The Rookery Files

Dear Sweetbird,

I have seen you out and about my sweet. You looked ravishing as usual....a true treat for the eyes.
Looking for answers to murderous questions?  You already received a hint about the Corporation being involved didn't you?...with that lovely girl who  poured decent drinks I believe is how you described her....you have lovely penmanship my sweet.
Though I must admit I find this whole matter rather dull compared to what I've been up to....shall I tell you my dearest.
I wonder if you get out much to see what your kind get up to outside of the Rookery. Lots of pretty birds out enjoying their cages as it were.
I met such a lovely young bird just recently.
Have you been to the Perched Jewel?
Lovely establishment for those with....eclectic hungers such as myself.
Miele was one of my favorite dancers....you should have seen her.
She doesn't have your predatory beauty my sweet but her plumage was beautiful.
That bright colorful parrot pallete and a soft curved beak....unlike you she had the full beak....much more exotic to kiss.
Her wings had been clipped of course but were no less beautiful...a standard for most of your kind these days...but I noticed your feathers remain untouched.....you are a rare prize indeed my sweet.
Unlike your barmaid and her would be suitor.....yes I know all that you know my dearest....Miele enjoyed my advances and attention.
She joined me in my room more than once and showed me how....delicate....she could be with her beak.
Oh and the sounds she would make....your kind do make the most lovely sounds in your moments of ecstasy and pleasure....and torment and agony as well.
Ah the sounds I made her make in the end dearest would have made you molt.
Your wings make you especially easy prey for me did you know?....all those nerves and sensitivity become quite the hinderence when you're grabbed by the ends and held by your wings...
As for poor sweet Miele...well she eventually got the full taste of my hunger.
She was so hopeful that I was what she thought I was....that I would marry her and take her away from all of this and protect her.
I'm somewhat of a tinkerer myself and even offered to make her wing attachments to fix the cruel clipping that had been done.
Your kind are quite trusting.
Each week when I visited I told she just had to be patient....such a silly little dove.
When I told her about a special night together it was easy to have her keep it a secret.....I told her I didn't want others to judge our love.....she wanted to believe in me so badly.
Oh she was such an obedient creature in the end.
She did everything I asked....all my filthy demands....all the while wanting to please me....and once the knives came out....she was very obedient indeed.
Oh how she begged my sweet bird you would've cried.
Your kind produce a wonderful scent when deep in fear.
When she could tell I wouldn't stop and changed to begging for it to end....I can still taste it.
I enjoyed every morsel of her.....sweet Miele.....
I sent you a souvenir with the letter to remember little Miele....I wonder if you can still see the fear in her eyes?
....
PS. I noted the lovely little tatto you have hidden away in that secret place on your body (...) suits us beautifully....our little call sign... until I see you again my sweet bird....and I do see you...
..........

File 002 — The Gold Sleeps Somewhere

Recovered from the Rookery's east annex, third drawer, beneath a folder marked UNREMARKABLE. The folder was mislabeled. Nothing in this file is unremarkable.

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EXHIBIT A — Intake Log, East Annex, night shift

Received: one (1) parcel, unmarked, no postage, no courier of record. Cardboard. Weight: logged and struck from the record by order of the Chief. Packing material: newspaper, Society pages, dated three weeks prior. Contents: logged. Photographed. Sealed.

Accompanying correspondence: one (1) letter. Handwriting: educated, steady, fond of itself. Signature: none. Terminal mark: four dots, spaced like footsteps.

The Chief read the letter alone. The annex log records that the lamp over her desk burned 41 minutes past the end of her shift, and that she fed her pen twice without writing anything.

The post-scriptum of the letter has been removed from the evidentiary copy at the Chief's instruction. Reason entered in the log, in her hand:

Because it is mine.

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EXHIBIT B — Field report, K. Moore, crow of no fixed dignity

Report filed late. Report filed on the back of a napkin. The napkin is from an establishment the Rookery does not expense. The Rookery expensed it.

