The Butcherbird Stories Read online

  “You’ll be lucky to see your next birthday,” he added, as though taking the line from the report.

  One morning almost three weeks later, a nurse walked into the examination room and found the doctor hanging by his neck—urine dripping from the heel of one of his polished black shoes. She realised later the urine was an indication that she might have been able to save the doctor had she not, in her shock, run for help. It was confirmed he died of asphyxiation and not a broken neck.

  The doctor’s own birthday fell on the following weekend.

  Bruno Kramzer had a wife and two children, and in-laws who lived in his house, for the most part harmoniously. He lied to them every day when he told them he still ran his business selling nuts from a stall in town. After winter, and the good business generated by his roasted chestnuts and hot cashew nut mixes, town workers passed him by, no longer interested in nut snacks.

  His family came to know he was moonlighting as a professional rogue. They needed Bruno’s earnings so they didn’t speak about it openly. Besides, they had seen the advertisements where two disputing neighbours, both old women, argue every day. One calls the professionals, who come over and scare the hell out of the other neighbour’s cat, tossing it up into a tree. The whole family enjoyed laughing at the two silly old women and thought this was the kind of thing Bruno might be doing. There was far worse he was required to do than scaring cats up into trees.

  In recent years professional rogues had begun wearing informal uniforms. There was a special belt they wore while they were on duty. Most professional rogues were rogues with or without the belt. This distinction was clear with Bruno, even if he refused to wear the belt most of the time. It was a job, nothing more.

  He worked with a man called Rainer. Rainer’s personal brand of action, as it was called by the professionals, was the prank. When clients were not specific about the details of a commissioned action he would include a signature twist. In fact, it was so hard to keep Rainer from adding a twist he soon became notorious for his special touch.

  Bruno and Rainer were hired to ruin a rich businessman’s sixtieth birthday party, and Rainer’s predilection for the prank proved almost catastrophic.

  It was a straightforward action and Bruno wanted to expose the birthday boy’s many infidelities. There were children from other marriages that could be revealed at the party. Bruno didn’t want children to suffer in an experience such as this. The birthday boy had been the rogue—a very accomplished one, in fact—and Bruno would simply be uncovering the truth. He might even go home, depending on how it all turned out, not feeling a negative charge—which Bruno knew was simply feeling like a rogue, professional or otherwise.

  Rainer insisted on something more elaborate. An immense cake was wheeled into the restaurant of a luxurious hotel. It was supposed to contain a beautiful woman, ready to spring forth naked. Instead, out came a black bear. The circus had assured Rainer that the bear was trained, yet warned that she was young and her native ferocity could be provoked in unusual circumstances. Rainer hadn’t thought being trapped within a small space, with little air and no light, and then released into a room full of clamorous, drunken people qualified as an unusual circumstance.

  The rich businessman was mauled and might have been killed. He was so drunk he was almost paralytic and fell into a quiet, prone position that calmed the frightened creature. The circus bear didn’t go on the kind of rampage that would have caused a complete catastrophe. She hid beneath a table with the businessman’s severed hand in her mouth, sucking on it as a baby might a dummy. The client was satisfied since the birthday party was indeed successfully ruined.

  It was after this job that Bruno was made senior agent in their partnership. He doubted whether he had the natural ability or resolve required to do the job as effectively as Rainer. Regardless, Rainer still wanted to pull pranks, whether on their targets or on Bruno himself. Only yesterday Bruno had drunk his coffee, brought to him by Rainer, and was stuck in the toilet for hours afterwards with the runs. Altogether, it wasn’t easy being a professional rogue. Bruno longed for winter so that he might wheel out his stall and begin roasting chestnuts again.

  Bruno’s daughter told him she missed the way he used to smell when he would come home from a day’s work carrying the aroma of roasted almonds and cashews. Now he came home reeking of perspiration—the acrid kind of sweat that turns a white shirt yellow at the collar—because the truth was, he spent most of his days in fear of Rainer, the people they worked for, the clients and their targets. Nina told Bruno he needed a bath and refused to hug him.

