Frogmouth

by William Marshall

  Inside the cocoon, it turned them into redness.

  It hid Jakob as he whispered and rasped in the settling fog.

  It was not darkness or fog or the night.

  It was a blackness.

  It was getting worse.

  At night, inside the kaleidoscope, the dreamer thought only, suddenly, upstoppably of death and killing.

  The dreamer thought of knives.

  9

  I don't care about conservation or goddamned wildlife protection just so long as when I retire someone's left me a forest or two with a few wildflowers and animals in them." It was his little joke. It fell flat. On the phone to Feiffer in his fourth-floor apartment at 11:00 P.M., the commander said, "I don't like this one, Harry. I don't like the sort of things people are saying about it at Headquarters—I don't like the way people are confused about it." He ran the Division. There was very little he didn't hear about most things. The commander said, "I'm confused about it." He became for some reason suddenly angry, "And you—the chief cop in charge of the Confusion Squad—you tell me your main, your only piece of major—or minor—evidence is a goddamned feather!" Outside, to make it worse, there was the fog. The commander said, "No one's been killed, no one's even been bashed over the head, no one's even been lightly nudged—so tell me why I can't sleep over it! I slept through riots, chainsaw massacres, mass murders, and half the goddamned Korean War!" The commander said, "I've represented the Department at seven hangings! Why the hell does this bother me so much?" He asked, "What have you found out? Why the hell does any of this even matter?"

  In the bedrooms his wife and son were asleep. Feiffer, at the phone in the darkness, watching the fog rising against the big picture window facing the harbor, said quietly, "It matters."

  "Why? Has anyone even been threatened? It was just one isolated incident! For all anyone knows it could have been kids!" There was a pause. The commander said suddenly, "Birds and animals get slaughtered all the time! Even bloody crocodiles end up as somebody's handbag! If the world didn't go around slaughtering animals on a regular basis we'd all be walking around like starving survivors from Auschwitz! People need to kill animals! They kill them for food, for protection—they kill them for sport!" The commander said, "So a pile of animals in some third-rate zoo has been knocked off—what's the essential difference between that and knocking off a line of bullocks in a goddamned abattoir for your breakfast steak? The difference is nil! And don't tell me it's different because I don't see the bullocks getting knocked off—I didn't see any of this and it still worries me! I don't even like bloody birds! They shit on people. So why does this bother me?"

  "They all look the same." He had been alone in the dark before the commander rang, thinking about it. Feiffer said cautiously, "Maybe, because people all look different to one another the death of one is just the death of one. Maybe, because, at least to the ordinary eye, birds and animals of the same species all look the same maybe it's not the death of an irreplaceable individual, but somehow part of the demise of a finite and limited species. I don't know." Scientifically, maybe it made sense. It didn't explain the feeling he had about it. Feiffer said, "What surprises me is that no one has asked if whoever did it is going to move on to people." He touched at his face. Feiffer said, "It doesn't seem to matter. Moving on to people—after this—doesn't seem a step up, a progression at all—"

  "If it were people at least we have the mechanism to deal with it! It'd be understandable! People kill people for a reason! This—" The commander said again, "This confuses me."

  "Maybe if you kill one animal, in a funny way you kill them all."

  "This isn't even us! We shouldn't even be doing this!" The commander, spluttering, said, "This isn't police work, it's—it's somebody else's! Even if you get whoever did it, what the hell are you going to charge them with? Breaking and entering? Theft? Destruction of property? Poultry slaughtering without a license? Making old men of sixty-one who think they know everything, who think they've got the world pretty well taped by now, stop to wonder? Murder? Reading the papers and listening to people at Headquarters, it isn't a murder, it's something worse. With a murder you get an anger, a feeling of indignation." The commander said, "Harry, people are talking about this in whispers as if it's something else—something just . . . wrong! I can't sleep over it. I'm sorry to ring you so late and at home, but I just can't file it away in my mind and let it go. It doesn't worry me that a few pretty birds and animals have been killed, it doesn't even worry me that someone attacked and killed them in the night for no reason, what worries me is the way it was done!"

