Frogmouth (6 page)

He watched the bird. It was out there not sailing for the comfort of the human heart, but for killing, for food. It was a bird. It saw itself as a bird, not as a symbol, and the fact that it was free and loose and wonderful was only something that men thought. Out there, it was merely hungry and was looking for something to kill. It was a sea gull, nothing else, merely a bird at work for its food.

It was more.

On the seat next to him, in a plastic envelope, there was the strange, gray-black tawny feather. He had no idea at all what it was.

Everything in the place had been dead.

It was a feeling he had never had before. He could not put a name to it.

It was the Bambi syndrome, brainwashing.

It was something else, more.

Whatever it was, it had no name.

He wondered.

Passing a garbage truck at the corner of Beach Road and Wyang Street he made a left to change lanes for Queen's Street to go north, still glancing at the bird wheeling in the free, still, rising air above the harbor.

The truck had stopped for a pickup at one of the litter bins. In the bin, wrapped in newspaper, there was a broken umbrella with a name engraved on its handle and, put down inside it, out of sight, a heavy iron bar.

It was 8:42
A.M.
, too early to worry about plunder, and the trashman following the truck emptied the contents of the bin into the back of the truck without looking at it.

Briefly, as he pulled the empty bin back from the apron of the truck's disposal unit, he saw something dark and weightless flutter from the mess, but it was only a feather and, giving the bin a bang against the lip of the apron to make sure it was empty, he took it back, clipped it onto its post in the street and, making a sniffing sound, began jogging after the truck as it moved off again for the next collection.

Out there in the harbor, in the lightning, the bird was wheeling and turning above the water.

The trashman had a job to hold down.

He looked across to it not once, not at all.

In the Twilight Zone it must have been time for a commercial break. The phones were working. At his desk, gripping the receiver for dear life, O'Yee said, "Inspector Hurley?"

"Hullo . . ."

O'Yee said in a rasp, "Inspector Glenn Hurley . . . ?"

Hurley said in a whisper, "Yes."

O'Yee said, "Christopher O'Yee, Yellowthread Street."

Hurley said, "Ah."

O'Yee said, "I just wanted to know if we'd beaten anyone to death in the cells here in the last few years."

Hurley said, "No." Hurley asked with interest, "Why? Do you think you're about due?"

O'Yee, clearing his throat, went, "Harra—hem!" He looked at Lim. Lim was looking at him. O'Yee said, "No, why I—"

"I can send you a form."

O'Yee said, "I'm just checking. This is an official police investigation and I'm directing an official police enquiry to you for which I require assistance and I—"

Hurley said, "Anything I can do to help."

"You're writing the official history of the Hong Kong police— how many people would you say have met violent externally induced ends inside the precincts of the—of the precinct station or, indeed, self-induced deaths inside the—" O'Yee said, "Here."

Hurley said, "If it's an official police enquiry I'd have to go downstairs here in Headquarters and dig out all the records going back for the last hundred years, cross-index them with coronal proceedings and departmental enquiries, then with actual trial records and then, to give you the exact, precise figure—"

"Just give me a rough estimate."

Hurley said, "Roughly—none."

"Somebody must have hanged himself from a steam heating pipe at least once in the last—"

"If someone had hanged himself more than once, then the first hanging wouldn't have gone in as an accidental death because, obviously, he was still alive to try it the second time." He had a degree in sociology. Hurley, being helpful, said, "There was one guy a few years ago who tried to fast himself to death in one of your cells—"

"He was an Indian fakir. Fasting was what he did for a living."

"Then none." All he wanted was a nice secure job in an American university museum somewhere working on rice husks and flint forks from a prehistoric cave find. What he had was a junior honorary inspectorship in Hong Kong working on guns, knives and corruption. Hurley, sighing, said, "Your station has a reputation for incorruptability."

O'Yee said, "Right." O'Yee said, "Twenty-eight."

"Mind you, it's only been a police station for about sixty years and even then, during the war, it was—"

O'Yee, subliminally, said, "Twenty-eight." He saw Lim cringe.

Hurley said, "Pardon?"

O'Yee said, "Nothing."

"You haven't actually killed someone in the cells today have you?" Hurley, sounding anxious, said, "Look, if you've killed someone there today past statistics aren't going to be of any assistance. I'm not going to be of any assistance." Hurley said, "Joke though it is, I'm still nominally a cop, an officer of the law, and if—"

"We haven't killed anyone!"

