Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 13, Mid-December 1994

Birds of Paradise by S. J. Rozan

The sky was dazzingly blue, the air was shirtsleeve warm for the first time this season, and as I drove up the highway beside the Hudson, I could see two hawks circling a distant hill. In the expansive early-Sunday, early-spring silence, with the hillsides yellow-green and the streams rushing with meltwater, it was easy to believe that at least some problems could be solved.

I turned off the highway onto the county road that would take me to Hanover, to the cheerful neighborhood of wood-frame houses where Pearl and Harry lived. I didn’t go through town; we’d go into town later when Harry was ready to open the store and show me the phenomenon he’d brought me up here to see.

Harry Hershkowitz sold hardware in Hanover, which he’d always said qualified him to join the 4-H club. Not that he ever had: “From the end of the horse that eats the oats, I wouldn’t know.” Hanover, a big town for this part of the state — it supports an elementary school, a synagogue, and eight churches — is a forty minute drive from the cabin I have two counties over. It was a drive I’d learned to make after the locals let me in on the secret: for three-penny nails or hacksaw blades, the Agway was fine, but when you needed just the right bracket or reverse-threaded screw, you needed Hershkowitz’s.

And now, according to Harry, Hershkowitz’s needed me.

The door to the small, neat house opened as I pulled into the driveway. Harry, bent, bald, spry, and smiling, trotted down to the car, shook my hand, tugged me through the door and into the sunny kitchen. Pearl, also wrinkled, also smiling, kissed my cheek, poured me coffee, and ordered Harry to leave me alone until I’d eaten. I surveyed the kitchen table: platters of smoked fish, tubs of cream cheese, a mound of sliced tomatoes, and a basket of seeded rye and bagels crowded together as though they had stopped jostling each other for position just before I walked in.

I turned to Pearl, feeling a little helpless. “I ate,” I said. “Before I left.”

“So?” Harry pulled out a chair. “This means you can never eat again?”

“Sit,” Pearl smiled. “Drink your coffee, nibble. Harry doesn’t open the store until noon on Sundays, and the preachers don’t come until eleven thirty the earliest, so what would be the point in rushing?”

So I sat, sipped strong coffee, and arranged tomato and smoked trout on a half bagel. “Tell me about the preachers,” I said.

Pearl made a disgusted, dismissive sound. She poured Harry coffee; he wagged his finger at me. “I’m telling you, it’s people like this who give men of the cloth a bad name.”

“I didn’t know men of the cloth had a bad name,” I said. “I think they’re pretty generally respected.”

“Of course they are,” Pearl said. “The way they should be. We’ve always gotten along so well with our neighbors, such nice people in this town. Our children went to day camp at the Y. This is why Harry doesn’t open the store until noon on Sunday, from respect for their church services. And all the customers understand we don’t open on Saturday. Never a problem, always everyone with their differences living side by side.”

“For thirty-five years.” Harry picked up the story. “Until suddenly comes this goniff, he—”

“ ‘Goniff’?”

“This thief, this fast-talking con man, Gull. The Reverend Lester Gull, you should excuse me. He could steal the words right out of your mouth, the Reverend Lester Gull. Do you know the Aerie Motel?”

“Up on Route Six? Restaurant, and a dozen little cabins? Abandoned?”

“Abandoned not any more. The Reverend Lester Gull bought the whole place last spring. Did a little bit of fixup, reopened as Heaven’s Messenger Bible School. Bible School! The man wouldn’t know from a Bible if one fell out of Heaven and hit him on the head.”

“This, of course, is not true,” Pearl interrupted. “The Reverend Gull is a very learned man. He quotes his Bible all over the place, from memory. Which only proves that learning and wisdom are not the same thing.”

“All right,” I said to Harry. “So we have the Reverend Lester teaching the word of the Lord up in the old motel. What’s the problem?”

“Up in the old motel there wouldn’t be a problem. In front of my store there’s a problem.”

“Which is?”

