The Blackbird Papers

by Ian Smith

  Sterling took his toasted cinnamon-raisin bagel and orange juice and sat down at one of the small back tables. It was only six thirty; he wasn't expected at Professor Mandryka's for another half hour. He flipped open the Times and began skimming the front page. Nothing. He then scanned the nation section. There was the headline DARTMOUTH PROFESSOR MURDERED IN VERMONT.

  It was a short article, starting at the bottom of the page and continuing in the science section. Most of the space was devoted to Wilson's scientific accomplishments. A biologist whose name Sterling didn't recognize was quoted as calling Professor Bledsoe one of the most important ethologists in the history of the discipline, in the same class as the Austrian Konrad Lorenz.

  Sterling thought it odd that only the last paragraph dealt with Wilson's murder. The details were sketchy at best. He had been killed after a party in his honor, and the authorities had no suspects or motive for the killing. There was no mention of the racial disfigurement or that he had been found in a heavily wooded area. The quote from President Mortimer was brief but it expressed the sadness felt not only by the community but by Mortimer himself, who had been a colleague and friend for almost twenty years. That at least was heartening.

  Sterling pulled out a dollar and left it in the empty tip jar on the front counter. The fluorescent-headed girl gave him a lazy nod of appreciation. Professor Mandryka was waiting.

  Professor Yuri Mandryka spent most of his time in a dark, musty laboratory that took up the entire third floor of the Gilman Life Sciences Laboratory building. His lab was housed in three rooms, all of them with views overlooking downtown Hanover and the greenery of the surrounding area. Sterling found him lighting a Bunsen burner underneath a column of foamy blue liquid.

  “Good morning, Professor Mandryka,” Sterling said.

  “Morning to you,” Mandryka replied. “But call me Yuri. No need for titles and formalities. Those things don't matter so much when you get to be my age.” Mandryka poured more of the blue liquid into the glass column, then turned his attention to Sterling. “Did you bring any company?”

  “No, just me, as you asked.”

  “Good. Privacy could be important.”

  Mandryka continued to fiddle with the bubbling solution while measuring a charcoal-gray liquid in two other graduated cylinders. He whistled a tune as he fidgeted with the experiment, hobbling from one side of the lab bench to the next. Though he moved slowly and deliberately, his decades of experience still allowed him to deftly handle the solutions and instruments.

  “Just a second,” Mandryka said, still rearranging the glass beakers and eyeing the levels of the fluids. “I want to get these reagents going so we can talk without being interrupted. I'm trying to degrade some proteins.”

  “I thought you did animal research,” Sterling said, looking around the room. It was full of smoky glassware, microscopes, and test tubes. “This could be a chem lab.”

  “It is,” Mandryka said, wiping his hands on a lab coat that looked like it had survived a chemical war. He folded his wire-framed glasses and tucked them in his breast pocket. “I'm from the old school. When I was coming up in science, there was a lot of crossover in the disciplines. Chemists were biologists and biologists were chemists. These days, everyone is super-specialized, just working on a small part of the problem. I like to work a problem from beginning to end. My lab has been trying to develop new ways to analyze the mitochondrial DNA in monkeys. We're almost there.”

  Mandryka rinsed out a couple of glass beakers in the sink and brought them to an empty lab bench. He poured equal amounts of clear white solution into each beaker, then put them on a rotating mixer. He opened one of the drawers and pulled out a timer, turning the small knob with great effort and setting it on the counter.

  “Follow me,” Mandryka said.

  Mandryka opened a door to an expansive office. Windows filled one entire wall, overlooking a vast wooded area that dropped into a valley—a spectacular view of unblemished wilderness.

  “Quite a view you have here, Yuri,” Sterling said, walking over stacks of books and papers to get to the windows. Mandryka hobbled to his chair without using his cane and took a seat behind the cluttered desk.

  “That's one of the few perks that comes with all these gray hairs,” Mandryka said. “Or at least what's left of them. Choice lab space goes to the most senior in the department.”

