Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff VanderMeer

  The weather had turned a sour lukewarm with pockets of chill, unfamiliar for the season. Glittering gutters. Tinkling gurgle of water passing through shards of ice. Now we had flood warnings instead of sleet warnings. Flowers bloomed that should have waited until spring. I took my own car, telling my husband short-term parking was more convenient than him having to take me. Not that his grumbly offer had been convincing; I’d sprung conferences on him before, but it always unsettled him, and him being unsettled made our daughter grumpy. Even if most days she would’ve hardly known if I was home or not.

  On the way to the airport, I had two stops to make. First, the gym. It wasn’t to work out. Just to check that the hummingbird was safe. Maybe that was me not thinking straight. Maybe it was me worrying too much. I guess I thought I’d get a few sets in, too, in my street clothes. Settle my nerves.

  The box was there. The hummingbird was in the box.

  The new thing was Charlie coming over to talk. Instinctively, I put my body in front of my locker so he couldn’t see the box.

  “What’s up?” Thought I’d broken some gym rule.

  “Someone followed you here,” Charlie said. “Two men—in a black SUV in the back of the parking lot.”

  I laughed. That sounded ridiculous. Why did it sound ridiculous? A pinprick of alarm, but I didn’t know the source. The information or my reaction?

  Then I took a look, frowned. No one in the parking lot. “I don’t see anyone.”

  “No—last time. This time, who knows?”

  “Are you serious?” Like Charlie was paranoid. Like some quirk of his past was surfacing. Me playing amateur psychologist to deflect.

  “Think I’m talking to you for fun or something?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Somebody is onto you.”

  “I haven’t done anything.” Blurted out.

  He chuckled, like I’d told a joke. “You must’ve done something.”

  “No one’s following me. No one’s there, Charlie.”

  It came down to this: I wasn’t ready to believe some online searches had spilled over into the meat world.

  Charlie looked at me like I was naïve, then shrugged. “Okay, then. No one’s following you.”

  He went back to his chair, picked up the newspaper, gave it a stiff shake to straighten the page he was reading. Didn’t speak to me again. Wasn’t going to waste more time on a fool like me, said the economy of his body language.

  In the end, I left the hummingbird in the locker. Because I’d extracted what I needed. Because I didn’t have time to do anything else with it.

  * * *

  Next stop was the coffee shop, where I’d gotten Silvina’s message. I hadn’t gone the whole week. “Safe” or “unsafe”—these weren’t the words. But something had been broken and it didn’t feel like a sanctuary. Or even a respite.

  Only one reason to go back. And I almost didn’t, except I checked the whole way. No black SUV following. No one following that I could tell, trying to remember all the bullets in PowerPoint about tailing someone from a past conference. Old-school stuff. New to me.

  I slid into a chair at a rickety table facing the register. Returning to the scene of some crime. Except I didn’t know what the crime was yet.

  Did I have a heightened sense of my surroundings? Yes. Was my heartbeat rapid? No.

  The barista who had given me the note stood behind the counter, trying to ignore me. Half expected he wouldn’t be there. Different shift than usual or just disappeared. A gangly young man. A shadow beard. He wore a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, with a coffee shop apron over that. Though the place wasn’t much warmer than outside.

  When he was free of customers, I beckoned to him. For a moment, he looked like he might flee out the back. Then what? Would I try to retrieve him?

  But, instead, he asked a bored-looking woman with a nose ring and fiery red-orange hair to take over. He slid into the chair across from me, smelling of clove cigarettes. A kind of confused defiance lit his features. As if trying to get behind a cause but didn’t know what he’d signed up for.

  “I told you already—the envelope got dropped off for me along with the money. No one remembers who dropped it off.”

  I pulled out a hundred-dollar bill. With the way inflation had spiked, who knew how much it would be worth in a month.

  “I just have a few questions. Not really about the envelope.”

  He looked at me. Pity or distaste. At what? Me playing amateur detective?

  “I have to serve customers again soon,” he said. But he pocketed the hundred.

