There followed a barrage of Chinese and Russian mixed with the odd English word: bird, window, broken, black, and make shit on myself.
"Stop!" Charlie held up a free hand. "Mrs. Ling, what happened?"
Mrs. Ling had recovered from the bird hitting the window and the mad dash down the steps, but she was now showing an uncharacteristic shyness, afraid that Charlie might notice the damp spot in the pocket of her frock where the recently deceased Barnaby Jones lay orangely awaiting introduction to some wonton, green onions, a pinch of five spices, and her soup pot. "Fish is fish," she said to herself when she squirreled that rascal away. There were, after all, five more dead attorneys in the bowl, who would miss one?
"Oh, nothing," said Mrs. Ling. "Bird break window and scare us. Not so bad now."
Charlie looked to Mrs. Korjev. "Where?"
"On our floor. We are talking in hall. Speaking of what is best for Sophie, when boom, bird hits window and black ink run through window. We run here and lock door." Both the widows had keys to Charlie's apartment.
"I'll have it fixed tomorrow," Charlie said. "But that's all. Nothing - no one came in?"
"Is third floor, Charlie. No one comes in."
Charlie looked to the fishbowl. "What happened there?"
Mrs. Ling's eyes went wide. "I have to go. Mah-jongg night at temple."
"We come in, lock door," explained Mrs. Korjev. "Fish are fine. Put Sophie in car seat like always we are doing, then go look in hallway for coast to be clear. When Mrs. Ling look back, fish are dead."
"Not me! Is Russian who see dead fish," said Mrs. Ling.
"It's okay," Charlie said. "Did you see any birds, anything dark in the apartment?"
The two women shook their heads. "Only upstairs," Mrs. Ling said.
"Let's go look," Charlie said, moving Sophie to his hip and picking up his sword-cane. He led the two women to the little elevator, did a quick assessment of Mrs. Korjev's size versus the cubic footage, and led them up the stairs. When he saw the broken bay window he felt a little weak in the knees. It wasn't so much the window, it was what was on the roof across the street. Refracted a thousand times in the spiderwebbed safety glass was the shadow of a woman that was cast on the building. He handed the baby to Mrs. Korjev, approached the window, and knocked a hole in the glass to see better. As he did, the shadow slid down the side of the building, across the sidewalk, and into the storm drain next to where a dozen tourists had just disembarked from a cable car. None of them appeared to have seen anything. It was just past one and the sun was casting shadows nearly straight down. He looked back at the two windows.
"Did you see that?"
"You mean break window?" Mrs. Ling said, slowly approaching the window and peering through the hole Charlie had made. "Oh no."
"What? What?"
Mrs. Ling looked back at Mrs. Korjev. "You are right. Flowers need water."
Charlie looked through the hole in the window and saw that Mrs. Ling was referring to a window box full of dead, black geraniums.
"Safety bars on all the windows. Tomorrow," Charlie said.
Not far away, as the crow flies, under Columbus Avenue, in a wide pipe junction where several storm sewers met, Orcus, the Ancient One, paced, bent over like a hunchback, the heavy spikes that jutted from his shoulders scraping the sides of the pipe, throwing off sparks and the smell of smoldering peat.
"You're going to fuck up your spikes if you keep pacing like that," said Babd.
She was crouched in one of the smaller pipes to the side, next to her sisters, Nemain and Macha. Except for Nemain, who was beginning to show a gunmetal relief of bird feathers over her body, they were devoid of depth; flat absences of light, absolute black even in the gloom filtering down through the storm grates - shadows, silhouettes, really - the darker ancestors of the modern mud-flap girls. Shades: delicate and female and fierce.
"Sit. Have a snack. What good to take the Above if you look like hell in the end?"
Orcus growled and spun on the Morrigan, the three. "Too long out of the air! Too long." From the basket on his belt he hooked a human skull on one of his claws, popped it in his mouth, and crunched down on it.
The Morrigan laughed, sounding like wind through the pipes, pleased that he was enjoying