by Lisa Sandlin
When Anderson returned, he lowered himself into an armchair. A moderate-size gray bird with a bright red tail climbed out of the smaller cage and waddled across the wood floor.
Phelan rose from the dinette table and tailed it to the living room. Could you call a parrot pigeon-toed? This one was. It reached its owner, and gripping with its beak, swung its way up the upholstered back of the armchair. It claimed the man’s shoulder, dipped its head, flicked its tail. Sheen on its slick feathers, Phelan observed, but whoa monster-movie eyes. The thing had white pupils. Its beak and scaly feet were a dark dead gray like a mummy left out in the yard.
“Perry here’s doomed, too,” the old man said, continuing a conversation that, as near as Phelan could figure, must have begun in his head.
“All three of us, we’re all on the Titanic, ain’t we, Perry boy? Got him when I was six. Had him since. Well, ‘cept when Raffie was little. When he was…well, I let Perry go live with the kid for a little while. Raffie loves the old fart.” Rudy turned from chucking the bird’s head to give his visitor a lopsided smile. “Perry’ll curl up like a baby and let Raffie hold him, won’t ya, Perry?”
Phelan casually took a chair.
“Anyway, he’s sixty-seven. I got him, Ugo got a puppy. Needless to say.”
“Needless to say, what?”
“Unlucky dog. But brainy. One day, I took him with me on the streetcar to the end of the run. Shooed him off. He didn’t come home. Name’s Rudy, by the way.”
“Not Jim? Or Rodney?”
The old guy brushed the bird away from his ear. “Rudy. From Rodolfo. OK, what you wanna know?”
“Your real surname. It’s not Anderson, it’s Sparrow, right?”
Rudy tipped his head.
“Well, Mr. Sparrow—”
“Rudy.”
“Rudy, my client claims you’re the hide and seek champion. Says he labored while you lived it up at the Ritz. So to speak. Tell me who to believe.”
Rudy sighed. “Little early, but get us a couple beers, OK?”
Phelan obliged, popping the pull-tabs and tossing them into the sink. Hot-footed it back to the living room and handed Rudy his Schlitz.
“OK. You wanna know, he’s nuts. Always has been. Our parents wouldn’t admit it, but ever once in a while I’d catch Ma or Papa givin’ him the eye. The happiest I ever seen them was when he came back from the war with a medal.”
“A medal? How’d he win it?”
“Didn’t mention the medal? Hunh. Argonne Forest. 1918. He and a guy named Antoine Richard from the Quarter snuck around and took out a German machine gun nest camouflaged under some trees. Silver Star.”
“Big stuff. Musta made your parents proud.”
“Not so much proud as relieved. Like, maybe Ugo was all right.”
“But you didn’t think so.”
Rudy gave a coughing laugh. Phelan’s eyebrows hiked when the gray parrot mimicked him. Exactly.
“Mr…. what’s your name again?”
“Tom Phelan.”
“Right, Phelan. Mick name. Hell, no, I didn’t think Ugo was all right. You kiddin’? I’m his brother, grew up black and blue. Anyway, he got this gleam when I asked him about his medal. Seen that look before, believe you me. That poor dog, and…well, seven, eight years after the victory parade, musta been ’26, ‘27, I run into this Antoine, same one was his Army buddy. Bottle of busthead, drunk as a monkey. Told me when they crawled up behind ’em, he’d had his ’03 leveled on those three German boys, ready to take ’em prisoner. Ugo had his, too, bayonet fixed, but he had a trench knife in his right hand. Ever seen one of those? You have? Then you know it’s double-edged, hilt shaped like brass knuckles. Ugo rushed in and cut their throats. Too late to surprise the last one, he ran. Said Ugo jumped at his back with the bayonet, man died standin’ up. Got the idea Antoine saw the gleam.”
“Kinda shit goes on in every war.”
“I wouldn’t know. Too young for the first one, too old for the second. But…listen, you ever wonder why it goes on?”
“Depends. Maybe you gotta be quiet. Maybe you’re out of bullets.” Phelan made a huh sound in his throat. His squad had never been out of ammo. “Maybe these gunners mowed down your buddies and you couldn’t hold back. Or could be colder. Straight-up psy-ops, let the other side know how bad you are.”
“Yeah…yeah, you say so. But there’s…well, you’re missing one. Maybe you always hankered to slit somebody’s throat. Here’s your chance.”