  “You’ve seen me in here a thousand times, right?”

  A pause before he nodded, as if it was a trick question. Let’s call him “Clove,” because I’m tired of typing “he.”

  “And you’ve seen a lot of other people in here around the time I’m in here who are regulars, too?”

  “Yeah.” With a “So what?” subtext.

  “Any of them stop coming around the last month or two?”

  Clove thought about that a moment. “I think so. I think some of the regulars dropped off. There’s a new coffee shop down the road.”

  “Any of them women?”

  “Some. Maybe.”

  “Any of them look like this?”

  I slid Silvina’s photo across the table. Not a great shot, a little grainy and ten years old, but close enough.

  Clove picked up the printout. Exhaled, inhaled. Was he more nervous now? Put the photo down.

  “Took a moment. She wore dark sunglasses a lot and had blond hair, but I think that’s the same face.”

  Silvina, disguised. From me or whoever pursued her? Or just hiding from the light?

  “How often did you see her?”

  Again, Clove paused, reset.

  “I can’t say when she stopped coming in, or if she has. I just know I haven’t seen her in a while. I couldn’t say how long, though. A lot of people come in here.”

  “Was she ever in here when I was in here? If you remember.”

  “She always came in the morning. Early. So, yeah, she would’ve been in here.”

  Was it excitement or fear that spiked the adrenaline?

  “Did she have a favorite spot to sit?” I asked.

  “Oh, I dunno. Maybe.”

  “Are you saying she took her order to go instead?” Old trick with clients: put words in their mouths they had to react to, dislodging information.

  “No.”

  “Then where did she sit?”

  He pointed over my shoulder.

  I swiveled to look, turned back to Clove. “That table there? By the window?”

  Clove nodded.

  I felt for a moment like I was back in the river by the farm, drowning. That I would be stuck in that moment forever.

  But I managed to ask, even though I couldn’t breathe, “How long has she been coming in?”

  “Off and on? A year, maybe.”

  I was sitting in my own favorite spot.

  According to Clove, for a year before her death, Silvina had come to the same coffee shop and sat in the best place to watch me. Without me noticing. Never striking up even a casual conversation.

  “Did you peek?” I asked him. Random interest. Maybe I wanted to punish him. I was leaning in, invading his space.

  “What?” Clove’s expression suggested pornographic thoughts.

  “Did you peek? At what was in the envelope?”

  “No. I wouldn’t do that.” As if I’d accused him of a serious crime.

  “Not even a little, tiny peek?” Tempted to share the message, ask his opinion. But that would be further contamination. What if men in a black SUV pulled up later and asked him questions from this same seat?

  Clove shook his head. Grim-faced. Hands clenched in his lap.

  Time to put him out of my misery. On a hunch, I took out the photo of Langer Allie had given me.

  “One last question. Do you recognize this man?”

  “No, neve
r seen him.” No hesitation.

  “Fair enough.” Skeptical.

  But my sin was worse than disbelief.

  My sin was the thought that Langer would’ve been in disguise, too smart for the man in front of me to notice.

  [25]

  The nests of the hummingbird are another miracle. They occur high in hemlock, Sitka spruce, western red cedar, Douglas fir. The birds are so small that the needles act like branches, and the nests, skillfully woven, are only three centimeters across.

  S. griffin uses its bill as a crochet hook to incorporate lightweight lichen, moss, and downy plant material into a hammock for her young. Nests are attached to the needles with cobwebs. One or two uniformly white eggs are incubated in the nest for several weeks. The female coats each egg with a bacteria-rich fluid she excretes, which protects her brood from harmful diseases that can colonize the young as they emerge from the eggs. The baby’s beak—a fraction of the size of a human baby tooth—cracks open the shell, and the hatchling immediately seeks nutrition from the mother, which she dutifully provides through regurgitating flower nectar and protein-rich insects.

  The young spend less than a month in the nest. In that short time, they must grow and learn critical behavior from the mother. At month’s end, they fledge and prepare for their ten-thousand-kilometer migration to a land unknown.

