Post by Deleted on Feb 24, 2022 5:29:02 GMT
The Great Congo Shreeke spots a fat, white worm from high in the acacia tree. Before the circling raven can lay his claim, the bird dives, snatches it up, and returns to her perch beside the building from which she has not long escaped.
With a whip of her neck, she impales the juicy morsel upon one of the acacia’s many thorns. It seems odd to the little predator her dinner is not wiggling. Sometimes this happens. Even so, she rips the flesh and gobbles it down, fingernail and all.
Six weeks later….
Professor David Bixby gazes at boxes he must move from his old, cramped first floor office at Columbia to the more spacious one on the third. He’s been moving for nearly a week. He is not lackadaisical, but often gets lost in the piles reviewing all his books and papers stacked in every available space not impeding traffic. Ten years of flotsam and jetsam from his research in electro-mechanical physics and Earth field energies lay around, but none of it about his hobby, the study of the cavernous passerine in captivity or his secret “personal research,” which his department casts a yellow eye, he only conducts at his home laboratory deep in the sub-basement levels of the Bixby Building.
He looks at the remaining mess and wonders if he should get one of his students to help, but grabs a case packed with essays and scientific journals under his left arm and another under his right. At twenty pounds each, he bears them with ease bounding up the up-staircase. His regiment of walking the city and never using elevators keeps the thirty-five-year-old fit as a Yale boat club rower.
Though he had never rowed, nor been to Yale, nor been in a boat. He rarely leaves the city except to go to the Bixby family’s cottage on Montauk. And then in a very slow-moving vehicle, because Professor David Bixby suffers from a proprioceptive and somatosensory agitation to the vestibular nuclei of the brainstem, also known as motion sickness. Automobiles, aeroplanes, trains, blimps, buggies, or bicycles, if set in motion with him in any of them, his stomach flip-flops, he gets vertigo, and nine times out of ten, he vomits.
On the third-floor landing, he crashes into a young woman, nearly losing his glasses as he juggles the boxes to keep from dropping them. His heavy specs slip sideways swinging on his left ear. The woman is a blur until she unhooks them, replacing them on his nose.
“You should watch where you’re going,” she says.
“What? You’re the one running the wrong way.” He shrugs up his boxes.” You should not be going down the up-staircase. There’s a system here and it--”
“Sorry. Your system is silly,” she echoes, continuing on down.
“What?” David watches her over the railing as she reaches the well floor.
She looks up at him from the exit door, “I said I think your system is silly.”
“But it’s not my syst–”
“Stairs are stairs. They all go up or down. Sometimes both at the same time” She flings open the door and goes into the sunlight beyond.
“Hmm.” His eyes linger on the wedge of light as the pneumatic pump closes the exit door behind her. One of those Miss Porter’s girls, he thinks. Bit old for a student. Probably taking classes, looking for a well-heeled husband.
In his new office, he drops the load down on the floor and checks his progress.
“Six boxes here,” he says, “One hundred and two left to bring up.” He feels pleased with himself. Out the window below he sees the young woman again. She is squatting down, feeding a squirrel.
“You’re the one who is silly,” he says out loud.
“Silly what, Professor?” Raleigh, the Bixby chauffeur, calls from the doorway. “I just picked this up at the pier. And how much did you pay for a bird to ride in a first class cabin?” In his meaty hands is a large birdcage. Inside the birdcage is the Great Congo Shreeke, whose last meal before she sailed for America was not a worm.
“Lanias magnis Congi. Money is no objective when it comes to science, Raleigh.” He takes the cage from the former pro-boxer turned wrestler, lifts it to a beam of sunlight and admires the royal sheen of her bluish-black feathers curling at the tail of the elegant six-inch bird no bigger than his hand. Over her long, ebony beak peer milky blue eyes with dark pupils. She cocks her head fixing them on the professor and lets out a high pitched, “Schmeereek!”
“I also paid for an attendant to accompany her. Where is he?” he says looking around.
“Beats me. The dockmaster just handed it over and showed me where to sign. Maybe the guy took the next boat back to wherever it came from. Where does it come from?” He sticks his thick finger through the wire bars. “Hi birdy. How do you know it’s a lady bird, Professor?”
“Oh, don’t do that.” David waves off Raleigh’s hand. “I know she’s female because of the thin line of red feathers above her eyes.”
“Yeah, kinda looks like eyebrows. What’s up with the tin ring on its ankle?”