Phelan frowned at the old man, sitting there fingers laced, parrot hooked onto his shoulder, a buccaneer on Social Security. “Really. You’re saying that a personal desire accounted for that Silver.”
“Not for everybody, believe me. Just Ugo. The hero.” He lifted his hands. “My take. And he didn’t like it that I didn’t look up to him. Ohhh no. He always expected that from his little brother. Had to look up to him.” Rudy shot out an index finger, lowered his chin, saying in a deep voice, ‘Don’t you dispute me now. Don’t dispute me.’ That’s what Ugo used to say, like nobody else in the world got to have an opinion. Come on. But then…you know, then I stop thinking and put him far out of my mind.” Rudy posed his index finger and thumb around four inches apart and squeezed away the distance. “I make Ugo fade away. See him get littler and littler till he’s nothin’.”
“Yeah? How do you not think about something?”
“Practice.”
Phelan nodded. He had some practice himself in this field. “What’s wrong with Raffie?”
The parrot dipped its head, stretched its feathery neck toward the old man.
“Raffie’s Raffie.”
“Never went to a doctor…say about the fits, even?”
“Nothin’ they could do. Any of ‘em.”
“He’s your…friend?”
The old man sputtered. “What I’d be doing with a friend like Raffie? C’mon.”
“So he’s a relative. Your son?”
Perry’s dead-gray beak pried open, displaying a dead-gray tongue. The bird nipped the old man’s ear lobe.
Wincing, Rudy clapped his ear. “Stronzo! Perry, you asshole!” He seized the parrot between both hands and, wings squeezed to his sides, delivered him to the cage and tossed him in. The bird hopped onto a perch and rocked from claw to claw.
Rudy latched the cage door and thumped it. “Put a cork in it!” He came back to the brown chair. “Ugo’s.”
Phelan sat forward. “Raffie’s Ugo’s son? How do you come to have him?”
“Took him.”
“You kidnapped your brother’s son, and that’s not why he’s chasing you?”
“No and yes. He’d say that if he needed to. Some kinda pinch. Truth is, he dumped the little guy.”
“Little? Gotta be close to six foot. One eighty.”
“Wasn’t always. Shoulda seen him, for crying out loud. It was pitiful. He’d cling onto me, arms and legs, hide his face in my belly, wouldn’t let go. Made these sounds, godamighty, like a puppy gettin’ beat. Oh, Ugo didn’t like it I took Raffie out of St. Vincent’s. Don’t get me wrong, there was a real botta da orbi.” Sparrow held up two bony fists, punched at the air.
“St. Vincent’s. Why was he in an orphanage?”
“Kinda special ward of the orphanage. They couldn’t handle him.”
“But you taking him, how was that legal? Nuns, right? Nuns just handing him over.”
“I’m his uncle. Ugo signed.”
“Why was that if he was mad—”
“Leverage. There were magic words.”
“What magic words?”
“He just signed, OK.”
“OK. Where was Raffie’s mother?”
Rudy flapped the back of his hand, dismissing the mother. “Elsa. Hotsy-totsy flapper from Brooklyn, New Yawk. All I can say, Elsa and Ugo didn’t act so happy. Then, Raffie. Didn’t sleep, didn’t talk, fits. The drop that made the vase run over.” His facial expression kaleidoscoped into patterns of love and grief, fixed fina
lly on exhaustion.
“Raffie, he’s a lotta drops. Ugo said the wife scrammed back to Brooklyn. Nobody in the family ever saw her again.”
“How long has Raffie lived with you?”
“Oh, less see. Since he was seven, that was…’34.”
Phelan stared, then was startled by Raffie’s laugh. “A-ha…a-ha…ah ah ah huk kuk huk.”
Expecting Raffie, Phelan glanced around, bypassing the multi-colored confetti of the parakeet cage to zero in on the monster-eyed parrot, sashaying on his perch. “A-ha…a-ha…ah ah ah huk kuk huk.”
There was a faint call from the back yard. Oodee.
“Wait, I gotta make a star appearance. Just a minute.” Rudy set his hands on his knees and hoisted himself to his feet, and walked away down the hall. After a few minutes he returned, saying, “That enough of my side?”
Phelan chugged a swallow of beer, stood and slipped his hands in his pockets. “I’ll be going. Just a couple more questions. You’d a been a young buck then. Why take on Raffie? And why buy a house now, at this stage of the game?”