Harry sighed. “Hershkowitz’s sits, which of course you know, in the best spot on Main Street. Right on the corner, nobody has to walk too far, you could get there from anywhere. And shaded, for the customer’s convenience, by the old oak tree who grows on the sidewalk in front. Two hundred years old, he was in that spot when the British were here. Which I don’t by the way remember, no matter what Pearl tells you.”

Pearl patted Harry’s cheek.

“I know the tree,” I said. “The sidewalk widens there to let you walk around it.”

“Right!” said Harry. “Which is what people do, now that the Reverend Lester Gull has come to town.”

“He tells them it’s the will of God that they should walk around the tree?”

“Don’t joke, this is not a funny situation.”

“I apologize,” I grinned. “Please continue.”

“Lester Gull,” Harry said with great dignity, “doesn’t even come to the tree himself. Except to stand in the crowd. It’s his students who make my customers walk around the tree.”

“Harry—”

“Harry, please, you’re giving the man heartburn. You eat, I’ll talk.” Pearl turned to face me. “Reverend Gull is training, what do you call them, they preach on TV.”

“Televangelists.”

“That’s right, such a silly word. Maybe they believe what they say, maybe they don’t. But religion isn’t what they learn from Reverend Gull anyway. From him they learn how to ask for money.”

“Specifically?”

“You bet specifically,” Harry broke in. “How to stand under my tree on Sunday afternoon and harangue my customers. They preach and preach and they ask and ask, and the customers get so upset they don’t come on Sundays any more, which is my biggest day because all the weekend people like you when else are they going to come? But now they don’t come, they shouldn’t have to know from the Reverend Lester Gull’s students doing their homework.”

“That’s what it is, their homework?”

“Homework,” Harry asserted. “Their assignment, should they choose to accept it, is to make people feel bad until they give money. Last summer they started this, this practice for picking your pocket. Over the winter they don’t come, but last month they’re back like the birds flying north. My customers are too smart to give money to a fake—” he said this proudly “—but they’re too good not to feel bad when someone asks and they don’t give. So what happens? My customers, they need a left-handed wall stretcher, they come to Hershkowitz’s. While they’re there, it shouldn’t be a total loss, they buy paint, they buy brushes, they buy hammers, they buy nails. But now the preachers yell at them, fire and brimstone and give us money. The customers say, ‘Paint and brushes and hammers and nails we can get at the Agway, those guys won’t bother us.’ So to Hershkowitz’s they don’t come any more, unless for a left-handed wall stretcher. And you can’t make a living, my friend, selling those.”

Harry finished his tale, looked at me mournfully.

“You’ve talked to the sheriff?” I asked.

“Don Brown, I voted for him four times already. ‘Harry,’ he tells me, ‘I’m sorry, but they got a right. The old oak’s in front of your store, but it’s public property. People got a right to give any kind of speech they want there. Nothing I can do.’ ”

“And you talked to the Reverend Gull?”

“The Reverend Gull,” Harry was affronted, “suggested I consider joining his flock. He said I had the makings of a first-class TV preacher. Can you believe this? I told him—”

“What you told him,” said Pearl, “you will not repeat in this house, in front of our friend. It was not nice,” she added to me.

“I’ll bet,” I said. “So. What do you want me to do?”

“Something smart,” Harry said. “You’re a big-city private eye, a very smart man. I want you to think of something very smart, to make the Reverend Lester Gull and his phony preachers go away.”

Harry and I walked through Hanover to the center of town. Kids rode bikes, and dogs chased after them through the bright sun and sharp shadows. Tulips and daffodils glowed in front gardens, and curtains billowed out from open windows.

As we turned onto Main Street a block from Hershkowitz’s, I saw the oak tree and the crowd. The tree was huge, the crowd was small, but the preacher under a drooping branch was giving them his all: the arm-waving, the shouts that dropped suddenly to whispers, the finger-pointing, and the burning eyes.

Harry scowled, looked meaningfully at me; then he turned the lock on Hershkowitz’s door and disappeared inside.

