‘Zip,’ said Nathan. ‘It didn’t work, did it? I’m beginning to think that Jādir never did create a phoenix, not for real. Maybe everything he wrote about it was a legend. You know – like something out of The Arabian Nights. Like genies, and dragons, and flying carpets.’
He scraped aside the last of the ashes with the edge of the steel rule, and then stood up straight. ‘I don’t know how the hell I’m going to explain this to Ron Kasabian. He’s going to cut off our funding for sure. And he’s certainly not going to give us any more money to create a wyvern.’
Aarif was trying to salvage his camera equipment, but the heat had shattered all of the lenses and the legs of his tripods had collapsed.
‘I believed so much that this would work,’ said Aarif, shaking his head. ‘I believed it with all of my heart.’
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Nathan. ‘It’s always the same with science. You work your butt off for year after year, and in the end you come up with squat. It’s not surprising that you get so many mad scientists.’
‘Professor,’ said Kavita.
There was an odd inflection in her voice, which made Nathan turn around and say, ‘What is it, Kavita? What’s wrong?’
Kavita was staring up at a ventilator hood on top of the burned-out vivarium. Nathan frowned at her and then he looked up to see what she was staring at. On top of the ventilator hood he could just make out a silhouette that looked like a bird’s head with a hooked beak.
At first he thought it might be an optical illusion, an angular arrangement of shadows on the ceiling. But then the head jerked sideways, opened its beak, and let out a high, harsh cry.
‘Aarif!’ said Nathan. ‘Aarif – up there, on top of the vent!’
Aarif looked up, too, and then he turned to Nathan with a widening smile on his face. ‘You did it, Professor! You did it! I was sure that you could do it!’
‘You mean we did it, Aarif. Me and you and Kavita. We did it. And I think I need to apologize to Jādir, for doubting him.’
‘I will bring the stepladder,’ said Aarif, and hurried off to the storeroom to fetch it. Nathan crossed over to the far side of the laboratory, where a large parakeet cage was standing ready on a workbench. When he had ordered this cage, he had believed that he was tempting fate, and that he would never be able to create a living phoenix to put inside it. But at last he had done it. He had brought to life a living creature that for centuries had been known only as a myth.
Aarif came back with the stepladder and set it up beside the remains of the vivarium. Nathan made sure it was firm, and then climbed up it very slowly, so that he wouldn’t startle the phoenix with any sudden moves.
Little by little, the phoenix came into view. It cocked its head sideways and stared at Nathan with one glistening eye, and then it let out another harsh crarrrrkk.
‘Come on, baby,’ Nathan coaxed it. ‘Come to poppa. You’re beautiful, aren’t you? You’re really, really beautiful!’
The phoenix was about the size of a small scavenger hawk. The French author Voltaire had described this mythical bird as having a rose-red beak and feathers covering its head and its neck that were all the colors of the rainbow ‘but more brilliant and lively, with a thousand shades of gold glistening on its body and its tail’. But then Voltaire had never seen one, not for real. This real phoenix had brown, lusterless plumage, almost shabby, with darker brown tinges to the tips of its wings.
As Nathan rose higher on the stepladder, it spread its wings a little and backed away, its claws scratching noisily on top of the ventilator hood.
‘Come on, baby,’ said Nathan. ‘Come to poppa.’
The phoenix gave a nervous little skitter and backed even further away. Nathan froze, and then stayed completely motionless, both hands raised, scarcely even breathing, for over half a minute.
Aarif said, ‘Do you want me to try, Professor? When I was a boy, I used to catch my uncle’s chickens for him.’
Nathan didn’t answer, and still didn’t move. The phoenix let out yet another crrarrrk of alarm, but after a while its curiosity was beginning to get the better of it, and it came a few steps nearer, repeatedly twitching its head from side to side.
