Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(45)
My assistant helped Vienna to her feet, made sure she was fine, and gave chase. As luck would have it the suspect ran into the old town, and I saw Lair pass at the cross street I was approaching. A moment later Jallico ran by in the same direction. I called out to let my assistant know I was also in pursuit. Kemton ducked into the municipal entrance of the historic underground, a confusing warren of paths and dimly lit passageways that ran beneath the entire old neighborhood. Jallico asked if we should split up. “He has a knife,” he said as we bounded down the stairs to the first level of tunnels. “We stay together,” I told him. I drew my weapon, and we started slowly ahead through the shadows. We got lost for hours, never seeing a soul and never finding a flight of stairs up to the street. “Good lord,” I said, “by this time he could have eaten a half dozen spleens.”
“You think this white worm is the Beast?” said Jallico. “I don’t think he could cut bread with that knife.”
“I’m not sure what to think,” I said.
As it turned out, my assistant was right. Kemton Lair was not the Beast. In fact, we found him in our 3rd and a half hour of looking for a way up and out. He was slumped against the wall in a particularly dark passage, only one torch to light the entire length of it. Jallico retrieved the torch from off the wall and brought it up close for us to see. Lair had been raggedly cut from larynx to navel. His face was shredded so badly it was like a mop head of skin ribbons rinsed in blood. I knew before we even heard back from the coroner that his spleen was missing.
“I made a mistake,” Jallico told me. “I should have followed them a little longer to see what was going on.”
“You did right. He had a knife on her,” I said.
The monetary line for our unit remained intact. I kept my job as Inspector and Jallico remained my assistant. The Commissioner called me in one afternoon and told me that there were those in the constabulary who posited that Jallico and I did away with Lair, making it look like a Beast attack, to keep our unit together. I was sitting across from him. I stood up and leaned over his desk. “You know, we found a note from the Beast,” I whispered. “He wrote that this year he is hunting you.” Of course, a lie. The very thought of the Beast actually writing a note seemed amusing to me.
My superior trembled slightly and yelled, “That’s not true.”
I backed away, smiling and nodded.
“Well, catch the damn thing, will you?”
“Will do, sir,” I said.
Winter gave way to spring and, in the intervening months, Jallico and I looked more thoroughly into the background of Kemton Lair, the way we should have to begin with. Apparently the old woman he was often seen in the company of was not his mother. It was an assumption of those who knew him from the Coffee Exchange and the wine bar around the corner from the cathedral. As one woman put it, “I swore it was his mother by the way she yelled at him in a whisper, but when I referred to her as his mother, he shook his head. ‘She’s my fiancé,’ he said. Well that struck me because she looked saggy and old with that crazy white hair. He was so young and handsome and she was a mess.”
We asked after the woman, but nobody knew her nor where she lived, except that she seemed to be local, a resident of the old town. We couldn’t find Lair’s address either. We set that information aside for a while, since it was going nowhere, and went back to shadowing Vienna. It was difficult to tell whether she acknowledged that Lair was missing from their rendezvous. I watched her from a considerable distance through a spy glass as Jallico watched her from a bench ten feet away. She peeked in the Coffee Exchange window, hesitated a moment, and then fled in her inimitable style—like a sleep walker.
All spring and into late summer, I played the voyeur, setting myself in some vantage point in town from where I could spy on Vienna’s progress as she circumnavigated Pellegran’s Knot. I told my assistant to follow her every day. I tracked them as they made their way. Why? What did I have to prove? Nothing. I was waiting for Vienna’s next murmuration, for the Beast to strike again. Waiting and watching. In addition, we accomplished one other thing. We tested the white hairs we found on the body of Lair and a few of the other victims, seeing as that the old woman was said to have a shaggy head of white hair. We found in all cases, though, with the exception of one, that the hairs were not human—believed to be those of a cat. In the one exception, the victim’s own hair was white and that is what was believed to have been found.
We were reminded of the murmuration of the image of the cat, but it turned out to be as fruitless as the image of the fountain or of the starling itself. That summer was balmy, slow and still. Pellegran’s Knot had never seen so many tourists, but they were a subdued lot. I admittedly dozed through most of the spring and summer when I wasn’t spying on Vienna and Jallico. Then in late August I noticed that Vienna’s daily constitutional shifted course and the walk now took her, every day, out of sight, behind the giant sand dune east of the harbor known as the Eruption. For a good five minutes she and Jallico were blocked from my view. When the young woman finally appeared on the other side of the Eruption, she was walking in her usual somnambulant gait, and Jallico followed a surreptitious distance behind.
Vienna’s autumn murmuration that year told the tale. As clear as day, all made of birds flapping and soaring, she and Jallico embraced and kissed for distinctive seconds and then shattered into individual starlings dispersing.