Flight (24 page)

Prissi thought that, in person, the old man,
dressed in a flowing paisley robe, resembled a eunuch in an Ottoman
court portrait. His small pursed pale pink mouth looked like the
end of a piece of chem lab hose.

Given the neighborhood, Prissi was surprised
at the faded opulence of Baudgew’s apartment before she remembered
that a half-century ago, New Harlem as it was called then, was one
of the most desirable locations in the city. All of the Oriental
rugs, filigreed brassware, and heavily carved dark furniture again
made her think of a Turkish court. As Baudgew darted and glided
quickly from living room to kitchen and back to living room
carrying a brass tray with tiny cerulean blue cups, a pot of coffee
and a dish of cardamom seeds, his silk robe swirled and swished
about his cropped pajama pants. Prissi was sure that, if she were
to walk to the far end of the long narrow, red wall-papered living
room, none of the pix she could see hanging there would be of her
host with wife and children. When he finished his hurly-burly of
hosting duties, the little man sat primly on a gold and ivory love
seat and tightly tucked his robe close around his short, thick and,
apparently hairless, legs.

The syrupy black coffee was poured and, at
Baudgew’s insistence, Prissi agreed to float a cardamom seed on its
surface before the old man’s tiny, pink, strangely smooth hands
reached out for the pix. He held the image close to his face before
snapping several of the faces with a lacquered fingernail.

His first words, “Of surpassing beauty and in
the bloom of youth,” were drenched in sarcasm. He flipped the pix
back onto the table. When Prissi leaned forward to recover it, she
spilled a drop of coffee on the tray. Dr. Baudgew sharply
inhaled.

“Sorry. I can be a little spasmotic.”

The little man’s mouth looked as though he
has eaten something tart.

“Spasmotic?”

Knowing that her welcome was wearing out
faster than her knowledge was growing, Prissi pointed to the pix,
“This is you, isn’t it?”

The effete elf slightly nodded. Prissi
touched the other faces that Pequod Jones had named. When she
herself repeated the names, Baudgew agreed. With tingling
fingertips, Prissi lightly touched the two faces of the couple
holding hands, “Who are these two?”

“Oh, my. Those are the twin wizards, Smart
Glen Laureby and his smarter sidekick, Roan Winslow.”

“I think she might be my…great aunt.”

Baudgew had a half-smirk on his china doll
lips as he leaned back and studied Prissi’s face.

“Really? I don’t see the resemblance. Is your
great aunt’s name Roan?’

Prissi shook her head.

“Was her maiden name Winslow?”

Prissi was still considering that Nora was an
anagram of Roan and didn’t really hear Baudgew’s question.

“What?”

The petulant homunculus repeated, “Winslow.
Was her name Winslow?”

“No. I don’ think so.”

“Is your great aunt a too smart person?”

Prissi, not understanding the little man’s
animosity, ignored his comment. She tapped the pix and asked, “What
did they do?”

Baudgew paused for a second as he decided
whether he wanted to be sidetracked.

“Do? Why, science, of course. What else do
really smart people do? We were all scientists. Except those two
were just a little smarter and a little quicker scientists than the
rest of us. We plodded. They bounded…until they got so far ahead of
the pack, they got lost.”

“Why? What happened?”

“If you believe one of them to be a relative,
I would be doing an egregious unkindness to say.”

“No. I want to know. I do.”

The shriveled pixie tugged his robe even
tighter around him.

“Thus spake Pandora.”

“I do. Please.”

“They were working one weekend and there was
an unfortunate explosion and fire and two too smart people
disappeared.”

“Disappeared? Wasn’t that kind of hard to
do…even back then?”

“A euphemism. To protect youth’s innocence.
They were in the explosion. A rather dramatic explosion. Given how
large the explosion was and how fierce the fire that ensued,
perhaps disappeared is not so much the euphemism.”

Baudgew’s hands exploded from his silk
cuffs.

“Poof. Left just a belt buckle and a tooth or
two. And memories…such fond memories.”

Prissi looked closely at the picture again to
see if she recognized her mother.