Nathan waited until the phoenix had almost reached the near edge of the ventilator hood. It stared at him, making a thin warbling noise in its throat, and ruffling its feathers. Even when it was close enough for him to try snatching it, Nathan held off. He wanted to make sure that he got a good firm grip on it, first time. He didn’t know for sure if it was developed enough to fly yet, and he didn’t want it to fall off the top of the ventilator hood on to the floor and injure itself. It was only a fledgling, after all.
‘Aarif,’ he said, ‘take off your lab coat and hold it out, just in case it loses its footing.’
Aarif did as he was asked, and he and Kavita stood underneath the phoenix with his lab coat stretched out between them as a safety net.
The phoenix came even closer. Nathan took a deep breath, and then lunged forward and caught hold of both of its scaly legs.
Immediately, with a screech of rage and indignation, the phoenix attacked him. It jabbed at his face with its beak, narrowly missing his left eye, and its claws scrabbled at his wrists. It screeched again and again, its beak hacking at his forehead and his cheeks and splitting his lower lip, and its wings beat so frantically that it almost lifted him off the stepladder.
He tried to take a step down, but the phoenix went for his face yet again, and when he instinctively jerked away from it, he lost his balance. He clattered backward down the stepladder, still holding the phoenix’s legs in both hands. Aarif managed to snatch the tail of his lab coat and partially break his fall, but he landed heavily on his right shoulder on the floor. Even as he lay there, winded, the phoenix kept up its furious attack, tearing at his left earlobe with its beak and clawing at his neck.
‘For Christ’s sake get this damned thing off me!’ Nathan shouted.
Aarif tried to pin the bird’s wings against its body, the way he would have caught a frightened chicken, but the phoenix was like a blizzard of feathers and claws, and it was impossible for him to get his hands around it. He tried instead to seize its neck, but it screeched and twisted its head around and viciously pecked at his hand.
It was Kavita who finally managed to subdue it. She threw Aarif’s discarded lab coat right over it, twisting one of the sleeves around its legs and tying it roughly into a knot. The phoenix screeched again and again, and fought with such determination to escape from its makeshift straitjacket that they could barely hold it. Eventually, Aarif managed to keep the struggling creature pressed against his chest long enough for Nathan to be able to climb to his feet. Between the two of them they carried it across to the parakeet cage, opened the door and forced it inside.
Aarif untied the sleeve of his lab coat and dragged it out of the cage, while Nathan quickly fastened the catch. Instantly, the phoenix exploded with fury. It thrashed its wings and hurled itself from one side of the birdcage to the other, crashing against the bars so violently that some of its feathers burst out and floated in the air all around it.
‘Aggressive little critter, isn’t it?’ said Nathan, dabbing the blood from his face with a paper napkin. ‘You remember what I told you about mythical creatures not being afraid of humans? I should have remembered it myself.’
‘It won’t hurt itself, will it?’ asked Kavita.
‘Maybe we should give it a tranquilizer,’ Aarif suggested. ‘A small dose of metoserpate hydrochloride, like they give to chickens whenever they get stressed.’
‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘At least, not yet. Let’s just give it time to relax. I don’t want to risk giving it an overdose.’
Outside in the street, they heard the wailing and honking of sirens. At the same time, the building’s super appeared in the doorway, a tall rangy black man called Henry. He wore a flappy gray uniform with the Schiller insignia on the pocket, and a peaked cap.
‘Holy Moses, Profess
or!’ he said. ‘What happened in here? I heard a bang, but I thought it was just more thunder.’
‘Slight accident,’ said Nathan.
‘You ain’t kidding me. Look at this place!’
‘Don’t worry. We called the fire department, as you can hear.’
‘But your face, Professor! You’re all cut up!’
‘It’s nothing, Henry. Only a few scratches. Why don’t you go back down to the lobby and show the firefighters where we are? And you can tell them that the fire’s out now, so they won’t be needing their hoses.’
Henry loped around the workbenches in his thick-soled shoes, sniffing and shaking his head. The way he walked always reminded Nathan of Jar Jar Binks. ‘You know they had this entire laboratory refurberated just last fall, only a couple of weeks before you moved in. Man, oh man! Mr Kasabian, he’s going to go apeshit.’
