Dr. Phibes in The Beginning Read online

  It was already 3:15 and she still had that one stop to make.

  ***

  His dressing room was next to his sleeping room. It was a double room actually, the wall separating two smaller rooms having been knocked out. Compared to his sleeping room it was well-designed, elegant even with its Birdseye maple cabinetry, large dormer windows whose seats were fitted with rich red plush and a concealed lighting system that lit the space always with the correct brightness. The thin batik rug on the floor covered enough of the planks to deny what otherwise would have been a ‘wooden’ look.

  She wasn’t allowed to touch anything in this room. He selected his daily attire from the wall cabinets - suits, jackets, shirts and pants each had one of their own. A corner cabinet held his shoe rack: a sturdy metal pipe fitted with wooden circles, each of these containing half a dozen pairs of shoes and rotating freely around the pole on a ball-bearing cuff. The genteel efficiency of the Jazz Age.

  The large dressing table on the wall opposite held the room's focus. Its globe-rimmed cathedral mirror emulated the theatrical, a look that was not quite dispelled by the comb, brush and file set on its white cloth coverlet. Not quite, because on this starched white expanse was stationed a population of wigs and moustaches, of ear locks and eyelashes, of noses and lips and ears and chins, cheekbones and throats and full masks as well - a whole family of them, enough to manufacture platoons of characters whose looks could only be imagined, and badly at that, in this pale morning light.

  The man who wore these items would never be the same man seen twice.

  She was expressly forbidden to disturb this remarkable array but if any piece was out of place, she was required to put it back where it belonged, the tapered ear next to its mate, the curved nose third from the bottom of the column, etc. Early on she had memorized every detail of this vast placement so that its order, its correct order, would be preserved.

  She was almost through with her room survey when she heard it. It was the sound of a sparrow in a blizzard, of a worm beneath an avalanche, of that lone bicyclist at rush hour. It was unhearable! The human ear could not hear this sound if indeed such a sound - this particular sound - had been made.

  Our reader should know that a sound had been made and that it was perceptible, even though it had come from a great distance. Vulnavia reacted with a slight turn of her head. Moving quickly, she took a quick last look around the room and satisfied that all was in order, she hurried away.

  ***

  The eagle had overshot his mark. He’d flown over the Channel and was halfway across France when the signal caught up with him. He knew right away from the stretching of the wave peaks that he’d gone too far. Turning in a sharp downward arc - that strike kill used by all of the great raptors - he pushed back toward the Channel. There was a headwind. Progress was slow. And he had not eaten since leaving the Irish coast.

  He dropped down a couple hundred feet when he reached the Woevre Plain. The air would be stiller over that broken battlefield. Its trenches were still intact and the piles of tangled wire broke up its graveyard gloom.

  He didn’t see them at first, the twin birdlike shapes that shot up from the trench works like a salvo of French 75s. Peregrines! They were smaller than eagles but their beaks and claws were equally lethal.

  The first pass was a warning to get out of where he was - fast! As late as he was he just kept going, knowing that next would be the kill pass.

  It came fast. He tore the wing off the first bird with his claw. The falcon dropped like a stone, the gushing blood from where his wing used to be blinding his partner, who had to veer away.

  The eagle flew on. Dusk was closing fast. He had to hurry if he was to make London by first light.

  ***

  She tapped on his door. No answer. She tapped again. More silence. Had he left without her? She was making a fist for the third try when the door to the dressing room opened. Phibes came out looking very fresh and ready for the morning's work.

  He smiled. Her hero smiled at her! Beautiful women know by instinct how to accept adulation; with grace if it is sincere, with disdain if it is not. This stunning creature was pure. She had none of the mannerisms, employed none of the nuances that drove the engines of polite society.

  This mansion was her only society and its master was her master.

  Phibes was dressed for the morning task: a worn leather jacket over khaki trousers with a matching turtleneck. A single heavy glove was folded over one arm.

