Nightingale, Sing

by Karsten Knight

  “As roses watch,” I whispered, “the fount’ runs dry.”

  Atlas entered the fountain with me and cast a glance toward the entrance to make sure we were alone. “Just to be clear, what we’re about to do is vandalism and the defacement of a historical landmark of immeasurable value.”

  My eyes glistened as I looked earnestly at Atlas. “The only thing of immeasurable value, as far as I’m concerned, is my sister’s life.”

  I squatted down and wrapped my arms around the edge of the fountain’s stone centerpiece, bear-hugging it. Atlas tried to nudge his way in to help, but I scolded him away.

  I channeled all the love I had for my broken family—all the things I’d never get to say to Jack, all the things I’d say to Echo if it wouldn’t break her—and I lifted. The heavy urn looked like it was solidly attached, but some makeshift plaster crumbled away when I really put my legs into it.

  Ten seconds later, with my face red as a Maraschino and every muscle in my body nearly torn or trembling, I toppled the urn onto its side.

  Atlas caught me under my armpits before I could go down with it. Once he made sure I was steady, we both turned to the piece of paper that had until seconds ago been covered by the urn.

  It was heavily coated in stone and plaster dust, so I dropped to my knees, put my face close, and blew with all the air left in my lungs. The dust flew off the yellowed page, revealing the familiar cursive scrawl of a man from another century.

  “The truth entombed,” I said, “Exhumed at last.”

  Together, the two of us sat on a grassy step and read the journal page—the riddle on one side and the next installment of Cumberland Warwick’s story on the other. And when we were done, I let out a long, trembling breath. “The Serengeti Sapphire isn’t a gem at all,” I said.

  “It’s a flower.”

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF DR. CUMBERLAND WARWICK

  Charleston, South Carolina | February 14, 1865

  Dearest Adelaide,

  Morning has come, and the giant survives.

  All night, his brow burned feverish, his sleep fitful, as he fought the infection that festered within. And all night, I tended to him, soaking a cloth in the cool rainwater to dispel his fever, cleaning his wounds as best I could. All the while, I found spare moments by lantern light to write my letter to you, my beloved. The Serengeti Sapphire, the object of my new companion’s fixed concern, never strayed far from my thoughts, nor my awestruck gaze. I shall try to sketch the Sapphire in the margins, though my humble artistry can do it no justice.

  A stranger flower I had never seen. Its cerulean petals gleamed in such a way that, even in the dark, they truly earned the name of the gemstone for which they were named.

  When the giant finally came to with a parched gasp, he wasted no time in doting on the flower and would not relax until he was certain that not a petal was out of sorts. “It is safe,” I assured him. “And so are you. Now tell me about your son.”

  I cannot fault him for being wary of a white stranger, but in time, he let flow a story that spanned an ocean. For reasons that will become clear, I will summarize his tale with brutal precision.

  Malaika and his wife had been farmers in their native Africa, harvesting tea leaves in the fertile valley within the shadow of a massive mountain. They often traded with the Arab and British merchants, thus his proficiency in the English tongue. They had one son, Jaro, who had been born with the most beautiful eyes, golden and flecked with stardust, but the boy had been plagued by an unshakable sickness since infancy. The symptoms Malaika described matched a chronic illness that, from my years as a traveling physician, I knew was endemic to the male slave population on the Louisianian plantations.

  As the illness progressed, desperation drove Malaika up the mountain in search of a local legend: a rare blue orchid that could irreversibly cure even the most corrosive malady. After three days of climbing, he found it, a singular blue flower nestled in the snowy crater atop the formidable summit.

  His triumphant return quickly turned to tragedy. Slavers had come during his absence, taking both his wife and his sickly son.

  So Malaika followed the slavers’ trail through the Dark Continent and back to America, stowing aboard a ship that came in through the West Indies and then South Carolina. In Charleston, he narrowly escaped a lynching on his flight from the city, and the mob had imparted on him numerous wounds before he found shelter in this barn.