He passed close to the phoenix cage, and as he did so, the phoenix screeched and scrabbled at the bars. Henry jumped back, and said, ‘Shee-it! That’s some seriously cranky bird you got there, Professor!’
He bent down and peered at it more closely. ‘Homely, too. Never saw a bird like that before.’
Nathan was dabbing more blood from his ear, but he couldn’t stop himself from smiling. ‘No, Henry, you never did. Nobody ever did. Nobody in this day and age, anyhow.’
FIVE
Tuesday, 7:43 a.m.
‘More coffee, honey?’ asked Trixie.
Detective Jenna Pullet shook her head emphatically from side to side. ‘No, thanks, Trixie. I don’t want to spend the rest of the morning shaking like a fricking epileptic.’
‘You didn’t touch your bacon,’ said Trixie, frowning at her plate. ‘You hardly touched your eggs, neither.’
‘That’s because the bacon is watery and the eggs are rubbery. And is this a buckwheat pancake or a mouse mat?’
‘I don’t never know why you come in here,’ said Trixie. ‘You order breakfast, you always hate it.’
‘I come in here to lose weight. It’s a whole lot nearer than my gym.’
For Jenna, her weight was a never-ending struggle. She was blonde, with big hair and a wide, generous face, and a wide, generous figure to go with it. In her closet at home she had seven suits of three different sizes – the suits she could comfortably get into, the suits she could get into if she wore her Bali firm-control briefs and held her breath from morning till night, and the suits she could only aspire to get into.
It was the irregular mealtimes that did it. The jelly donuts when they were out on early-morning stake-outs, the hurried Reuben sandwiches before they had to give evidence in court, and then the cheesesteak and beer orgies after they had made a successful arrest. She could never keep track of the calories, and she always imagined that her digestive tract was like the CSX marshaling yard, with food being shunted down her like coupled-up railroad cars.
‘So, you doing anything exciting today?’ Trixie asked her, taking away her plates.
‘Sitting in front of a computer screen, most likely. Things have been real flat for the past couple of weeks. Even the South Philly mob are sitting at home and doing all their racketeering online. These days, I think “Mousie” Massimino employs more hackers than hit men.’
Joe McVitie came out of the kitchen holding up Jenna’s plate. ‘What the hell’s the matter, Jenna, this is best farm bacon, fresh eggs!’
‘I know, Joe. It takes real talent to mess them up as bad as that.’
‘So why do you keep on coming in here if you think I cook so shit?’
‘That’s what Trixie asked me. I really don’t know, Joe. Maybe it’s a Catholic thing. Mortification of the palate – you know, like the nuns force themselves to eat gristle.’
‘Well my advice to you is to go eat breakfast someplace else.’
‘No, Joe. It’s not in my nature. I’m waiting for a miracle. I’m waiting for the morning when I walk in here and the bacon is crispy and the eggs are over easy and the pancakes are light and golden. An angelic choir will start singing and the whole diner will be filled with dazzling sunshine and I will know that my faith in you has at last paid off. And do you know when that will be?
Joe shook his head, partly because he really couldn’t guess and partly because he thought Jenna was nuts.
‘Sometime around the year twenty-thirty, if I’m lucky,’ Jenna told him.
She climbed down off her red leather stool and lifted her coat off the back. As she did so, her cellphone played ‘Blanket on the Ground’. She slid it open and demanded, ‘What?’
It was her partner, Dan Rubik. It sounded as if he were out on the street someplace, because she could hear traffic and sirens and people shouting in the background.
‘Jenna – I’m here at the intersection of Green Street and North Twenty-second. Just outside the Convent of Divine Love. We got ourselves a very weird DB here.’
‘Weird? What do you mean by weird?’
‘Looks like the guy got hit by a half a ton of rock, right out in front of the convent. Killed him instantly.’
‘What? Did it fall off the roof or something?’
‘Couldn’t have done. He’s nowhere near the roof.’
‘OK – I’ll get right down there. Do you have backup?’
