Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff VanderMeer

  I considered that, nodded. “Got it. Thanks again.” Wanted to leave it at that. Tried to put on a poker face.

  But I was stunned. I hadn’t known. Hadn’t guessed. Because the hummingbird was so beautiful.

  Terrorist? Murderer?

  “Should I send flowers?” Allie was still standing there.

  “What?” I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic.

  “To the family.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. She’s dead. Recently.”

  That came crashing through.

  But why did it hurt? Hadn’t the note told me that? Hadn’t Silvina herself told me, in her way? Yet, somehow, I’d thought the task would be finding Silvina. Literally finding her. Not tracking her ghost.

  “And there’s this,” Allie said, handing me a black-and-white photograph of a man standing on the bow of a yacht. He had a kind of weird bowl-cut for his dull brown hair, clean-shaven, and had a hooded look about the eyes and a small nose. Wearing a short-sleeved button-down shirt with a flower design, cargo shorts. Prominent gold chain around his neck. Something in the thin mouth, the curl of lip, made me dislike him. If not for the clothes, he would’ve had a chameleon-like look. You might not notice him in a crowd.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Ben Langer.”

  “Am I supposed to know who he is?”

  “You always talk about ‘the credible threat.’ About ‘collateral circles.’ Well, this name kept coming up. Ben Langer. Works for an import-export company that Silvina tied to wildlife trafficking. Also has a hand in illicit biotech and drugs. Langer might be doing the dirty work for that organization.”

  “Good point,” I said.

  “Langer is an opportunist of the worst kind. A sociopath at best.”

  That seemed like belaboring the good point. Half our clients were sociopaths.

  “And?”

  “What I mean is: Silvina’s friends are dangerous. Silvina’s enemies are dangerous. This whole thing is fraught.”

  “Fair assessment,” I said.

  I set the photo down on my desk. Wanted to turn it over, but resisted the impulse.

  “That’s that, then, right?” Allie asked, arms still crossed.

  Projecting irritation. But unsettled underneath, the irritation for putting her in a bad mental space. Crime was meant to be invisible in our systems.

  Should I stop? It seemed antiseptic to me. We were just gathering data. Passively. Not interviewing past associates. Not being obvious. So I felt confident in my answer.

  “Keep digging,” I said. “It’s low-risk. This is all information on the surface.”

  “Keep digging,” she said, in a flat voice. “You want me to keep … digging.”

  “Yes. Keep at it. There must be more than a photo and”—I flicked through the folder—“a paltry dozen pages of information.”

  Allie said nothing.

  A mention of a corporation run by her father caught my eye. “Check property. Shell companies, the rest.”

  “No,” Allie said.

  I put down the file.

  “No?”

  “This isn’t about work,” Allie said. “Larry told me.”

  Larry doesn’t know shit. Larry isn’t your boss.

  “Larry doesn’t—”

  “What about the pipeline account?” she asked.

  “Spend an hour on this. It won’t kill you.”

  “Then tell me the client, because Silvina’s dead.”

  I sighed. Okay, I would go through the charade.

  “The Vilcapampa companies. As you noticed, many of them are local. Silvina’s death may create an opportunity.”

  Was that crass to say? She must have thought so, from the stare she gave me.

  It occurred to me that I hadn’t tried to bind Allie to me. That I hadn’t done the things that create loyalty. Because that felt like a trick. A trap. And now it turned out I didn’t know her at all. Didn’t know the first thing about her personal life. Had rarely taken her to lunch. The kind of interest I’d taken was important to me, but maybe not to her. Was that what I was paying for now? Interoffice politics? Larry talking to her probably felt like sympathy or empathy.

  “An hour or two,” she conceded, but I wondered if she would. She walked out.

  Funny—I’d wanted her to be independent. I had wanted her to question me. And now …

  Only later did I wonder if she’d found something more, something she hadn’t put in the file. That had unnerved her.