"Half killed them?"

"No!"

"Then if you're considering—"

"There isn't anyone in the cells! What there is is in the walls—" O'Yee said, "Twenty-eight! Twenty-eight!
Twenty-eight!
"

Hurley said, "Oh, God."

"What do you mean, 'Oh, God'?"

"Nothing! Nothing! Nothing at all!"

"Yes, you did! You meant something! What did you mean?"

"Nothing! I didn't mean anything!"

O'Yee said, "I'm not crazy!"

"No, of course not." Hurley, sounding as if he was talking to someone crazy said, "Well, I have to go now—"

"Someone, somewhere, sometime must have been beaten to death in the cells or no man ever loved or I never wrote!" He was going crazy. O'Yee said, "Then how about beaten to a pulp? Beaten to a near pulp? Badly frightened?"

"In nineteen twenty-eight?"

"Why nineteen twenty-eight?"

"You said twenty-eight. I assumed you meant—you know, twenty-eight with an apostrophe in front of the twenty, like, you know: 'twenty-eight . . ."

"What happened here in nineteen twenty-eight?"

Hurley said, "Nothing."

O'Yee said, "The walls have ears." They also had a mouth. Behind Lim the wall was beginning to creak. There was static starting in the phone. There was a grinding noise. O'Yee said, "I mean, I mean that psychic events can be imprinted on walls as if they were screens for a projector and if the projector is projecting things that the wall saw—" O'Yee said, "
What the hell happened here in nineteen twenty-eight?
"

"Probably a little man with a surveyor's theodolite said to another little man holding a measuring rod, 'Back three feet or so.'"

"You mean the station wasn't even built here then?"

"No, it was built in the nineteenth century as a police day post." Hurley said, "It was extended as a full station in about 1929 on the site of the old settlement."

O'Yee said, "What old settlement?"

"The leprosarium, and then it came into full twenty-four-hour operation and first appears in the police crimes returns in nineteen thirty-one." Hurley said, "Architecturally, it's an expression of the late Victorian tomb school of redbrick design that persisted well into—"

O'Yee said in a whisper, "
Leprosarium?
"

"Well, no, more the lazar house for the leprosarium a little way up the street—"

O'Yee said, "
Lazar house?
"

"Death house, you know. But it didn't last long because of the bad joss the Chinese lepers associated with it because it had been the site of the old gallows in the last part of the century."

O'Yee said, "
Gallows?
"

"It was a convenient site because, traditionally, long before the Opium Wars in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, the Chinese had used it for their execution ground and the continuum, you know, in the locals' minds of beheadings by the old regime and neck stretchings by the new—by the British . . ." Hurley said, "Well, it had a certain neatness about it."

"
Beheadings?
"

"Yeah." Hurley, becoming interested said, "There are some old photos and prints of some of them on file. If you like I could—"

O'Yee said, "
Hangings?
"

"Oh, and a few shootings in the back of the neck, but that was mainly reserved for rapists caught in the Chinatown section where the Imperial Government still had some authority—"

"
Shootings?
"

"Yes, they had a hell of a time digging up all the bodies and heads and twisted hangman's ropes when they laid the foundation for the extension and the cells." Hurley said, "No one ever asks me about history. It's really most interesting to—"

"
Hangman's ropes?
"

"Yes. Even the Japanese during the war got a bit pissed off when they were there because of all the bits and pieces that kept coming up to the surface."

"
The Japanese had the station during the war?
" Lim had goggled out. He was walking up and down, then round and round making funny little gurgling noises. O'Yee said in a fury, "And what the fuck did they use it for if they didn't kill people in the cells—
a goddamned preschool creche
?"

"No, a torture chamber."

"A WHAT?!"

"A torture chamber." Really, the ignorance of some people was appalling. Hurley, sighing, said, "It wasn't taken over by the Imperial Japanese Army as such, it was taken over by one semiautonomous branch of it called the Kempeitai. The Kem-peitai was the Gestapo of the East—"

"
I know who the Kempeitai were!
"

"But I don't think they actually killed anyone in there. At the end of the war during Liberation it was said that one of the Chinese secret societies caught the torturers and hacked them all to pieces, but I think that may have been outside on the grass—"

"Outside, there isn't any grass!"