‘There were half a dozen uniforms here by the time I got here, and the medical examiner’s on his way.’
‘OK. Give me ten minutes.’
Jenna took out her billfold to pay for her breakfast, but Joe McVitie said, ‘Forget it. It’s on the house. Go be a nun. Eat gristle.’
Officers Steinbeck and Cremer gave Jenna a ride to North Twenty-Second Street. Officer Cremer had a head cold and kept noisily blowing his nose, and the interior of the squad car reeked of menthol.
When they arrived, Jenna saw that the wide paved area in front of the Convent of Divine Love had already been cordoned off with POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape and that the side street was crowded with spectators. A black van from the medical examiner’s office was parked nose-to-tail with a van from the crime scene unit and another van from 6 ABC Action News.
Dan Rubik came across the paved area and lifted up the tape for her. He was a young, intense detective with a bright ginger buzz-cut and pale green eyes and freckles. He always wore green coats because he thought that they complemented his gingery complexion.
‘OK – we have at least five eyewitnesses already. They all say that the vic was crossing this forecourt, minding his own business, when crash! This massive block of stone dropped on top of him, right out of the blue. No warning. Just crash!’
Jenna elbowed her way into the knot of officers and CSIs and medical examiners who were gathered around the victim. When they saw who it was, they all stepped aside and let her through. Several of them gave her a wary nod of acknowledgement. One or two of them put on sour expressions and backed away.
The body was that of a man about forty-five years old, wearing a dark blue linen coat and light khaki pants. He was lying with his face pressed flat against the paving slab, still wearing his horn-rimmed Clark Kent spectacles, as if he had made no attempt at all to break his fall. The back of his head was crushed in – a glistening mixture of brains and skull fragments that looked as if somebody had broken a white china pudding basin filled with boysenberry jelly.
Lumps of shattered stone were scattered everywhere. Several of them were still resting on the victim’s back, but most of them had exploded in all directions, and now littered an area spanning the street. One chunk was over a foot wide, but few of them were bigger than tennis balls, and most of them were much smaller.
Jenna looked up. The convent’s facade was a gray Gothic chapel with a circular stained-glass window like the spokes of a huge cartwheel. Dan was right. The vic was lying at least sixty feet too far away to have been struck by a piece of stonework falling from the roof of the chapel – not that she could see any sign of missing crosses or spires or statues or gaps in the parapet.
Ed Freiburg, one of the crime sc
ene specialists, came up to her. He was short and chunky, with pitted cheeks and steel wool for hair, and he looked more like a boxing coach than a forensic scientist. ‘We’re guessing there’s nearly a thousand pounds of stone here. We can’t know for sure until we collect it all up and weigh it, but that’s our estimate.’
‘So how the hell did nearly half a ton of stone drop out of a clear blue sky?’ Jenna asked him. ‘Did any of the witnesses hear a helicopter?’
Dan said, ‘None of them.’
‘All the same, run a check on all helicopter flights in the vicinity. See if some construction company was maybe trying to fly a block of rock across the city for some restoration job.’
She turned back to Ed Freiburg, ‘Do you know what kind of stone this is?’
‘Limestone,’ Ed Freiburg told her. ‘And it’s some of the best quality limestone I ever saw. Usually used for building and sculpture, that kind of thing. So if it was dropped from a helicopter, this is the kind of stone it would most likely be, if that makes sense.’
Jenna looked around. She hated cases like this. More often than not, they turned out to be negligent homicide, and cases of negligent homicide invariably involved weeks or even months of tedious paperwork and hours of Byzantine interviews with evasive executives and slippery corporate lawyers. Eventually, somebody would pay off somebody else and the whole process would be dropped for the lack of anybody willing to point a finger at whoever had added the lethal chemical to the cleaning fluid, or whoever had left off the safety switch, or whoever had allowed the pipes to rust through, or, in this case, whoever had failed to secure half a ton of limestone to whatever it was supposed to have been secured to.
‘I presume the vic was carrying some kind of ID,’ she said.
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