Anansi Boys

spattered with dried blood. She placed it into a plastic bag. The stout man pulled out his phone.

“I want Forensic down here,” he said.

Fat Charlie now found himself viewing his cell as a refuge rather than as a prison. Cells were deep inside the building, for a start, far from the haunts of even the most adventurous birds. And his brother was nowhere to be seen. He no longer minded that nothing ever happened in cell six. Nothing was infinitely preferable to most of the somethings he found himself coming up with. Even a world populated exclusively with castles and cockroaches and people named K was preferable to a world filled with malignant birds that whispered his name in chorus.

The door opened.

“Don’t you knock?” asked Fat Charlie.

“No,” said the policeman. “We don’t, actually. Your solicitor’s finally here.”

“Mister Merryman?” said Fat Charlie, and then he stopped. Leonard Merryman was a rotund gentleman with small gold spectacles, and the man behind the cop most definitely wasn’t.

“Everything’s fine,” said the man who wasn’t his solicitor. “You can leave us here.”

“Buzz when you’re done,” said the policeman, and he closed the door.

Spider took Fat Charlie by the hand. He said, “I’m busting you out of here.”

“But I don’t want to be busted out of here. I didn’t do anything.”

“Good reason for getting out.”

“But if I leave then I will have done something. I’ll be an escaped prisoner.”

“You’re not a prisoner,” said Spider, cheerfully. “You’ve not been charged with anything yet. You’re just helping them with their inquiries. Look, are you hungry?”

“A bit.”

“What do you want? Tea? Coffee? Hot chocolate?”

Hot chocolate sounded extremely good to Fat Charlie. “I’d love a hot chocolate,” he said.

“Right,” said Spider. He grabbed Fat Charlie’s hand and said, “Close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“It makes it easier.”

Fat Charlie closed his eyes, although he was not certain what it would make easier. The world stretched and squeezed and Fat Charlie was certain that he was going to be sick. Then the inside of his mind settled down, and he felt a warm breeze touch his face.

He opened his eyes.

They were in the open air, in a large market square, somewhere that looked extremely un-English.

“Where is this?”

“I think it’s called Skopsie. Town in Italy or somewhere. I started coming here years ago. They do amazing hot chocolate here. Best I’ve ever had.”

They sat down at a small wooden table. It was painted fire-engine red. A waiter approached and said something to them in a language that didn’t sound like Italian to Fat Charlie. Spider said “Dos Chocolatos, dude,” and the man nodded and went away.

“Right,” said Fat Charlie. “Now you’ve got me into even deeper trouble. Now they’ll just do a manhunt or something. It’ll be in the papers.”

“What are they going to do?” asked Spider with a smile. “Send you to jail?”

“Oh please.”

The hot chocolate arrived, and the waiter poured it into small cups. It was roughly the same temperature as molten lava, was halfway between a chocolate soup and a chocolate custard, and it smelled astonishingly good.

Spider said, “Look, we’ve made rather a mess of this whole family reunion business, haven’t we?”

“We’ve made rather a mess of it?” Fat Charlie managed outrage extremely well. “I wasn’t the one who stole my fiancee. I wasn’t the one who got me sacked from work. I wasn’t the one who got me arrested—”

“No,” said Spider. “But you were the one who brought the birds into it, weren’t you?”

Fat Charlie took a very small initial sip of his hot chocolate. “Ow. I think I’ve just burned my mouth.” He looked at his brother and saw his own expression staring back at him: worried, tired, frightened. “Yes, I was the one who brought the birds into it. So what do we do now?”

Spider said, “They do a really nice sort of noodly-stew thing here, by the way.”

“Are you sure we’re in Italy?”

“Not really.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

Spider nodded.

Fat Charlie tried to think of the best way to put it. “The bird thing. Where they all turn up and pretend they’ve escaped from an Alfred Hitchcock film. Do you think it’s something that only happens in England?”

“Why?”

“Because I think those pigeons have noticed us.” He pointed to the far end of the square.

The pigeons were not doing the things that pigeons usually do. They were not pecking at sandwich crusts or bobbing along with their heads down hunting for tourist-dropped food. They were standing quite still, and they were staring. A clatter of wings, and they were joined by another hundred birds, most of them landing on the statue of a fat man wearing an enormous hat that dominated the center of the square. Fat Charlie looked at the pigeons, and the pigeons looked back at him. “So what’s the worst that could happen?” he asked Spider, in an undertone. “They crap all over us?”

“I don’t know. But I expect they can do worse than that. Finish your hot chocolate.”

“But it’s hot.”

“And we’ll need a couple of bottles of water, won’t we? Garcon?”

A low susurrus of wings; the clack of more arriving birds; and beneath it all, low, burbling secretive coos.

The waiter brought them bottles of water. Spider, who was, Fat Charlie observed, now wearing his black- and-red leather jacket once more, put them into his pockets.

“They’re only pigeons,” said Fat Charlie, but even as he said it, he knew the words were inadequate. They were not just pigeons. They were an army. The statue of the fat man had almost vanished from view beneath the gray and purple feathers.

“I think I preferred birds before they thought about ganging up on us.”

Spider said, “And they’re everywhere.” Then he grabbed Fat Charlie’s hand. “Close your eyes.”

The birds rose as one bird then. Fat Charlie closed his eyes.

The pigeons came down like the wolf on the fold—

There was silence, and distance, and Fat Charlie thought, I’m in an oven. He opened his eyes and realized that it was true: an oven with red dunes that receded into the distance until they faded into a sky the color of mother-of-pearl.

“Desert,” said Spider. “Seemed like a good idea. Bird-free zone. Somewhere to finish a conversation. Here.” He handed Fat Charlie a bottle of water.

“Thanks.”

“So. Would you like to tell me where the birds come from?”

Fat Charlie said, “There’s this place. I went there. There were lots of animal-people there. They um. They all knew Dad. One of them was a woman, a sort of bird woman.”

Spider looked at him. “There’s this place? That’s not exactly very helpful.”

“There’s a mountainside with caves in it. And then there are these cliffs, and they go down into nothing. It’s like the end of the world.”

“It’s the beginning of the world,” corrected Spider. “I’ve heard of the caves. A girl I knew once told me all about them. Never been there, though. So you met the Bird Woman, and—?”

“She offered to make you go away. And, um. Well, I took her up on it.”

“That,” said Spider, with a movie-star smile, “was really stupid.”