Frogmouth

by William Marshall

He looked at Auden. He heard, across the street, Auden go Click! There was no time. There was no time now for logic. Spencer, steeling himself, going quickly across the road and disappearing down a side street, catching Auden's half-open eye, knew. He knew how it was done.

  He decided. He was prepared to be shot to pieces to prove it.

  8:24 and a half. Spencer, getting down on his haunches, said softly to Annapura Lane, glaring across to the autobank, said softly to himself as the first of the day's customers began to turn into Old Himalaya Street to trustingly go about their business, "Boom."

  It was not a .577-500. It was the Big Bang theory.

  It was like the universe. It was, after all, once you mastered a few things like the theory of relativity, the death and birth of supernovas, black holes, time travel and infinity, all perfectly simple.

  He was ready.

  He was prepared, like all original thinkers, to be martyred to prove it.

  8:26.

  Scrunching down lower in the land, until, like simple, uncluttered intelligence, he was almost invisible in the world, Spencer waited for the proof.

  He only had six rounds.

  No, he didn't. He had a boxful. Lim, on the eighth round, blasting at the wall so hard the floor under O'Yee's legs jumped and masonry powder and fungus miasma went up and down, down and then up again like a secret panel out of control, yelled, "Hit the bricks up there now!" Give a man a gun with explosive bullets and he thought he was in charge. "Don't wait around for me to bring the bricks down here—hit the bricks up there!"

  He was. O'Yee shrieked, "I am!" He wasn't. Every time he got the chisel against the bricks, the entire station shook and the chisel jumped off.

  There was a blast. Lim yelled, "I got the paint!" And another. Lim yelled, "I got the cement rendering and I'm onto the bricks! I'm where you are!" He must have had ears made of stainless steel. Lim yelled, "I can't hear you tapping! You're falling behind!" Lim shrieked, "I can't hear anything from the wall now! We've got The Thing on the run!"

  Well, at least the male menopause theory had gone. O'Yee, ducking as the dead fly took flight with a blast from below, yelled, "Will you wait a minute! I can't get the chisel to stay still! Will you—"

  "You've got five seconds!"

  "I need—"

  "Yaa!" He let fly twice. The room shook. The chisel jumped. The fly went up again. At the wall, the last of the chipped rendering flew off in a cloud of shrapnel and O'Yee got the chisel back in and whacked. The brick broke in half. It powdered. There was another blast and it turned to steam and vaporized. Downstairs, Lim yelled, "I'm through!"

  "Get the screwdriver in!"

  He ignored that one. There was another blast.

  "Get the screwdriver in and give it a—"

  He gave it an explosive .357 Magnum right where it hurt. There was a sound like a train wheel losing traction on a steel rail and in the Detectives' Room the wall moved.

  "The wall moved!"

  "Yeah, down here too!"

  "No, I mean the wall moved!" There were cracks forming from the floor to the ceiling. There was a ripping sound. O'Yee, swimming his way through the falling cataract of masonry dust and dead flying fly, yelled, "Something's happening!"

  There was no sound from the basement.

  "What's happening down there in the basement?"

  Silence.

  "Lim! What the hell's—"

  Lim yelled, "The bricks are falling out!" Things must have been in flight down there too. Lim said, "Ya!" He must have ducked the dead rat as it reached apogee and then declined in orbit and missed him by an inch.

  The bricks went, "Slish!" They disappeared in a line to the ceiling two-bricks wide straight down into the floor like a stage magician's guillotine knife disappearing down in a single slash into the magic box where the lady in the sequined swimsuit was. Behind the bricks there were wooden laths and the cavity. The laths, caught in the fall of the bricks, turned to splinters. The cavity in the wall was full of old, rusted gas pipes.

  O'Yee said, "Pipes! I can see gas pipes!" The place had been part of the original building of 1872. Jack the Ripper time. O'Yee, slapping his hands onto the top of his head and raising talc from what looked like his peruke, yelled in triumph, "We've solved it! It's nothing! It's just fungus slime and gas pipes!" He even knew about the fly. O'Yee said, "We never even thought of it! But the fly—it does happen, you know—the fly probably died of natural causes!" O'Yee yelled down in the silence of comprehension, "Don't shoot anymore."

