Stuffed

by Brian M. Wiprud

  Renard cast a sleepy eye over my list of missing property, cleared his throat, and read it aloud:

  “Skins: two leopard, five zebra, one tiger, one panther, two lioness, three lion, one grizzly. Rugs: two polar bear, two Kodiak, one lion. Skulls: three ocelot, one tiger, four lion, one cheetah. A pair of carved ivory elephant tusks . . .” He paused to inhale. “. . . And one white crow in a bell jar.

  “Tell me.” Renard closed his eyes, and for a second I thought he’d dozed off. “You have papers for this, and the rest of your collection?” His eyes tweaked open, peering closely at a snipe on the shelf by his elbow.

  Papers? Put him in a black leather trench coat and he’d be a shoe-in for the Gestapo. Most ECOs use the word documentation.

  I knew Renard’s predecessor, Pete Durban, a bold character who had once been a lion tamer. No lie. Circuses still need lions tamed, after all. Durban had come to trust that I was on the up-and-up. He’d gone through all my documentation. Now I had to break in the new kid, and at a time like this.

  “He’s got paper up the wazoo,” Walker laughed, “if you think that means anything.”

  “Detective Walker is a big fan of ours,” I said, trying to get Agent Renard to look at me. “He’s been over for tea and scones lots of times, you know, just to check up on us, make sure we’re all right.”

  Walker flushed. “Patrolmen seen all kinds of things going in and outta here. Five’ll get you ten this operation isn’t completely kosher, Renard. And what’s it with this character? This Russian? Hey.” Walker snapped his fingers at Otto. “You saw these bandits?”

  Otto was posed in the booth by the window like a Rodin bronze in the clutches of some existential conundrum.

  “But of course. Workink many job. My vife, Luba, not happy, so I vurk. Vhen voman like Cossack, not good go to home, eh? Not lookink.”

  “What’s this guy talking about?” Walker sneered.

  “He was working late, Walker,” I growled. “He was out back smoking a cigarette when it all went down. He heard the commotion, looked in the window.”

  “Yes. Vindow I look. KGB come, take. Not lookink. I fraid, because for me, is at very difficult. I vait, then come to find basement Yangie and Garv.”

  “What the f—”

  “Muggers, thieves—bad people—he calls them KGB. Not looking means wrong or bad.”

  “You’d think these people come to America, they’d speak American, for chrissake. Okay, so what did they look like?”

  Otto donned an expression of dismay. “KGB always like KGB. Verink black. But!” Otto jumped to his feet. “Boss man, off he take black mask face, eh?” Otto stepped up close to Walker and winked. “I see boss. Teeth big, vood in leeps.”

  “What’s this creep talking about?” Walker pleaded.

  “Big teeth and a toothpick,” Angie translated.

  “Is that it?” Walker poked Otto in the sternum.

  “But of course, eh?” Otto poked Walker in the sternum. “Otto big eyes.”

  Walker looked like he was going to head-butt Otto, but he turned crimson instead. “Renard, I tell you, between this creep and these animals there’s something very illegal here.” Walker rocked on his heels, grinning wolfishly. “And I’m gonna find out what it is too.”

  I cleared my throat. “And when he catches us red-handed with a crate brimming with bald eagles, the police chief himself is going to make him detective sergeant and invite him over for a pool party.”

  Walker took a step forward, and I was ready to do the same—I’d had about all I was willing to take from him. But Renard swung out an arm toward a small brown bird, blocking Walker’s advance.

  “And this.” Renard twinkled an eye in my direction. “A long-billed dowitcher. Part of your collection?” Still with the black-leather trench-coat stuff.

  “That’s a snipe you’re looking at, and this is not a collection. I told you, I’m a dealer, I rent. This is my stock. The numbers at the bottom of that page are my personal tracking numbers.”

  I tossed him a small key and gestured to a file cabinet in the corner. “The files on them are all in there, along with complete records of everything I’ve bought and sold over the last two years, where it was bought, where it was from, where it went, organized Aardvark to Zebra. Records from before then are in the basement in bankers’ boxes.”

