The Dinosaur Feather

by S. J. Gazan

  “Why did you have her ears pierced?” Anna asked.

  Silence the other end.

  “You had her ears pierced without asking me first,” Anna said, a little louder this time.

  “Yes, sorry about that,” Cecilie said sincerely. “I didn’t think you would mind. I thought we had talked about it? I thought you had said you would be okay with it. That it looked nice on little girls.”

  “You could have asked me, Mom,” Anna said.

  “Yes, you’re right. Sorry, darling. No, I mean it. I’m really sorry.”

  “Piercings are prone to infections, aren’t they?” Anna asked.

  “They were a little infected on the first day, but it passed quickly. I put some antiseptic on them.”

  “Goodnight, Mom,” Anna said and hung up. It was 8:30 p.m. and her blood was boiling.

  Fifteen minutes later, Anna knocked on the door of the apartment below hers. Her downstairs neighbors had a daughter the same age as Lily. Lene answered. No, it was no problem, she said. They didn’t mind listening to the baby monitor. Anna explained she wanted to go for a run and added, casually, “I’ll just stop by the university on my way back. I’m working from home tomorrow, and I forgot an important book. Is that okay? I’m taking my cell, so just call if there’s anything.” It was her only chance to meet with Dr. Tybjerg.

  Anna ran faster than ever. It took her only twenty-five minutes to cover the Four Lakes. The sky over Copenhagen glowed orange, as if the universe itself were on fire. She ran up Tagensvej and accessed Building 12 by swiping her keycard through the magnetized lock. It was black and silent inside. She went to her study, turned on her computer, and wiped the sweat off her neck and stomach with a kitchen towel. She glanced at Johannes’s dark computer. He hadn’t called back, and when she checked her e-mails she saw he hadn’t replied to that, either. A sense of unease started to fill her. What if he didn’t want to be friends anymore? She had yelled at him, she had crossed a line. Troels and Thomas had both left her because she had crossed a line. But Johannes was different, she reminded herself. He wouldn’t just drop her. He was bound to call her eventually.

  She found a sweater in one of her drawers and put it on. Then she went down the corridor.

  She regretted her decision as soon as she let herself into the museum. The likelihood of Dr. Tybjerg still being at work was less than zero. He must have given up waiting for her and gone home. The building felt deserted. She switched on the light and started walking. She had a constant feeling of doors opening behind her, of hearing footsteps; after all, it was a distinct possibility, she told herself. There might be students around, busy with exam preparations, dissertations, or essays.

  She was relieved when she reached the Vertebrate Collection. He was there. Or rather: he had to be there. At the entrance to the collection, a solitary lamp was lit on his usual desk, there was a pencil, a pile of books, and, when she looked more closely, she saw the box with Rhea Americana. He would never have left it out if he had gone home. She pulled out a chair and sat down. It was very quiet; only a fan hummed in the distance.

  After less than five minutes, she grew impatient. Perhaps he was somewhere inside the collection looking for more boxes and had been distracted by something? She put the lid on Rhea Americana, picked up the box, retrieved the master key from her running pants, and opened the double doors leading to the Vertebrate Collection. The sweet smell of preserved animals and boiled bones enveloped her immediately, and she breathed through her mouth. The doors closed behind her with a deep, soft sigh.

  Only the nightlight was on, so Dr. Tybjerg couldn’t possibly be inside. He would have needed more light to work. Anna was just about to leave when she heard a rustle. The sound was coming from the right-hand side of the room. The blood started racing through her veins.

  She heard another noise. It was a sniffle, followed by the long, slow groan of rusty hinges, then feet, shuffling across the room. Anna kicked off her sneakers without making a sound. The labyrinthine rows of cabinets were to her left and, in only four steps, they would conceal her.

  At that moment, someone switched on a study light in the far end of the room and a soft, honeyed glow spread to Anna. Then she heard Dr. Tybjerg.

  “Ah, well,” he sighed. He whistled briefly, there was the sound of another hinged lid squeaking. Anna coughed. Tybjerg instantly fell silent and turned off the light. She heard footsteps and again the creaking sound of a hinged lid. She frowned.