I listened for awhile and watched the crowd. The text was from Matthew, the preacher reassuring the onlookers that they were of more value than many sparrows. From that came the pitch: as you have value to the Lord, you must demonstrate the value of the word of the Lord to you; as the Lord sees each sparrow fall, He will see the strength of your faith in the size of your offering. It was a good tie-in, though I didn’t see many takers. What I did see was what Harry was complaining about: people crossing the street, or cutting behind the back of the tree, to avoid the preacher altogether.

I followed Harry inside the store, between shelves jammed with hinges and hacksaw blades, knobs and chains and gardening gloves.

“So?” he said as I reached the counter where he was leaning. “Did you save your soul?”

“I haven’t even seen my soul in years,” I said. “Are all the preachers that good?”

“That’s good?”

“Terrific,” I told him. “Is Lester Gull out there?”

Harry craned his neck to peer through the window. “No. The chicken, he probably knows you’re in town.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Did you tell him about me?”

“I told him I was going to get someone to fix his wagon. How, I didn’t tell him.”

“Good, because I don’t have a clue how. Listen, Harry, I’m going over to my place, and back to the city tomorrow. I’ll give you a call.”

“I can’t wait,” Harry said.

Harry did wait, until the next Sunday afternoon, when I came back up to Hanover with the results of my week’s work. I checked out the preacher under the oak on my way into the store. He wasn’t as good as the other one, but what he lacked in eloquence he made up in heat. People hurried by, avoiding his accusing eyes.

Inside the store, everything was quiet. Harry leaned disconsolately on the counter. “I called some people I know in Albany,” I told him, “to discuss Heaven’s Messenger. It’s interesting stuff, but it doesn’t do us much good.”

“What good were you looking for it to do us?”

“I don’t know. An outstanding bunco warrant on the Reverend Gull would have been nice.”

“But no?”

“But no. The school is a legal setup, a tax-exempt nonprofit religious institution.”

“But religion he doesn’t teach! He teaches how to make a profit. This makes him a nonprofit?”

“Well, maybe there’s something you could do with that, but it would take time to dig around and then go through channels. You’d have to complain to the attorney general, things like that.”

“Time, my friend, I don’t think I have. A whole season like this, I’m out of business. Where are you going?”

“To the lion’s den,” I said, heading for the door. “The belly of the beast. To the cedars of Lebanon, where the birds make their nests. I’m going to see the Reverend Gull.”

The golden sun was getting ready to sink comfortably behind the hazy hills when I reached Heaven’s Messenger. On a newly painted sign by the side of the road a dove flew out of an open Bible. The old restaurant building and the cabins wore fresh coats of green-trimmed white paint, and the front door had a shiny brass doorknob. I wondered, admiring its glow in the low sun, if it had come from Hershkowitz’s.

My ring was answered by a thin, beak-nosed man whose smile sprang to life a half second late, as though he hadn’t decided whether to activate it until he saw who I was. “Welcome, my friend, welcome!” His bony hands grabbed mine, pressed and pumped. “Heaven’s Messenger welcomes you. You’ve come for the month’s session? Or perhaps the two week intensive study course? Please come in. You’re the first of your class to arrive. I’m Lester, Reverend Lester Gull. You’re...?”

“Not here to study with you, Reverend Gull. Bill Smith. I’m a friend of Harry Hershkowitz’s. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

“Oh.” Gull’s eyes filled with sympathy. He stepped out onto the porch, shut the door behind him. “Mr. Hershkowitz. I did suggest gently to Mr. Hershkowitz that if he were to come to the Lord—”

“Harry has a Lord he’s fond of, reverend. He also has a business he’s been running in Hanover since before the Flood. He’d like to keep it going.”

Gull shook his head sadly. “The concerns of man are so temporal, aren’t they?”

“And your concerns?”