  Or had. For many thousands of years. Now they were so rare the one in my locker was worth upward of a quarter of a million dollars. To the right collector.

  If you could put a price on life in death.

  And, apparently, you could.

  PANORAMA

  [26]

  I did and didn’t enjoy air travel back then. The quiet, cool cocoon, the ice in the glass just so, the smooth camaraderie of seasoned travelers broken only on occasion by the person to whom it was all too new. The freedom to be alone, to think alone. The spotlight from above that pearled the scented air. Pointing at only the important things. The sense of being motionless once at altitude. Outside of time, outside of history. Even with weather delays, in first class you could almost forget the world was fucked.

  But, even there, the seats weren’t always wide enough to be comfortable. Depended.

  I had always been big—big-boned, broad-hipped, “shoulders like a linebacker,” my father would say, as he pulled on those shoulders and said “Straighten up.” The “son” implied. “Learn the clutch, not the automatic.” “Go hunt with me.” (I wouldn’t.) Until the day, sometime in college, when something my mother said made me realize he was just saying and doing all the things his father had said to and done with him. And I had a vision, down through history, of a series of dad-robots saying and doing the same things and other sons and daughters being caught up in those ghosts.

  From then on, I never let my father pull my shoulders back. I didn’t like the idea that my grandfather’s ghost was there; I always hated him. Maybe, too, that’s why my father drank so much, and it had nothing to do with the farm or my mother’s condition. At first.

  My mind roved so much on that flight. Hummingbird, salamander, life on the farm, my brother. Settled on Silvina, on the file, on her family.

  Silvina’s parents were still alive, back in Argentina. I looked at the photos before the rest of the data—an old trick. The data always made the photos conform to a certain story. Sometimes the photos wanted to tell a different story.

  The patriarch, Matias Vilcapampa, first glimpsed from a fairly recent picture, in his early seventies, with a great mane of silver hair and a ruddy, brooding, pockmarked face. A terrible flare of irritation to the eyes as he did nothing to soften his expression in the company photo. Perhaps even took pride in his anger, expressed. Yet in the bags under those eyes, an undecided quality to the set of the jaw, I decided I saw weakness or vulnerability or confusion that signified loss. Something the anger was meant to draw attention from or solve.

  He fled repressive regimes in Argentina only to wash up in Miami even more absurdly wealthy and come back after to his native country with more influence, more millions, than his ranch-owning grandfather ever could have imagined. The empire he’d created during this time focused on mining, oil, and other dirty industries. Vied for wells and veins in African and Central Asian countries and then preyed upon the South American countries with the least regulation.

  In Argentina, as if not to soil the nest, he stuck to cattle ranching, even gave to environmental organizations. Everywhere else: a major exploiter, extractor, and polluter, with his own private army of bodyguards, and ruthless tactics from a corresponding army of lawyers.

  What did Matias do for recreation? A big game hunter, a trophy hunter. The glazed, open eyes of a giraffe, lion, water buffalo, bear, accompanied him across a grim progression of photographs. And in these I imagined the confusion was mitigated or canceled or briefly gone. Because there is, at the very least—and Silvina would call it less than least—a certainty of purpose, a calm in the aftermath. In death.

  I knew this man. So close in kind to my clients. This was how they postured, how they showed off the size of their balls. Common knowledge that we tried not to think about: that some of our clients had their own security teams. People who were ex-military. People who would do things for their bosses beyond fixing their security systems.

  Confirmation as to why there was so little information about Silvina’s death. Men like her father snuffed out controversy; it was the default. There, in the relative safety of my office, I imagined his reaction to my prying.

  He would have been ashamed of her for decades, fighting with her about her life for decades. Even as the family name was a sham, a shame. A claim of indigenous blood, but from what I could tell, it wasn’t the original family name. It was a name he had invented when he became a businessman.

  Had there come a point where Matias couldn’t take Silvina’s actions any longer?