  “Dr. Tybjerg,” she called out, tentatively. “It’s me, Anna Bella.”

  There was a five-second pause, then another creak, after which the lamp was turned on again. Anna walked toward the light, and Dr. Tybjerg walked toward the sound. They didn’t follow the same path, so when Anna turned a corner and could see the desk with the lamp, Dr. Tybjerg wasn’t there. Suddenly, he appeared right behind her. She spun around and took a step backward.

  “Anna,” he said, sounding fraught. “You came after all.” He stepped past her. Anna tried to understand why on earth Tybjerg was here. There was no obvious sign of collection boxes, bones, a notepad, or a magnifying glass.

  “What are you doing?” Anna said, gently putting down the box of Rhea Americana on one of the desks. Dr. Tybjerg stared at his hands.

  “Researching,” he said.

  “In the dark?”

  Dr. Tybjerg’s face looked sly and the faint smell of stress from this morning was now mixed with an unmistakable note of stale sweat. He kept looking at his hands. Anna turned on the lamps on the adjacent desks.

  “All right, Dr. Tybjerg,” she demanded. “What’s going on?”

  Tybjerg didn’t speak for a long time.

  “Anna, I’m scared,” he said at last, glancing up at her. His eyes were dark.

  “What are you scared of?” Anna asked.

  “Helland’s dead,” Tybjerg whispered.

  “Yes, Helland had a heart attack. It happens and it’s not infectious.” Anna tried to gauge if he knew more. Tybjerg looked at her for a long time, as though he was trying to pull himself together.

  “I heard about his tongue,” he said finally, and pointed to his own. “The tongue is a mucus-covered muscle, found only in vertebrates. Its upper surface is covered with papillae, of which four different types exist. The filiform papillae, the foliate, the circumvallate, and the fungiform….” He stared into space. “Why was his tongue severed? I don’t understand. There’s something fishy about this, there’s more to it.” He paused and looked straight at Anna.

  “Mold is a furry layer found on items such as food, and it occurs when the relevant surface is infected with, for example, Mucor, Rhizopus, or Absidia, not that I’m a mold expert.” Baffled, he shook his head and let himself flop onto a chair. Anna pulled up a chair for herself and sat down opposite him. She was on her guard.

  “I’m not really sure where you’re going with this…” she began.

  “He’s here,” Dr. Tybjerg said.

  “Who?”

  “Freeman.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Tybjerg shook his head in disbelief. “There’s a bird symposium this weekend and Freeman is one of the speakers. He’s giving a so-called ‘cultural contribution,’ it says on the Internet—that’s their way of saying that, scientifically speaking, his contribution is hogwash. And yet, he’ll be speaking. For an entire hour. On utterly ridiculous subjects, which he’s spoken on twenty times before. It’s just a cover, that’s what it is.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know how he did it, Anna.” Dr. Tybjerg suddenly looked very worried. “But Freeman must have found out about your dissertation. That we intend to annihilate him once and for all. Helland and I have spent the last ten years deconstructing Freeman’s scientific credibility, and we’re slowly getting there. He’s cornered now and—”

  “Clive Freeman is an old man,” Anna protested.

  “He attacked me,” Tybjerg whispered. “Two
years ago. In Toronto. He was wearing a ring and he hit me with it, on purpose.” Tybjerg touched his eyebrow, where Anna remembered he had a thin, white scar. She was taken aback.

  “Didn’t you report him?” she asked, horrified.

  “And he sent threatening e-mails to Helland,” Tybjerg said. “Helland treated it as one big joke, ‘ha-ha, hilarious, don’t you think,’ he would say to me. He just laughed it off, but I saw things differently. I’m the only one of us who has actually met Freeman. Helland always sent me. I’ve debated with him before, but the last time…” Tybjerg gulped. “His eyes.”

  “What about them?” Anna said.

  “They were filled with hate.”

  Anna sighed.

  “So you’re saying Freeman is using the bird symposium as his excuse to go to Denmark and murder Lars Helland?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that you’ll be next?”