He smiled, his lips curving under the sharp point of his nose. “At Heaven’s Messenger, we are concerned with souls. With preaching the word of the Lord throughout the land. Isaiah 61:1, ‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me; because the Lord hath annointed me to preach good tidings to the meek.’ ”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Well, some of the meek aren’t getting it. I’ve spent the week tracing some of your graduates. Four have phone-solicitation businesses — one also runs a phone sex line, by the way; two have pulpits in churches with shaky charters; and one is wanted by the Feds, something to do with mail fraud. And those are just the ones easy to trace in a short week. Not a very holy bunch, reverend.”

Gull’s eyes grew gently sad again. “It’s tragic but true, some of my flock have strayed. It’s always the way, and it causes me great pain, but I can hardly be held accountable. Genesis 4:9, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ ”

“Well, I wouldn’t know, but I do know you’re getting rich off your brother. I checked you out, too, reverend. You’re worth quite a bundle.”

“Ecclesiastes 5:19, ‘Every man to whom God hath given riches and wealth, and hath given him the power to eat thereof, and to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labor; this is the gift of God.’ ” He smiled benignly. I felt my blood begin to boil. I lit a cigarette to give myself time to cool off.

“Mr. Gull, sir,” I said, “I was baptized Catholic and raised Baptist. I can tell a can-rattier from a man of God; you don’t even make it hard.”

His face saddened. “Your lack of faith is distressing, Mr. Smith. I do think a course of Bible study here at Heaven’s Messenger would do you a world of good.”

“I doubt it, but I won’t argue. I’m just here to ask you to move your final exams to a different place and time. Harry needs his Sunday business, and you’re ruining it.”

“Alas, the Bible says nothing about preaching the word at a time and place convenient for the heathen. Quite the opposite — Romans 1:15, ‘So, as much as is in me, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also.’ ”

“A block up from Harry’s store is still Rome.”

“Ah yes. But that magnificent old oak is at the center of Main Street. That’s the perfect spot. The Sabbath is the perfect time. A hostile shopkeeper and an indifferent crowd are excellent practice for my students. That’s why they come to me; my training methods ensure their success. No, I’m sorry, I’ve found what I need.” He gazed out over the darkening hills, watched the red-streaked sky with a satisfied, proprietary air.

“If I have to,” I said, “I’ll keep digging. I’ll turn up something on you that will wipe you out.”

Gull smiled again. “I think not. I’m a careful man. I’m well established here and prospering. All my sessions are full; Heaven’s Messenger is doing quite well. No, Mr. Smith, I believe I’m here to stay.”

Gull’s sharp, smug face was too much of a temptation. I had to leave or take a swing at it. Halfway down the front path I turned.

“Jeremiah,” I said. Gull’s eyebrows lifted. “Five: twenty-seven. ‘As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit: therefore they are become great, and waxen rich.’ And check Matthew. Something about camels, needles, and rich men going to Heaven.”

Gull seemed disconcerted. As I drove off, leaving him staring after me, I hoped that was true, and not just a trick of the fading light.

I went back to Pearl and Harry’s, reported the results of my meeting with Gull — “He won’t quit, and he won’t move” — begged off dinner, and drove over to my cabin with Harry’s worried look and Pearl’s confident smile lingering in my mind. “Leave the man alone,” Pearl had commanded Harry. “He can’t think with you hovering like a vulture.” To me she’d said reassuringly, “Go home, sleep on it, tomorrow you’ll have an idea.”

I wasn’t so sure, but I didn’t have any other idea where to get an idea. At the cabin, I settled myself on the porch with a bourbon, watched the fresh spring evening. Then I went in and tried the piano. I played for awhile, Schumann and then Liszt. I played well and felt good about it, but it didn’t give me any ideas. Finally I gave up, folded myself under the quilt, and went to sleep.

In the morning I didn’t have any ideas, either. I took my coffee out onto the porch, watched the pale sun burn off the mist, listened to the chatter of the birds. It was a busy time, an early spring morning, birds in pairs and flocks staking out territory, grabbing up the best places to nest and feed. They hopped on branches, dived through the air, flicked to the ground. I sipped my coffee, tried to think.

