The Last Nightingale

by Anthony Flacco

  That record, however, was no longer available to the public. It was folded into the inside pocket of the ever baggier uniform jacket belonging to Gregory Moses.

  Moses stood and watched the sergeant disappear around the corner, then he turned and shambled back to his office, where he was keeping Mr. Tommie Kimbrough himself waiting. He had been cooling his heels there for a good twenty minutes. Just to soften him up.

  Hallelujah, thought Moses. Moses had a strong hunch that the foreclosure lien might be instrumental in his efforts to remain in place as Station Chief. It proved a serious vulnerability on the part of Tommie Kimbrough, who had strangely made a fat cash contribution to the SFPD at the same time that his house stood under foreclosure. The decades that Moses spent in the Record Keeping Department had sensitized him to the negotiating potential that was often contained in one’s financial oddities. He was ready to deal.

  Besides, this “gentleman” gives off a fishy aura, Moses thought. Just what one might expect of a planted spy.

  Blackburn headed straight back to his new apartment, less than a mile from the station. His eyes felt sandy and his whole body ached with the need for sleep, but he felt no regret at having taken the detour. The files clearly showed that Shane had been officially adopted by the Nightingale family, as required in order to move him into their home. He legitimately had the family name as his own, and though the Nightingale family will did not list Shane as an heir, Blackburn was sure that the boy must have something coming to him. With a family business that big, it seemed certain that there should be some sort of estate left over. He resolved not to say anything to Shane about any of it until he could find out whether there was something for the boy or not.

  Blackburn had spent enough of his own boyhood being happily alone that he was not particularly troubled over Shane’s isolation. He just hated the idea of the boy spending the foreseeable future doing nothing more than earning each day’s meals. The fact that Shane was capable of such brutal clarity of thought certainly proved that he had some sort of extraordinary talent. The boy stood out, in this city of displaced people, even though he appeared not to realize it.

  If he kept the search to himself, then Shane would never miss what he had never expected. On the other hand, if it turned out that there was anything there, then Blackburn would find some way to make sure that this timid and fragile boy would receive what was due to him.

  Blackburn was within a block of home. Relieved, he quickened his pace along the row of standing houses and made a beeline for his front door. There was just time for a few hours of rest before the next midnight shift of dancing with the stumblebums down along the Barbary Coast.

  Not far behind Blackburn, Vignette skipped along, darting from one concealment to another. In her master spy mode, she took pains to remain undetected even by the general public. To achieve that, she made sure to behave like a stupid little girl engrossed in playing some sort of game. It caused grown-ups to dismiss her and most kids to ignore her altogether. She could outrun the others.

  That was the next best thing to being invisible. As long as she never got in anybody’s way, she could sense that nobody noticed her. Later, they would not remember that she was ever there at all.

  Vignette slipped behind the thick pole of a gas streetlamp and peered out from behind it, just in time to see Sergeant Blackburn pull a key from his pocket and stop in front of the sunken door to a garden apartment. She ducked out of sight while he let himself in. When she heard the door pulled shut, she stepped out and pretended to tie her shoe in order to sneak a good look at the big sergeant’s building.

  So this was where he lived. Vignette decided that the best thing to do was to spook around the neighborhood for a while, get a feel for the whole area. And, she realized, to quickly locate any food that was looking to get stolen. She was starting to feel like she didn’t weigh anything at all, as if a puff of breeze would blow her over.

  First things first, then. She caught a whiff of something wonderful in the air. Not far away, somebody was doing some baking. Baked things were often set out to cool. Within moments, she was off on the trail of the luxurious smell like a hound on two legs.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Moses casually waved to Kimbrough. “No need for formalities with you, Mr. Kimbrough.” Moses walked around his side of the desk and sat, making it a point to give Tommie a generous smile.

  Tommie Kimbrough’s face glistened with tiny beads of sweat— it was the worried face of an obvious spy, Moses reckoned, the tool of somebody up in the department brass. He would find out. Right now, he was in no hurry. They were on his turf.

  Kimbrough realized it was his turn to speak. “Of course I’m still upset over Private, uh—over the private’s death. But I’ll tell you anything I can.”

  “As long as it’s the truth, you mean,” Moses interrupted with a scowl.

  “What?” Tommie almost gasped the word.

  Moses broke out laughing. “I’m joking with you! Please! We are among friends here, aren’t we?”

  Kimbrough broke into a relieved smile. “Oh. Oh! We certainly are!”

  Moses made a serious face. “It is most unfortunate, however.”

  “Oh, absolutely! That poor man! Did he, ah, have a wife and children?”

  “I didn’t mean him.”

  “Oh.” Tommie waited. When nothing happened, he added, “What did you mean?”

  “The volunteer program at the morgue. There’s just no way to continue it for the time being, even as badly as the help is needed there.” Moses leaned forward and made sure to remove any trace of joy and triumph from his voice.

  “I am so grateful for your help. It is most impressive that a man of your means would voluntarily occupy his time amid the stink of rotting bodies. I’m sure the department can relocate you to a hospital or something where you can make the same sorts of drawings.”

