Descendant

Man-trailing

We left the hotel just as the pregnant-looking longcase clock in the lobby chimed eight. Frank was straining so hard on his leash that he sounded like a Cajun squeeze-box. It hadn’t rained hard, but a fine wet mist had descended over the city, and the cobbles were all slippery and shiny. I could hear heavy bombers somewhere in the distance, but they were very far away. Drone, drone, drone. Then that crumpity-bump-crackle sound of anti-aircraft fire.

Corporal Little said, “Thirty-six of them, sir. Jesus. Do you know how far this could have spread? Half the city could be Screechers by now.”

“I don’t want to think about it. Let’s just concentrate on picking up the scent from Markgravestraat.”

We jolted our way back to Ann De Wouters’s apartment building. Somebody had taken the dead horse away. We were flagged down three times on the way by Canadian troops who wanted to check our papers, so it took us almost twenty minutes before we arrived there. “US Counterintelligence?” they asked, half respectfully and half disdainfully. Some of them were so young that their cheeks were still pink.

We were admitted to No. 5 by an old man in a saggy beige cardigan with a face the color of liver sausage. Frank snapped furiously at the old man’s worn-out slippers so that he almost had to dance upstairs to get away from him.

“He won’t hurt you,” I reassured him. “I promise you, he’s a friend to everyone.”

“I don’t have any friends who try to bite my feet,” the old man retorted.

“It’s not your feet, sir, it’s your slippers. He thinks they’re dead rats.”

We allowed Frank to have a good snuffle around Ann De Wouters’s room. We said nothing while he crossed from one side of the linoleum to the other, thrusting his head underneath the bed and into the curtained-off space where Ann De Wouters had hung her clothes. He spent a long time licking the dried blood that was spattered over the floor. Bloodhounds don’t identify scents with their noses, but with their tongues. I was hoping that the Screechers had left plenty of traces of saliva for him to pick up on.

When he was finished, Frank sat up straight and made a whining sound in the back of his throat.

“You ready, Frank?” Corporal Little asked him.

“Urf,” said Frank.

We went back down the narrow staircase. There was a light shining under Vrouw Toeput’s door but I didn’t want to disturb her. The old man with the dead-rat slippers was nowhere to be seen. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, Frank ignored the front door and turned sharp right, heading toward the back of the building. He led us past an alcove crammed with mops and brooms and strong-smelling bleaches, and up to a heavy oak door. I pulled back the bolts and unlocked it, and we stepped out into the fairy-fine mist.

“Told you,” I said. “Out the back of the building, and on to Kipdorp.”

Frank hurried through a low archway on the opposite side of the yard, where six or seven bicycles were propped up, and then he hurried into the street, his claws clattering softly on the cobbles.

He hesitated for only a moment, and then he turned right, toward Sant Jacobs Markt, and Kipdorpbrug. Every now and then he paused and looked around, to make sure that we were following him. I seriously believe that he thought we were like two stupid children, and it was his responsibility to take care of us.

Although the sidewalk was wet, the scent of Screechers must have been very strong, because Frank went straight along the north side of Kipdorp and there was none of his usual circling and sniffing and whuffling around.

“I think we’ve got these jokers, sir,” said Corporal Little, triumphantly.

But when we reached Kipdorpbrug, Frank galloped straight up to the sandstone wall of the Maritime Bank and stopped. He looked upward, and barked, and then he turned back to us, whining in frustration.

We looked upward, too. The bank building was seventeenth century, five stories high, with a flat Flemish-style facade. Apart from the window ledges, there wasn’t a single handhold between the sidewalk and the roof.

I looked at Corporal Little and Corporal Little looked at me. We were both deeply impressed, and frightened, too. “They went straight up,” I said. “At least one of them, anyhow.”

We had known Screechers to run up twenty-foot walls, and jump from one sloping roof to another. We had seen one run across a ceiling. But we had never known one to climb up a sheer hundred-foot building.

Frank kept returning to the wall and jumping up and barking. “Good boy,” Corporal Little told him, pulling his ears. “Good boy, it’s not your fault you can’t climb walls.” It was difficult to know what to do next. We could have located the manager of the Maritime Bank and have him open up for us, so that we could follow the Screecher’s trail across the roof, but that could take us hours, and in any case the Screecher had probably climbed down the front of some other building and come back down to ground level.

“My guess is, this was a dead one,” I said.

Corporal Little nodded. “He must of left a real strong trail behind him, the way Frank’s getting himself so excited. And if he could shimmy straight up a wall like that. ”

“It’s worth checking, though. Maybe he only climbed up part of the way, and then jumped back down again.”

I hunkered down and opened up the Kit. I took out the compass and opened up its silver filigree lid. The needle immediately swung around and pointed to the front of the bank building. When I held it up vertically, it pointed directly upward. There was no question about it. Our Screecher had gone all the way up to the roof, with no deviation.

“Like a rat up a drainpipe,” said Corporal Little, and Frank let out another expectant bark. I swear that dog would have talked if he’d had the larynx for it.

As I was fitting the compass back into the Kit, however, the needle started to creep back the other way, in the direction of Kipdorpbrug. It wasn’t an urgent swing, but the needle was trembling a little, the way it always did when Screechers weren’t too far away.

“Look at this,” I told Corporal Little, shining my flashlight on it. “I don’t think all three of them went up the wall. Maybe only one of them. I’m definitely picking up another trail in this direction.”

Corporal Little took hold of Frank’s collar and tugged him away from the bank. “Hear that, boy? More Screechers! Go get ’em, boy!”