  “Yes.” Tybjerg swallowed a second time.

  “I hope you realize just how insane that sounds.”

  Tybjerg’s face shut down and Anna instantly regretted her words.

  “And what about me?” Anna forced Dr. Tybjerg to look her in the eye.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered. “He must have found out we’re about to deal him the fatal blow. I don’t know if he’s made the link to you.” Tybjerg gave Anna a wretched look. “But I think you need to be careful.”

  “You’re wrong,” Anna said, lightly.

  “Possibly, but I’m not taking any chances.”

  “But you’re wrong.”

  Tybjerg focused on the darkness. He was in a world of his own.

  “Helland died because his body was riddled with parasites,” Anna said and waited for his reaction. Tybjerg continued to stare into space until, slowly, he turned to her.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “His tissue was full of Taenia solium cysticerci. Thousands of them; several were found in his brain and that’s why his heart failed. The police are currently trying to establish whether the infection was the result of a crime. But whether or not it was deliberate, it couldn’t have been Freeman. The infection had reached an advanced stage. The cysticerci were three to four months old. Big ones.” Anna straightened her back. “So unless you think Freeman came here in the summer to infect Helland, then it couldn’t have been him.”

  Tybjerg looked confused.

  “I know this from Professor Moritzen and Superintendent Søren Marhauge. By the way, Marhauge is looking for you,” she added.

  “Leave now,” Tybjerg suddenly urged her.

  “Dr. Tybjerg, my dissertation defense is in twelve days, even if we have to hold it down here! I have to do it. Did the office forward my dissertation to you? I handed in three copies last Friday. Have they given you one?”

  Tybjerg nodded.

  “Have you read it?”

  “You need to go now,” Tybjerg said.

  “Yes, I do,” Anna said, but she waited. “Perhaps we could leave together?” she suggested.

  “No, I’ve a few things to do,” he mumbled. “Just go without me.”

  Anna shrugged.

  “Okay, bye,” she said. She started walking down the aisle, turned around and said, “See you, Dr. Tybjerg.”

  Tybjerg didn’t reply, but turned his back to her. Anna pretended to leave, but slipped back inside and closed the door. She stood very still. Her sneakers were still on the floor where she had left them. She could hear Tybjerg mutter to himself. Anna tiptoed back to the light. Rather than retrace her original route, she walked two aisles further along. Then she peeked around the corner. Tybjerg had opened one of the cabinets and was struggling to pull something out. It was a thin mattress, which he rolled out on the floor. Then he undressed, took out a sleeping bag, climbed into it, and made himself comfortable on the mattress. He started reading a journal and munching an apple. Anna watched him for a little while, then she slipped silently out of the collection and started her run home.

  It was 10:15 p.m. when she came down Jagtvejen, and though her speed was good, she was cold in her running clothes. She would defend her dissertation in less than two weeks, she had yet to prepare the one-hour lecture that would precede it, and she still had plenty of revision to do if she was to have a hope of answering the questions that would follow. When she had met with Dr. Tybjerg, she had intended to tell the police where he was the next day. Smoke him out, force him to examine her. Now she was having second thoughts. Tybjerg was clearly terrified and beyond rational argument. What if he had a breakdown? She had already lost one supervisor, and the last thing she needed was for Tybjerg to be out of action. She sped up as if she could run off her frustration.

  Anna let herself into the communal stairwell and heard a door open upstairs. The timed light went out and Anna felt a pang of guilt. A run shouldn’t last nearly two hours, not even with the bogus excuse of picking up a book. She reached out to turn on the light, but it came on before she touched the switch. She leaned forward and looked up the stairwell. A cold, defensive shiver ran through her.

  Lene’s face appeared in the gap between the banisters, looking down.

  “Any problems?” Anna said, shamefaced, taking several steps at a time. Her downstairs neighbor was holding the baby monitor in one hand and Anna’s key in the other.

  “Who was that?” Lene asked. The light went out and Anna turned it on again.

  “Who?” Anna was confused.

  “That guy.”

  Anna looked perplexed.

