"I think she's back, Finch."
Reese enters the hallway, searching the rafters before scanning the top of the book cases. He can barely see the top of the shelves, but knows what he is looking for. It isn't there, not this time at least.
"I don't think so, Mr. Reese," comes his employers unruffled reply.
A rather rumpled Finch sitting in his customary spot at the computer station is intently involved in coding a new subroutine, his eyes on the keys as his fingers fly across the board. Considering the unusual state of the computer geeks attire, Reese guesses his boss has been at it for some time, a supposition verified by the desk top debris which seems to have birthed another set of empty cups and paper plates since the evening before.
"Cheep!"
"No…? Well, I can hear her! And why Mother Nature hasn't already eliminated that "stupid" gene in the bird pool is a mystery to me!"
He continues his inspection of the hall, peering into a discarded waste basket, shoving aside books piled on a dusty chair, and shaking out the sweater that since the last cold spell, had taken up residence on the ancient file cabinet.
Several times during the year he'd had to clear out partially constructed nests, all built in the most inappropriate, haphazard locations. The bird had seemed oblivious to the fact that a nest built on a fan blade was destined to fail as the weight of her chicks would send the entire construct sliding to the ground far beneath. And that locating her compact little cup of leaves and twigs on top of Harold Finch's precious collections was viewed nothing short of a declaration of war by the fastidious book worm.
Fortunately for the bird, and him, none of the nests had yet been occupied, forestalling the guilt that would have resulted from having to destroy eggs or dislocate fledglings. Since his boss wasn't physically or emotionally up for such an undertaking, that task too would have fallen to him.
"It's not the wren, Mr. Reese." Finch answers, his voice still calm. "You boarded up that broken pane, remember?"
"po-ta-to-cheep!"
"What's that noise then?"
Reese saunters into the library area and comes to a full stop. There, next to Finch's roost in front of the computer station and hanging from an elegantly curved stand, is an old fashioned bird cage, its delicate bars reflecting the weak sunlight filtering through the library's grimy windows.
And inside the cage, a small yellow bird with dark wings. Reese stands transfixed as the bird twitters again.
"Cheep!"
"Finch…What is that?"
"A bird, Mr. Reese. More specifically, a Spinus tristis. A Goldfinch."
"A finch. How…appropriate!" Reese approachs the stand cautiously, and with the vintage cage at chest height, gives into a natural inclination to stick his finger between the bars. The finch immediately takes umbrage at this intrusion and drops nervously to the bottom of the cage where it turns its head to fix a beady eye on the human invader.
"Don't do that Mr. Reese!" Finch admonishs, confirming that he had been watching, and with some trepidation as his employee neared the cage. "It's rather delicate. It could harm itself if agitated."
"So why do you have a finch…Finch?"
The older man sighs, resigned to postponing at least temporarily his coding project as he swivels his desk chair around to face his employee. "Mrs. Erhart, my elderly neighbor, moved to a nursing facility. One that doesn't allow pets."
"And so you're adopting?"
Finch snorts, turning back to his keyboard. "Not hardly. The landlord was going to just turn it loose." He glances at the small creature. "It's a caged bird, Mr. Reese. Probably has been for most of its life. It wouldn't last a day in the middle of the city." Resuming his typing, Finch continued. "I've already made arrangements to have the Columbary Haven take it in. They'll put it in their aviary with the rest of their fringillidae."
"Their what...?"
"Finches, Mr. Reese. Birds of the family Fringillidae," the smaller man replied patiently.
"Oh." said Reese as he turned back to the cage, watching the small feathered specimen anxiously walk around the bottom of its cage. "It's pretty. You could just keep it…you know, company for those long hours you put in."
Finch peered at the monitor, a part of his facile brain concentrating on the last code he'd imputed. "I could. But it's better off with its own kind. Unfortunately, it's a holiday weekend, which means it will need to stay here until Tuesday."
"Guess we should be thankful then that your mouser has a new home. This bird would have been lunch way before Tuesday."
Finch grimaces, turning his body again to frown at his employee. "We'll see how they like finding a dead rodent on their desk! Anyway, Charlie served his purpose. In case you haven't noticed, we no longer seem to have a pest problem."