A sudden screeching made me look up. Two birds, small and large, soared, swooped, hurtled through the blue of the sky. The big one, a hawk, circled, faked, and cut back, aiming for the branches of a great ash tree. The small one, screaming and flapping, wouldn’t let him near it. The battle was balletlike in elegance and dead serious in content: a mother bird protecting her young from a predator. It was over fast, and the smaller bird won. The whole thing became too much trouble for the hawk; he circled, lifted onto an air current that took him over the trees and across the valley. The mother bird disappeared into the branches of the ash.

I stared after her for a moment, then laughed. I was still laughing as I pulled the car out of the driveway, heading for Hershkowitz’s.

All over the world, hardware stores open early. Even upstate, even in Hanover. It was eight thirty by the time I got there, and Harry’s day was already well begun. “Okay,” I said. “Time to get to work.”

“One of us is already working,” Harry pointed out.

“Where’s your nearest lumberyard?”

“Sheppard’s, off the highway. You had an idea?”

I was moving through Harry’s shelves, grabbing what I’d need. “No,” I said. “Divine inspiration.”

I spent the rest of the morning hammering, sawing, glueing. Out on the porch of my cabin I had quite a little assembly line going. It occurred to me halfway through that I probably could have just gone to the Agway and bought these things, but I decided I liked the personal touch better anyway. Just after three I pulled up to Hershkowitz’s again, trunk and back seat crowded with the work of my hands.

I stuck my head in the hardware store door. “You have a ladder?” I called to Harry.

“This is a hardware store, I better have a ladder. How long?”

“Long.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Climb the tree.”

I climbed the ladder and climbed the tree, twelve times altogether because I couldn’t carry much each time. Luckily I only needed to work in the lower branches; ten to twenty feet above the ground, I reasoned, was just about what this plan needed. When I was done, Harry and I stood back and admired my craftsmanship.

“This will work?” Harry asked.

“Harry,” I said, “this will work. Isaiah, 31:5.”

Harry gave me a sideways, appraising look. “I didn’t know this about you, that you know so well the Bible.”

“I looked it up.”

I had dinner with Harry and Pearl, warned them it might be a week before they saw any results from my installation, maybe longer before it had the desired effect on the Reverend Gull’s students. “It will take work,” I warned Harry.

“I am prepared,” he replied solemnly.

Two Sundays later I went back up to Hanover to see how things were going.

I left at midmorning, had a leisurely drive. The Hudson flowed high in its banks, and the yellow-green of the hills had deepened to a glowing emerald. The air smelled sweet, early flowers and damp earth. By the time I got into town, it was after twelve. I parked up from Hershkowitz’s, sauntered down the block, checked out the tree. Everything looked good to me.

“Hey, look who’s here!” Harry greeted me as I entered the store. “Mr. Smart Person! Why didn’t you tell us you were coming, Pearl would have made breakfast.”

“I’m still full from last time. How’s business?”

“Like the garbage man, my business is picking up. Which, by the way, is not so funny. This plan of yours makes a mess.”

“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

“Don’t talk about breaking eggs! I... oh oh, look at this,” he interrupted himself.

I turned around to face the window, saw what he was seeing: across the street, two shiny, late-model cars had pulled up. From them, dressed in their dapper Sunday best, emerged the Reverend Lester Gull and six other men.

“Harry,” I said, “I think I feel the need to hear the Word.”

“Me too,” said Harry.

We left the store, stood waiting as Gull and his entourage strode toward us. I lit a cigarette and smiled at Gull. He smiled back.

“Mr. Smith, isn’t it? What brings you back to Hanover? Good day, Mr. Hershkowitz.” He turned his smile to Harry.

“I’m like a homing pigeon, reverend,” I said. “You preaching today?”

“No, no. Mr. Vogel is going to share some thoughts with us this beautiful afternoon.” He turned to one of the men beside him, a short sour-faced man in a pale gray suit. “What’s your text today, Al?”

“The Book of Job,” the man replied, squaring his shoulders in a self-important way.

“Job,” I said. “I like that. Some of my favorite verses are from Job.”

“Oh? Which might those be?” Gull asked pleasantly.

