The Conjurer's Bird

by Martin Davies

  The case was built of old, dark wood with a glass pane set into each side. One of the panes of glass was cracked and another was misted with a haze of tiny flaws so that it was almost opaque. Inside, crudely perched on a wooden branch, was a small brown bird, its head cocked slightly toward us as if in surprise. A very ordinary bird, very like a thrush or a blackbird or something in between. It could have landed in a suburban garden without exciting much notice.

  “Jeez!” exclaimed Potts. “Is that it? All this fuss for that?”

  But Anderson and Gabby were both crouching down, studying it intently through the two clear panes. I took a deep breath and turned on the overhead light so they could see it properly. And that made a difference.

  It was easy to see the bird wasn’t in a good state. It was a little shapeless, as if its body had begun to sag with gravity, and the harsher light showed that the once-rufous feathers had faded to a stale gray in places. There was a patch on its neck where the feathers seemed to have been torn away from the skin and now stood up in an undignified tuft. But the better light also showed the shadings of color that distinguished it, the tiny markings that made it neither a blackbird nor an ordinary thrush, but something different and unknown.

  Anderson turned to me, his eyes shining. “What do you think? Is it the one?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t enjoying this as much as I’d hoped. “It certainly could be.”

  He turned back and began to point out the details to Gabby. She was nodding, scrutinizing it minutely. Neither of them was a specialist but they both knew about birds and about preserved specimens, and they knew what they were looking for. Potts watched them both, observing their reactions. Katya took my arm and leaned against me slightly. I shut my eyes and waited. I could hear Anderson murmuring under his breath, repeating the description made by Forster over two hundred years ago: “Head dusky marked with brown…Wing dusky, primaries edged with brown…Twelve tail feathers…” Eventually he stood up; I heard the click of his knees as he straightened. Something of his usual manner had returned.

  “Of course, it’s nothing without provenance,” he said.

  “I know that.”

  He looked at me, surprised at my confidence. “There would need to be tests done.”

  “Of course. The lab people will want to do their bit of poking around.”

  He bent down and looked at it again. “It’s a miracle that it’s survived.”

  “A miracle? Perhaps. It’s certainly an amazing piece of luck.”

  “Jeez!” Potts snorted. “Are we doing business here or not? You two can compare birdwatching notes later, because the most you’re going to get for that is a few thousand dollars. What about the pictures? We need to open the case.”

  “No.” I held out my hand to keep him away from the bed, and the authority in my voice seemed to surprise him. “You two are interested in the pictures, I’m interested in the bird. So nobody’s opening up the case until we have the right conditions, the right humidity, the full works. That’s part of the deal—whatever happens, the bird is dealt with properly. Now let’s go back downstairs and talk figures.”

  I leaned forward and replaced the brown paper wrapper around the case to protect the bird from the light. When we left the room I took good care to lock the door behind me.

  Back in the bar, I watched Anderson settle back into one of the hotel sofas. When I’d met him at the Mecklenburg, he had spoken in quite an offhand way about my grandfather. At the time I’d thought it was the contempt of the natural winner for the habitual loser. But perhaps I had it wrong. Like my grandfather, he’d begun this expedition feeling he had something within his grasp that only he believed in. Perhaps he was afraid that, like my grandfather, he would be forestalled by some unforeseeable freak of chance. And now the chance had happened, the lightning had struck. It was I who had ended up with the bird.

  Even so, it left him considerably better off than it had left my grandfather. By the time Chapin made his successful foray into the Congo basin and emerged with those living specimens of the Congo peacock, my grandfather and his companion had probably already come to the end of their journey. The remains of their equipment were found two years later by a pair of French surveyors, many miles east of where Chapin found his peacocks. The few rather pathetic objects that the Frenchmen retrieved included my grandfather’s journal, the prose brittle with determination even while the logic and sense were draining from his words. The last entries were almost meaningless and nearly illegible. They contained no message for his wife or son, my father, a child he may not even have known existed.

  The bodies were never found. When news of the expedition’s demise reached Britain, a small memorial service was held. The Times praised his courage and endurance. My grandmother never remarried.

  Unlike the two men who lost their lives in the jungle, Anderson would prosper. I watched as Gabby settled beside him in the bar’s big velvet sofa. They sat close to each other, almost touching, as they had at the Mecklenburg. This time I didn’t resent it. I just sat quietly and waited for someone to speak.

  “Well, Mr. Fitzgerald,” Potts began, “what’s the deal here? Are you selling the bird now and the paintings later, if they turn out to be there? I’m not prepared to bid blind.”

  “I don’t care about the pictures. As I said, it’s the bird that counts. I’m prepared to sell the bird to either of you, but these are my terms: as soon as we agree on a price, we take the bird to the Natural History Museum, and the case is opened there, in proper conditions. The bird itself is donated to the Natural History Museum, but you get to keep the case and anything in it. And if the pictures are there, one percent of anything you get for them goes to the museum for the upkeep of the bird.”

  Potts snorted. “You’re joking, Mr. Fitzgerald. No one can do business on those terms. There may not be any pictures! Or you might already have opened the case and taken them out, for all we know.”