“Someone must have tagged her before transport.” He hands the cage back to Raleigh. “Despite her size and appearance, the shreeke is a formable predator. As the name indicates, she’s from the Congo and her favorite prey are small lizards, snakes, and especially fat grubs.”
“A grub? What’s that, professor? Remember, I’m from Brooklyn. We don’t got much wildlife. Not that kind anyways.”
“It’s the larval state of many insects.”
Raleigh nods his head I don’t know. Since he left the ring, he tends to get his shakes and nods backwards.
“You know, like a caterpillar before it becomes a butterfly?” The professor helps.
More nods.
“Or a big, fat worm.”
“Oh, okay, yeah.”
“And your finger resembles one.”
“That’s just what my old lady tells me. Where do you want it?”
“Take her back to the apartment. She’s going into the aviary in a week. Until then, she will be quarantined in my bedroom.”
“Will do, Professor B. Do you need I should come back to pick you up? Mrs. B says you should come home early tonight because of the dinner party.”
“Is that tonight? Damn, I had forgotten.”
“You always do.”
“Why does Mother have so many parties? We had one just last week. Well, I can’t leave until four.” David consults his pocket watch. “It’s almost three. Deliver the shreeke and then recover Mrs. Bixby at her club. I’ll walk home as usual.”
“It’s looking like rain.”
David looks out the window and sees the young woman below now feeding a half-dozen squirrels.
“Then I’ll go underground.”
“Sure thing, Professor.” Raleigh nods. “Nobody in the city knows the tunnel system better than you…except maybe the Doctor.
“I have something to show him later tonight,” Bixby adds.
“Is it the--?” Raleigh’s eyes grow wide.
David shushes him with a finger on his lips. “Yes.”
***
The New York City police lieutenant settles into the chrome, streamline office chair across from Frederick Bixby-Vole, the chief executive officer of the Bixby Corporation, formerly known as Bixby Tool and Die.
Freddy sizes up the little man. He’s fiftyish, balding and looks more like a bespectacled librarian than a cop. But the cheap, dark blue surge stretches over formitiable shoulders and a barrel chest.
“How can I be of service, ah, Lieutenant Derson of the Department of Criminal Intelligence?” Freddy consults the calling card and leans back in his leather executive chair. “Are criminals intelligent?”
“You’d be surprised, but I’ll come right to the point,” the detective’s voice matches his bookish appearance. “You are the cousin of Professor David Bixby, I understand?”
“Yes.” A thrill courses through Freddy’s body. Hopefully, that clown is in trouble with all his secret experiments. He has always been jealous of David as the sole heir to the Bixby millions.
“Has he done something?” He hopes his smile is not too gleeful. “Though I can’t imagine my cousin doing anything wrong.”
“Oh, no. Nothing like that, however we’ve been alerted by the FBI that certain parties have become interested in one of his patents.”
“You can speak to me.” The word “patents” alarms Freddy. “I am the CEO.”
“I was hoping I could speak directly to him about the importance of our national security and perhaps enlist his help.”
“David rarely comes down to the executive suites,” Freddy says with a hint of disgust. “He doesn’t even have an office in this building. Even though he is chairman of the board, I pretty much run the company. My cousin is busy with his research and teaching. Though of course, he has final say on all company decisions.” The last sentence is bitter alum in Freddy’s mouth.
“I guess I could find him at the university.” Derson looks at this wristwatch. “It’s getting late and I would like to speak with him as soon as possible.”
“Tonight Mrs. Bixby is having a dinner party and later cocktails. I’m invited, but I can bring a guest. Would that work?” Freddy is eager to find out what the man wants from David.
“Yes. At what time?”
“Dinner is at seven-thirty.”
“Fine. Where does she live?”
“Right here in this building. My aunt occupies the penthouse suite on the 57th floor and above. Oh, and above that is David’s aviary in the tower. He teaches physics, but birds are a secondary research for him, among other things.”
“That’s a broad stretch of subjects,” the policeman says.
“I think he should concentrate more on the business,” Freddy lies. “He sometimes gives tours to guests.”
“Of the business?”
“No, the aviary.”
“I look forward to that. I’m a bit of a birdwatcher myself.” Derson rises to go. “Do you know who else will be at the dinner?”
“I’m not sure. My relatives are eccentric,” he says, escorting the lieutenant to the door. “They invite all sorts of odd characters to their soirees.”
“Until this evening then.”