  [20]

  Strength lived in my body so directly back then that I could mistake it for armor. It shone out of me like a drug and flowed back into me like power. It made me drunk in a way, made me take chances. Or gave me reasons for excuses.

  Worse, I was too proud of having studied criminology and psychology, in investigating Silvina. As if that meant I could exist, even flourish, in a world of mysteries. I knew in college that bodybuilding probably wouldn’t pay the bills. Or I wasn’t sure. It was more like: how do I make the strength of my body at least more than a hobby?

  I had a vague idea of joining the police force, maybe one day become a detective. I could snap any number of men over my knee. I might stand out, but I would also look like someone who shouldn’t be messed with. Be one of the boys. Pretend, at least. But what you face doesn’t always work like that. Whatever’s indirect. The thing your strength might not match up against, any more than a boxer understands how to fight a wrestler.

  But underneath that: even if you didn’t solve a case, even if I didn’t make it to detective, I would be the one who had the most information and most control. If you couldn’t make sense of a death, no one could, not really. Except, perhaps, a priest, and I didn’t veer existential or religious. No one in our family did. My brother came closest, but even in him it was more a kind of spirituality, a sense of awe at seeing the stars in the night sky. “The rogue immensity of the cosmos.” Like he’d never understand the world, but that didn’t bother him.

  Psychology was criminology’s cousin, and perhaps something in me also wanted to find a way to understand our grandfather’s situation. The way I despised him, and yet there were moments I wanted to conjure the pure, blunt, uncomplicated menace of the man.

  But, over time, the passion I’d had for being the one to solve cases had dulled, the anger and the sadness behind it.

  The verdict in my brother’s death was drowning.

  I never believed it.

  [21]

  The only obituary Allie could find ran in a niche leftist Buenos Aires newspaper with an online presence. Just a few sentences with no photograph. The feeling of a cover-up or data wipe persisted.

  Autotranslated from Spanish and cleaned up by Allie, the obituary noted that she’d died a week before, but didn’t list cause of death. “No mention of embezzlement online,” Allie wrote in the margin.

  An ardent defender of the environment and animal rights, Vilcapampa, 54, was the daughter of a notable industrialist and businessman. Born in Buenos Aires, she grew up Florida but moved to the Pacific Northwest for college. In the 1990s, Vilcapampa was arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit murder in the disappearance of five alleged wildlife traffickers but was released due to insufficient evidence. She moved back to the United States soon after to manage several of her father’s companies. She was suspected in further crimes in the early 2000s, including embezzlement from one of her father’s companies, but nothing was ever proven. Recently, Vilcapampa had been under investigation for alleged ties to bioterrorism groups.

  The mention of “bioterrorism” earned a raised eyebrow from me. I knew how activism became terrorism—in part, the shifting goalposts of changed laws. But how had Silvina’s ecoterrorism morphed into bioterrorism? Banned from her country of birth after the latest round of amorphous accusations. But the U.S. had let her stay. Why?

  Somehow, the father had managed to have his name kept out of even this brief mention. Fear on the part of the outlet or p
ressure applied?

  Allie had also found a local traffic report that named “Silvina Vilcapampa” as a “hit-and-run” victim seven days before. Police were looking for an SUV or minivan. “Nothing else local,” Allie wrote. “No funeral I can find.” No idea whether she had been buried or cremated. No follow-up to the initial mention. I found that suspicious. Normally, the paper would have run some kind of follow-up, under traffic reports or the police roundup. More meddling by the father?

  I tried not to imagine the violence of a vehicle hitting a human body, turned the page.

  Six or seven years ago, Silvina had begun a kind of community outreach, through an arts nonprofit created by Vilcapampa Enterprises. Trying to reconcile with Vilcapampa senior? She’d briefly funded “eco-artists” who’d formed their own community called “Unitopia” on an island made with recycled plastics, out in a lake in the wilderness. This struck me, after having seen the video, as ludicrous. The kinds of things that the Silvina in the video would label “bourgeois.” But a big deal to whoever Silvina thought she was at the time.