Rudy Sparrow gave him a straight-on stare. “You know it’s funny. When I was young, I’d a run a hundred miles not to say this. Now I don’t care anymore. I never had romantic inclinations, Phelan. Not Jack, not Jill. With Raffie around, I never had to play like I did. And lemme just say we been invited to vacate our rental dwellings a time or two. Raffie rubs some people the wrong way. Decided nobody’s gonna run us off anymore. Especially at this stage of the game. But now, Ugo.” Rudy shook his head. “’Bout all I got to say. Nice a you to help me with Raffie and all, but your shadow’s gonna tell him where you went, and you’re gonna second that we’re here, so pardon me I don’t shake your dirty hand.”
The old guy tilted his head, as though considering another angle. “Less you wanna switch sides. Don’t suppose you could go away and forget you ever saw us? Like Ma used to say, Il diavolo fa le pentole ma non i coperchi.” He crossed himself.
Phelan said, “What?”
“The devil makes the pots but not the lids. Wanna put a lid on Ugo?”
While Phelan was processing pots and lids, Rudy sighed and headed toward the kitchen area. “Why wouldja, he’s payin’ you. And your fellow gumshoe’s probably got the address anyway.” He opened a cabinet and took down a red and white can, plunked it on the counter, yanked at a drawer that at first stuck, then rushed open, clattering and clinking.
“I’m tired, kid. Got this house now and the budgies. Me and Raffie like to watch ‘em while we eat.” He jabbed backward over his shoulder with his thumb, either toward the cages or to the dinette directly across from them. “We still get out, but not every day anymore. Babysitter comes a few times a week, lets me get some rest. We’re fixed up. Me and my boy, we can just cruise on into the sunset.”
Rudy reached into the drawer, took out a can opener. Lumbering footsteps sounded from the hall. Raffie stumbled out into the kitchen, making a distressed sign at his uncle. The babysitter padded in asking what on earth it was Raffie wanted. “Juice,” Rudy said, “you want some, too?” He opened the fridge, poured out two glasses from a carton. Raffie downed his and pulled on Rudy’s arm.
They ended up by the parrot cage, where Rudy fetched out the gray bird and helped it into Raffie’s arms. A grin lit up the younger man’s face. He gurgled happily as he cuddled the parrot and petted his gray head. Perry surrendered his monster dignity. He lay on his back, red tail jutting up at forty-five degrees, claws spread helplessly on either side of its feathered breast.
XL
DIM UNDER THE front yard’s bewitched pine forest. Phelan walked out into a yellow day, not a woodpecker in range, just the sound of tires spinning by on the avenue a block away. If there’d been a black Mercury parked around here, it was gone now. Plenty of time to go off and call Bell or rather, Ugo, and report on this location. Had the car been there the day he found the two men in the back by the pond? Who knew, but the trees would have blocked them. Maybe. Unless his competitor got out of the black car and prowled around the side of the house. If the other P.I. had caught any of that scene, Bell knew now.
Phelan drove to the corner, turned into a filling station, pondered, kept an eye on the street. Then he hit the outside pay phone and called Delpha. Told her where he was and what Rodney had divulged about Ugo and Raffie: the tall old boy was Ugo’s abandoned son. “Last name Sparrow like you said. Real first name’s Rudy. Not Rodney.”
“Yeah. I found that,” Delpha said. Reported how, beginning with the book on sparrows in the library, its heading Passer, she’d found the Passeri family in the Louisiana Archives. Three Passeri children. Not two, three. A little sister born 1906 that Xavier Bell had denied he had. Amalia.
Phelan slid down the block wall to a squat, a hand shading his eyes from noon sun as he heard every detail. “Sister?”
“What the record said.”
“Rudy didn’t say anything about her.”
“Well…” Delpha hesitated to tell him the Aileen story.
“Well, what?”
She warned him about grains of salt, then she told him. The sister, a tiny girl buried in a pile of sand. Both brothers had been there.
They held their receivers a while.
Phelan told her that Rudy had said Ugo’s wife beat it back up to Brooklyn. Said the family never laid eyes on her again. He added Rudy’s story about Ugo and his medal. The trench knife and the bayonet.
“What’s a trench knife?”
Phelan described the double-sided blade, brass knuckles on the handle.