  They looked out over the endless mountains, quietly taking in the soaring peaks and deep valleys. It was still early in the morning, but the haze had lifted and visibility extended for miles. Sterling knew that back in the city rush hour was just beginning, with cars jamming the narrow streets and buses careening down the wide avenues. But outside Mandryka's lab, Sterling counted only three cars on the road below and no signs that it would get much busier anytime soon. He turned and found an empty chair across from the old scientist. It was time to talk.

  “How much did Willie say to you about what he'd been doing lately?” Mandryka asked.

  Sterling shrugged. “Not much. We only spoke to each other once every couple of months, and when we did, we didn't talk much about our work. We spent more time catching up on our lives. Personal things.”

  “I see.” Mandryka removed a stack of papers and cleared off a small oak humidor on the corner of his desk. He opened the lid and pulled out a fresh cigar. “Care for one?”

  “I don't smoke, but thanks anyway.”

  “One of my students is from London,” Mandryka explained. “When he goes home for vacation, he always brings me back a box of Cubans.” Sterling watched as Mandryka clipped one end, lit the cigar, then took a long drag. “Of course, I pay him,” he said, blowing a cloud of bluish-gray circles toward the ceiling. Sterling looked at the no-smoking sign tacked to the bulletin board and smiled.

  “I've already told you that your brother and I go back a long way,” Mandryka said, allowing the cigar to rest in the corner of his narrow mouth. “Willie knew that I spent a good portion of my time studying animal anatomy. I took an interest many years ago after I hit a deer one morning on the way to work. When I went to move the poor thing to the side of the road, I noticed that it had been severed in half, just as if someone had taken a saw and buzzed it right down the middle. Its innards were spread all over the hood of my car and the ground. The heart muscles were still in spasm.”

  Mandryka took another drag on the cigar and leaned back in the chair, making his small frame look like that of a child who had climbed into his father's recliner.

  “I lost my old car in that accident, but I found a new interest in anatomy. For years I had studied animals, their behavior, and their relationship to environment, but now I was going to find out not only how they behaved but why they behaved as they did.”

  “Anatomy is my area of expertise,” Sterling said.

  “Yes, Willie told me, which is why I thought you might appreciate that story. A few months ago, Willie called me at home very early in the morning and asked if he could bring something by the lab. I, of course, said yes, and he came that morning with a brown bag that had been wrapped in a larger plastic bag. I thought he was bringing me breakfast.” Mandryka took another drag and let out a soft cackle. “Wilson had brought me breakfast all right. It was a dead blackbird.”

  “Where did he get it from?” Sterling asked.

  “The back of his property. You see, what made Willie such a good scientist was that he lived his craft. He didn't just sit in front of the classroom or laboratory and teach these kids. He went out in the field and collected data, developing his theories and putting them to the test.”

  Sterling thought of the story he had read on the Internet about Chogan and of how Wilson had spent his last minutes alive writing the word on his ankle. Sterling was unsure how much Mandryka knew, but to call a clandestine meeting like this, he knew something.

  “Birds and other animals die all the time,” Sterling said. “I'm sure Wilson could have found plenty of dead animals in those woods if he had looked lon
g enough.”

  “Yes and yes,” Mandryka said. He leaned forward to stand, grabbing on to the edge of his desk. “Come and let me show you something.”

  Yuri Mandryka waddled around his desk, barely able to lift his legs high enough to clear the stacks of science journals and papers littering his floor. He ignored the cane resting next to the door and instead reached out to different pieces of furniture to maintain his balance. Before he left the office, he snuffed out the cigar and slid it into one of his coat pockets. Sterling followed, noticing the nasty curve that twisted the old man's spine and bent his head downward. He had probably been half a foot taller in his younger years, but the curse of osteoporosis and its insidious thinning of the bones had robbed him not only of his height but of the ability to straighten his neck for long periods of time.

