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Canary Air	By : Nos4a2 Category: DC Verse Comics > Birds Of Prey Views: 7065 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Birds of Prey,nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 3
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- 5
CHAPTER FOUR
The Purple Lilly Music Society is housed on the first floor of a three-story apartment building in a quiet, respectable neighborhood. The street is clean and the buildings are spaced wide apart. If it weren’t for the toxic air and distant blare of thousands of car horns, I’d think I was in an American city. It’s funny, but Asia is becoming more and more like the West every day. Nice, well-maintained homes four blocks away from the most terrible kind of human suffering you can ever imagine. God and the devil as roommates, BMWs parked across the street from a little girl selling herself on the corner. At least the Thais believe it’s because of the karmic cycle. Americans blame the economy, the government…anyone but themselves.
Sonchai parks a block over and we walk the short distance in the sweltering heat. It’s almost five p.m, and I’m not surprised when we’re admitted into the house by a thin, silent woman. She’s dressed plainly, her tone soft and timid as she responds in Thai to Sonchai’s questions. She keeps bowing to me, which I find a little disconcerting.
The music school is one long, bare room with lots of natural light. There are sixteen upright pianos arranged around the white-paneled walls, their ivory keys protected from dust by strips of red velvet. Everything else is tucked away. The teak floor is immaculate and smells of wax. No errant sheet music is in sight, and a few specks of dust drift in front of the wide glass windows, captured in the sunlight. The room is humming, waiting for tiny fingers to begin running scales or pounding out tone-deaf renditions of ‘Chopsticks’. I picture a child at every piano, and take out my camera to snap a digital picture which is whisked away to Barbara and Gotham.
The woman nods to us and leaves the room. Sonchai glances at me. “She’s Jones’ wife,” he explains. “Hasn’t seen him since late last night.”
“She doesn’t know about his murder?”
Sonchai locks eyes with me, his face soft and sad. “No,” he says. “She’s agreed to let us look upstairs.”
“What’s upstairs?”
“Their apartment.”
I follow Detective Jipeecheap upstairs and listen as he continues to question the woman, while I snap a half-dozen pictures of the room with the digital. It looks like every other affluent ex-pat American apartment I’ve ever seen: materialistic in the extreme, luxurious rugs and draperies, sofas and chairs upholstered in the finest Chinese silk, local details (a Buddha statue here, a Thai mural there) to give the room some color. Lots of nice stereo and media equipment, including an expensive camcorder mounted on a tripod in the corner. I check the titles on a shelf full of tapes. Recital 12/03/00. Min B-day 04/15/01. Tet Festival 01/01/03. Nothing suspicious there, apart from Jones’ evident desire to record every minute detail of his family’s life.
“Any kids?” I ask Sonchai, who translates for Jones’ Thai wife. She rattles something off, shaking her head dully. The woman is completely calm and quiet, and I wonder why she doesn’t seem concerned about the sudden appearance of two strangers who ask such personal questions about her husband.
“No kids,” Sonchai replies. “A niece, she says. But the girl isn’t home. There’s a pic…”
I nod, glancing at the framed picture on the mantel that Sonchai has indicated. A smiling girl, ten, maybe eleven, posing in front of the temple ruins at Ayuthaya. I memorize her face and move on, taking a close look at Jones. I guess I make some kind of noise, because Sonchai moves to my side, almost protectively.
“What is it?” he asks softly. I pick up the picture, forgetting to care about fingerprints.
“Jones,” I say. “He looked…different under the bridge.”
“His soul had departed,” Sonchai tells me quietly. “We all look different in death.”
I shrug, not sure if I agree. “Can we look around some more?” I ask, setting down the family portrait. Sonchai doesn’t ask why my hands shake.
The wife waves us onward, into the small kitchen/dining room combination. I notice that Jones isn’t so enraptured with Thai culture that he’s given up the stiffed-back dining chairs and sturdy oak table in favor of a low table and cushions on the floor.
My earpiece jumps to life. Barbara. I duck into the bathroom.
“What’s up?” I ask. It takes her a moment to respond.
“I’ve been running this Jones character, and the more I read, the more I dislike him.”
“I’ve been getting weird vibes from his place too,” I tell my friend. “What did you find?”
“He’s connected to some kind of pedophile group. I did an online search for Purple Lilly. Lots of hits for the drug, of course, but Jones’ music company name came up in a chatroom.”
“NAMBLA?”