  Angie brought me a breakfast beer, and I rolled the icy bottle along the bruise gracing the side of my head. She ditched her tea for a cold one herself, still holding the ice pack to her swollen cheek. You’d think we were a couple of Canadians the day after a rousing midnight curling match.

  Detective Walker chuckled. “Miss, do you mean to tell me that nobody touched your supply of gold wire and diamonds? That they didn’t even go through your studio, open any drawers?”

  “Left my studio alone, sorry to say. At least my stuff is insured.” Angie sighed, and perched on the arm of a chair.

  “Gimme a break.” Walker snorted. “They came in here just to steal these dusty old dead animals? Maybe these characters were some of Carson’s business partners who double-crossed him, a deal gone bad.”

  “KGB not lookink.” Otto grunted, and he left for the backyard and a smoke. He’d been brooding fitfully all night and all morning about failing to save us from Liberty Valance’s hooligans. Now I think he’d had about as much as he could take of Walker.

  Renard was playing with a calculator, his brown eyes shining.

  “Detective, these ‘dead animals’ add up to at least sixty thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise. They have a very high resale value, better than most stolen property. And they were highly visible going in, going out, and on display. Thefts from large private taxidermy collections are not all that unusual. By comparison, the jewelry is small, and the diamonds are probably kept in a plain-looking little envelope in what to the untrained eye doesn’t necessarily look like a jeweler’s bench.”

  Walker was fed up. “So, Carson, sell any bear gallbladders lately?”

  “He doesn’t deal in that stuff anymore.” Angie looked at Renard. “In fact, he went undercover for you guys to break up a chop shop. Two years ago.”

  I’d have preferred this not come up. The gallbladder incident had netted me $52,700 and got Walker on my case in the first place. I didn’t want the black leather trench coat to get any inkling that my dealings weren’t completely on the up-and-up. I could get along very nicely without any more of Renard’s sly innuendos.

  “See?” Walker began, waving a finger in my direction. “They sent him in to rat out his pals.”

  I gritted my teeth. “Check it out in your files, Renard. The agent I dealt with is named Pete Durban, guy who used to have your job before he went to U.S. Fish and Wildlife. When I reported this character named Park to the New York DEC, they had me go back and buy fifty thousand dollars’ worth of endangered skins for Candid Camera. And believe me, this guy was not a pal. He ran an animal chop shop.”

  “Park?” Agent Renard raised his eyebrows at me, like his alarm clock had just now pulled him from a deep sleep. “Gallbladders. A lucrative business,” he added dryly. His sleepy indifference returned and he flipped randomly through a folder of my permits.

  “Damn right. I dealt only once in bladders, when I brokered them for a taxidermist friend out west.” I’d made a nice chunk of change during that short stint too.

  “And so: Why did you give it up?” Renard shoved the file closed and tossed me the key.

  I pointed to the bandage on the back of my head and winced.

  “’Cause of this kind of rough play. Sleazy characters. It was like doing a drug deal. Not to mention that it’s now illegal to sell gallbladders in most states.”

  “I see.” Renard buttoned his jacket. “Did you mark your stolen acquisitions in any way that—”

  “My pelts and rugs are branded on the underside, dead center, with my name and the ID number. Head mounts I brand behind the plaque, on the neck stopper. Skulls have a yellow sticker in
side the skull cavity that’s a bitch to remove. The tusks have my brand on the stump, but that won’t help much once they chop them up.” It hurt just saying it. Those babies were part of my personal collection. “Dammit.”

  “Carson, it’s not like they cleaned you out.” Walker was calling me a crybaby.

  “Oh, yeah? Imagine, Detective Walker, somebody breaking into your house and stealing everything but the veggies, fruit, and condiments from your refrigerator.” I raised my arms toward the aviary of predatory birds hanging from the high ceiling, then at Fred, then waved my ice pack at the stand-up bear, the full-body albino deer, the badgers, beavers, otters, porcupines, bobcats, muskrats, weasels, martins, and polecats. “All potatoes and no meat. What’s left doesn’t add up to what was taken. This is mostly domestic, a few nice pieces, but nothing like the African skins. I still have a few cat mounts, but . . .” I smacked an armchair with a fist.