  Instead of a bath, Bruno went outside to the barn and brushed his horse. He opened a bottle of wine and drank without a glass. It was harder to savour wine straight from the bottle, yet he didn’t want to go back into the house for a glass and have to face the questions of his wife or in-laws. His horse, Faramond, looked at him silently. Bruno brushed with his free hand and Faramond went back to munching his bag of oats.

  Where previously they’d pretended not to know how Bruno was earning his money, now his family asked where he’d taken his cart and what he’d seen, and what kind of nuts he’d sold. They asked him about his customers and Bruno came up with stories about various nut-buying people.

  One such story was about a dog groomer named Klaus whose wife was unfaithful to him with his own brother, a soldier wounded in war, for whom everyone felt sorry. Klaus didn’t want to physically harm his heroic brother, despite the cuckoldry. His retribution was to make love to his wife’s sister, who unfortunately was rather fat. She lived with many cats and she expected Klaus to groom all of them for free.

  Bruno’s family loved such tales. They laughed and repeated the stories, emphasising favourite parts and details, asking questions of Bruno that were sure to provoke even more laughter. What were the cats’ names? Did Klaus make their tails fluffy? Did he put pink or red satin bows around their necks? They knew Bruno was lying and that was the best part of it.

  He enjoyed hearing his family’s laughter after years of having nothing pleasing to tell them and little but drudgery to share, yet it wore him out and he wanted to reveal to them that life as a professional rogue came with a heavy toll. It corroded the pleasure in everything and made him want to drink an entire bottle of wine straight from the bottle.

  Better these stories than the truth, he told himself. Klaus was a client, as Bruno had suggested. He was a vet, however, not a dog groomer. His only concern about his heroic brother was that the man was dangerous, being well experienced in killing men in duels and military action. He was popular with everyone who knew him. He had military friends who visited regularly and were certain to avenge him no matter what causes or justifications Klaus might give them as the innocent party, the abused brother and cuckolded husband.

  The heroic brother was indeed wounded now but not from battle. He had been run over by a carriage pulled along at a gallop by four horses. Rainer had stood by the side of the road as Bruno drove the carriage away into the evening darkness. Rainer seemed to tend to the half-conscious man. In fact, he made sure he crushed the war hero’s testicles beneath his boot.

  Tomorrow, Bruno and his partner were scheduled to find the principal of a prestigious boarding school, to tar and feather him. They would brush hot tar onto the man in his own office, throw a basket of chicken feathers over him and then parade him in a cart before his students.

  To Bruno this seemed far worse than the adulterous brother being run over and stomped, since there was no sense of comeuppance for the principal as there was with the philandering soldier. Yet this was the kind of thing being demanded of professional rogues these days.

  Clients didn’t merely want justice for wrongs they had suffered at the hands of stronger, more powerful people in their lives. They used professional rogues to satisfy a more innate desire for cruelty—a need to inflict lasting disgrace and measures of torture.

  Bruno came home with bleeding knuckles. He’d wrapped his hands in bandages,
and had an elaborate story planned for his family about an accident he’d had in town, pushing the cart down the steps of the train station. He would say the cart had been destroyed and thereby be done with the lies as well as his secret work for a while.

  When his son asked him, Bruno noticed that the bandages on his right hand had bled through and he couldn’t keep himself from crying. If only little Klemens had seen how the principal had fought and what they’d had to do to subdue the man.

  All along Rainer had been saying a school principal would be a pushover, so they’d gone into the man’s office entirely unprepared for a real struggle. Bruno had to take responsibility for that. Rainer had an eye torn right out of its socket and would have to wear a patch for the rest of his life. Bruno hadn’t been able to apologise. What good could a sorry do for such a loss?

  Bruno felt that saying anything at all might result in him getting throttled by Rainer. In their world, admitting to a sense of guilt could easily turn into actual guilt. Most professional rogues believed they were responsible for nothing and merely acted as agents of fate.