Freddy returns to his desk and unlocks one of its drawers. Inside is a calling card with a phone number. He asks his secretary for an outside telephone line, starts to dial, then cancels the request.
This call, he thinks, should be done from a telephone booth.
With a whip of her neck, she impales the juicy morsel upon one of the acacia’s many thorns. It seems odd to the little predator her dinner is not wiggling. Sometimes this happens. Even so, she rips the flesh and gobbles it down, fingernail and all.
Six weeks later….
Professor David Bixby gazes at boxes he must move from his old, cramped first floor office at Columbia to the more spacious one on the third. He’s been moving for nearly a week. He is not lackadaisical, but often gets lost in the piles reviewing all his books and papers stacked in every available space not impeding traffic. Ten years of flotsam and jetsam from his research in electro-mechanical physics and Earth field energies lay around, but none of it about his hobby, the study of the cavernous passerine in captivity or his secret “personal research,” which his department casts a yellow eye, he only conducts at his home laboratory deep in the sub-basement levels of the Bixby Building.
He looks at the remaining mess and wonders if he should get one of his students to help, but grabs a case packed with essays and scientific journals under his left arm and another under his right. At twenty pounds each, he bears them with ease bounding up the up-staircase. His regiment of walking the city and never using elevators keeps the thirty-five-year-old fit as a Yale boat club rower.
Though he had never rowed, nor been to Yale, nor been in a boat. He rarely leaves the city except to go to the Bixby family’s cottage on Montauk. And then in a very slow-moving vehicle, because Professor David Bixby suffers from a proprioceptive and somatosensory agitation to the vestibular nuclei of the brainstem, also known as motion sickness. Automobiles, aeroplanes, trains, blimps, buggies, or bicycles, if set in motion with him in any of them, his stomach flip-flops, he gets vertigo, and nine times out of ten, he vomits.
On the third-floor landing, he crashes into a young woman, nearly losing his glasses as he juggles the boxes to keep from dropping them. His heavy specs slip sideways swinging on his left ear. The woman is a blur until she unhooks them, replacing them on his nose.
“You should watch where you’re going,” she says.
“What? You’re the one running the wrong way.” He shrugs up his boxes.” You should not be going down the up-staircase. There’s a system here and it--”
“Sorry. Your system is silly,” she echoes, continuing on down.
“What?” David watches her over the railing as she reaches the well floor.
She looks up at him from the exit door, “I said I think your system is silly.”
“But it’s not my syst–”
“Stairs are stairs. They all go up or down. Sometimes both at the same time” She flings open the door and goes into the sunlight beyond.
“Hmm.” His eyes linger on the wedge of light as the pneumatic pump closes the exit door behind her. One of those Miss Porter’s girls, he thinks. Bit old for a student. Probably taking classes, looking for a well-heeled husband.
In his new office, he drops the load down on the floor and checks his progress.
“Six boxes here,” he says, “One hundred and two left to bring up.” He feels pleased with himself. Out the window below he sees the young woman again. She is squatting down, feeding a squirrel.
“You’re the one who is silly,” he says out loud.
“Silly what, Professor?” Raleigh, the Bixby chauffeur, calls from the doorway. “I just picked this up at the pier. And how much did you pay for a bird to ride in a first class cabin?” In his meaty hands is a large birdcage. Inside the birdcage is the Great Congo Shreeke, whose last meal before she sailed for America was not a worm.
“Lanias magnis Congi. Money is no objective when it comes to science, Raleigh.” He takes the cage from the former pro-boxer turned wrestler, lifts it to a beam of sunlight and admires the royal sheen of her bluish-black feathers curling at the tail of the elegant six-inch bird no bigger than his hand. Over her long, ebony beak peer milky blue eyes with dark pupils. She cocks her head fixing them on the professor and lets out a high pitched, “Schmeereek!”
“I also paid for an attendant to accompany her. Where is he?” he says looking around.
“Beats me. The dockmaster just handed it over and showed me where to sign. Maybe the guy took the next boat back to wherever it came from. Where does it come from?” He sticks his thick finger through the wire bars. “Hi birdy. How do you know it’s a lady bird, Professor?”
“Oh, don’t do that.” David waves off Raleigh’s hand. “I know she’s female because of the thin line of red feathers above her eyes.”
“Yeah, kinda looks like eyebrows. What’s up with the tin ring on its ankle?”
“Someone must have tagged her before transport.” He hands the cage back to Raleigh. “Despite her size and appearance, the shreeke is a formable predator. As the name indicates, she’s from the Congo and her favorite prey are small lizards, snakes, and especially fat grubs.”