“No,” Babs sniffs in distaste. “Some kind of live-stream video site. It was tough to access, even for me. Some of these freaks who are into children are proud of it, Dinah. They spam child-advocacy lists and talk about their right to free speech. They’ve got a website that gets thousands of hits a year, newsgroups, web forums. But this Purple Lilly thing, the video streaming-”
“Underground?”
“Deeply.”
“And what kind of material did it specialize in?” I ask, talking in some kind of weird professional code, hoping to put as much distance between myself and what Babs is going to tell me as possible.
Her answer comes as a sick relief. “It wasn’t bad,” she says, her voice hard. “I mean, it sexualizes children, but it was more of a peeping-tom thing than any kind of direct physical contact with the kids.”
“I hope you’re not saying that there are degrees to this kind of thing,” I say, catching a look at myself in the bathroom mirror. I look like shit. Feel like it, too.
“He had a camera going beneath the pianos in the music room, aimed up and underneath those little girls’ dresses. It was a live feed: I think I caught your shoes when you and your new Thai friend entered the apartment.”
“And that’s it?” I breathe a sigh of relief. “There’s nothing to suggest that Jones ever touched those kids?”
“Well, just because he didn’t get it on camera doesn’t mean he didn’t do it,” Barbara tells me.
I feel a chill go through me. Bastard.
“Hang on, Babs,” I tell her. “Back in fifteen.”
I get Sonchai to escort the wife out of the room. I go back to that shelf of video tapes with the benign titles, and pick out the Recital one. It takes a second for me to figure out how to hook up the camcorder to the TV: I do not have Barbara’s gift with electronics. I pop the tape in and watch static for a few moments. In all this time, Sonchai hasn’t asked me what it is I’m doing, just crouches next to me and waits for the story on the tape to unfold.
It’s not what I’d expected. Just a bunch of kids at a music recital, their parents gathered in a small exhibition hall, clapping and cheering for their sons and daughters. Thai, mostly, although I see a few Western parents in the audience. The camera pans back to the stage and watches the kids play for a second. The sound isn’t working, but I’m in no mood to figure out how to fix it.
We watch the recital continue in silence, the children playing what could be Beethoven or Mozart or Disney’s Greatest Hits. We watch their parents, too, who look tense, bored, sometimes proud. Hot, because I doubt the little music hall has enough air conditioning to deal with the fifty or so gathered in the room. They clap an rem reminds me of those old black and white MGM gangster movies Dad loved. He’d seen them so many times he could watch them with the sound off, and he’d let me stay up with him sometimes late at night, after Mom had gone to bed. We’d recite the dialogue to each other. I was good at faking machine-gun noises.
The tape fizzes out white noise, and I looked at Sonchai. “I thought-”
He holds up a finger to his lips, silencing me. Then he stands and approaches the shelf.
“What’s going on?” Barbara asks. She hates it when she can’t Big Brother me visually.
“We’re trying to figure out why this piano teacher got himself killed,” I explain, watching as Sonchai does a cursory examination of the videos.
“These dates are in the Thai calendar,” Sonchai tells me over his shoulder. “We’re two thousand years ahead of the West.”
I check the label on the ‘Recital’ tape. “It says December 3^rd, 2000.”
“But these don’t,” he says, pulling a stack of tapes that had been filed behind the others, two layers deep into the shelf. The labels are all written in Thai, and I trust him about the dates.
“Do the titles match the others? Piano recital, birthday, Tet festival?”
“Tet falls at the end of January, not the beginning,” Sonchai informs me, his tone lacking censure. Does he expect ignorance from me? “Let’s check that one.”
He pulls out the video labeled Tet 01/01/03, and another from the layer behind. The video with the English label is of Jones and his silent wife with their niece across the boarder in Saigon, celebrating the Vietnamese lunar New Year. I’ve been in Vietnam during Tet: it puts Mardi Gras to shame. The streets are crowded, red flags everywhere, and the locals are all smiles for Jones’ camcorder. Nothing even remotely suspicious there.
“We’re checking the second tape,” I tell Barbara. Sonchai inserts the minicasette and hits ‘play’. It’s the same as the English-labeled version, at least in the beginning. Jones and wife and niece, surrounded by a thousand smiling Vietnamese at the biggest party of the year in Southeast Asia. Then white static again, and something clicks on the cassette. The sound is suddenly working.
