'Pardon me,' says Zahn, because he bumps Katrina when he opens the door. If it even crosses his mind that it's strange of the actress Katrina Marek to be dressed in a sheet for hailing taxis, Zahn doesn't give it much thought. He's dressed none too smartly himself.

And once again my grandfather is troubled by what he calls his far-sightedness.

'Hilke,' he says. 'Would you bring me my coat? I think I'll be going out.' And although there are two possible entrances to the Schwindgasse, Grandfather settles his gaze on one.

Meanwhile, the eagle is still preferring alley travel; he swoops along the garbage routes, and it's not until he emerges in the Rilke Platz that he realizes he's in my mother's neighborhood. Zahn feels a little weighed down from all his swooping under chainmail. He boards the hindmost platform of a Gusshausstrasse tram, just starting up from behind the technical high school. Zahn thinks it's wise to stay outside the tramcar, but the tram picks up a little speed, and the eagle's pieplates begin to clap. The conductor squints down the aisle; he thinks a piece of the tram is loose and flapping. Zahn hangs back on the handrail and takes one step down the platform stairs. Someone points at him from a pastry-shop window. Zahn rides the platform stairs alone; his tail feathers learn to fly.

And he'd have been all right that way, for at least the block or two farther he had to go, except that a throng of technical-high-school students, sitting in the last car, decide to come out on the platform for a smoke.

'Morning, boys,' the eagle says, and they don't say a word. So Zahn asks, 'You haven't seen Katrina Marek this morning, have you? She's wearing her sheet, you know.'

And one of the student mechanics says, 'You wouldn't be that birdman, would you?'

'What birdman?' says another.

'What birdman?' says Zahn.

'The one who's terrorizing people,' the student says, stepping a little closer, and one of his friends remembers, then; he steps up closer too.

Zahn is wishing he had his head off so he'd have better peripheral vision - and know, if he were to jump, whether he'd hit a hitching post or a litter basket.

'It looks like my stop coming up,' says Zahn, only the tram isn't slowing any. He puts one foot down another platform step, and leans out on the handrail.

'Get him!' shouts

the closest student, and brings a lunch pail down on Zahn's hand. But the eagle flies off backwards, losing one of his claws.

Zahn makes an awful clatter, and his pieplates spark on the sidewalk; several little fastening wires gouge the eagle's back. But he is less than a block away from my mother's, and hasn't time to grieve over the pieplates spinning and rolling free down the sidewalk and along the curb.

My grandfather says, 'You can shut off the damn radio, Hilke' - having just heard the news brief of the birdman's brutal kidnapping of a worker from an Opernring street crew.

Hilke already has her coat, and she puts her scarf on - loose around her neck. She follows Grandfather to the staircase landing outside the apartment. Grandfather looks up the marble-and-iron-spiral stairs, tuning his ear to the opening of letter slots and doors. Then he leads Hilke downstairs and through the long lobby to the great door with the foot-length crank-open handle. Hilke peers up and down the street, but my grandfather looks only left - to the corner at Argentinierstrasse. He watches a man who's tamping his pipe bowl with his thumb and standing back-to Argentinier.

Then the man turns round to the corner and ducks his head, thinking he hears the approaching wing beat of a hundred pigeons. And Zahn Glanz, banking on the corner, topples the man and jars himself off balance down a short flight of steps and against the door of someone's cellar cubby. So that Zahn is below sidewalk level and altogether out of sight when the man picks himself up and shakes the pipe tobacco out of his hair; and looks both ways along the street - and seeing nothing at all, bolts down Argentinierstrasse with a wing beat all his own.

Grandfather waves. Zahn is crawling up to the sidewalk when a bustling little laundress opens the cellar-cubby door. She jousts the eagle with a sock stretcher, and prances lively up to the sidewalk; she's going to give the bird a clout, but Zahn lays his limp, cold remaining claw against her indignant bosom. The laundress drops to her knees, convinced the thing is real.

Zahn is winging to my mother. He chooses to fly the last few yards and nearly clears a parked car, getting his beak caught on the aerial and ripping off his whole head. Grandfather gets a grip under the pieplates and clatters Zahn through the great lobby door. Hilke scoops the eagle's head under her arm and covers it with her scarf. Downstreet, the laundress still kneels on the sidewalk, hiding her face in her hands; fanny-up, she seems to be expecting some ungentlemanly visit from a god.

My mother picks up feathers and bits of down; fussily she gets them all, from the parked car to Grandmother's kitchen. Where Zahn slumps against the oven - an almost-plucked bird, wrapped in tinfoil and ready to bake.

'Zahn,' says Grandfather. 'Where did you leave the taxi?'

'With Katrina Marek,' Zahn says.

'Where?' asks Grandfather.

'I ran out of gas right under her nose,' Zahn says.

'How far from here, Zahn?' says Grandfather.

'She was wearing her sheet,' Zahn says.

'Did anyone see you leave the taxi?' Grandfather asks.

'The proletariat,' says Zahn, 'they're rising up to destroy the city.'

'Did anyone see where you left it, Zahn?' Grandfather shouts.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net