  He took her arm by the elbow, the thick worsted muting their steps as they moved down the hallway. She was smiling as they walked.

  MALDINE SQUARE

  THE EARLY DAYS

  The Maldine Square brownstones were built in the 1840s. The Industrial Revolution was entering its second century and it was a time of great wealth concentration. Of the British Empire, it was famously said that ‘the sun never sets on the Union Jack!” And thanks to Admiral Nelson and the Iron Duke, the threat from her #1 rival, Napoleon Bonaparte, had been snuffed out.

  In its thousand-year history, Bermondsey had never been a ‘fashionable’ district. Warehouses, ships’ chandlers and sail makers led up from the Thames-side docks for three or four blocks. Stables and an old firehouse marked the dividing line between this riverine zone and the flophouses and taverns beyond. All in all, Bermondsey was a place of hard work, harder drinking and little sleep.

  Someone - no one knows quite when but perhaps it was in the seventeenth century - someone stuck a park just beyond the perimeter, in a block that had not yet filled up with the two-and three-storey flophouses that had already gobbled up most Bermondsey's vacant land.

  This park occupied one corner of that block - the southeast corner, to be exact - and took up no more than three lots. It was intended, as all parks are, as a respite from the local bustle. Soon after it was sanctioned, the Borough Forester sent his gardeners to grade and amend the designated site with compost and overlay it with a fine bed of fescue. When all was ready he ordered sturdy saplings of oak and yew to be stuck into the prepared soil and the whole park to be surrounded with a row of privet. Then this great gentleman, who was responsible for all of London‘s park land, officiated at the tree-planting ceremony after which he hurried off, never to return. Keep me informed, he muttered to his two gardeners as he lumbered into his carriage.

  Punctilio is the hallmark of civil servants large and small since time immemorial. And these two fellows, after laboring for a day and a half on their report, sent a nineteen-page document complete with sketches and footnotes to their superior‘s headquarters, where it was date-stamped at the intake desk and promptly filed in the ’Parks Pending’ cabinet. There it remained for the next two hundred years, unopened and unread.

  The park itself did not. Tended by those same gardeners until they retired, their duties were taken over by the locals, whose first expression of social activism was to erect a block granite fence to supplant the privet. Completed a decade later and topped by a row of tall steel spikes, this fence was to prove a formidable barrier against the outflowing from the local wine shops when they closed at 4AM. The river men who could not make it back to their flophouses just a few blocks yonder were now barred from drifting into the park to sleep the night away as was their habit.

  To further contain their sonambulance, a heavy steel gate was installed in the granite wall, the intention being to provide the Bermondsey citizenry with access to their park during the day but to discourage the nighttime drunks.

  This gate was permanently locked on St, Swithin's Day in 1875. The Borough Forester, always pressed for funds, deployed his gardeners elsewhere. The privet and the fescue renewed every spring but it was the trees that grew unchecked, reaching spectacular heights in a very few decades. Pedestrians approaching the park from a distance were treated to the forested grandeur of the Sierra Nevada - right in the middle of London Town! - the mighty Bermondsey oaks towering over every other structure for miles around.

  Maldine Squa
re was in the same block as the park. In their impulse toward gentrification, the city fathers saw the Square as one of the tonier regions of Bermondsey so they sited it near the park to give its residents views of the nearby verdure. The only requirement in their bid solicitation was that each residence have at least one bay window on its upper floors ‘to take advantage of the morning (or afternoon) sun’, London's daytime overcast and nightly fog perennially trumping this purpose notwithstanding.

  Judge Maldine, the successful bidder, started off on the right foot by instructing his architects to be ‘creative‘. One of the more forceful jurists to sit on the Queen's Bench, the judge had used his connexions to advance himself financially, which for a man who came from humble beginnings - his father was a fishmonger and his mother, struck low by scrofula, never saw her 30th year - was quite acceptable in the moral framework of that Victorian era. Gritty lives beget true grit, the judge liked to say as he lit into fortune-making like a greyhound chasing a rabbit. Even so, there was never even the appearance of impropriety! Judge Maldine believed in the purity of the Robe. All of his investments were above-board and timely. His thousand-pound flyer on London Municipal Electric tripled in eighteen months!