We’re in a different world, no longer in the crowed streets of Saigon. It’s the jungle, at night. The digital camera picks out the stars above the dark canopy of tropical vegetation. There are bright lights in the sky, but they aren’t stars. Planes. I cear ear the engines. A mad scramble as everyone, even the camera operator, runs. The screen shakes, and the stars warble in and out of focus.
Everyone comes to a stop by a river. I can sense others, although they linger just outside the camera’s field of vision. More plane noises, closer this time. Another sound from the jungle. Gunfire, what I think is an AK-47, one of those old Soviet sub-machine guns that they’ve used in every third-world conflict from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Serbia. I hate those fucking guns.
Suddenly the screen erupts in fire. The camera had been tracking one of the lights moving above the jungle, and I realize what it is we’ve been watching.
“Drug drop,” I whisper to Sonchai, who nods. “Was Jones with the people who took out those planes?”
My Buddhist friend shakes his head, still focused on the screen. A plane lands by the water. It’s light-weight, fuel efficient. Inexpensive, but it operates exclusively as a short-term flight. Dark figures scramble around the plane like a nest of spiders roused to action. I squint, trying to make out from the grainy picture what it is they’re doing.
A figure drops out of the plane. A child, thin, clad in loose, worn black clothing. The kid raises bleary eyes, blinking in the darkness. I clench a fist. Jones’ ‘niece’ from the family pictures. The little girl we just saw grinning at the camera at the Tet festival on the other tape. The dark figures are still busy with the plane. Moonlight reveals that they are loading bags filled with white powder into the plane’s belly, and quickly. More gunfire, and everyone scatters again. The camera jostles over the rough terrain, and I think Jones must have fallen, because the image on the screen does a 360° and suddenly we’re staring at the jungle floor. The kid falls next to the camera, her face level with the lens. I stare for a moment, her wide face and sad eyes blinking in confusion, mouth open and breathing heavy. She’s so frightened. Someone picks her up, then the camera. More gunfire.
The screen goes black.
I step back, wanting to distance myself from the TV. “What the hell was that?” I ask Sonchai. He’s still staring thoughtfully at the dark television, totally calm.
“I don’t know,” he says slowly. “Would your friend be able to…”
I nod. Babs can do anything. “I’ll have to FedEx it to her,” I tell him. He shrugs, and I appreciate the lack of procedural red-tape in this country. Try convincing a Gotham cop that you need to remove evidence from a murder victim’s home without a search warrant.
“What now?” I ask him. Sonchai turns and heads out of the apartment. I’m only too grateful to follow. “Reptile farm?”
“You must sleep,” he tells me gently. “It has been a very long day, Black Canary. You sleep, and I will meditate on our problem. The answers will come.”
I open my mouth to say something and decide that it’s best not to question his wisdom. If he says he’ll get the answers from a trance, well, who am I to argue? My sensei tried to teach me meditation, but I was always too impatient. I can only manage for about an hour or so before I need to do something physical. I get the feeling that Sonchai regrets breaking meditation to participate in the world.
“Call me Dinah,” I tell him. “I insist that everyone I team up with to solve a murder calls me by my first name.”
He smiles, a soft li gri grin and a nod. Everything about him is very contained, very controlled. Must have gone to the same school as Batman.
We pile back into Sonchai’s rusted, immaculate little car and head back into the city towards Wireless Road and my hotel. As soon as I unlock the hotel room’s door, I finally relax enough to let myself feel how tired I am. I sink down onto the bed. Sonchai lingers in the doorway.
“You have a message,” he tells me. I groan and sit up, checking the phone. A bright red light is blinking on the side, and I pick up the receiver, dialing through to the hotel’s answering service.
Nong’s voice, lacking the throaty-seductive quality I remember from the night before. That night seems like it happened a thousand years ago, not as long ago as Ollie and Seattle, maybe, but long enough so that I’m already having trouble remembering the way she smelled and tasted.
“Meet me at club, four a.m. Important,” she says in her heavily-accented English. I drop the receiver back into its cradle and look up at Sonchai.
“I have to meet someone in a few hours,” I inform him. “Wake me up at three-thirty?”
I can tell that he wants to go. I don’t know if the leggy blonde American spread out on the bed before him is a temptation to his arhat sensibilities, or if he just wants to get back to his own place and meditate in peace. I think he’s still deciding as I draw the blinds closed against the late-afternoon sunshine and pull off my shorts, settling into the bed beneath a thin sheet. I’m too exhausted to watch him come to a decision.
“’Night, Sonchai.”
“Good night, Black Canary,” he whispers in the dark.
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Canary Air