  Having accomplished what he had volunteered for, Tommie was unconcerned with the news. Now he simply needed to make sure his tracks were covered with regard to the dead private.

  Moses paused and maintained his benign smile until Kimbrough realized it was his turn. “Well, Lieutenant, I’m sure that will be—”

  “Because as I said, we are among friends.”

  “Um, yes.”

  “Good!” Moses pounded the desktop for emphasis. “We understand each other!” He sat staring at Kimbrough with a meaningless smile.

  “So, ah, Lieutenant, should I give you my formal statement about Private, ah, Private . . .”

  “The late private?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Why would I trouble you? You wrote out a very nice statement for the duty sergeant. And after you were so kind as to spend time in my station house doing volunteer work in our city morgue, in spite of your own troubles.”

  “Troubles?”

  “But nobody needs to know.” Moses winked and gave a conspiratorial grin. He pulled the notice from his jacket and placed it on the desk. He opened it flat and turned it toward Kimbrough for easy reading, than watched Kimbrough’s glance drop down onto the page. His eyes widened in surprise. All the color drained from Kimbrough’s face.

  “You see,” Lieutenant Moses went on, “I pulled this from the files before anybody could see it. Since the quake, nobody has checked any private property details except where owners request it. And because your house was in an untouched zone, ordinarily nobody would have found it. In which case you wouldn’t have needed my help at all.”

  He looked straight at Kimbrough again, who had now shrunken into his chair. Still, Moses was careful not to gloat while he pulled the linchpin.

  “Sergeant Blackburn just happened to be rummaging through the Nightingale files today, and might have accidentally come across this dangerous document.” He gave a reassuring smile. “If it had been there.”

  And that was it, Moses assured himself. After today, no matter how high up the ladder this little lump of s
hit was connected to the department brass, nobody could say that Moses failed to show Mr. Tommie Kimbrough proper respect. Even while he gave him the bum’s rush out the door.

  “So you see, Mr. Kimbrough, we are among friends here. Certain troublemakers could misunderstand and become very, very, very concerned as to how you made a large cash donation here while you have a foreclosure notice on your house.”

  Kimbrough’s mouth began to move like a drowning fish. Nothing came out.

  “Rest assured,” Moses soothed, “a friend like me sees no reason to point out this little fact to anybody.”

  “I told him I would pay him!” Tommie hissed. “I kept telling him!”

  “I believe you! Greedy bastard tried to break your back, didn’t he?”

  “Exactly! That’s exactly what he tried to do.”

  “And if he died in the earthquake along with who-knows-how-many other people, maybe that was just the Almighty Lord taking care of things for you.”

  “Yes!” Kimbrough practically shouted.

  “Maybe the way that things finally shook out is the real settling of accounts.”

  “It is! That’s right! I knew it the moment that the quake hit. It was so strong. It had to have been righteous destruction!”

  “Well, then!” Moses clapped his hands together and smiled yet again. “No cause for alarm, my friend.” He snatched up the document and whipped it back inside his jacket. “I will keep it safe.” Moses leaned in closer to Kimbrough and whispered, “Always.”

  “Perhaps,” Kimbrough tentatively began, “I could . . . arrange to purchase that notice from you?”

  “Purchase? Sir! You misunderstand. I would never try to rob a man who cannot pay his mortgage.”

  “I can pay it. I could pay it anytime I wanted. It’s just that—”

  “No! You will never have to spend a penny to assure yourself that this document is safely hidden. As long as I am Station Chief, you have my word that there is nothing to fear,” he patted his jacket pocket, “from this.”

  Moses’ impression was that the little man could not decide whether to sigh in relief or shit himself. The wheels inside his skull were turning so hard that the lieutenant could almost hear them creaking.

  Kimbrough stood, offered Moses his confused thanks, and shuffled out. It was perfect. Moses never had to say anything that Kimbrough could repeat without pulling himself down at the same time. He was willing to bet that whoever was using Kimbrough would never hear another bad report about Gregory Moses from that moment forward.

  “Acting Station Chief.”

  The term scalded him as if it was meant to imply that he was only acting like a station chief, and that he wasn’t fooling anybody.

  Except now Moses had this Kimbrough under his thumb, a man who somehow possessed both cash and connections. Now Kimbrough clearly understood that his own well-being was a direct result of how well or how poorly things went for Lieutenant Gregory Moses.

  With friends like these, Moses chuckled to himself, you don’t need real ones.

  Sunset over the Pacific was spectacular when viewed from the third story of Tommie’s home. He caught a glimpse through the window while he knelt to open the lid on his new glass-topped cage for the plague-infested rat. There was no time to regard the view out the window. Nature’s ability to paint a pretty picture was far less compelling to him than Her ability to place the power of life and death directly into his hands.

  He felt so filled with anticipation that the strain made his fingers quiver, so he kept his moves slow and deliberate until the experimental box was open and ready for the transfer.

  The box was about two feet long and two feet wide, six inches high, with a solid floor and a lift-up glass top. The inside was painted solid white. Tommie donned protective leather gloves, then he opened the lunch pail and retrieved the rat. It squirmed in his grip until, with the utmost care, he released it into the white box and quickly clamped down the glass top.