“A grub? What’s that, professor? Remember, I’m from Brooklyn. We don’t got much wildlife. Not that kind anyways.”
“It’s the larval state of many insects.”
Raleigh nods his head I don’t know. Since he left the ring, he tends to get his shakes and nods backwards.
“You know, like a caterpillar before it becomes a butterfly?” The professor helps.
More nods.
“Or a big, fat worm.”
“Oh, okay, yeah.”
“And your finger resembles one.”
“That’s just what my old lady tells me. Where do you want it?”
“Take her back to the apartment. She’s going into the aviary in a week. Until then, she will be quarantined in my bedroom.”
“Will do, Professor B. Do you need I should come back to pick you up? Mrs. B says you should come home early tonight because of the dinner party.”
“Is that tonight? Damn, I had forgotten.”
“You always do.”
“Why does Mother have so many parties? We had one just last week. Well, I can’t leave until four.” David consults his pocket watch. “It’s almost three. Deliver the shreeke and then recover Mrs. Bixby at her club. I’ll walk home as usual.”
“It’s looking like rain.”
David looks out the window and sees the young woman below now feeding a half-dozen squirrels.
“Then I’ll go underground.”
“Sure thing, Professor.” Raleigh nods. “Nobody in the city knows the tunnel system better than you…except maybe the Doctor.
“I have something to show him later tonight,” Bixby adds.
“Is it the--?” Raleigh’s eyes grow wide.
David shushes him with a finger on his lips. “Yes.”
***
The New York City police lieutenant settles into the chrome, streamline office chair across from Frederick Bixby-Vole, the chief executive officer of the Bixby Corporation, formerly known as Bixby Tool and Die.
Freddy sizes up the little man. He’s fiftyish, balding and looks more like a bespectacled librarian than a cop. But the cheap, dark blue surge stretches over formitiable shoulders and a barrel chest.
“How can I be of service, ah, Lieutenant Derson of the Department of Criminal Intelligence?” Freddy consults the calling card and leans back in his leather executive chair. “Are criminals intelligent?”
“You’d be surprised, but I’ll come right to the point,” the detective’s voice matches his bookish appearance. “You are the cousin of Professor David Bixby, I understand?”
“Yes.” A thrill courses through Freddy’s body. Hopefully, that clown is in trouble with all his secret experiments. He has always been jealous of David as the sole heir to the Bixby millions.
“Has he done something?” He hopes his smile is not too gleeful. “Though I can’t imagine my cousin doing anything wrong.”
“Oh, no. Nothing like that, however we’ve been alerted by the FBI that certain parties have become interested in one of his patents.”
“You can speak to me.” The word “patents” alarms Freddy. “I am the CEO.”
“I was hoping I could speak directly to him about the importance of our national security and perhaps enlist his help.”
“David rarely comes down to the executive suites,” Freddy says with a hint of disgust. “He doesn’t even have an office in this building. Even though he is chairman of the board, I pretty much run the company. My cousin is busy with his research and teaching. Though of course, he has final say on all company decisions.” The last sentence is bitter alum in Freddy’s mouth.
“I guess I could find him at the university.” Derson looks at this wristwatch. “It’s getting late and I would like to speak with him as soon as possible.”
“Tonight Mrs. Bixby is having a dinner party and later cocktails. I’m invited, but I can bring a guest. Would that work?” Freddy is eager to find out what the man wants from David.
“Yes. At what time?”
“Dinner is at seven-thirty.”
“Fine. Where does she live?”
“Right here in this building. My aunt occupies the penthouse suite on the 57th floor and above. Oh, and above that is David’s aviary in the tower. He teaches physics, but birds are a secondary research for him, among other things.”
“That’s a broad stretch of subjects,” the policeman says.
“I think he should concentrate more on the business,” Freddy lies. “He sometimes gives tours to guests.”
“Of the business?”
“No, the aviary.”
“I look forward to that. I’m a bit of a birdwatcher myself.” Derson rises to go. “Do you know who else will be at the dinner?”
“I’m not sure. My relatives are eccentric,” he says, escorting the lieutenant to the door. “They invite all sorts of odd characters to their soirees.”
“Until this evening then.”
Freddy returns to his desk and unlocks one of its drawers. Inside is a calling card with a phone number. He asks his secretary for an outside telephone line, starts to dial, then cancels the request.
This call, he thinks, should be done from a telephone booth.