  I looked at him steadily. “I guess that’s the risk you have to take.”

  “You’re living in dreamland if you think anyone will touch a deal like that. It stinks.”

  But Anderson was watching Potts and smiling.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he mused. “I like what you’re saying, Mr. Fitzgerald. You’re right to want to safeguard the bird. So let’s see. Let’s say I promise to make a donation to the Natural History Museum to cover all the costs incurred in restoring the bird and in keeping it on display in proper conditions, plus fifty grand more for the upkeep of other rare specimens. No Canadian millionaires, no laboratories, no DNA experiments. In return, if the pictures are there, I get to keep them. The risk is all mine.”

  I nodded and turned to Potts.

  “Frankly, this is all bullshit,” he told me, taking off his glasses and rubbing them on his waistcoat. For all the innocence of the gesture, I could tell he was getting increasingly agitated. “Look, Mr. Fitzgerald, here’s my offer. You open up the case. If the pictures are there, I look after the business of getting them over to the States nice and quiet. I take a ten-percent cut, but I promise you’ll make a darn sight more this way than you will if you take them to Sotheby’s. I’m talking private sale here, Mr. Fitzgerald. Discreet, tax-free. No questions, no red tape, no markups to anyone else. Plus you get to keep the bird. If they’re not there, we go our separate ways and you can give the bird to whoever the hell you like. Think of it, Mr. Fitzgerald. Ninety percent of a million dollars is going to pay for some pretty good bird preservation. And what’s he offering you? Not a dime.”

  “My offer’s on the table, Mr. Fitzgerald,” Anderson said evenly.

  I turned back to Potts. “He’s guaranteeing the future of the bird, pictures or no pictures. I need you to do the same.”

  “Oh, for chrissake!” He stood up, very clearly agitated now. “This is crazy. Give me ten minutes. I need to think.”

  We watched him stalk out of the bar, a slightly absurd figure, too rotund and genial for his anger to be taken ver
y seriously. When he was out of sight, Anderson chuckled.

  “I guess I’ve just matched his highest bid,” he remarked with a smile.

  I looked over at Katya, who raised her eyebrows at me questioningly. I answered her with a nod and then turned back to Anderson.

  “Let’s have another drink.”

  “Yes, of course.” He sat forward and reached into his jacket pocket for his wallet.

  “Assuming Mr. Potts doesn’t change his mind, we’ll need something in writing about all this,” he said.

  “Okay, start writing. Put down exactly what you’ve just said. Tomorrow I’ll get it checked over by a solicitor.”

  He produced a sheet of paper from his briefcase and began writing.

  “It’s amazing,” he mused as he wrote. “Seeing that bird. Who would have believed it? Even if we don’t find Roitelet’s paintings, it was worth coming over just for that. I really mean it.”

  He wrote in silence for a while, then pushed the paper over to me and looked around contentedly.

  “Where’s Potts?” he wondered idly. “He’s taking his time.”

  For three or four seconds that statement hung in the air before anyone reacted. Then we all moved at once. Anderson was first to his feet and first to the door of the bar. I was a couple of yards behind him as he barged across the lobby and launched himself up the hotel stairs. And I was still behind him when he reached my room and found the lock forced, the bed empty, the bird gone.

  IN THE YEARS after her departure, Banks pursued both his work and his pleasures with a grim vehemence. His scientific projects enveloped him, and he labored tirelessly at them, impressing all who met him with his fierce commitment to the advancement of knowledge. His standing grew and his career flourished. His reputation spread. His correspondence alone was enough to fill three days of the week, and a man so busy can allow himself little time for introspection. And he had little need for it. In his own mind he had already answered the question that so beset him in the days after her departure: the two of them, he knew, would never meet again.

  But in that he was wrong. He was to see her one more time, some three years later, on a bright morning in spring. It was one of the last days he spent in the house on New Burlington Street, and his mind was fixed on the many matters squabbling for his attention. There were arrangements to be made, papers to be signed, and formalities to be overcome. As a result, his temper was short that day and he had no intention of receiving callers. It was only by chance that he appeared on the stairs at the moment the front door was opened to her. She did not see him for that first moment, intent as she was on asking for him, but he saw her, and the sight made him stop abruptly. With the shock came a tightness in his lungs and he felt the blood running to his cheeks. Then she looked up and their eyes met again.

  He brought her into the house himself, all the anger he had manufactured in the years since she’d left suddenly dissipated by the touch of her gloved fingers on his hand. All the recriminations he had rehearsed were replaced by speechlessness; all the coldness he carried in him changed to raw feeling.

  She had prepared herself for that day, so the shock of meeting was less for her. But when she looked into his face she saw lines there she did not recognize and furrows where no frown had been. The sight of them touched her in a way she had not anticipated.

  To him she seemed unchanged. As graceful and neat as that time he had come upon her arranging flowers. As poised behind her defenses as that day a lifetime earlier when he had first spoken to her in the Revesby woods.

  “I was in London,” she said. “I came to thank you.”

  He looked beyond her, into the street where a carriage was waiting.

  “To thank me?” he asked, still confused by her presence.