  It was best to view such an event as an implacable ‘act of God’, as it was defined by insurance brokers. People could accept a great deal if it was presented in the vast star-wrapped packaging of destiny. If Bruno hadn’t announced the disgrace that was about to be brought down upon the principal, the man would indeed have been subdued easily. Being tarred and feathered and paraded before his schoolboys was not something the man could allow to happen. It would have been far easier for him to enter subjugation blindly. Men were like horses in that respect, except that the blinkers they wore didn’t allow them to see straight ahead. This way they moved along, committing all manner of actions—mean, painful or pointless.

  Bruno stood in his darkened hallway, looking at his bandaged hands. The trembling pain in the bones of his fingers spread up through his entire body until he wasn’t sure what was broken and what was not. He’d been knocked unconscious early in the fracas and his head had yet to stop spinning. Even now the objects of the world had a liquid quality, as if made of oil in various states of thickness and fluidity. Regaining consciousness had been a lengthy process and it had taken such a long time on the principal’s carpeted floor, listening, before he could raise his head.

  The sounds the other men made as they struggled amid the chaos of broken furniture and falling books was terrible. This was not at all similar to the baying of wild animals, as it was sometimes described in the novels Bruno read. These were the grunts and groans children made when they were in pain, more guttural and frenzied coming from the two grown men. It was still childlike, and all the worse for it. When Rainer’s eye came out on the principal’s long forefinger, the baby squeal that Rainer made raised the hair on Bruno’s arms and legs.

  Bruno got up and found that he was far clearer of mind standing than he had been on the ground—overwhelmed by the primal noise and desperate, pathetic push and pull of wrestling bodies. Words were useless. Rainer wouldn’t make out a syllable. To stop the imminent strangulation of the principal, Bruno split his knuckles on Rainer’s skull.

  “Daddy, please …” Klemens said as he desperately hugged Bruno’s legs to himself. “I want to help you.”

  Bruno was still standing in the hallway. The rest of the family slowly emerged from other parts of the house and he began to feel ashamed. He wanted to leave his home but didn’t want to break his son’s hold on his legs.

  “Son, it’s my job to help you. Not the other way around.” His voice was steady enough and, since no-one had lit any candles, his wet face and tearful eyes couldn’t be seen clearly.

  “Why are you crying Bruno?” asked his father-in-law. Ernst had stepped closer and Bruno expected to see his disgust. There was only surprise in the patriarch’s face.

  “The world got on top of me today, I’m sorry,” Bruno said.

  Bruno’s wife lit the candles in the kitchen and told everyone dinner would be ready soon. The family left the hallway. Bruno looked down at his son and asked him if he wanted to go outside and kick a ball around. Klemens nodded and let go. He opened the door and waited for his father.

  Bruno took Faramond out for a ride. The horse was almost frisky as they made their way along dirt roads to the countryside. He had become so used to pulling a cart, being ridden made him feel young again. Together they trotted and then pranced along to the bank of the Danube.

  Bruno dismounted with a huzzah when they arrived at the mighty river. He was beaming yet Faramond pushed away from his appreciative embrace. The animal was in a lather, dripping sweat and breathing raggedly. His legs were trembling and Bruno removed the saddle to prevent the horse from collapsing.

  They had galloped over wooded hills, shooting across a narrow bridge spanning a stream, and slalomed downhill around trees. Bruno had used the riding crop to spur on his horse, crouched and riding high, calling encouragement into Faramond’s ear. The exhilaration they’d both felt must have worn off much sooner for the animal—Bruno went on feeling an elation that kept him spurring his horse on and on into the bright flowing air.

  Bruno apologised for having been so foolish. A three-mile run across hills would have been a challenge for a young horse. Faramond could only drool and tremble—a teardrop of blood trickling from a wet nostril. Bruno walked him to the water’s edge and encouraged him to drink. The horse closed his eyes in long, slow blinks and his master could do nothing but leave him to rest.