  Professor Mandryka led Sterling to the other end of the long hallway, where they caught the elevator to the basement. He didn't say anything during the ride, instead keeping his eyes straight ahead, weighing something serious. The doors opened onto a dimly lit, bare hallway that looked like a storage room for custodial supplies.

  Mandryka continued to waddle down the hall, reaching out to the wall with every step to balance himself. They walked through one heavy steel door, then another, which Sterling helped the old man open. Mandryka fumbled with his key ring for a few minutes, then inserted a long key in the lock of the third door. It took all of his effort to push the door open, and once he did, Sterling was immediately hit with the room's teeth-chattering chill and the heavy smell of formaldehyde. Mandryka turned on the light, but Sterling was not prepared for what he saw.

  “Jesus Christ!” Sterling exclaimed. “What the hell is this?”

  Blackbird carcasses were everywhere. In cages, on top of cabinets, lined up on metal tables, wrapped in bags on the floor. There must have been hundreds of dead blackbirds in that tiny room. Mandryka stood there quietly and allowed Sterling's mind to catch up with his eyes.

  “You see, Sterling,” Mandryka finally said. “Willie did walk farther into the woods, and as you surmised, he did find lots of dead animals. The only problem was that they were all blackbirds—not one or two, but hundreds.”

  “I've never seen anything like this before,” Sterling gasped.

  “And neither had Willie, which is why he brought them to me.” Mandryka let out a violent cough.

  “What did he expect you to do with them?” Sterling asked.

  “He needed to find someone who could help explain all this death, but he didn't want to raise too many eyebrows. He knew my chemistry background, so he thought I could help.”

  Sterling walked around the room, looking inside the cages and picking up the bags on the floor. There were so many birds, it was hard to believe that they were real. Some had black bodies, others were a streaky brown.

  “There are two different species here,” Sterling said.

  “Not true,” Mandryka said, shuffling to a stainless steel table covered with an opaque plastic bag. He reached underneath the table for a box of gloves and snapped on a pair. “Not to worry—your mistake is common. This is one species.” He removed the plastic table cover.

  Five birds had been lined up in different stages of dissection. The first three had been dissected down to the skeleton with all of their organs exposed and tagged. The last two were completely intact. Mandryka offered Sterling a pair of gloves, then picked up the last two birds. “These are the red-winged blackbirds,” he said, holding them up in the light. “They're arguably the most abundant type of blackbird in North America.” Mandryka handed one of the birds to Sterling.

  “But they look so different,” Sterling said as he turned the bird in his hand.

  “Only on the outside,” Mandryka said. “What you're holding is the male red-winged.”

  Sterling grabbed a tuft of small scarlet feathers that sprouted from the rest of its shiny black feathers. “And this is how it got its name.”

  “Precisely,” Mandryka said, taking the bird from Sterling's hand and spreading its wings. “This area is called the epaulet, from the French word meaning shoulder. As you can see, the males are glossy black everywhere except on the shoulder of their wings.” Mandryka brushed the scarlet feathers, which were bordered with a yellow stripe. The bill was also black, thin and pointed.

  Sterling picked up the other bird. “And this is the female.”

  “Exactly. And to the untrained eye it looks like a different bird altogether. The females are blackish-brown on top, streaked with buff and chestnut. The head is streaked and the cheeks are brown. You can see how the throat is pale with a pink tinge and the breast and belly are whitish with heavy dark lines. They share some of the male's red coloring in the wings, but not much.”

  “What killed them?” Sterling asked.

  “That's why Willie brought them to me over the last couple of months. I've been dissecting them every day, comparing the size of their organs and looking for an abnormality that might be common to all of them.” Mandryka went to a large refrigerator and opened the top door. A puff of cold mist dusted his face. Hundreds of tiny vials had been separated in long metal baskets. They were full of a dark-crimson viscous liquid.

  “Serological studies,” Sterling said.