  “For not following us.”

  The plural noun caught his attention. “You mean…?”

  “Sophia and me.”

  “I see. I’d promised I would not.” Then he shook his head and found he could smile. “In truth I was too resentful. I wanted you to return unbidden.”

  She looked up and he could no longer avoid her eyes.

  “You knew I would not.”

  “Yes. I think I knew that.”

  She saw the smile, but also the tension in his body, and she reproached herself for the visit, the lack of warning she had given him.

  “I would not have come, but I had need to be in London and I wanted to tell you that Sophia is well and happy. Only that.”

  “As you promised.”

  “Yes, as I promised.”

  He nodded. “I think of her more often than you would believe.”

  She shook her head. “No, I would believe it.”

  They stood still and looked at each other then. From outside, the bright spring day cast a silver light in the space between them.

  “Do you blame me for what I did?” she asked.

  “I try to.”

  “Do you succeed?”

  “For three years I have succeeded. But I was not then looking at your face.”

  “Then I am glad that I came.”

  THEY PASSED an hour together that morning, surrounded by his collection, the great magazine of curiosities that had filled his house and become the wonder of Europe. In the wide, light-filled rooms, the size of the collection seemed to dwarf them and they drifted almost in silence from exhibit to exhibit, each more aware of the other than of the marvels before them. Sometimes she would pause to study an object, and as she did so he would step back and watch her—until he realized that her concentration was too intense, that in truth she was tangled in her own thoughts. Then he would speak blithely of the first object to catch his eye, and she would follow him to it, and for a little while they would discuss it brightly before again falling silent.

  They moved from room to room, from the great display of human implements and the memorabilia of his days in the South Seas to the herbarium, where they flitted from plant to plant and back again. There were the pictures, too, wild landscapes and the faces of strange men and women, but most of all the botanical works, the incomparable collection of drawings made by Parkinson before his death on the Endeavour. She studied them most closely, not in admiration, but as one workman observes another to see what can be learned. From time to time she would nod as if acknowledging a particular touch of his brush.

  Finally they came to the room of animal specimens, some mounted, many of them only skins stored flat. He showed her the greatest curiosities, the novelties that had become the talking point of his museum. As they browsed, he paused for a moment and looked at her directly again.

  “One thing I should tell you…Do you remember Lysart, the geologist? He has a daughter who is…who is like Sophia. She grows up in Kensington and he visits her often. But I can see it is difficult for her. Society is hard on such a woman.” He turned back to the drawing in front of him. “It is only just that I should tell you as much.”

  She nodded, scarcely looking at him, and their inspection moved on.

  Toward the end of the final room she came upon a mounted bird of no great distinction. He studied the label. From the South Seas, he said, from an island near Otaheite.

  “Such a plain bird to be so displayed,” she said.

  “Indeed. I don’t know why Forster mounted it. I remember he talked of some new practice in preservation that he wished to try. Perhaps he chose something unexceptional lest the experiment failed.”

  She was still looking at the bird.

  “But I like it,” she said. “A plain brown bird amongst all this glory. It has its own beauty, I think.”

  “Take it,” he said urgently, seized with the desire that she should have an object to remind her of that day. “Or I can have it sent to you.”

  “But that would diminish your collection,” she replied.

  “By a fraction. Who will notice?”

  In the end he insisted, and she gave him an address in Soho where it could be sent.

  “It is th
e house of Monsieur Martin,” she told him. “It is he who buys my work.”

  And so, when she had gone, when their last words had been spoken and he had handed her into her carriage, the bird was taken down and prepared for dispatch.

  For a few weeks its place in the rooms on New Burlington Street stood empty. But in the summer of that year his collection moved to Soho Square and the brown bird was forgotten.

  The day after Potts’s theft from my hotel room saw the first snow of the year. Katya and I had been up half the night, calming Anderson and shaking our heads while the police were called, the hotel roused, details explained, and a great deal of swearing done. When it was clear the bird was gone, I tore up my agreement with Anderson and gave the pieces back to him. I had sufficient respect for Potts by then to know it was highly unlikely that we would ever see either the bird or its case again. He certainly wasn’t going to be stupid enough to stumble into the arms of the police with a stuffed bird in his possession. At about three o’clock, groggy from lack of sleep, Katya and I left Gabby and Anderson in the hotel bar and went to bed. I can’t speak for the rest of them, but that night I didn’t even dream.

  The next day we checked out of the hotel as the snow was beginning to fall. There was too little of it to turn the world white, but the drift of snowflakes onto the cobbles was strangely soothing. I think we both felt the same. Katya put her arm through mine as we walked to the car.

  “What will Potts do with it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. When he finds there are no pictures, he might just dump it in the river. Or he might leave it dormant somewhere until things calm down, then sneak it to America to see what Ted Staest will pay for it.”

  “And Anderson?”

  “He’ll write it off as a business loss, I guess. He’ll soon find another project to replace it. And something tells me that, bird or no bird, he’ll find the money to make sure Gabby’s project carries on. I don’t think that’s a business thing for him.” I smiled at my own contradictions. “They make a good couple,” I said.