“Twelve: seven,” I said. “And 20:5 and 7. Those, reverend, particularly make me think of you.”

Gull’s face clouded. He fixed me with angry eyes; then he nodded curtly and turned his back. With a smoothly reassuring smile he said to the little man, “Whenever you’re ready, Al. I know it’s your first time; don’t be nervous. Just preach as the spirit moves you.”

Gull and his friends, Harry and I, and a few stray shoppers stood in a semicircle around the tree as the little man started his sermon.

“Must be a beginner,” I whispered to Harry, watching Vogel shift uncomfortably, start in a voice too soft, lose his thread. He glanced at Gull, who smiled. That seemed to give him courage. He set his shoulders again and warmed to the full force of his argument, which was that although the purposes of the Almighty are not always apparent, nevertheless faith is required of the faithful — Harry lifted his eyebrows at that — and that support of a preacher like himself is a tangible sign of that faith.

As a pitch I’d heard better, but that wasn’t why I was here. I was waiting for my reward from Heaven, or at least from the sky.

And it came. A few minutes into his talk Vogel, without missing a beat, brushed something from his hair. A minute later, something else. Then he waved his arm to make a point, stopped horrified as a wet white lump landed on his sleeve. He twisted his head to look up into the tree just in time to catch a sunflower seed in the eye, but that was good because it made him jump back fast enough to avoid the next big white splotch headed his way.

Someone in the crowd stifled a laugh. Everyone looked up into the tree. And the tree was full of action.

All the feeders I’d built were full, overflowing with nuts, seeds, crumbled bread. Harry had been assiduous. I’d built the feeders flat, to make it easier for the birds to toss what they didn’t want over the side. They were busy tossing, eating, digesting. In the next higher set of limbs were living: wrens, robins, sparrows, crows, and finches flitted, hopped in and out of birdhouses, landed on nesting platforms. Five pigeons sat cooing on a branch.

“I didn’t know you had pigeons up here,” I said to Harry as Vogel, out of the line of fire, frantically scraped at his sleeve with a handkerchief.

“I got everything,” Harry said proudly. “But I’m telling you, cleaning up under that tree every day is a pain in the neck. Seeds and crumbs and what do you call that stuff, guano?”

“In the Bible,” I said, in a voice meant to carry to where Gull and the others huddled in hasty conference, “they call it dung.”

Gull spun and glared at me. “You did this!” he accused. “You did this to keep us from spreading the word of the Lord!”

“No,” I said, “I did it to keep my friend Harry from going out of business. You said this was the perfect spot. I disagree. I think this spot is for the birds.”

Gull paled with anger. He turned on his heel, stomped off to his car. His flock followed. They all slammed their doors as they screeched away.

“That man is not happy,” Harry said.

“No.”

“What if he comes back? In the middle of the night, and poisons all my birds?”

“Harry, as long as you keep those feeders full, you’ll have a waiting list. If Gull poisoned all these guys at midnight, you’d have new tenants by dawn. He knows that. He won’t be back.”

The crowd that had gathered was dispersing, smiling and glancing into the tree. One man asked Harry if he was open. “I just need some wing nuts,” he said with a grin. “It’s no big deal, but as long as I’m here.”

“I better go inside,” Harry said to me. “The customers might come back, now that there’s nobody yelling at them. But you better come for dinner, or I’m in big trouble with Pearl.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

“Wait,” Harry said. “Those verses from Job that you told him you like. What do they say?”

“One was for me. ‘But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the birds of the air, and they shall tell thee.’ ”

“How about the ones you said made you think of him?”

“ ‘The triumphing of the wicked is short,’ ” I quoted to Harry, “ ‘and the joy of the hypocrite but for the moment. He shall perish forever like his own dung; they which have seen him shall say, where is he?’ ”

Harry grinned, and I grinned. With a wave he turned back, disappeared into Hershkowitz’s.

I stuck my hands in my pockets, ambled down the block, enjoying the sun and the breeze and the songs of the birds in the smalltown morning.