  I went on to the information about the mother, Catalina.

  Catalina, amid rumors of Matias’s mistresses, was easy to diagnose, even before I turned to the text. Much like my own mother, although hard to talk about. She looked worn and haggard and her gray hair had thinned, and none of the lavish sequined dresses could distract from the fact that something in their life was leaching the life from her. Or laughing at her. Skip to the part where your husband spent most of his free time posing with dead animals.

  Beloved she was to many for being the face of her husband’s charitable giving. Their endowment of libraries and university buildings. Some small controversy about the name “Vilcapampa” and what it meant to indigenous communities affixed itself to the charity. But, in the end, no one cared.

  To many, they were not bad people, not even close. Pillars of the community. They believed in the future. They believed they were contributing to the future even as they took the future away. I had probably pumped gasoline into my car that came from the Vilcapampa Oil Company. Had components in my phone made from rare earth minerals extracted by various Vilcapampa mining concerns.

  Just as I had traveled out to their storage palace, which appeared to be the farthest and least extent of their empire. The most visible vestige of an effort to branch out. A receding tide in time—gashing the earth and extracting things from it was the expertise.

  The storage palace must have been one of the companies Silvina was tasked with managing because who cared what happened to it. As far as I could tell, it operated at just twenty-five percent capacity currently, so must serve as a tax shelter. Or, just gotten lost in a spreadsheet somewhere. The Vilcapampa business empire was so vast.

  Wondered which others had been on the list for Silvina to manage. What that list added up to.

  But, mostly, I wondered what the ghosts looked like in Silvina’s family. What were the words and phrases carried forward. What version of “drive a clutch” or “shoulder turning”? How far apart had we been growing up? Her accustomed to the newly aristocratic wealth, no matter how she would reject the trappings. Me in the lower mi
ddle class and living on a farm to boot. What would friendship have looked like? Couldn’t imagine it.

  And how did Langer fit into that? Just as an enemy or was it more complicated than that? At first, I thought Langer wasn’t too far off from Matias. In the sense that Alex knew just which of our clients would hit it off over dinner. Even if they seemed to come from different worlds. Something always bound them, and that binding didn’t bear too much scrutiny. If you wanted to pretend you lived a moral, ethical life.

  Langer’s sketchy background, pieced together, didn’t help much. Grew up in New Hampshire out in the woods. His father had collected guns and Nazi memorabilia. Even had a cannon—it was there in the estate sale after the father died. Langer moving from business administration in college (flunked out) to a stint in the army (also brief). Peace Corps for a two-year tour, then ex–Peace Corps, too—Sumatra. Divorce while in Guatemala, no kids. Moved on to Ecuador, Chile. “Go overseas no matter what” seemed to be his mantra. Special ops? Then just regular ops—stumbling into import-export that happened to include wildlife trafficking? While also belonging to left-wing anarchist groups. An on-the-nose rejection of his conservative father.

  It would be a long time before Langer came into focus, like some deep-sea creature glimpsed briefly through the murk.

  I thought of Allie’s warning, thought of my search on Larry’s computer, then put it all aside with a rum and Coke.

  On the way to New York, in blanketed dark comfort.

  The last time I flew anywhere.

  [27]

  The conference had a small, tight feel. Insular. Familiar logistics. The jokes familiar, the words “disruptor” and “drone” meaningless—the first from repetition, the second through transformation, camouflage. The new, shiny thing, the way biotech advances could dovetail with new ways to view security. That kind of hum and babble that spreads like a wave, but isn’t reflected in programming locked in months before.

  The hauntings we could rationalize, become full-throated here, conjured up by panel titles on subjects that might be obsolete or irrelevant soon. “Smart Phone Virus Displacement in Reporting Tools.” “Home Security Exfiltration Tactics in Totalitarian Regime Change.” “Future Opportunity in Zoonotic Viruses Sector.” “Wireless Trail Cam Lamprey™ Remote Access.” Nation-state infiltration, third-party nihilists, ransomware, Defcon.