3 Crows in a TrenchcoatBooks, Films & Bottles

The rain had been working the city over since noon. It was the slow, patient kind that gets into your coat and your conscience and doesn’t much care which one it ruins first. I was on my second cup of coffee and my third bad idea when the librarian called about the coat.

Three crows. One trenchcoat. A month back, they’d walked up to the reference desk like they owned the place and asked, in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere around the second button, whether the library had anything on birds people would kill for. The librarian has worked that desk for thirty-one years and stopped being surprised somewhere around year four. She handed over The Maltese Falcon without a word. The coat said, “EXCELLENT.” Then it tipped its hat, and the hat was the only part of the whole business that looked like it was on the level. I started calling the one under it Harrow. Don’t ask me why. Some names are just waiting for you in the dark.

They brought it back on Friday, nine days overdue. The book was dog-eared and water-stained, with a black feather still marking the last page, like somebody had stayed up all night to find out how it ended. I’ve had nights like that. The fine came to a dollar eighty. They paid in two bottle caps, a subway token, a brass button off a policeman’s uniform, and a gold cufflink engraved with somebody else’s initials. The middle one did the counting, carefully, twice. He smelled faintly of fresh herbs and had the look of the only one in the outfit who’d read the instructions. I call him Basil. The librarian kept the cufflink. Thirty-one years at that desk, she knows good collateral when she sees it.

I checked the book out myself before it could be reshelved. In this city, nobody pays a fine in stolen goods unless the bird is worth something. Tucked inside the back cover was a ticket stub for the Rialto: Saturday, midnight, the 1941 picture.

Saturday night I walked to the Rialto through the rain. On the corner of Fourth Avenue, a tourist stopped a newsboy for directions and made the mistake of saying the city’s name out loud, all four syllables of it. Every streetlight on the block dimmed at once. The newsboy sighed, pulled a quarter from his cap, and fed it into the nearest lamppost, the way you do. The lights came back up slowly, like they were doing us a favor. Nobody says the name much anymore. It’s cheaper that way.

I took a seat in the back of the Rialto’s balcony. The coat was already there, front row, one seat, eating popcorn from three directions at once. Nobody said a word through the whole picture. Then the bird came on screen, black and heavy and shining in the projector beam, and a voice from somewhere around the coat’s hem drawled into the dark. “That’s the bird? Looks like a paperweight that owes somebody money. I’ve met doorstops with more mystery and fire hydrants with better legs.” A pause, long enough to light a cigarette he didn’t have. “Men are dying for her. Some guys’ll fall for anything that holds still long enough.” The popcorn stopped. The other two went very still. Whatever the low one touches goes a little off, and I get the feeling he likes it that way. Some guys you name after their looks. Some after their habits. Him, I named after the aftertaste. Taint.

When the lights came up, the coat was gone. What I didn’t know yet was what had gone with it. Three doors down, in the window of Mercer’s Antiques, the falcon statue was right where it had sat for twenty years, safe and sound. Its shadow wasn’t. The long black shape that had stretched across that windowsill every afternoon since before the war had been peeled up clean, like a stamp off a letter, and the light fell straight through the place where it used to be. Nobody touched the till. Nobody touched the bird. Somebody just walked off with the dark it left behind.