“And where does Pandora live?’

Prissi caught herself in time to edit her
answer. The little man was setting off lots of her Africa-honed
alarms.

“In Connecticut. May I ask what you did at
Centsurety?”

“Why, of course. Asking questions has always
been youth’s privilege. Do you in youth mean you, as in me, or as
in all of us?”

Baudgew wriggled in his robe at his
cleverness. Prissi leaned down to the low table to pick up her cup.
When she sat back up, using a trick she had learned to cope with
certain Dutton boys, her body was several inches further away the
from the dwarfish man.

“All of you.”

Baudgew twisted on the couch so that he could
look at Prissi more directly as he coyly smiled, “We made
things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Oh, you know …interesting things.” He
reached over to slide his hand down Prissi’s wing. “Did you know
that wings used to be interesting? A long time ago. We were
interested in wings…and things.”

When Baudgew stroked her wing a second time,
Prissi decided that it was time to go. She stood, thanked her host
and put the pix back in her kanga. She paused for a second in
thought before she suddenly reached down and, before her host could
protest, scooped her cup and saucer and took them to the kitchen. A
second later, Prissi was back in the living room and headed for the
door, which Baudgew was just opening. Even though he groped her a
third time as she was half-way out the door, she asked, “May I ask
why you live in this neighborhood?”

The old man raised a finger tip and
theatrically wiped away a non-existent tear. “Though Cain, though
able, I can’t leave Elba, thus able in Elba I remain.” His harsh
little laugh and final touch of her feathers sent Prissi bolting
through the door.

The creeped-out Prissi stood on the cratered
sidewalk outside Baudgew’s home for ten minutes hoping that she
would meet someone from his building. He was such a bizarre little
man that she was sure his neighbors would have lots of stories. She
was prepared to wait even longer, but a group of four boys, dressed
in reds and treads crossed the street to be on her side. After
being attacked twice the day before, Prissi didn’t wait. Two hops,
four flaps and she was out of reach. The shortest boy shook his
fist and yelled something. It was Arabic, but the phrase wasn’t
familiar to her. She dipped a wing as she yelled, “Not today,
zurga.”

Her small tormentor darted sideways to the
gutter looking for something to throw at his taunter, but Prissi
was beyond range before he found anything suitable. The urchin
threw the half-bottle anyway. He laughed when it exploded in the
street, and his friends laughed too, but Prissi was sure that their
laughter was directed at him.

Prissi leveled off when she got to one
hundred meters. She was confused. She was sure the woman in the
picture was her mother. The fact that Roan was an anagram of Nora
seemed important. But, Baudgew said that she was dead. As she flew
cross-town she thought of going back to the NYPD to see what she
might find out about Roan Winslow and Glen Laureby…and Richard
Baudgew, but as she swerved south onto Lenox Avenue, she decided
that before she did that, she needed to clear her head. It was a
beautiful day for flying. At 96th Street, at the top of Central
Park, she turned west toward the Hudson. When she got to the river,
she turned back south, but only for a few blocks. On a sudden whim
she banked west again and began flying across the river.

As soon as she was over the water, Prissi had
to fight the urge to breathe fast and fly faster. From the
licensing course all wingers took, Prissi knew all about
aerohydrarophobia; however she had never felt its symptoms before.
But, the after-effects of nearly crashing from exhaustion the day
before, and the fact that she had dislocated her wing less than two
hours before, made her nervous. The fear came from thinking that
she had no place to land. As soon as she started having that
thought, landing was exactly what her body felt compelled to do.
Despite her trepidations, Prissi was not so hinky that she was
willing to fly another eighty blocks north so she could cross above
the George Washington Bridge. The winger calmed herself by reciting
the statistics which showed that it was much more dangerous to fly
in bad weather or at night than to fly over water.