  Gas pipes. So simple. Old abandoned gas pipes behind the wall. Child's play. With some movement of the earth—probably the pressure from the typhoon—the bricks had simply moved and exposed a hole in one of the old gas pipes and air had got in and—and, and the fly, poor bastard, like O'Yee himself, just wasn't feeling in top form and the pressure and the noise . . . well, he probably had a weak heart and—O'Yee shrieked, "We've solved it! We've solved it! The movement of the bricks sealed the hole where the rat got into the basement and he couldn't get back and he starved to death down there!"

  The rat had also been torn to pieces.

  O'Yee said, "What about the rat?"

  What about twenty-eight?

  What about Aaaragg-gah?

  What about—

  Lim had the gun. O'Yee shrieked down, "Well? Contribute a theory!"

  "Shut up!"

  O'Yee said, "What did you say?"

  "No, shut up, listen!" From below, Lim yelled in a tight, strained voice, "Listen! Listen!"

  There was nothing.

  "Nothing!"

  "Listen!"

  "I am listening! All I can hear is—" He heard it. It was air in the ancient gas pipes. It was a single mournful organ note. It was an F flat. It came from the wall, from the pipes with perfect pitch.

  Lim, in a ghastly voice from the basement, hearing something a second before O'Yee did, said, "Listen . . . !"

  O'Yee listened. He was sitting in a sand hill of powdered rendering and brick dust. He listened as a child listens in its sand pit for the voice of its mother calling it home.

  The wall, softly, gently, said, "Elephant . . ."

  It was a woman's voice. It was low, sad, coaxing, lost.

  The voice said softly, slowly, in English, "Elephant . . . Elephant . . . !"

  "Elephant!"

  In his car parked by Hoosier's van in the botanical gardens, Feiffer watched as the last of the dead birds in their glassine sterile envelopes were loaded into the back and Hoosier closed the doors on them. He watched as Hoosier paused for a moment before getting into the van to drive away.

  He watched Hoosier's face.

  He tried to read what was written there.

  He had said nothing to him about the call in the middle of the night to the Federal Police in Australia. He waited only to follow him to the Quarantine Station.

  He had said nothing to anyone about the figure of the old man by the bench.

  He merely waited for Hoosier, tapping with his fingers on the steering wheel of his car with no expression on his face.

  In his car, in the park, with no expression on his face, Feiffer waited.

  The woman's voice through the wall said sadly in English, "There, there . . ." The voice said softly, sadly, "Elephant . . ." The voice cried out in sudden terror, "Don't leave me!" The voice cried out, "No! No!"

  "Twen-ty-eight! Twenty-eight!"

  The voice shrieked, "Someone! Someone!" The voice shrieked, "I can't get out!" The voice cried, "Someone—! Someone—! Is there anyone—is there someone there?"

  In the Detectives' Room, it chilled him to the bone.

  He put out his hand and touched the wall.

  O'Yee said in a whisper, "Lim—"

  He was there behind him. Lim said in a gasp, "Yes." He had heard it. O'Yee saw his face.

  It was nothing but bricks and cement rendering and laths and old abandoned gas pipes from 1872. The voice was coming from there.

  The voice said in an awful, app
alling soulless whisper, "No!" There was no one there.

  She was alone.

  The voice said or perhaps they just imagined it, "Elephant . . ." It sounded as if, briefly, she wept.

  The wall, against his hand, was as cold as death.

  ". . . Elephant . . ." It was the voice, not of a woman, but of a little girl.

  They waited.

  They waited.

  The wall fell suddenly, abruptly . . . silent.