  “What about the man Garth told the officers about?” Angie sidled up next to me and gave me a squeeze, trying to calm me. She’d already reproached me for having held back my encounter with Kim until we were at the hospital. “That guy in the bar who asked Garth about the crow.”

  Walker flipped a page in his notepad. “Do you have any idea how many Kims are listed in the phone book, and how many of them might have changed their Korean first names to Jim? Forget about it. Probably a phony name anyways.”

  “A Korean?” Renard knitted his brow, a bad dream disrupting his sleep. “There was a Korean asking about the crow?”

  “Said I should give the crow to some people he knows who wanted it, before they took it from me.” I sighed. “But I dunno. These guys took a lot more than the crow.”

  “Indeed? Well, Mr. Carson, I should think you’re most fortunate that you two weren’t more severely injured.” Renard fitted a blue plaid porkpie hat on his shiny head. It had what looked like a red salmon fly in the hatband and was the kind of thing Perry Como would have worn. “You do realize they could have killed one or both of you, on purpose or by accident? Doesn’t seem worth it.”

  I rearranged the ice pack on my head and squeezed Angie’s hand.

  “You’re right about that,” she sniffed.

  “I’ll put the list on the wire.” Renard opened the door. “By the way . . .”

  I knew the sound of that opener. It’s the “one last, small question” ploy detectives use just as they’re going out the door, when the suspect’s guard is down. His spin on it was to yawn first, like he was just turning in for the night and was about to remind me to set my alarm. I found myself wondering what kind of pajamas he wore. Stripes, plaid, or polka dots?

  “Any idea why they took the white crow? Why the Korean warned you?”

  “Nope.” I was too disgusted to even think about it.

  “I see. Where did you ever find a white crow?”

  “Bermuda, Vermont. That important?”

  “I’ll be in touch.” Renard ducked out the door.

  “By the way, Carson,” Walker grinned, “I don’t suppose you noticed how the parking regulations keep changing in front of your building?”

  I gave him a smarmy squint. “Teenagers: such a handful.”

  Walker slammed the door behind him.

  Angie and I sniffled back tears and sat for a while without speaking, as we finished our beers.

  The apartment suddenly seemed unbearably quiet. No solace in this sound of silence, just the victim’s mute and relentless echo of frustration. I’d never been the victim of violence before, not like this, and it made me angrier than I think I’ve ever been, mostly with myself for failing. Failing to protect Angie, failing to capitulate, failing to anticipate. I didn’t ask Angie whether she felt the same. But I know we both had that nasty lump of humiliation in our throats, which in combination with my anger had me ruminating on all sorts of fantasies where I locate the bastards and hack them to pieces with the sawfish bill on the wall over the sink. And naturally, I felt somewhat emasculated. It was the first time either of us had been “mugged” in all our years in New York, something that only happened to other, less savvy people. I guess we should have felt lucky. That’s what our friends told us. Then again, none of them had been gun-whipped, kicked in the head, had their partner smacked around, and then been thrown down a flight of stairs and locked in a dark basement. But mostly I think we couldn’t get over coming so close to losing each other, all for a mere sixty thousand dollars of dead animals.

  Had my prayers in that dire moment been answered?

  Please, God. Don’t ask me to hand out pamphlets in Penn Station. Goat sacrifices, you say? We’ll talk.

  Chapter 5

  As if the attack by burglars wasn’t bad enough, the morning-after cat-and-mouse with the fuzz left Angie and me feeling at loose ends. We sat around staring at the vacant spots on the wall, a bad taste in our mouths. We slept fitfully for a few hours, then went out to a coffee shop and found we had nothing to say, except to rehash our unfortunate episode, upon which we were clearly tired of dwelling. We gave up. Angie hopped the subway to catch up with fellow goldsmithies uptown.

  I had work to do. There was an Elks’ convention in town, and I was supposed to get back to them about supplying an elk head for above the podium. At a film studio in Astoria, they were shooting a Freezy Cone commercial and wanted some stuffed penguins to fill in the background behind some live ones. I had to get my six Magellanic penguins over to them by eleven-thirty that morning, if for no other reason than I wanted to talk to the live-penguin wrangler to make sure he’d keep his birds away from mine. Live ones will viciously attack the taxidermy variety—I’ve been told they think the stuffed ones are sitting so still that they’re nesting on their turf. Never mind that they’re in a television studio and not on an ice floe. I lost one of my squad members (poor Sneezy, RIP) in just such a tragic incident two years before. The penguin squad is almost always rented as a set—nobody ever wants just one penguin, for some reason.