  Then that came to a halt as quickly as it had begun.

  Her whereabouts unknown the past four or five years. Activities unknown. Purpose unknown.

  I could feel my blood pressure spike. The message and storage unit key took on a heightened intensity.

  Surely no one cared about Unitopia these days? Still, at lunch I went to a shitty little internet café, put on protections, checked to see if their website was active. Rather than upset Larry again.

  Static, but still there. Mostly just a gallery of shots of the space. It had the slick, seamless feel of something put together by a branding company. Because it had been.

  A floor plan that almost looked more like the schematic of a spaceship, or cathedral, with a long, wide space with circles and half circles for rooms branching off to both sides and leading eventually to the crux of it all: a huge dome in the back that housed the visitor center and a presentation about the environment billed as “planetarium-worthy.” But the sneak peek video didn’t exist anymore. Just some text about how Unitopia had been inspired by a diagram by Humboldt, the naturalist. A symbolic peak, showing the richness of the world’s habitats, altitude by altitude. From valleys to the oxygen-starved summit. The idea of wilderness integrating humans into it. The holistic view. “Unitopia.” Silvina’s word for it, not Humboldt’s. Her contribution to a lost canon.

  Then I noticed in a photograph of the center a peculiar presence: taxidermy. Very ordinary, bear heads and more benign plastic models of sea life.

  Did it mean anything?

  Screw it. The more I dug, on a public computer, the worse things could get. But I was curious. Since the project had received city money, I wondered if there were line items for the budget or a proposal with vendors. Like, who had provided the taxidermy.

  Sure enough, “assorted animal models” appeared in an old PDF proposal, with a company name, “Animal Magic,” that was easy enough to find online, although now bankrupt.

  Animal Magic was a blanket company that provided a number of services, even animal mascots for birthday parties. They had a list of third-party vendors, if you looked hard enough.

  Only one was a taxidermist: Carlton Fusk, based in Brooklyn.

  I leaned back in my chair, in that humid, claustrophobic space, surrounded by the pecking and clicking of people searching for god-knows-what.

  Was this a valid clue? Or was this just a coincidence?

  Too early for me to know the difference.

  But, deep inside, I felt a thrill.

  My head felt clear, working on this mystery, like I’d been fuzzy before and hadn’t realized it.

  That was enough to make me want to pursue it.

  Which required me legitimizing it.

  [22]

  I stopped by Alex’s office: another glass cube with a minimalist desk, shockingly offset by a whaling scene in a gold Victorian frame and, in the corner, a stubby, faux Doric column with a bowl of gummy bears on top. Like usual, it smelled of his spice cologne. Reeked of it.

  He gave me a cheery smile, looking up from his laptop. He wore the glasses that performed no known use for him.

  “You know, Allie’s up for a raise,” Alex said.

  No preamble, as if he’d come to my office.

  “Oh really?” The hierarchy was shifty in our company, but I was responsible for her performance review.

  “Yeah—she’s hitting it out of the ballpark. Thanks for keeping her on the straight and narrow.” All these dead words we used.

  The message was clear. Allie had complained about the Vilcapampa research.

  “I agree,” I said.

  He looked pleased about that, as if he’d expected an argument.

  “So, what do you want?” The largesse would be of use to me.

  What I wanted and what I needed—were they the same? Maybe some part of me wanted Alex to say no. Needed Alex to say no and stop me. Because I wasn’t going to stop myself.

  “I know it’s short notice, but I need to go to that conference in New York.”

  Alex frowned. “I thought we’d decided to skip it this year.”

  “I took another look. Seems important for some of what we’re working on.”

  Alex took off his glasses, chewed on one stem. You could see the accumulated bite marks had torn the plastic off, revealing wire underneath.