  "Maybe if it had been a gun it would have been better."

  'It would have been! Birds and animals are shot every day. I've shot them myself. You just stand there with a highly sophisticated product of some five hundred years of mechanical progress, pull the trigger, release a sear and a lump of lead designed expressly to do the job does the job and whatever it is you're shooting drops and—"

  Feiffer said tightly, "Whoever did this got up close. And while they did it they carried an umbrella so they wouldn't get wet from the rain."

  "There are probably people in this world who could explain it to me, but by the time I finished listening to them—" The commander said tightly, "Maybe what it is, Harry, is that I don't like feeling ignorant!" He asked abruptly, "I ran across that lunatic Chao out at Lo Wu Station once—" He said quickly, "Oh, yes, I know all about him and his bloody dead birds—and he tried to tell me some theory of his that once all the birds and animals had been moved out to oblivion by high rises and land development the bloody sky would darken over or turn green or—"

  "He probably wanted you to collect birds for him."

  "What he's doing, collecting his birds, by the way, is totally illegal!"

  "Yes."

  "They're all bloody nuts, these bird people!" The commander said, "What the hell's happened to the Chinese lately? They've become as stupid as everyone else! In Shanghai, before the war, when a Chinese became rich enough to own a dog he didn't bloody moon over it and pat it the way we do—what he did was hire a man to walk it on the Bund for him so everyone could see he was also rich enough to hire a man to walk his dog! According to, at least the popular Western press, the Chinese haul dogs off the street and eat them!"

  "That's a particular breed of dog bred for—"

  "I know what it is!" The commander, getting angry at everyone, said in disgust, "Now the bloody Chinese have picked up the Walt Disney syndrome and they think that every little deer and doggie flits through a Technicolor forest having conversations with the bloody songbirds in high, female kindergarten California accents!" The commander said, "This goddamned feather you've got—what sort of bird is it anyway?"

  "It's an Australian frogmouth. It's a horrible-looking thing with a beak evidently a little like a trawling net with a spear on the end. It's the color of burned wood. It kills things and then takes them back to its tree to eat them." Feiffer said, "I've got a call in to the Australian Federal Police in Canberra. I'm waiting for it now."

  "If it had been some sort of bird or animal that had done the killing—"

  "Birds and animals don't carry iron bars and machetes."

  "What the hell's the point of killing a bloody crocodile?" The commander said, "According to the newspapers the bloody thing even had a name. It was called Daisy! And the Wishing Chair? Why smash that up and nothing else?"

  "I don't know." Feiffer said, "I thought I'd put the Canberra call on the departmental account if that's all right."

  "Why does it bother me?!" The commander said abruptly, thinking it through, "It bothers me for the same reason that it bothers you. It bothers me because something's gone wrong in the world and there isn't any explanation for it, isn't that right?"

  There was a silence.

  The commander said abruptly, "It's a psycho, that's all it is. The thing is that it's a psycho using psycho logic and anyone who tries to make sense of it using reasonable sane thought
processes—" The commander said self-assuringly, "We've had psychos before. You've had them. All cops have had them. I'm getting dotty and senile and past it and I've got too much on my hands and I'm forgetting the first, simple rule of psychos: that you don't try to understand them, that all you do is just grab them, cart them off to a loony bin somewhere in a straitjacket and then bloody forget about them!" The commander said, "Yes, that's what it is: it's a psycho." The commander said, "It's that and the bloody lightning and the fog and all the rest of it: it puts you slightly off stride and turns the whole event into some sort of dark Shakespearean drama, but it isn't a dark Shakespearean drama, what it is is just some fucking loony with a knife and an iron bar who's killed a few animals and birds in a bloody zoo somewhere!" The commander said, "It's people like George Su and D.S. Chao and all those bloody madmen with their rimless glasses and their binoculars and their bird-spotting books, it's—" The commander said, "It's—" He was sixty-one years old and there was very little he had not seen at one time or another in one place or another. The commander said suddenly, "There's something all wrong about it and it bothers me and I don't know what it is and, maybe, above all, that's what bothers me." The commander said, "I can't sleep." He asked in a voice so low Feiffer had to strain to hear it, "What if it doesn't happen again? What if we never hear anything more about it? What if it was just the one, isolated case? What then?" The commander said softly, "George Su and Chao, I know what they think. What the hell does the person who did this think? What does he think?"