  Adelaide, I hope you can forgive me for the words I said next, as they will undoubtedly forestall my return to you, and have irrevocably intertwined my destiny with that of a man whose people I once fought to keep in servitude. In truth, when I looked at Malaika, cold, beaten, yet determined, I saw only a father whose love for his son knew no manacles. So I leaned toward him and said, “My name is Cumberland Warwick. And I’m going to help you find your boy.”

  A clash of two dreadnoughts

  One ferric, one ice,

  A victor gloats coldly

  O’er the colossus’s grave.

  A thousand souls swallowed

  Down the dark, frigid maw,

  While a library sinks

  With its scholar in tow.

  But he’ll study eternal

  In what looks just like home,

  While dreaming of black spots,

  Islands, and gold.

  I stood in front of the bathroom mirror with a lock of my red hair curled around one finger and a pair of scissors in the other hand. Despite everything that had happened in the last two weeks, I felt a shameful wave of vanity at the thought of lopping off my hair.

  But this was a transformation as necessary to Echo’s survival as it was to my own. Nox by himself would be bad enough, but with a detective on his payroll, the kingpin had at his disposal all the same resources as the police department. Security camera footage. Credit card statements. If I made even one misstep, Nox would sniff me out like a bloodhound. And then he would put me down.

  Knowing all this, I had instructed Atlas to take a random detour through the suburb of Burlington on the drive home, where I stopped at a branch of my bank. While he stood sentry outside the ATM, I withdrew as much money as I could from my account, feeling the beady eye of the closed-circuit camera watching me the whole time. No doubt, the use of my debit card was already sending a ping to Detective Grimshaw. If anything, I hoped it would distract him and Nox’s men with a search on the completely wrong side of the city.

  After that, we stopped at a thrift store so that I could replenish my supply of clothes with something other than Atlas’s baggy hand-me-downs: black jeans, black t-shirts, a mound of underwear and socks, and a black hooded sweatshirt that caught my eye on the way to checkout. It had the outline of a large bird stitched into the back.

  Atlas eyed the dark, rumpled lump of clothes in my basket. “You have a vendetta against color?” He noticed the design on the back of the hoodie. “Sweet bird, though.”

  I took the sweatshirt off the hanger and tugged it over my head. It fit perfectly. “I’m going to take everything from Nox,” I explained. “Why not start with the symbol he built his empire around.”

  Now, back in the Dollhouse, I made swift, decisive cuts, while the mound of hair in the sink slowly pile up. The instant I finished, I dropped the shears and set to work massaging the dye into my hair. I let it sit for the full hour before rinsing it out.

  When I finally toweled my hair dry and gazed back into the mirror, I couldn’t help but gasp at the transformation. I now sported a haphazard pixie cut, black as a well of ink.

  And I kind of liked it.

  Before Atlas had left for his evening seminar at BU, he made me promise to stay put, vowing in return to bring me dim sum from the best restaurant Chinatown had to offer.

  This was a promise that I had no intention of honoring. I had two loose ends in the Fenway area, so I made the half-mile walk to the Broadway subway station. As I waited on the platform, I experienced a rare flicker of nostalgia for a man I almost never
thought about these days: my father.

  Jack Tides Sr. had spent his whole life living in the same eight-block radius of the Dorchester neighborhood where he was born. Thanks to the stag tattoo on his neck, inspired by the logo of his favorite whiskey, his unsavory friends had nicknamed him Buck. His father had been a subway car driver for the MBTA, an alcoholic, and an all-around bastard, and Dad hated him so intensely that he grew up to be exactly like him. Even though my father held a steady job behind the throttle of a Red Line car, a job that should have been enough to make ends meet for his wife and three kids, he never lost that chip on his shoulder that he wanted—no, deserved—more than his lot in life. “I’m so sick of breakin’ even,” he would mutter at dinner, huddling over his TV table and stabbing furiously at mom’s casserole with his fork. “Is it too much to ask to get ahead in life for once?”