  “Didn’t you pass a guy on his way down? He’s just left.”

  Anna squinted.

  “I didn’t see anyone. I’ve been out running.” Anna was still confused.

  “There was a guy here just now,” Lene persisted. “The baby monitor bleeped, and I went upstairs to check that everything was okay. He was sitting on the stairs by your landing. He was waiting for you, he said, and that was fine by me. I said you would be back shortly. Lily was sleeping when I went inside, so I don’t know what set off the monitor. I put her comforter back and was going to call you to find out when you were coming back because we wanted to go to bed. I’d left your front door open, but when I was about to leave, the guy had made himself comfortable on your sofa, and I wasn’t happy about that. I tried calling you to find out if it was okay.”

  Anna fished out her cell from her running jacket. Three missed calls.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It was on silent.”

  “Because I couldn’t get hold of you, I asked him to wait outside. I explained you had gone running and he would just have to wait on the landing. I’ve never seen him before; I couldn’t just leave him in your apartment when you hadn’t mentioned anything about visitors, could I?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “I wasn’t expecting anyone,” she managed to say. She felt cold all over.

  “But you must have seen him,” Lene insisted. “He only just left.”

  “I didn’t see anyone,” Anna said. “Could it have been Johannes, my colleague from the Institute of Biology? Did he have red hair?”

  “He wore a cap. And a long coat,” Lene said. “I think he removed his cap when he sat down in your living room, but I don’t know if his hair was red. More brown, I think. I’m not sure.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Anna said. “I used my key to let myself in downstairs and then I walked up. No one came down. I swear.”

  Lene looked tired and ran her fingers through her hair.

  “Weird,” she mumbled. “He raced down the stairs only a minute ago. I’d closed my door, thinking how odd it was for someone to visit you this late. I wondered if I should fetch Otto, and then I heard him leave in a hurry. As if he had changed his mind and decided not to wait for you. I went back out on the landing, I saw his hand glide down the banister, the light went out, you switched it back on and we spotted each other in the gap.” Lene pointed to the curved banisters. Anna felt another chill down her spine.

  “You turn
ed on the light, right? Because it wasn’t me,” she said.

  “No,” Lene said. “I didn’t turn it on. You did.”

  Anna raced up the stairs to her own front door, holding out her key as a weapon. Her hands were shaking, and it took three attempts before she found the keyhole. The apartment was dark. Anna ran blindly into Lily’s room. She could make out the comforter, Lily’s toy dog, Bloppen, which had keeled over, and her daughter’s favorite embroidered pillow; she could even make out the stickers Lily had stuck on her bedposts, but she couldn’t see Lily. She heard Lene behind her, and the two baby monitors screeched when they got too close. Lene switched off the transmitter and Anna turned on the light.

  Lily twitched, but soon resumed sucking her pacifier energetically and carried on sleeping, rosy-cheeked and safe. Anna slumped next to her daughter’s bed and buried her head in her hands. She was shaking all over and struggling to breathe. What did she think she would find? An empty bed? A blue-eyed doll? A child’s corpse?

  She heard the hiss of a kettle boiling and of cups being filled. The cups were carried into the living room, away from Anna who was still sitting on the floor, panting. Of course Lily was safe and sound in her bed, where else would she be? Anna dug her fists into her eyes. She had to repeat this rational explanation, a thousand times if necessary, or she would go crazy.

  Anna heard Lene open the doors of the wood stove, heard the scrunch of newspaper followed by the sound of logs and a match being struck. Shortly afterward, Lene appeared in the doorway.

  “Why don’t you come into the living room?” she said.

  Anna got up. A cup of tea was waiting for her and a white ribbon of steam wound its way up to the rosette in the stucco ceiling. Anna couldn’t look Lene in the eye. A man had been waiting for her. He could have been anyone, and that was seriously weird. Anna would surely find out who he was tomorrow, or in a few days. A suitor who had gotten cold feet, was Lene’s suggestion. She, too, thought the whole incident had been bizarre.

  But Anna had panicked, and Lene had witnessed it. The tears started rolling down her face. Lene stroked her hand.