  The commander said, "Harry, sometimes I sit in my car near the harbor and watch the birds. I hate birds. They shit on you. They—" He had already said that. "They—"

  There was a silence.

  Feiffer said gently, "Neal, are you still there?"

  The silence continued. It was a little after 11:10 P.M. on a dark, still night.

  Feiffer said, "Neal, are you still there?"

  He had to have something. What he had was his job. It was what he did and what he was. It was very little. Sometimes, at night, getting old with his wife dead three years, it was nothing at all. He clung to it. The commander said briskly, "Yes, put the call to Canberra on the departmental bill if it's official business." The commander, at the other end of the line, clenching his fist hard to hold in something inside him that did not exist anymore, said tightly, "Yeah." The commander said, making his little joke, for the third time, "Birds. They shit on you. Christ, who the hell needs that at my age?"

  It was the wall. It wasn't the wall, it was his wall. It was the wall of his apartment. It was him. He had seen those movies where the pubescent girl was the one doing all the things and it was him. The pubescent girl was him. O'Yee, creeping along the wall in his darkened apartment, listening, said satisfied, "Good."

  He listened. He heard.

  In the wall, he heard noises, shufflings, sounds, movement. He heard . . . was it? Yes, it was! He heard words. O'Yee said in triumph, "Ha, ha." It was the lightning. He had looked up lightning in one of his children's encyclopedias after everyone had gone to bed and it was there.

  >Lightning is the sky falling down. It makes you feel funny. But it isn't something you should be afraid of . . .

  Right. He wasn't afraid.

  He heard words in the wall. He crept along the wall, tapping and putting his ear to it.

  O'Yee said coaxingly to the wall, "Twenty-eight . . . twenty-eight . . ." He listened.

  Two words. He heard them. They were there. It was him. They were there. O'Yee, grinning, creeping, listening, pounding on the wall with his fist, cried in his joy, "Twenty-eight! TWENTY-EIGHT!" He pounded on the wall.

  He heard the words. He heard the wall hear him speak. He heard as logic decreed he would, two words.

  Those words were, "SHUT UP!"

  It wasn't a pubescent girl, it was his neighbor, Mr. Wong. Mr. Wong worked for a living. For a living he broke rocks in the Aberdeen Street quarry. Mr. Wong screamed out through the wall in Cantonese, "GO TO BED, YOU FILTHY, WALL-LISTENING PERVERT OR I'LL COME IN THERE AND BREAK EVERY BONE IN YOUR BODY!"

  ". . . twenty-eight . . . ?"

  Mr. Wong screamed, "FILTHY MASTURBATOR!" He had someone in there with him. Maybe it was a pubescent girl. Mr. Wong yelled, "DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?"

  He did.

  Twenty-eight . . .

  It was the lightning.

  It was the fog.

  It was twenty-eight.

  O'Yee wondered, tiptoeing his way to bed in utter, absolute, thoughtful silence, what the hell the number meant.

  In the cocoon, Jakob's eyes were pale, unblinking. They were dead. Moving, traveling, passing through the events, there was only a whisper, a rasp.

  "Twenty-eight."

  The pupils of the eyes were white, like alabaster. They were not human.

  "Twenty-eight."

  He was traveling north.

  It was night.

  He was traveling unseen in the fog like a shadow in a dream. The knives were there. Inside the cocoon their edges glittered silver against the redness.

  "Twenty-eight . . ."

  Then the sound was still and, as the buzzing began, there was nothing left of it at all.

  The events were unstoppable.

  The events had begun.

  The person inside the cocoon drew a long, soft sigh.

  ". . . twenty-eight . . ."

  It sounded, with the sigh, like some sort of secret, something hidden.

  —It sounded, the way it was said, like a prayer.