  The box was otherwise empty, as it had to be, for Tommie to do a foolproof check for the presence of fleas. The tiny bugs made the phenomenon of scattershot infection too dangerous. But since the rat had ingested enough of the plague victim’s flesh to guarantee its own infection, he did not want or need any fleas on his rat. The white box would let him know. If he was right and the rat had no fleas, then it would be safe enough for him to handle as long as it was not allowed to bite.

  Minutes passed. No fleas appeared anywhere in the box. Not a spec. He gave it some more time, just as a precaution, but nothing else showed up. It confirmed what he already knew.

  Tommie had a highly effective silent killing machine under his control.

  He stepped back from the box and let the rat sniff around its sterile environment. “One more hour, I think. Although I’m certain that you are clean,” Tommie cooed to him. “Then you can eat, and eat, and eat.”

  How nice it would be, Tommie thought, if the rat could break its fast on Lieutenant Moses. But you can’t have everything, he reminded himself.

  He decided to distract himself for the night, so he whirled on down to his locked changing room and spent a few hours carefully transforming himself into a lovely female. Then Tommie walked, hips rocking provocatively from side to side, all the way down to the Barbary Coast district. The pain of the garments and shoes served to make the experience all the more real. It helped to prepare him for the kill, while he trolled the back alleys for robbers and rapists.

  Such killings were less satisfying to him now. They helped to pass the time, but he knew from experience that they could never rise to the level of art. There was not enough to savor.

  By eleven P.M.,the fresh sourdough loaf that Vignette had managed to purloin earlier that evening sat heavy in her stomach. She wouldn’t need to eat again before morning. As soon as she finished off the last of it, she crawled out from behind the bushes across from Blackburn’s place, hopped to her feet and brushed herself off. The street was quiet.

  She moved off in a direction that took her past one of the sergeant’s windows. For a second, she caught a glimpse of him through the opened curtains. He had on a clean uniform and was strapping on his weapon belt. She already knew that he worked at night, so she was not surprised to see him preparing to leave at this hour. To her, that just meant that she had learned all she could about him, for now. After tonight, she would know where to find him if she had to.

  With that, Vignette the master spy took off at a trot. Her mission for the day had been fairly easy, so far. However, the following, the spying, even stealing the food—none of that was the most difficult part. And now there was no way to avoid it any longer. It was time to face the real challenge: to find Shane and tell him what she had run away from St. Adrian’s to reveal.

  It was shortly after Shane had been adopted out of St. Adrian’s by the Nightingale family when Vignette, in disguise as Mary Kathleen, was poking around the Headmaster’s office. She spotted Shane’s name on one of the files that Friar John was careless about locking up. That was when she learned the truth about how and why Shane wound up there as a four-year-old, and why his existence there was officially erased as soon as the Nightingales took him in.

  But she had no intention of telling him that. She had a story that she was certain would be far better for both of them.

  It took her nearly an hour to cover the distance from Sergeant Blackburn’s place to the Mission Dolores. There she hurried past the wrecked remains of the newer brick church and the solid front doors of the unharmed old Mission. She stopped at the cemetery gate. The strenuous walk had kept her tension at bay so far, but when she lifted the latch and opened the gate, the screech of its rusting hinges nearly knocked her backward. Vignette had reached the moment to put all of her experience to the test. The goal today was to use her ability for something much more challenging than the little tricks she employed to make life better for herself around

  St. Adrian’s. Now, if only she could get Shane to believe what she intende
d to tell him, she would completely change her life.

  Inside the gate, she squinted through the midnight blackness to the back of the cemetery. There was a toolshed back there, with a glow of lantern light coming from inside. She quietly moved into the darkened graveyard and slipped through the shadows hovering between twisted tree branches and grave markers.

  She drew close enough to the shed to hear a boy’s voice. Moments later she recognized it as Shane’s. He was speaking at a rapid clip, but she didn’t hear any replies from whoever he was talking to. Vignette tiptoed up to the door of the shed. She spotted Shane inside, pacing back and forth with a newspaper folded in one hand and a lantern in the other. Now she could see that he wasn’t having a conversation, he was reading the paper out loud.

  Dozens of tiny memories flooded through her, glimpses of Shane over the past several years, while they lived out their lives among a changing group of strangers. She would recognize Shane’s quietly confident demeanor anywhere in the world. Now while she listened to him read with easy confidence, she could not help comparing his refined skill with her own struggles to read and write. Neither was her strong suit. She instantly admired him for it.

  Somebody who could read like that, Vignette figured, could probably accomplish anything that she needed to get done.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “SHANE?”

  It was a girl’s voice. Whispering. Shane dropped the paper and stumbled back until he hit the wall and nearly broke the lamp. He stared toward the door, but the lantern made everything outside dissolve in blackness. Then the voice came again, from close by.

  “Sorry if I startled you. You all right?” The girl stepped forward and stopped just before the doorway. She was nearly his height. Skinny as a post.