  Married and settled before he was 40, the judge knew no vices. His public displays of devotion to his wife Emily were noted and filed away by the parishioners of St. Simon's. Mrs. Maldine was a rather plain - homely even - woman whose frocks were always several cuts above the hopeless figure that they adorned.

  One item of her apparel that did attract attention was the trim on her bonnets. Always the finest lace and ribbons, these notions could only have come from Paris. Pure speculation, of course, but if gossip depended on facts, it would quickly cease to be. And so frumpy Mrs. Maldine's patriotism became suspect. Ain’t Fortnum & Mason's good enough for the lady, the parishioners grumbled. If she loves them Frogs so much, let her go live with them.

  The fact is (not that it mattered) that unlike most women, Emily Maldine didn’t care for shopping. Most of her wardrobe save for those items given to her by her husband, was bought by mail order.

  And so the gossip (and the gossipers) thrived, some of it spilling over onto the judge. Whatever does he see in her? they caviled, discounting the three small children the Maldines had in tow every Sunday morning at services. The kids were adorable but adorable or not their father, the judge, was conjured up with all sorts of tarts and strumpets by way of relief from the dreary prospect of life with the plain and frumpy Mrs. Maldine.

  None of this was true. What was true was that Judge Maldine was absorbed by one and only one avocation besides his juridical duties - and that was the making of money as much and as fast as he could haul it in.

  A lover (of money) he was: but a philanderer he was not.

  Having successfully bought and sold several small parcels over time, Judge Maldine fancied himself to be a real estate ‘investor’. One of the truisms of this craft is that real property - buildings both commercial and residential - has a value that can readily be determined. The value of raw land cannot.

  You can pretty well approximate the value of a house if you know what similar homes in that neighborhood recently sold for. The value of raw land, on the other hand, is subject to the whims of local politicians and the quicksilver of local fashion.

  It's hard to say what drives a sober man to make drunken decisions. Maybe it was the one-million-pound goal by age 50 that the judge had set for himself. He was 48 at the time and had just one third of that total in his bank accounts. Or maybe it was because Emily had just confided that she was pregnant - when little Irving was just six months out of his diapers. Perhaps it was the case he was hearing, a nasty divorce involving one of Parliament's most popular mc's that had pushed the judge beyond all prudence.

  The flashpoint came with the ’Beautiful Bermondsey’ offering from the borough elders. The raft of favorable zoning ordinances and tax ‘forgiveness's’ that went with it attracted investors both canny and adventurous from near and far. Confidently conceiving himself in the former camp, Blumel Maldine threw the dice. His chest filling with that same sense of adventure that sent the Pilgrims to Plymouth, he was soon into Maldine Square up to the hilt. And in that quick eye blink, Judge Maldine went from investor to speculator to pauper in the dazzlingly short span of 27 months, which is the time it took from laying the buildings’ foundations to installing the final slate tile on the roof of #15 Maldine Square.

  Thanks to his instruction to the architect to ‘be creative’, no two brownstones were alike. #5 for example, was gifted with a rooftop observatory in recognition of that astronomical craze that’d swept England ever since Sir Edmund Halley discovered the comet that bears his name. #7's balustrades were etched with the Lions of Sargon. The leaded glass windows of #13 were tinted in the colors of the Union Jack - all of this fulfilling the dream of uplifting Bermondsey to rival Paris’ fashionable Faubourg St. Germaine.

