"Was this because of the arrest?"
"Not as far as I know."
She looked across at him like a sympathetic pixie. "I'm sorry."
"Well," he said. "Right now I don't have a job, I don't have a love life, and - thanks mostly to your efforts - the neighbors are now all convinced I'm a yardie hit man. Some of them have started crossing the road to avoid me. On the other hand, my newsagent wants me to make sure the bloke who knocked up his daughter is taught a lesson."
"What did you tell him?"
"The truth. I don't think he believed me though. He gave me a free bag of cheese-and-onion crisps and a pack of Polo mints, and told me there would be more where that came from once I'd done the job."
"It'll blow over."
Fat Charlie sighed. "It's mortifying."
"Still," she said. "It's not as if it's the end of the world."
They split the bill, and the waiter gave them two fortune cookies with their change.
"What does yours say?" asked Fat Charlie.
"Persistence will pay off," she read. "What about yours?"
"It's the same as yours," he said. "Good old persistence." He crumpled up the fortune into a pea-sized ball and dropped it into his pocket. He walked her down to Leicester Square tube station.
"Looks like it's your lucky day," said Daisy.
"How do you mean?"
"No birds around," she said.
As she said it, Fat Charlie realized it was true. There were no pigeons, no starlings. Not even any sparrows.
"But there are always birds in Leicester Square."
"Not today," she said. "Maybe they're busy."
They stopped at the tube, and for one foolish moment Fat Charlie thought that she was going to kiss him good-bye. She didn't. She just smiled and said "bless," and he half-waved at her, an uncertain hand movement that might have been a wave and could as easily have been an involuntary gesture, and then she was down the stairs and out of sight.
Fat Charlie walked back across Leicester Square, heading for Piccadilly Circus.
He pulled out the fortune cookie slip from his pocket and un-crumpled it. "Meet you by Eros," it said, and next to that was a hasty little drawing of something that looked like large asterisk, and might, conceivably, have been a spider.
He scanned the skies and the buildings as he walked, but there were no birds, and that was strange because there were always birds in London. There were always birds everywhere.
Spider was sitting beneath the statue, reading the News of the World. He looked up as Fat Charlie approached.
"It's not actually Eros, you know," said Fat Charlie. "It's the statue of Christian Charity."
"So why is it na**d and holding a bow and arrow? That doesn't seem a particularly charitable or Christian thing to do."
"I'm just telling you what I read," said Fat Charlie. "Where have you been? I was worried about you."
"I'm all right. I've just been avoiding birds, trying to get my head around all this."
"You've noticed there aren't any birds around today?" said Fat Charlie.
"I've noticed. I don't really know what to make of it. But I've been thinking. And you know," said Spider, "there's something wrong with this whole thing."
"Everything, for a start," said Fat Charlie.
"No. I mean there's something wrong with the Bird Woman trying to hurt us."
"Yup. It's wrong. It's a very, very bad thing to do. Do you want to tell her, or shall I?"
"Not wrong like that. Wrong like - well, think about it. I mean, despite the Hitchcock film, birds aren't the best thing to hurt someone with. They may be death-on-wings for insects but they really aren't very good at attacking people. Millions of years of learning that, on the whole, people will probably eat you first. Their first instinct is to leave us alone."
"Not all of them," said Fat Charlie. "Not vultures. Or ravens. But they only turn up on the battlefield, when the fighting's done. Waiting for you to die."
"What?"
"I said, except for vultures and ravens. I didn't mean anything-"
"No." Spider concentrated. "No, it's gone. You made me think of something, and I almost had it. Look, have you got hold of Mrs. Dunwiddy yet?"
"I phoned Mrs. Higgler, but there isn't any answer."
"Well go and talk to them."
"It's all very well for you to say that, but I'm skint. Broke. Cleaned out. I can't keep flying back and forwards across the Atlantic. I don't even have a job any longer. I'm -"
Spider reached into his black-and-scarlet jacket and pulled out a wallet. He took out a sheaf of notes in an assortment of currencies, pushed them into Fat Charlie's hand. "Here. This should be enough to get you there and back. Just get the feather."
Fat Charlie said, "Listen. Has it occurred to you that maybe Dad isn't dead after all?"
"What?"
"Well, I was thinking. Maybe all this was one of his jokes. It feels like the kind of thing he'd do, doesn't it?"
Spider said, "I don't know. Could be."
Fat Charlie said, "I'm sure it is. That's the first thing I'm going to do. I'm going to head down to his grave and -"
But he said nothing else, because that was when the birds came. They were city birds; sparrows and starlings, pigeons and crows, thousands upon thousands of them, and they wove and wound as they flew like a tapestry, forming a wall of birds coming toward Fat Charlie and Spider down Regent Street. A feathered phalanx huge as the side of a skyscraper, perfectly flat, perfectly impossible, all of it in motion, weaving and fluttering and swooping; Fat Charlie saw it, but it would not fit inside his mind, slipping and twisting and thinning the whole time inside his head. He looked up at it and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
Spider jerked at Fat Charlie's elbow. He shouted "Run!"
Fat Charlie turned to run. Spider was methodically folding his newspaper, putting it down on the bin.
"You run too!"
"It doesn't want you. Not yet," said Spider, and he grinned. It was a grin that had, in its time, persuaded more people than you can imagine to do things they did not want to do; and Fat Charlie really wanted to run. "Get the feather. Get Dad, too, if you think he's still around. Just go."
Fat Charlie went.
The wall of birds swirled and transformed, became a whirlwind of birds heading for the statue of Eros and the man beneath it. Fat Charlie ran into a doorway and watched as the base of the dark tornado slammed into Spider. Fat Charlie imagined he could hear his brother screaming over the deafening whirr of wings. Maybe he could.