Right so the Chief says go perch at the Perched Jewel, very funny Chief, ha ha, the crow gets sent to the bird bar, nobody else sees the joke but I'm putting it in the report so it counts.

The Jewel. Velvet everything. The kind of velvet that's sticky. There's a stage and there's cages hanging from the ceiling, decorative, with birds in them, NOT decorative, and I want it written down that I said the cages were the nice kind, gilded, good sightlines, and that the girls in them were dancing, and that it took me most of the evening to work out which of those facts I hated.

Roster check like she asked. Dancers: six regular. One name no longer on the board. MIELE. Parrot-kind, bright plumage, the full beak, the exotic sort. I asked the bartender where she went and the bartender did the thing where they polish a glass that is already clean. She'd been seeing a gentleman. Human. Money. The kind of money that tips in advance. She told the girls she was going to be married. She told them to keep it secret.

The other dancers said: she was so hopeful.

I put that in quotes because they all said it, separately, in the same words, like they'd agreed, and I don't think they agreed, I think hope just sounds the same out of different throats.

Nobody's seen her in three weeks. Her cage is still rented. Her stuff is still in it. Somebody pays the rent on the cage. Cash. Nobody remembers the somebody. I believe nobody remembers. Remembering costs extra at the Jewel.

For the record I laughed when I read the first page of his letter. The handwriting, the sweetbird bit, all of it — I laughed, some poncy ghoul writing love letters to the Chief, that's comedy. Then I got to the part about the wing attachments and the laughing just — stopped working. Like a tap. I've been laughing my whole life, I know the plumbing, and the tap wouldn't turn. So I'm writing that down too: the crow laughed at him once, on page one, and the laugh died on page two, and I want it in the file that I said it first —

this one isn't funny. This one does it on purpose. All of it. On purpose.

Also I would like it noted that the dancers feed the crows chips out the back door at closing and that this is the only good thing in the whole report and I am keeping it.

— K.M.

Margin, red ink, the Chief's hand: The chips are noted. The laugh is noted. Both are evidence. — C.

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EXHIBIT C — The Blue Oyster, ledger, week of the parcel

The Blue Oyster keeps two ledgers, as establishments do. One for the tax men of the Corporation, which is honest, which is to say it is a lie told honestly, in rows. And one for the house, which is true. This is the second one. How it came to the Rookery is a matter between the Rookery and a napkin.

Table 4 — gin, gin, gin — settled
Table 7 — the special (bloodworm & ice cream) — declined again — note: WHY is it on the board — note beneath, different hand: because it catches liars — settled
Table 9 — RESERVED — Mr. C — two chairs, one occupied — the chair stays — 32 weeks
Table 9 — addendum, in the Chief's own hand: the chair stays.
Table 11 — brandy, the good one, poured and not drunk, paid twice — settled, and noted: grief tips better than thirst
RECEIVED, WEIGHED, AND ENTERED: one (1) souvenir, unsolicited — not for sale — NOT FOR SALE — placed on the highest shelf, where the light is decent and the room can see it — the room will look at it every night — the room will not forget the name that goes with it

And then, in the ledger, a new column appears. It has no header. The entries are in the Chief's hand, and they are not for the tax men, and they are not for the house. The accountants of the Corporation would find them irregular. The accountants of the Corporation are correct and irrelevant.

ACCOUNT: MIELE.
Opened this week. Parrot-kind. Dancer. Hopeful.
Deposits: one (1) voice, no longer singing. One (1) cage, still rented. One (1) promise, false, of wings that would be mended. One (1) box.
Balance: unbalanced.
Status: OPEN.
Interest: accruing.
ACCOUNT: THE HAND THAT POURS. (ref. File 001, the Hungin matter, the girl who poured decent drinks)
Cross-referenced this week. The letter-writer claims knowledge of the Corporation's part in Candice. Claim logged. Claims are cheap. Knowledge is expensive. He will find the prices differ.
Status: OPEN.
ACCOUNT: THE CORRESPONDENT.
New account. No name. Educated hand. Collects beautiful things. Pays in advance. Tips in advance. Tells dancers to keep secrets.
He writes to me now. He signs with a mark that is not his. He believes the mark means he is inside my house.
Let him.
A ledger is also a house, and everything he has mailed me is now inside it — weighed, entered, shelved in decent light. He thinks he has begun a correspondence. He has begun a balance.
I have catalogued his kindnesses the way he catalogued hers.
Status: OPEN.
Interest: accruing.
Payable on sight.
And I —

The entry breaks off. The ledger resumes the next night, in a calmer hand, with the price of gin.