  12

  "It came in on a yacht!" In his office in the wired-off Quarantine Station on Aberdeen Road, Hoosier said with surprise, "I remember it! I actually remember it! It came in on a tiny little five-point-three meter yacht called the Where Away from Brisbane, Australia, and it was found by Customs when the boat anchored at the clearing buoy in Hop Pei Cove! Podargus strigoides: tawny frogmouth—I looked it up. I remember because the boat was crewed by some seventeen-year-old kid sailing around the world on the maddest route Customs had ever heard of and at the maddest time of the year—in the typhoon season—and we prosecuted him because we thought it might keep him in port until after the typhoons were over." He had his British Museum Identification Guide to Every Bird in the World open on his desk with his finger on the picture of the frogmouth. "But it didn't. He paid his fine and he left for God knows where the next day." Hoosier, shaking his head, said, "It was a pet. He claimed he found it wounded on the boat when he was out to sea. He claimed it wasn't well enough to fly back to the coast. I had to look it up for Customs, for the court case." Hoosier, excited, said, "He fed it on fish. According to the Museum Handbook, frogmouths don't eat fish, but this one did." He said, for some private reason, elated, "I remember it!" He stabbed at the picture. "It was like the boy skippering: it was the scruffiest, hardiest, most beady-eyed and determined thing you'd ever seen in your life." He said suddenly, "He looked after it. He fed it up and it got strong. If it hadn't, if it had been just staggering around the boat maybe we would have kept it for him until he left, but it wasn't, it was getting stronger— it could have flown in."

  Feiffer said, "So?"

  Hoosier said evenly, "So we killed it." He looked down at the feather in the glassine envelope on the book. "No one could recognize a bird from one feather—well, I couldn't anyway. Customs took it from the boat in a cage—it just hopped in and stood there glaring at them—and it was transported here to Quarantine in a sealed van where it was identified, the necessary paperwork done, it was entered up in the Quarantine Book and a Destruction Order issued under the Health Act." There was something private going on in his head. He looked up from the book and, not to Feiffer, but out through his sliding aluminum window across the flat compound of the station to a line of low gray buildings, said, "The Destruction Order was signed by me and the bird was painlessly put down by the inhalation of lethal gas." He answered Feiffer's question before he could ask it. "About two weeks ago. The boy paid his fine the same week and sailed out."

  "Is there any possibility that the feather—"

  "The bird came in here intact. It died in here intact and then the remains were incinerated intact. Its droppings came in here. They were scraped off the boat and then the boat disinfected before the boy was even allowed to land. Customs even took his shoes and had them sterilized in an autoclave." Hoosier said abruptly, "We're without pity here. We're the Civil Service. Everything is written down, notarized, checked, dotted and crossed and what comes out at the other end is carcasses all humanely, quickly, efficiently and lawfully slaughtered with no room for discussion, exceptions or humanity." Hoosier said, "It has to be done. If it wasn't done—" Hoosier said to the window, "Here we kill anything without papers. Anything that says Unclean on its brow, anything that tries to get in or get away, anything that people try to smuggle or hide or sneak in, we kill. It has to be done. It's easy when what you've got is something like some drooling, filthy cur from India with incipient rabies and you're so frightened of it you shoot it in its cage, but with the others—with things like the bird—it's harder, but it still has to be done." Hoosier said violently, "The worst offenders aren't bird smugglers making a fortune with their suffocated and dying birds packed into briefcases for sale in America or Europe or wherever they're going—the worst offenders are ordinary, sad lonely people with no children who can't face the prospect of leaving their little doggie-woggies at home and who give them names and birthday cards and talk to them." He had a strange look in his eyes. It looked like shame or embarrassment. "Sometimes they even come out here and beg me. Sometimes, even if we offer them ninety days quarantine they'd rather we put their dog down. Sometimes—" Hoosier said, "I'm a vet. I love animals. But I don't use them for my own purposes and I don't risk infecting the Colony with them!" Hoosier, shaking his head, hardening his resolution as he must have done day after day, time after time, occasion after occasion, said, "Anything that comes in here without proper Quarantine clearance is destroyed!" He turned his eyes to Feiffer and the look was gone. Hoosier, trying to smile, said lightly, "If I was going into this business again, I'd go into botany. The Plant and Fruit Section across the compound, all they do is put their stuff in little plastic bags like greengrocers and toss it into an incinerator." He was still trying to force a grin, "Sometimes here when they have their burns it smells like Mom's apple pie baking time." Hoosier said, "That would be easier, wouldn't it? If d certainly be easier to justify to people at cocktail parties."