  This particular variety of penguin is not protected by CITES and is quite prolific along the Pacific coast of South America, though commercial fishing has put a serious dent in the Falkland Island populations. Estimates of breeding pairs is around 1,600,000. However, you do have to know your penguins to stay out of trouble, because the Magellanics can easily be confused with jackass penguins, from Africa, which are classified as “vulnerable” and thus protected. The jackasses (named so for their braylike utterances) have been decimated by habitat degradation at the hands of guano prospectors. The way you tell them apart is by the markings. The Magellanic has white brow markings that do not connect to the rest of the tux.

  I also had to pick up my zebra skins at the Expedition Club uptown, which I figured I could do on my way out to Astoria. (At least some of my zebra skins were out of the shop and thus spared.) You’d think they would have had enough of them lying around over there at the Expedition Club, but they needed a few extras as part of buffet table settings. I suspect that they preferred to have Richard Leakey and Robert Ballard spill wine and gravy on my pelts instead of theirs. So a light coating of Scotchgard goes on mine before I rent them out, and the tough stains come out with a dynamite little product called Furz-B-Clean. You’d be surprised how many people on the Upper East Side want to serve their cocktail weenies from a table cloaked in zebra skins. Better that than as a rug. Soak ’em in pinot noir, if you must, but nobody scuffs the hair off my skins with their boots. I don’t rent them as rugs, ever.

  I called the Elks and got a machine. So I rolled my penguins in bubble plastic and boxed them in foam peanuts. Appropriately, they looked like they were frozen in ice and up to their necks in snow. I had just grabbed my car keys when the phone rang—I hoped it was the Elks so I could save myself an extra trip.

  But it wasn’t the Elks. It was Pete Durban.

  “I heard” was all he said.

  “Word travels fast.”

  “Wanna talk about it?”

  “Not really. My penguins are waiti
ng for me.”

  “You going out drinking with your penguins rather than me?”

  “Who said I was going out drinking?”

  “That’s what guys do when they feel sorry for themselves,” Pete said. “And believe me, I’m a much better listener than your seven dwarfs.”

  “Six. Remember the refrigerator commercial?”

  “Right.” Pete sighed. “Poor Sneezy. So, what say we get drunk and toast his memory?”

  “Can’t. Got business.”

  “A wet lunch, perhaps? One o’clock, the Mexican place?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Pete’s a high-school dropout who literally ran away with the circus. Hard to believe that sort of thing has even happened in the last fifty years, but he apparently had a full beard at seventeen and they weren’t particular. He started on the lowest rung: cage cleaner. But like most people who really adore animals, cleaning up after them comes with the territory. That’s how he got close to the lions and mentored with the lion tamer, a man who had lost his own son in a car crash three years earlier. Pete stayed until his late twenties, when the circus went into receivership and threw everybody out of work. His mentor retired, but the bank hired Pete to care for the lions and find buyers. Well, to make a long story short, some of the buyers who came sniffing around weren’t exactly legitimate, and Pete helped the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the feds nab a chop shop, which in this case was a black-market operation that sold exotics for parts. The DEC had an opening for someone who could make big cats purr instead of devour and was relatively fearless around dangerous animals. So once the lions had new homes, they signed him up.

  We were meeting at a Mexican place over on Washington Street, which is walking distance from my place. I’d picked up my zebra pelts and found them to be relatively clean—Jim Fowler and Sir Edmund Hillary must have used their plates. Made my penguin delivery and duly admonished the penguin wrangler to keep his beasts’ beaks away from my squad. He showed me that his birds were suitably contained, penned up in a chicken-wire enclosure at one end of the set. They jostled and squawked like a bunch of wobbly bowling pins. I would have thought they were cute if they weren’t crowded at the end of the cage closest to my birds, casting their beady eyes at the nearest box. They must have picked up the scent. You could see the little bastards already gleeful about the prospect of shredding Doc, Dopey, and Grumpy.