  The river had many boats drifting on it. Small sailing ships for children. Rowboats with propped fishing rods, their bright red floats bobbing in the water. Rowing teams sculled along to the calls of men with small cones held to their mouths. Ducks lifted into the air on a whim and came swooshing down again. Women in long dresses, wearing large hats with flowers pinned to their brims, threw breadcrumbs to the ducks from boxes they’d prepared at home.

  On the bank there were families on picnic blankets, clusters of friends lounging in conversational circles, couples sharing wine, pet dogs released to scamper across the springy grass, even a couple dressed as French nobles with a monkey on a leash. The woman had a parasol over her shoulder and the man puffed on a cigar. They didn’t talk to each other except to remark on the tethered monkey’s endeavours to catch a tabby cat loitering nearby.

  A man with a scarlet robe, similar to the kind boxers wear, paced out to the river and stopped by the water’s edge. The children were the first to reach him and they formed an excited circle of onlookers as he began to disrobe. Beneath, he was wearing a blue-and-whitestriped bathing suit. The image of a whale in green was stitched on his back. When Bruno got closer he saw that below the leviathan was the name Jonah. The man sat on a rock beside the wide river, with his feet dangling above the water. He was breathing deeply yet rapidly and the whale on his back looked as though it were swimming through a blue and white ocean.

  A large group of people gathered around the swimmer. Bruno asked a gentleman with a monocle next to him what was happening. The man replied that the swimmer was going to swim across the Danube, from one bank to the other. At this point the great river was over seventy metres wide, and he would usually carry something in his mouth when making his crossing. He had been known to carry a man’s silver pocket watch, a blue robin’s egg, and once he’d even carried a wedding ring over and back—at which point a gentleman in the crowd had proposed to his prospective bride.

  “What’s in his mouth today?” asked Bruno.

  “Nothing. Today the swimmer is going to go all the way to the other side—and return—without coming up for air.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Bruno.

  “I know,” agreed the man with the monocle. “It’s impossible.” He smiled.

  More people gathered to watch the swimmer prepare. The smallest of the children took turns patting the whale on the back of the swimmer’s bathing suit, gently, as it seemed to swim below the deepest ocean.

  “How is he going to prove he went to the oth
er side and back?” asked Bruno.

  The man with the monocle looked surprised by the question and couldn’t answer. Bruno kept asking people until a young man with a very new, shiny top hat said that near the opposite side was a white balloon shaped like a star and it was attached to an anchor below the water. The swimmer would unhook the balloon when he reached the other bank and it would pop up to the surface.

  The swimmer folded the scarlet robe that had been keeping his legs warm and politely asked a red-headed girl to hold it for a little while. People began to clap. As he made his way deeper into the water the applause grew louder. It petered out when he was fully submerged. The Danube was clear today—even so, after a few strokes nothing more could be seen of the swimmer.

  People began to estimate how long it would take him to cross from one side of the river to the other. They looked for the white balloon which was sure to bob up soon on the distant bank. They did not spot it for all their eager searching. This fact was dismissed; one man who had the bearing of a judge pronouncing that it would be as difficult picking out a white balloon on a river so busy with boats, fishing floats and ducks as it would be to see a snowflake landing on the water.

  They all waited.

  “But it’s impossible,” said Bruno.

  “Yes, it’s impossible,” people assured him with expectant smiles.

  The gathering stood by the water for fifteen minutes before beginning to re-form into its original clusters of family and friends. People continued to talk as though they were all still part of an audience, if only for a few moments longer. There was speculation on how long it was possible for a man to hold his breath. What was the outer limit for a fellow with good lungs, or for someone who had trained for such endeavours as crossing the Danube, or especially, deep-sea diving? They had real professionals doing that kind of breath-holding. Conversations ranged over the things men found below water, from sponges and pearls to sunken ships and treasures.