He returns to his keyboard with renewed vigor. Reese grins, remembering the horrified look on his boss's face when confronted with a rat carcass on his keyboard. Finch simply hadn't thought through the consequences of having an assassin in the library...but to give him credit, the geek had been quick to react: Charlie had summarily been fired from his job and within the hour had been placed in the arms of the deli owner's grateful wife, a large jolly woman who seemed to have great faith in the cat's ability to rid their shop of a pesky mouse.
A faith not misplaced, Reese reminds himself. Charlie had cleaned out their library of all rodents…or scared them so thoroughly they packed up their tails and moved to less dangerous territory.
And Finch had Reese throw out the desecrated keyboard, replacing it with a pristine new one.
The ex-op looks at the small bird again. It has evidently decided that the tall man is no longer a threat, now that the offending digit had been removed from its space. The bird flies to the top perch and eyes the human with a cocky tilt of its darkly coiffed head.
"Po-ta-to-cheep!"
Reese can see the tiny bird's chest move with every breath, its yellow plumes sleekly covering what he knows to be a very delicate bone structure…hollow bones. In fact there really isn't much more than that to the bird: feathers and bones. And he is only too aware of how easy that whole construct can be crushed. With his employer providing a keyboard cadence in the background, Reese's mind flashes to an earlier time…
'''''''''''''''''''''''''''
As a member of the elite unit, he'd been sent to a Middle Eastern location to reconnaissance a terrorist attack involving the bombing of a chlorine tanker near a populated city. He has viewed the result of a chemical attack that left hundreds dead and critically injured many more. Mostly civilians; men, women. Children.
But the gas didn't just kill humans, it killed everything it touched: pets, livestock, wildlife. Birds... He'd walked through the carnage, training and will power alone allowing him to make mental notes without connecting to the images of the bloated and disfigured bodies.
And in his concentration, he stepped on a dead bird.
He watched now the delicate little finch hop nervously from one perch to the other and could still hear the muffled shattering of hollow bones grinding into the dirt beneath his boot. Could see himself crouch down beside the small body. What had once been one of God's creatures destined to soar above the earth became no more than collection of crushed feathers and bone.
Funny how he focused on that pitiful little corpse and yet barely saw the humans strewn about like so many straws caught in a wind storm. He'd kicked some dirt over the dead bird, and proceeded with his mission...
''''''''''''''''''''''''''
"Mr. Reese? John…?"
Vaguely Reese becomes aware of his employers concerned voice. He moves away from the cage as he shakes off the memory like he has done so many times since leaving the black ops missions behind. But like the bird in his past, this little finch in the cage is just as vulnerable, so easily destroyed….
Reese walks to the other side of the computer station and takes his customary chair next to the desk. Next to another one of God's creatures who deserves to fly free but, like Mrs. Erhart's caged finch, is forever imprisoned by circumstances not of his making. Forever in danger of being crushed by forces larger than him.
But this finch…his Finch…will be kept safe, protected. Or he'd die attempting to do so.
"Everything all right. Mr. Reese?"
"Fine, Finch. Just fine." Reese leans back in the chair and studies the brightly plumed bird.
"po-ta-to-cheep! cheep! cheep!"
"So what do you think the bird wants when it does that, Finch? Is it hungry?"
Finch turns and looks at his namesake. "No, Mr. Reese. A caged bird sings of freedom…"
...
FOOTNOTE:
There are Bewick Wrens on our property so I can attest to that annoying nest building behavior from experience, having had to remove partially constructed nests from garden boots, empty paint cans, flower pots, rolls of landscape cloth, etc. And from the top of a patio fan!
The one time the wrens did complete a nest in a building it was in the out-building, 25' above a concrete floor on a slanted joist support. The eggs hatched, the birds grew, and the nest slid off the support, plunging to the ground. The chicks did not survive. …sigh…
The incident in Reese's memory is unfortunately all too real. I would have used Saddam Hussein's chemical attack on Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan, an incident now officially defined as an act of genocide, and thus far remaining the largest chemical weapons attack in history directed against a civilian population. But that was in 1988, before Reese entered the army.
Unfortunately, to date there have been many bombings of chlorine tankers, releasing a gas that results in devastating any life form it contacts. It's one of those terrorist attacks I used for Reese's dark trip down memory lane.
PS: "Charlie" is a character from "The Assassin in the Library"