  “That's right. I've been running blood tests since Willie brought me the first bird.” Mandryka closed the cooler and hobbled over to the back wall, where he pulled a notebook from a rusted metal drawer. He placed the book on the corner of a table so Sterling could read over his shoulder. The word “Chogan” had been carefully written across the top.

  “Willie and I made some interesting discoveries,” Mandryka said, flipping the wrinkled pages. “All of the blood samples we tested were positive for a compound called bufalin.”

  “Lethal?”

  “Take enough of the stuff and it can kill you in seconds,” Mandryka said. “Its common name is toad venom. Several pharmaceutical companies used to synthesize a derivative, because it had cardioactive properties similar to the digitalis plant, which is used in the heart medication digoxin.”

  “Why did they stop making it?”

  “Two Japanese women back in the eighties. Lovers, ostracized by their families and community. They committed suicide by taking high doses of the Chinese medicine Kyushin, which contains a bufalin derivative. They died in a matter of minutes. Autopsies showed their hearts had doubled in size. The pathways that conduct electricity throughout the heart had been so badly destroyed that the medical examiner suspected the muscle lost its rhythm and began beating erratically like a bag of worms. Horrible way to die.”

  “So the FDA wouldn't let the companies develop the drug here?”

  “As you might expect. We have the most conservative drug approval policy in the world. If a drug makes you sneeze one extra time, patient advocates are down the FDA's throat not to approve it.”

  “That explains what I found on Wilson's computer. The last website he had visited was the FDA. I found some of the printed pages in one of the trash cans. They didn't say much, but he had been looking at the safety alert pages.”

  “That's right. We found a posting in the archives that warned consumers and scientists about the dangers of this toxin and the products that were being made from it.”

  “But how do you know that bufalin killed all these birds?”

  “Take a look at this,” Mandryka said, hobbling over to another cooler. He opened the door and pulled out a covered tray. He carried it back to an empty lab bench and rested it on the counter, then removed the cover.

  “What are those?”

  “You've probably never seen these before. They're bird hearts.”

  Fifty beefy-red hearts, smaller than olives, covered the tray. They had been divided so the larger hearts were on the right and the smaller ones on the left.

  “The hearts on the right side belong to the birds with the highest levels of bufalin in their blood,” Mandryka explained. “Those on the left either had trace amounts
or none at all.”

  “So the poison is causing the hearts to enlarge to the point that it kills them,” Sterling deduced. “How fast do they die?”

  “All depends on how much they consume and how concentrated it is. If I had to guess, I'd say a matter of hours to a couple of days. When I opened the hearts and dissected the muscles and septum, I found that all of their electrical systems were ruined.”

  “So these birds are coming in contact with the toads that carry this poison?”

  “Impossible. First of all, the poison is located in the toad's skin glands, so they'd have to eat the toad or its skin to be poisoned. Blackbirds don't feast on toads. Secondly, bufalin is found almost exclusively in the Bufo bufo gargarizans species, toads which predominantly live in China. The European toads—Bufo bufo vulgaris—contain a similar compound, but it's not as lethal as the Chinese bufalin. But there's something else.” Mandryka turned the pages of the register. “I've taken blood from at least a couple of hundred of these birds and I've found that not all of them contain the poison.”

  “So the birds that don't have the poison are dying from something else?”

  “No, I still think they're dying from the poison. They have the enlarged hearts and the ruined electrical systems. It's just that there's no detectable poison in their blood.”

  “Degradation,” Sterling said. “By the time you run tests on the blood, the poison has degraded beyond recognition.”

  “Exactly. And when I did an external examination of the birds, I found that the longer the birds had been dead, the less likely they were to have traces of the poison.”

  Mandryka pointed to a series of columns for Sterling to analyze.

  Everything he had just said made sense. The birds had been listed from those most recently killed to those that had died a long time ago. The new deaths had the highest concentrations of poison while the older deaths simply had “undetectable” scribbled beside them.