  A series of failed get-rich-quick schemes forced our family further into debt, which was when Dad abandoned the law altogether. Unfortunately, Buck Tides was an incompetent thief. Ten minutes into a botched robbery at a chemical warehouse, my father found himself writhing face-down on the concrete floor with a bullet lodged in his thigh and a SWAT officer kneeling on his spine.

  In the end, his two associates—including my degenerate godfather—took plea bargains from the DA and squealed on him, which bought Buck fifteen years. When the bailiffs led him out of the courtroom, he’d yelled to my mother, “I was just trying to provide for you! That’s all I ever wanted!” I had only been ten at the time, but even then, I knew he was full of shit.

  Still, as much as my father was a nonperson in my life, I thought of him every time I heard the screech of the subway car’s brakes as it slowed into the station. When I was a kid, I’d stand out on the platform, watching the train crest the hill. It looked like a long steel caterpillar with a red stripe. Back then, I imagined that my father was behind the wheel of every subway car, looking dapper in his blue vest.

  I climbed into the trolley and pushed my father out of my mind. After all, he was wearing a different uniform these days.

  I had arranged to rendezvous with Rufus at a riverside glade in the Longwood area, and was waiting there when the gangly man-child biked up beside me. He leaped off the pedicab with about as much grace as an orangutan dismounting a racehorse, stumbling forward several steps and letting his riderless cab collide with a tree. “Sabra Tides,” Rufus said, and noting my hair added, “Now available in black.”

  “I figured I’d get a haircut for the both of us.” I ruffled the disheveled nest on his head. “Let this grow any longer and the National Park Service is going to declare it a wildlife sanctuary.”

  Rufus responded unexpectedly by wrapping me in a tight hug. “Sorry about your brother, lass,” he said into my ear. “Good kid like that deserved at least a century.”

  I swallowed hard and refused to squeeze him back. I’d crack if I did. “You would have liked him.”

  Rufus gazed around the wooded clearing, which was empty save a few twilight joggers. “So after two weeks without you on the pedicab circuit, you ask for a clandestine meeting. What’s up, chica? Please tell me there’s mischief afoot.”

  A cool wind swept through the trees and I tightened my hoodie’s drawstrings. “The abridged version: I need to get into the hospital to see Echo, but there are possibly some bad people outside. I need the help of someone trustworthy and knowledgeable about Boston’s shadier residents. And who meets those criteria more perfectly than the only part-time private detective in my contact list?”

  Rufus’s left eye twitched. “Sweet buttered biscuits, Sabra. First you ask me for a fake ID. Now this. Exactly how deep are you in?”

  “Ever watch one of those documentaries about the ocean’s trenches, where no sunlight penetrates and the pressure is so intense that it can crumple submarines? A little deeper than that.”

  At first I thought that Rufus would say no to helping me. He exhaled a long breath. “Well, the Sabra I know wouldn’t let anything stand in the way of a visit with her sister. So if I can’t stop you, then I guess I better help you. Give me the unabridged version as we walk.”

  On our journey to the hospital, we made a quick detour by Fenway Park, where Yawkey Way was a red and blue sea of tourists lining up for tonight’s game. At his direction, I bought us Red Sox shirts and caps from a vendor cart for camouflage. Then we swung by Children’s Hospital, where we camped out on a bench across the street from the entrance. At first, I saw no trace of any armed mercenaries waiting to intercept me.

  I was starting to feel foolish about dragging Rufus along when he said, “I count two of them: police officer by the ambulance and the guy making balloon animals.”

  I scanned the milieu of people around the long circular drive until I found the two men he was talking about. “How can you tell?” The cop looked just like every officer you could find patrolling the streets of Boston, stern-faced behind a pair of shades, and if there was a reasonable place for a balloon artist to be, it was a hospital full of children.

  “The truth is in the details.” Rufus nodded to the cop first. “His shirt is a different shade of blue than the BPD wears, his radio is clipped in the wrong spot, and his shoes aren’t regulation.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Spoken like someone who’s had a few brushes with the law. What about the wannabe clown?”