  On the phone to the Federal Police in Australia, Feiffer said to make it clear from the outset, "I've got a single wing feather from a tawny frogmouth, Podargus strigoides—"

  "Well, good for you." Senior Sergeant Beth Durning, with one of those Australian accents you could use to cut butter, said with what could either have been a very late night sense of humor or a very late night sense of annoyance, "Now give it back. It's illegal."

  "Is it?"

  "Yes, it is. The Wildlife Preservation and Protection Act states among other things that it is an offense to take, possess, keep or otherwise remove a protected bird or animal from the wild or any part of such a bird or animal or any eggs, young, pelt, claws, feathers or any other—" She faltered, "—bit therefrom. Or words to that effect."

  "I see."

  "Unless the taker, keeper or person requesting such a bird, animal or part thereof is an agent of a recognized museum in which the object may be kept for scientific study, a licensed zoo or person authorized by the Minister to engage in bird or animal keeping or breeding or has special dispensation for some other reason as stipulated by the Minister or his agent of the Crown." Senior Sergeant Durning said, "Thank you for the confession, Mr. Feiffer. The whizzing sound you can hear in the background is me rushing to get a request form to take three long weeks in Hong Kong to extradite you for this heinous crime." Senior Sergeant Durning said, "The various Australian state police forces usually deal with this sort of thing. The Federal Police get interested when this sort of thing crosses state borders in the gunnysacks of smugglers or go out on jumbo jets to America stuffed in suitcases." In the background there wasn't the sound of whizzing. There wasn't any sound at all. In the Records and Information Section of the big, gray building in Canberra she was alone. Senior Sergeant Durning said, "Presently, the Federal Police have got over five hundred and sixty drug-smuggling cases we haven't even started, two hundred and six we can't get the overtime authorization or money to proceed with, and a growing cocaine and heroin problem that's beginning to reach epidemic proportions." She said lightly, "So you can probably keep the feather." She asked, "You do realize it's two A.M. here?"

  "Yes." Feiffer said evenly, "We've had something awful happen here—"

  "In the zoo. Yes, it made the papers here too." There was a silence. "I thought that was what it was about."

  "We found a single frogmouth feather on the scene. Nothing else. Just that. I've been told it's an Australian bird—"


  "The tawny frogmouth, yes." There was a brief silence. "I've got the federal copper's Guide to Protected Birds here in front of me and the only bird anything like it is from New Guinea—who told you it was the Australian variety? The natural history museum there?"

  "Someone reliable. There isn't a natural history museum here in Hong Kong." It was worth seeing how much he could get. Feiffer asked, "Like to start one up?"

  "Yes, please!"

  "Tell me how many frogmouths a year get smuggled out of Australia and I'll put in a good word for you."

  "None."

  Feiffer said, "What?"

  "None. Zero. Zilch. Numero nothingo. None at all. They're not considered smuggleable birds."

  "Why not?"

  There was a silence. "They're not pretty enough." The silence had been to think of another way of putting it. There was no other way of putting it. Senior Sergeant Durning said, "That's it. That's always it in the end, I suppose, but in the case of the frogmouth, that's it." There was a sound on the line as if she made a clucking noise. "It's a fairly nondescript-looking bird during the day—it hides in trees and camouflages itself so you don't even know it's there—at least, you don't notice—and at night, when it comes out, it lives in the dark and moves around on the edge of the light. And it walks funny."

  He listened.

  Senior Sergeant Durning said, again amused or irritated, "And in case you think I'm being metaphorical, let me tell you that even though I sit out the lonely hours here in a deserted bloody great stone building looking out at the lights of other deserted bloody great stone buildings, I'm shatteringly beautiful, the object of much unrequited love and when I walk on my four-inch stiletto high heels in my silk stockings and long-wearing serge uniform dress cars crash into plate glass windows." She said suddenly, "I've never been to Hong Kong. What's it like?"

  Feiffer said, "Full of plate glass windows." He asked, "If it's so ugly and not worth taking, how would it have gotten here to Hong Kong?"

  "It sure as hell didn't swim."