diplomatic entanglement that grieved him. As had indeed
proved to be the case.

  “The question is,” Douglas continued, “will you help to locate her fiancé, as her father pleaded, and bring him back to her?”

  Mycroft slipped on his gloves and looked about. “Forgive me, Douglas, I seem to have lost my yen for sightseeing. If you wish to remain, I could meet you back at the hotel…”

  “No, I am glad to accompany you,” Douglas replied.

  Mycroft nodded his thanks, and the two left the café.

  “You are certain that it will not rain?” Douglas asked doubtfully, squinting up as if already expecting a drizzle. “I can fetch us a cab.”

  “I’ve a mind to walk, if that suits you,” Mycroft replied. “Do not misunderstand me, Douglas,” he added, reprising the former subject. “I do not mourn merely for myself, but for her. I think it abominable that such a brilliant creature will be relegated to a life that is little better than servitude.”

  Douglas lifted an eyebrow. His expression was serious, but Mycroft was rankled to note the play of a smile upon his lips. “Surely you do not think it the exclusive purview of the Asian continent?” he said. “Surely you know that it is the status of women everywhere?”

  “Yes, but I was not referring strictly to domestic duties,” Mycroft countered—sounding, even to himself, a tad dense—“but to, well, to… to possessiveness! And the concomitant ‘woman-handling,’ if you will, that occurs within the Chinese community at large, should a woman prove to be less than submissive to whatever her husband demands.”

  “‘Woman-handling’?” Douglas repeated, his eyebrow arching even more. “Foreigners are no more or less likely to abuse their wives than are Englishmen. If you cannot fathom that a modern British man might be vicious towards his spouse, I challenge you to visit the London Hospital on any Saturday night.”

  “I have no need to visit any hospital, thank you; I well know the viciousness of which you speak.”

  “So then, all this talk of her woeful status is simply a philosophical detour,” Douglas declared, “designed to keep your emotions at arm’s length. I grant you, emotions are tricky things. But do try to remember that, unlike me, you are still young: twenty-seven, just turned—”