  But Bermondsey wasn’t the Right Bank, the Thames was not the Seine and the real estate coup sought by Judge Maldine - Canary Docks - was still a century away: a crucial but commonplace mistake made by real estate speculators ever since the dawn of cities. If you must build, build where the people will come! By the end of the decade (1840s) Judge Maldine's fortune had evaporated and he and his by now much larger family were forced to move to the Bromwich middens. The one gain in all of this was that his own dear Emily no longer had to flaunt those suspect bonnets. Now she wore her graying locks ensconced in a simple cotton - and very English - scarf.

  No matter. Attracted by the newiness of the Square a restaurant - Hayzelle's - opened across the street. Calling itself a charcuterie, it offered up a variety of French-sounding dishes served on white tablecloths by waiters spiffed in long black formal aprons. To dine at Hayzelle's was to be guested at a black tie affaire. Alas, few people did. The outliers stopped coming as soon as the novelty wore off and the locals, for their part , stayed home. Fried potatoes and a chop was a rare treat for these working folk to whom Hayzelle's big prices and small portions offered no inducement at all.

  Not that Maldine Square was an eyesore. It certainly looked decent enough, prosperous even, especially since the Square and the thoroughfare adjacent had been recently paved with a rich-textured brick the color of madder (at a deep dent to the civic budget).

  Fernald the farrier was the richest pioneer to settle there. He’d added three more infants to his already large family before the next occupants moved in. Progress was slow but steady thereafter but finally in May, 1882, all fifteen of the brownstones had people living in them. To celebrate, the just-moved-in young couple from America organized a block party for their new neighbors. The fish and chips bundled in newspaper went fast. The bangers without beer (they were temperance missionaries) was a bit of a disappointment on this first - and what was to prove its last - Maldine Square social function.

  Thereafter, residents came and left. Few of them had the money to do even basic maintenance. The brown stone itself weathered well but the wooden window sills and door frames peeled off their paint soon enough. The feeble attempts to patch up were largely unsuccessful with the result that the gracious black and tan of the original facades had given over to a motley gray palette. By the turn of the century, Hayzelle's was long gone as was the hotel establishment next door. The barbershop - Hairtician! - soldiered on in the name of gentility. But the tiny church closed its doors after one year, giving Maldine Square and its environs over to sinners and sundry tenants.

  The deed holders never came. Neglect turned to disrepair. Absentee ownership, that blight of many a hopeful neighborhood, settled in.

  THE

  OBSERVATORY

  The 5th floor observatory was built to meet the standards of the Royal Astronomical Society. Its all-weather metal-encased dome rotated on a large brass flywheel. Phibes had replaced its small refractor with a 30” reflecting telescope, whose barrel extended 5’ beyond the dome's slit aperture. The aperture itself coul
d be widened by sliding panels on each side.

  The eagle was there when they got there, perched atop the end of the barrel. He glanced at Vulnavia and then fixed on Phibes. Animal handlers and zookeepers have much to say about raptors, big cats and other large meat eaters. When they're ready for the kill, the signs are there: crouching, flattened ears, the guttural summons. But it's their eyes that matter the most: sizing you up and all ablaze with that killing glare.

  Seen up close, the eagle was big, 40 pounds maybe, with his claws gripped halfway around the telescope barrel. Shaggy and weather-worn from the long flight, his coat was missing more than a few feathers, revealing a tight rope work of muscles through the patches. There was a spray of red flecks across his chest from the last kill.

  Phibes and the eagle were looking at one another now, their eyes narrowing and fixing on specific points. Vulnavia brought a tray of offal which the eagle ignored, his gaze fixing ever stronger on Phibes, on the lines in the man's face.

  Had he reached the kill point?

  Phibes gave no notice. He continued to size up the eagle, taking in every tensing and fluttering of this great bird, watching the claw grip tightening, hearing the scraping in his throat quite clearly now over the street sounds down below where the excited crowds of earlier in the day had long since gone about their business.

  “Flight or fight” is that well-documented interim where prey and predator meet. And in that hair trigger moment where sweat, the fall of a diaphragm, or a dry swallow can trigger mayhem, all of these were absent now.

  Instead there was respect, respect of kindred spirits for one another.