Prissi tipped her head up so that she could
stare at the palisades far in front of her rather than at the brown
and white waters of the Hudson churning beneath. To distract
herself, the teener imagined what she might find at her
destination. After her second standoff with her father, the
frustrated girl had gone to her room and ogled every scrap of
information she had. One of those scraps was Al Burgey, the name on
the two letters she had found among her mother’s things. An A.
Burgey lived in Verona, New Jersey. Beyond a couple of lines in his
letters, there was no evidence that he was a scientist, but Prissi
didn’t care. An Al Burgey knew her mother. An A. Burgey lived in
Verona, so that was where Prissi was going.

As soon as Prissi was clear of the river, she
landed, caught her breath, and keyed Burgey’s address into the
mypod’s flight planner. According to the itinerary, it would take
her just over an hour to get to Burgey’s house. Prissi closed her
eyes and tried to gauge whether she could fly to Verona and still
have enough energy to get back home. Her best answer was maybe. She
dug into her kanga and found a semi-smashed Zzolt-a-bar. She
gobbled it, brushed the sticky crumbs from her face, used her
tongue like a spatula to work the greasy not-quite-strawberry
flavored scum from the back of her teeth, and flapped back into the
air.

An hour later, as she looked down from one
hundred meters, Prissi thought Verona looked quite a bit like of
Waterville. The newly green tops of mature maples and oaks lined
both sides of the narrow streets. The houses, mostly large and
mostly old, sat back from the streets. The only indication that the
wealth and serenity of the small town might be less than what it
appeared was the four burned-out houses Prissi saw as she flew
over.

House-burnings, HBs, had been a common method
of grass-roots social change during the Ticklish Situation of 2038.
Usually the HBs were set by poor walkers against rich wingers or by
radical fundas against their ecoist counterparts. In both
instances, the fact that the destruction was by fire was considered
to have importance. In the previous five years, as evidence of
world cooling grew and more people doubted their science, and the
ecoists started to lose power, houses began to burn again.

When she got close, the winger’s Prissi’s
mypod squeaked and its arrows began their sequential flashing.

Prissi slowed her speed as she flew ten
meters above the smooth pavement of Oakstaff Street. Burgey’s house
was an ancient mongrel with two eyelash gables jutting out over a
low-walled porch. The house was painted a sallow yellow with black
shutters. From her perspective, Prissi thought the overall effect
was of a toothless geri having a snit. When she walked up the
undulating brick walk, the teener was surprised to see, given the
HBs close-by, a wooden door with a large oval of etched glass. No
steel door, no bars, no slide screen, not even a safety screen. The
lack of caution on the owner’s part caused Prissi to stop dead on
the first step of the porch. She had already dealt with one weird
person; she wasn’t sure that she wanted to make it two on the same
day. She considered, half-turned, re-considered, then, turned back
and hurried up the steps to ring the doorbell before she changed
her mind.

A tall cadaverous man with a tomahawk nose,
rheumy eyes and tendrils of silver hair floating like seaweed over
the large reefs of his ears, bent forward, stopped for a moment, as
if nonplussed, then, offered a lipless smile before asking,
“Yes?”

Prissi was sure that the man standing before
her was older than her father, yet, he had the voice of a young
man.

“Mr. Burgey?”

When he gave his head a slight shake, an
empty bag of skin beneath his chin wriggled.

“Burgey. The accent is on the first syllable,
and the g is hard.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Please, don’t be. How could you know?” He
paused for a second before continuing sotto voce, “How,
indeed?”

When Prissi told him her name, his smile
widened and the wrinkles in his cheeks expanded like an accordion
drawing air.

“You knew my mother?”

“Yes, yes I did.”

“And, you know she’s dead?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“How did you know?”

Burgey waved his hands.

After waiting for more and receiving nothing
but a cluck, Prissi launched into telling the sickly-looking geri
about her school project studying blind alleys in science. She
ended by asking, “Did you ever hear of a company called
Centsurety?”

It was very apparent that that was not the
question that he was expecting. His short narrow eyebrows shifted
from
accent grave
to
accent aigu.

“Would you like to…?”

Before he finished his question, Prissi had
answered it with her most confident smile and a tactical retreat.
Instead of starting to go inside, she took a step back, flared her
wings, dropped them over the railing and leaned her butt against
the railing’s peeling paint.