  “Kind of a rebuilding year. And you’ve got the pipeline project.”

  “Allie’s doing great on the pipeline project. Like you said, she’s hitting it out of the ballpark.”

  He considered me. A full-on, taking-my-measure look. Like, was I playing him somehow.

  “Allie says you’ve got her on a wild-goose chase, since you mention her.”

  He’d brought her up first, but whatever.

  “I haven’t let her in on the details, but I think the Vilcapampa companies are a good possible client. They’re international, but have local affiliates. There’re hundreds of subsidiaries. The backing behind some popular brands. Like you said, a rebuilding year. Some of their reps will be in New York. Could be worth millions.”

  Didn’t mention Vilcapampa Enterprises owned the knock-off brands, mostly, the second- or third-tier ones that mimicked the brands people knew and loved. Didn’t mention that Vilcapampa had their own in-house security analysts. That the closed familial hierarchy meant even if I’d been serious, getting an in, getting an audience, would be tough.

  Alex considered that a moment. One thing I’d never done, or been good at, was generating business. He had me on record as saying I didn’t think that was an analyst’s job. But, mostly, I stood out like a sore thumb. My body made men uncomfortable. Women, too.

  “Yeah, she said you were researching that. I have to admit, I wondered why. Still, seems like short notice and the pipeline thing can’t really—”

  “Tell you what—how about in return this year Larry takes my place on your yacht retreat?”

  Flash of anger. I could see it there, plain. There was a way he had to control his body’s reaction to me calling him on that. How we both knew I’d never get that invite, ever. Then it was gone. But I’d expended capital, and I wouldn’t know how much until the punishment. Maybe the punishment would even be disguised as a perk.

  He wouldn’t look at me as he said, casual, “Oh, what the hell—go. Have fun. Just don’t order room service or book a room with a gold-plated toilet.”

  That was my cue to laugh. But I didn’t.

  [23]

  “Work toward a better world, but never forget what world you live in.”

  Strange, this compulsion. I lived within it, but also studied it from afar. I would be in a meeting presenting charts, ideas, diagrams to a client and they would have no idea I was somewhere else, in another world. And neither would I, at first, and then I would have the peculiar feeling of continuing the presentation while spying on my own distractedness. Muscle memory of so many other presentations carrying
me through. Click of the key to advance the slide; the transition from statements to the questions I only asked when it was safe.

  The nylons that signaled “familiar” and “safe” to the client. The high heels, with their wide, pragmatic soles. The stiff, siege-like quality of my dark gray business suit, that kept them far enough away that they could not peer into my thoughts.

  But my thoughts kept spilling out, strange and stranger. I kept having a dream. Every night. The hummingbird flew down like a tiny god, to the back deck of our house. Some fairyland version, glowing phosphorescent in a cascade of emerald, sapphire, and hot pink. As if revealing a true self as it descended steep from on high. Looking the whole time as if being moved seamlessly by an invisible hand from an invisible point in the sky to a hovering position above me.

  The hummingbird gave me what I can only describe as an imperious or even contemptuous look, hovering there weightless. It pierced me. Found me wanting.

  Then, with a slight leftward tack, the hummingbird veered off, disappeared, and I woke with a start. Sweating. The ticking of the bedroom clock, too loud.

  In the neighborhood we had an unidentified drone. Not a delivery drone. One of the new small ones. Could perch on a branch so you almost didn’t register the presence, because you thought it was a bird. Then, I loved drones. I loved how I could order something and it would be there immediately. I would toss the plastic in the recycling bin and never questioned the magic of how I had received yet another gift. We could do drones well, but we could not stop pouring plastic waste into the ocean.

  And, still, I was lost in the dream.

  [24]

  In a rush: of a sudden, the end of the week. Gasping from that. Yet also euphoric. Trying to be calm on the outside. I locked my office as I left Thursday night. Didn’t want Larry in there. But he could get in if he wanted. Anyone could.