  “He sucks at making balloon animals,” Rufus replied, a little offended. “What is that even supposed to be, a walrus? If that doesn’t convince you, he’s been fiddling with the same balloon since we got here, without offering it to any of the kids who’ve walked by.”

  I’d always seen Rufus as a man lacking ambition, so I’d never taken his P.I. business seriously. Now I was impressed. “You must have been killer at Where’s Waldo? as a kid.”

  “You haven’t seen anything yet.” Rufus flagged down a kid in baggy jeans and a Metallica t-shirt who was strutting by. “Hey, chief, wanna make an easy five bucks?” With the boy’s attention, Rufus pulled a noise popper from his pocket, the kind you could buy at a party store. He pressed it into the kid’s hand with the promised cash. “Cross the street and pull this as you walk by the entrance.”

  The boy looked at Rufus like he was nuts and shrugged. “Your dime, dude.”

  “Why do you even have one of those on you?” I asked Rufus, as I watched the boy make his way toward the hospital.

  “You never know when you’ll need a distraction.” He put two fingers to his eyes, then pointed to the balloon artist. “Keep your gaze on the clown.”

  Ten seconds later, a loud pop of the noisemaker echoed across the street. The balloon artist instantly dropped the animal in his hands and reached for his right hip, exposing a concealed holster and a firearm. His hand relaxed once he realized that it wasn’t a gunshot, but in that one reflexive motion, he’d given himself away.

  “A balloon artist who’s packing?” Rufus said. “I think not.”

  There was a moment, too, when the cop and the artist locked eyes to acknowledge each other, before they went back to looking busy.

  “So how do we—?”

  Rufus waved off my question. “Leave it to me.” He pulled out his phone and rapidly dialed a number. After someone on the other end picked up, Rufus began to ramble in a panicked voice. “Hello, Boston Police? I’m trying to leave Children’s Hospital with my six-year-old daughter, but this creep making balloon animals just offered her a pot brownie. He’s about six-foot-two, two hundred pounds, and—” Abruptly, Rufus held the phone away from his face and screamed, “You get that flask away from her, you sick bastard!” Then he hung up.

  “You are one twisted genius,” I said in genuine awe.

  Rufus tapped his watch. “I give them about two minutes response time.”

  In reality, it only took ninety seconds for a police cruiser to whip around the long drive. Two cops—real ones—spilled out of the doors and cornered the balloon artist. The mercenary had only started to protest when they slammed him
face-first down onto the bench. After patting him down, one of the officers found the concealed pistol, which is when the shit really hit the fan. The balloon artist bucked free, but only made it three steps down the sidewalk when the second cop zapped the nape of his neck with a taser. His body convulsed on the ground while they kneeled down to cuff him.

  Meanwhile, I saw the fake cop slink away into the shadows, then break into a fast stride away from the hospital.

  I clapped Rufus on the back. “That’s my cue. Just let me know what your going rate is and I can reimburse you.”

  Rufus waved me off with his hat. “You’re on the friends and family plan. Besides, it was cheaper and more entertaining than a movie. Be careful, kid. I’d suggest using an auxiliary exit when you exfiltrate, in case they send replacement dirtbags.” In true Rufus fashion, my companion reached into the pocket of his cargo shorts, pulled out a partially consumed hotdog, and ate the rest as he watched the mercenary get stuffed into the back of the squad car.

  I was grateful to find Echo alone in her hospital room, without my mother—I would deal with her next. My sister was sleeping fitfully, her brow slick with sweat, her blanket cast to the floor. Ordinarily, I made a rule not to wake her, but tonight this visit needed to be as efficient as possible.

  Even though for the time being it would be my last.

  I placed a hand on Echo’s cheek. “Hey, little nugget.”

  Echo blinked lethargically. Her eyes widened as they gravitated to my hair. “What did you do, Sabra?” she asked shrilly.

  I put a finger to my lips. “Weirdest thing happened on my way here. First, some landscaper thought I was a bush, so he used hedge trimmers on my hair. Then it started raining dark chocolate, and I couldn’t find any shampoo that would rinse it out.”