“Oh please.”
The hot chocolate arrived, and the waiter poured it into small cups. It was roughly the same temperature as molten lava, was halfway between a chocolate soup and a chocolate custard, and it smelled astonishingly good.
Spider said, “Look, we’ve made rather a mess of this whole family reunion business, haven’t we?”
“We’ve made rather a mess of it?” Fat Charlie managed outrage extremely well. “I wasn’t the one who stole my fiancée. I wasn’t the one who got me sacked from work. I wasn’t the one who got me arrested—”
“No,” said Spider. “But you were the one who brought the birds into it, weren’t you?”
Fat Charlie took a very small initial sip of his hot chocolate. “Ow. I think I’ve just burned my mouth.” He looked at his brother and saw his own expression staring back at him: worried, tired, frightened. “Yes, I was the one who brought the birds into it. So what do we do now?”
Spider said, “They do a really nice sort of noodly-stew thing here, by the way.”
“Are you sure we’re in Italy?”
“Not really.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
Spider nodded.
Fat Charlie tried to think of the best way to put it. “The bird thing. Where they all turn up and pretend they’ve escaped from an Alfred Hitchcock film. Do you think it’s something that only happens in England?”
“Why?”
“Because I think those pigeons have noticed us.” He pointed to the far end of the square.
The pigeons were not doing the things that pigeons usually do. They were not pecking at sandwich crusts or bobbing along with their heads down hunting for tourist-dropped food. They were standing quite still, and they were staring. A clatter of wings, and they were joined by another hundred birds, most of them landing on the statue of a fat man wearing an enormous hat that dominated the center of the square. Fat Charlie looked at the pigeons, and the pigeons looked back at him. “So what’s the worst that could happen?” he asked Spider, in an undertone. “They crap all over us?”
“I don’t know. But I expect they can do worse than that. Finish your hot chocolate.”
“But it’s hot.”
“And we’ll need a couple of bottles of water, won’t we? Gar?on?”
A low susurrus of wings; the clack of more arriving birds; and beneath it all, low, burbling secretive coos.
The waiter brought them bottles of water. Spider, who was, Fat Charlie observed, now wearing his black-and-red leather jacket once more, put them into his pockets.
“They’re only pigeons,” said Fat Charlie, but even as he said it, he knew the words were inadequate. They were not just pigeons. They were an army. The statue of the fat man had almost vanished from view beneath the gray and purple feathers.
“I think I preferred birds before they thought about ganging up on us.”
Spider said, “And they’re everywhere.” Then he grabbed Fat Charlie’s hand. “Close your eyes.”
The birds rose as one bird then. Fat Charlie closed his eyes.
The pigeons came down like the wolf on the fold…
There was silence, and distance, and Fat Charlie thought, I’m in an oven. He opened his eyes and realized that it was true: an oven with red dunes that receded into the distance until they faded into a sky the color of mother-of-pearl.
“Desert,” said Spider. “Seemed like a good idea. Bird-free zone. Somewhere to finish a conversation. Here.” He handed Fat Charlie a bottle of water.
“Thanks.”
“So. Would you like to tell me where the birds come from?”
Fat Charlie said, “There’s this place. I went there. There were lots of animal-people there. They um. They all knew Dad. One of them was a woman, a sort of bird woman.”
Spider looked at him. “There’s this place? That’s not exactly very helpful.”
“There’s a mountainside with caves in it. And then there are these cliffs, and they go down into nothing. It’s like the end of the world.”
“It’s the beginning of the world,” corrected Spider. “I’ve heard of the caves. A girl I knew once told me all about them. Never been there, though. So you met the Bird Woman, and…?”
“She offered to make you go away. And, um. Well, I took her up on it.”
“That,” said Spider, with a movie-star smile, “was really stupid.”
“I didn’t tell her to hurt you.”
“What did you think she was going to do to get rid of me? Write me a stiff letter?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think. I was upset.”
“Great. Well, if she has her way, you’ll be upset, and I’ll be dead. You could have simply asked me to leave, you know.”
“I did!”
“Er. What did I say?”
“That you liked it in my house and you weren’t going anywhere.”
Spider drank some of the water. “So what exactly did you say to her?”
Fat Charlie tried to remember. Now he thought about it, it seemed an odd sort of thing to say. “Just that I was going to give her Anansi’s bloodline,” he said, reluctantly.