"There was then. It was, of course, where the old typhoid pits had been in—"

"OH, GOD!"

"—the great epidemic of—"

"
Herk!
"

"What was that?"

"Herk!" THEY had control again. The phone, as a sheet of lightning exploded against the window and lit up everything in the room, went "Pzzt!"

"Herk! Herk!
Herk!
"

Hurley said in alarm, "Hullo, are you still there?"

The wall shrieked, "YAR—RAAAGGHHH!"

All the phones went dead.

He rose up. He ran. He flew. He had lift-off. He was up off the ground flying, turning into a blur. Auden's brain said, "
My God, he can do it!
" He didn't need his brain. His legs had turned into flywheels. They were flying. No, they were not sparks: it was the metal eyelets in his shoelaces—they had turned into sparks. He was glittering in the sun. Auden said, "My God, I can do it!" His feet were not touching the ground, they were hydroplaning. He had reached bow wave speed and only the minimum keel was on the surface and to the accompaniment of swelling music
PT 109
was up off the water with all guns blazing shooting torpedoes as it went.

Spencer shrieked, "You can do it!" He could. Spencer shrieked, "You can!" Spencer shrieked, "GO! GO!"

He was going. The Tibetan, making for the hill with a fistful of money, looked back to sneer. He saw something the size of the Incredible Hulk moving at the speed of The Unbelievable Blur and he didn't sneer. Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive— The Tibetan, turning, still running, did a sort of trip-skip, then a hop to recover, opened his mouth, closed it again and
ran
.

Huh, huh, huh, huh! It was a tea kettle steaming up getting ready to blow the lid off. He heard the crowd start to roar. His feet didn't belong to him anymore, they belonged to posterity. He heard posterity roar: the crowd, the fans, the blurred faces in the stands on their feet shouting. Auden, running, no longer running, reaching Zen, passing enlightenment, unstoppable, unstopping, hit the first pain barrier at the fifty-yard mark.

The first pain barrier at the fifty-yard mark was as nothing. His brain, astounded, said to the first barrier at the fifty-yard mark, "Ha, ha!" The barrier came and went. It was still there as a faint twinge in the region of the left ventricle. The left ventricle was as nothing. All the people and traffic on the street were going: they were fading, doing a dissolve. The music in his ears was swelling. The music he heard was
Chariots of Fire
. He was going so fast that he was traveling in slow motion. Time for important flashbacks in his life—God, he could hardly wait for the movie! Auden, talking to his brain, said, "Flashbacks!" He hit the pain barrier at the seventy-five-yard mark and his brain said, "Aghhh!"

"GO! GO!" It was Spencer shouting, jumping up and down clutching his stopwatch. He saw the Tibetan weave his way in and out of a crowd of people standing there watching like hurdles and then Auden, not weave at all, but cleave through them like a dreadnought. Some dreadnought. If they had had dreadnoughts like that at the battle of the Dardanelles the fleet would have been in Constantinople for breakfast.

Seventy-five-yard pain barrier nothing. He had not even worked up a healthy sweat. Auden, traveling on winged feet, the air whistling cleanly in his ears and blowing out wax and all his inferiority, yelled to the Tibetan
with no breathlessness at all
, "Give me a race! Run faster! At least make a contest of it!" His brain was working overtime keeping his lungs supplied with air. His brain yelled at him, "Don't waste time with useless taunts!" So much for his brain. Useless taunts were what raised man up from the animals. Auden, as the Tibetan reached the bottom of the ninety-degree hill and turned back to glance at him with fear on his face, yelled, "Sagarmatha Hill—think you can make it?" The Tibetan went up the hill like a mountain goat.

Auden the Magnificent, laughing gaily, was a second behind him like an enraged yeti. By God, Errol Flynn had had it right in moments of triumph. Auden the old swashbuckler, wishing only that there was a dewy-eyed girl to fall into his arms panting at the top of the hill when he triumphed, when he ascended, when he charged, when he came through, yelled, "Ha, ha, ha, ha." It was the old sword-fighting with the Sheriff of Nottingham laugh. Auden, his brain still protesting—Auden yelled to his brain, "
Shut up!
"—yelled with a flick of his head, "Hee, hee—ho! Ho!"