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EXHIBIT D — Memorandum, hand-delivered, no chain of custody

On blue paper. Smells faintly of cedar and of something sharper. The fold is precise enough to cut on.

You have received mail.

I warned you that some accounts charge interest in feathers. I did not warn you that some correspondences are audits in disguise. He is auditing you, Chief. Every sentence of that letter is a question: does she flinch, does she hide, does she burn it, does she bite.

You have answered in a ledger. Good. He reads ledgers — collectors always do; valuation is their only grammar — but he will read yours twice, and the second reading will cost him something he did not budget. That is correct. That is how you bill a man who pays in advance.

A word of caution, from one who forecasts: he wrote you the truth about the girl, and the truth is his bait. Men of his kind spend honesty the way other men spend coin, precisely because it buys more. Do not mistake his accuracy for intimacy. Accuracy is the cheapest mask. I should know the price of masks.

And a forecast, since you tolerate my forecasts:
He will write again. The next letter will be kinder.
The kindness will be the worst part.

— 裁師

Margin, red ink: "The kindness will be the worst part." Noted. Filed. Feared. — C.

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EXHIBIT E — Transcript, the Chief's desk, the 41st minute past shift

Recorded by the annex's log-imp, which is not supposed to record voices, and does, and keeps them, which is why the Rookery keeps the imp.

[Sound of rain. The annex gutter is broken; the rain comes down off the roof in one place, like the building is being poured. Wings, settling. Feather on wet wool. The Chief works in weather when she can; the clerks believe she does not feel it. The clerks are wrong. She feels all of it. She has simply decided the rain may watch.]

THE CHIEF, to the empty room: You looked at her and saw plumage. I looked at your letter and saw a man who counts things. Very well. I am also a thing that counts things.

[Pause. Rain.]

THE CHIEF: You signed with the dots. Do you know what lives in the dots, Correspondent? … No. You collect cages. You wouldn't know a habitat.

[Pause. The pen, twice-fed, finally writing.]

THE CHIEF, writing: Account: the Correspondent. Memo line: he says he sees me. Memo line: he says my feathers are untouched, like a man appraising a window he means to come through. Memo line: he has been close. Memo line —

[Long pause. The rain keeps pouring off the one broken place.]

THE CHIEF, quietly, finishing the line: — memo line: so have I.

[The imp records no further voices. It records the lamp going out at last, and the Chief sitting in the dark a while longer, which the imp logs, dutifully, as: the Chief, sitting.]

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CODA — the highest shelf of the Blue Oyster

The parcel's contents do not go in the evidence locker. The evidence locker is where things are stored, and the Chief has ruled, in red ink, in a ledger that is truer than taxes, that Miele is not to be stored.

So: the highest shelf of the Blue Oyster, where the light is decent. The dancers from the Jewel came, eventually, one at a time, the way grief arrives. They did not say much. One of them left a feather — not Miele's, her own, a green one — tucked beside it, which is the bird-folk way of saying the flock counts its own.

The gold, meanwhile, sleeps somewhere. It moved before Candice died and it has not moved since, and the Corporation's name is on neither end of it, which is how the Corporation's name is on both ends of it. The Tailor forecasts. The crow perches. The gold waits.

And somewhere in the city, a man with an educated hand sits down to write his second letter, and it will be kinder, and the kindness will be the worst part.

Let it come.

The Rookery is a house of watchers, and the watchers are awake, and the Chief keeps three words in three registers, and tonight she practices the third one, the cold one, the one that is a sentence and a sentence:

I see you.

The account is open.