  "Between the time the bird was caged by Customs and its destruction—"

  Hoosier said quietly, tightly, "I've been around animals all my life. My parents had a farm. When I see a bird up in the sky, something soaring not for food or prey or purpose, but for the joy of simply soaring, I still . . ." He looked down to the book, "Between the time the bird was caged by Customs and its destruction it was kept here in a bonded holding area. It was caged and the cage sealed with an official lead seal."

  "Who had access to it?"

  "No one."

  "What about the yachtsman or his friends?"

  "Like the frogmouth, he had no friends. No, he wasn't allowed in. Any dealings he had with Quarantine he had with me by phone." Hoosier, shaking his head, running through the routine line by line, said without room for argument, "At night the bonded holding area is locked and patrolled by armed officers of the Prevention Section of Customs, and during the day, as you saw when you came in, you have to be admitted by another armed guard on the main gate from the road." Hoosier said, "Once or twice we've had to kill apes. When you shoot them they fall over like men."

  His face at the botanical gardens had not been for the flamingos, but for the unnecessariness of it. His face had been for the way it had been done.

  Hoosier asked quietly, "Do you ever do that? Do policemen ever stop to watch a bird soaring in the air?"

  "Who does the killing?"

  He was gazing out the window. Hoosier said softly, not to Feiffer but to someone else, maybe himself, "I read Shakespeare. What I like most about him is his humanity, his view of the world not as a series of isolated happenings, but as part of a great scheme, a great wheel of things." He came back, "The killing is done by contract. It's done by a trusted man with a love of animals who knows how to kill cleanly and quickly and whose greatest qualification—" Hoosier said, "It's all crazy! —whose greatest qualification is that he doesn't like doing it so that when he does it we'll all sleep better knowing that he didn't enjoy it!" He pointed stiffly with his index finger out through the aluminum window to one of the low, windowless buildings, "It's done in there. It's a gas chamber and a shooting room and behind it, out of sight, are the incinerators and the pits. It's Auschwitz, I'm Eichmann: what we do we do because it's right and the law and we're following orders. If we let one tainted creature by it would contaminate the entire Colony, so we don't. We do all the paperwork and the prosecutions and we make all the reports in lines and columns and, in the end, all you come to do is have no pity and set your face to people's pleas. You console yourself that the people pl
eading with you are the ones responsible anyway and it's not your fault, until all, all you have in the end, is just a highly organized, efficient, clean production line dealing in death and incineration and—and everything, everything I thought I was going to do in my life—" Hoosier said, touching his face, seeing his own reflection in the window as if Feiffer was no longer there, " 'I am not yet of Percy's mind, the Hotspur of the north; he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife, "Fie upon this quiet life! I want work." ' I'm a vet! I'm a goddamned vet! I'm a goddamned civil servant!" He was caught, caged as surely as anything in his bonded holding areas. Hoosier said softly, "Henry the Fourth, Part One. I can't do anything these days except take refuge in other men's thoughts." He said softly, "All the killing is done by a man called Idris, a Malay. His office is over there near the killing block. You'll find him." He was still staring out the window thinking his own thoughts.

  Hoosier said, "We use him to kill because he hates killing. God only knows what he'll make of the flamingos from the Gardens when he has to burn them. He used to go there all the time, I'm told. There and Yat's. He told me once, funnily enough, that what he liked most about Yat's was, of all things, the Wishing Chair." Hoosier said, "We all make wishes."

  Hoosier said softly, "He's a little old man with pale eyes from cataracts. You can't miss him. He's got bad skin cancer of the face. On hot days he carries an umbrella everywhere to shade himself." He tried to concentrate, but it was impossible.

  He advised Feiffer curtly, "Go ask Idris. He was the one who, with his lethal chambers, put an end to everyone's doubts about the frogmouth." He said with sudden anger, "Go and ask him about your bloody feather!"

  From the gas pipes, there was only the faintest whistling sound of air or wind. O'Yee ordered Lim, "Get Hurley on the phone! I want to know where the old gas pipes lead." He answered his own question. "They lead away under the streets!" O'Yee ordered Lim, "Get a metal detector!"

  Dialing the numbers quickly and without mistake, Lim got Hurley. Lim said in a whisper as O'Yee took the phone from him to talk, "I'll be back in ten minutes."