Delpha’s stomach fluttered. “You sayin’ it’s Bell. And that he mighta killed his wife too?”
“Gotta admit it comes to mind. Could even toss in the missing clerk from ’69 your nice friend in Florida gave you. I mean, if you were constructing a theory here.”
Delpha assembled that picture. All right, not a hunter like Deeterman. A man who committed murders years, even decades apart? She frowned. That picture was hard to reconcile with old Mr. Bell’s bright-eyed enthusiasms: The Thirty-Nine Steps. Profile of Madeleine Carroll. Not the hair of course, hers was wavy…I’d call him when I could still find him…
She said, “Maybe Rudy’s lying. Look, he took Bell’s…I mean, Ugo’s kid. Ugo could have a whole different story.”
“Ugo did have a whole different story. But who’s in the black car?”
Phelan wouldn’t be back to the office. He was going to hang out, keep an eye on the house. Maybe even knock on the door, if Ugo showed up. A neutral person might be handy at the brothers’ meeting. And now, he needed to say something: he’d really like it if she’d go on home to the Rosemont.
“But I could wait outside the house. In the Dart. If Ugo shows up, I could follow him back to where he’s living. Then…we’d know.” She stopped there. Phelan Investigations might or might not be the only party interested in his whereabouts.
“Yeah, well, if you do that, absolutely do not get outa the car. Lock the doors. Just write down the address and go back to the Rosemont. Please.”
XLI
DURING THE AFTERNOON, Phelan cruised by the house every half hour. He passed Delpha in the Dart around ten after four, parked down the street. They exchanged glances. An hour later at five o’clock, a gold Galaxie 500 was parked at the curb in front of Rudy’s pine forest, blocking out the stenciled street numbers. Phelan’d had time to sift through the ways this easy case had turned weird on him. He couldn’t see that he had a choice.
Through the trees, up the ramp to peer in the window. Bars of the budgie cage, hopping and flitting parakeets, a blue one clinging upside down like he might kamikaze his cheerier roommates. Past the parakeets Phelan saw two old men in the brown armchairs, facing each other. Rudy nearest the door, half-glasses, short-sleeved shirt, gripping the armrests, feet planted on the wood floor. The other, in the navy blazer Phelan had first met him in, sat with legs crossed. He had a bald crown wreathed by thin, whitish hair. No hat, no shades, no brie
fcase-brown mustache. Phelan would not have recognized the plain white face. The hooded eyes and thickened, pinkish nose, its tip grayed from cigarette smoke, yeah. Xavier Bell, unveiled. Ugo Sparrow. Must have brought his own—a liquor bottle sat on the end table next to the armchair, and he was holding a glass.
So. Rudy and Ugo Passeri. In America, you could change names. New name, new life. You could change names after a child had died under unfortunate circumstances, so the connection to that death became more distant. Change names to start a business. Old man Passeri chose the translation Sparrow. Simple.
Phelan knocked, his story, thin as it was, already concocted.
Rudy’s hand flailed toward the far armchair, where his older brother sipped from a glass. “Come back to see your handiwork? I told you. Godamnit, I told you.”
“Don’t want to intrude,” Phelan started.
“Intrude yourself into one of those dinette chairs while my brother finishes his visit.” Rudy’s voice aimed for tough but was falling more than a couple decibels short. Phelan took a second look at him. A muscle pulsed above his jaw.
“Why on earth would you barge in here, Phelan? I terminated you yesterday. No one answered your phone, unfortunately, so I dropped a note in the mail. Done.”
“Just being thorough, Mr. Bell. That’s my contractual obligation to you. Verifying that Mr…. Anderson is the party you asked us to find.” Phelan had tried out Delpha’s peaches-and-cream voice and failed. He sounded like a politician.
But look-a-there, Bell’s grimace relaxed halfway. “Oh. Yes, Mr. Anderson. You found the right man. If there’s a balance on my bill for expenses, just have your secretary with the Madeleine Carroll profile send it out. You can be on your way now. Shoo.”
“You’ll never see another nickel, pal. Sit your ass down. Case my brother here gets rowdy.”
“Leave, Phelan,” Bell ordered. “This is a private matter, and you know it.”
Yes, he did. But Phelan had heard the plea in Rudy’s growl. He pulled out a chair and sat down on it straight so he could get out of it quick. “Not planning on horning in, sir. Your brother Rudy has a point, though.”