TITLE: Coffee and the Rain
AUTHOR: Tory Anderson
E-MAIL: tory_anderson@yahoo.com
DISTRIBUTION: ...anywhere with these headers attached
RATING: G
CATEGORIES: V
KEYWORDS: none
SPOILERS: A reference to Home, I suppose, but you wouldn't even catch
it if you hadn't seen it.
SUMMARY: Mulder receives a winged gift from a stranger.
NOTES: Short on plot, long on description. I guess it would take
place during the cancer arc.
***
Coffee and the Rain
by Tory Anderson
tory_anderson@yahoo.com
www.geocities.com/tory_anderson
written in March, 2008
The Seattle streets were slick with rain, reflecting the headlights,
the streetlights, the lamplight peering out from the doors and
windows. It was not quite three in the afternoon but the dark clouds
cast a gloom like evening over the city. There was a misty chill in
the air.
Mulder had grown up in New England, in the northeast. He could handle
the snow; the snow was nothing. When the temperature dipped below
zero, he could layer on an extra sweater and a thick scarf under a
downy ski jacket. The damp on the west coast was something else. The
mercury may only rarely venture below thirty degrees Fahrenheit out
here, but Mulder felt the dampness in his bones no matter how much
insulation he was wrapped in.
The heat in the car was on maximum and his partner cuddled her venti
soy chai latte from the city's most famous export in her pale hands.
She bent her neck and pressed her cheek to the warm cardboard.
He glanced over at her. Her face seemed whiter than usual, like the
fog had stolen the brightness in her cheeks to warm itself. This
kind of weather gave him the creeps sometimes. He drove faster, a
man with a plan. Get to the lab, do their regular song and dance,
get back to the hotel. Make sure his partner drank a big mug of
cocoa and sat in a piping hot bath till her cheeks glowed with
colour again. He didn't like seeing her looking so pallid and
pinched.
The red brick building loomed out of the murky sky in front of them.
Mulder swung the car into an empty spot near the front doors and
took a swig of his still-hot coffee – house blend, no fancy bar
drinks for him, thank you – before pulling the keys out of the
ignition. Scully took a long sip of her drink then regretfully
placed it in the cupholder for later. Hopefully it would still bear
a trace of warmth by the time they were done.
The building was low in comparison to modern skyscrapers, being
perhaps only seven or eight storeys in height, and held a small
number of professional offices. The front face was succumbing to an
invasion of ivy.
Scully shivered and wrapped her coat a little more tightly around
herself as they made their way to the entrance. Mulder pulled open
the heavy front door, elaborately carved, and ushered her in. A
directory inside the foyer listed a selection of doctors,
chiropractors, notary publics, lawyers and psychiatrists. Mulder was
unsurprised. The building seemed tastefully appointed and was
located in a premium neighbourhood. Not everyone could afford to pay
this ostentatious lease. He scanned the list until the found the
panel he was looking for. It stated simply, Biezanko & Duponchel. No
qualifications, no degrees, no explanation. Just two names and the
floor.
Scully had passed through the foyer and was waiting. Behind a large
door with a small diamond-shaped window, the doors to the elevator
retracted. Quirking an eyebrow at him, his partner swung open the
outside door and entered the elevator.
"It's old school, Scully," he murmured, following her in and pressing
the button for the fifth floor. She smiled, but remained silent.
Probably thinking about her coffee.
They had to push through another door with another diamond-shaped
window on the fifth floor. The lighting in the hall was dim, throwing
shadows on the worn emerald carpet and the panelled walls. The
building had an air of sophistication that had passed its prime, like
a dim memory of gentlemen smoking cigars in a faded photograph.
A murmur of voices from down the hallway caused their heads to turn.
A door at the end of the hallway was ajar. It was an old-fashioned
door, with a large pane of textured glass taking up the top half of
the door, like a private investigator's office in a black and white
movie. Scully pushed the door open and the handful of police officers
and federal agents standing inside turned to look at the two
easterners in unison.
One man detached himself from the group and walked over to the entry.
"You must be agents Scully and Mulder," he said in a friendly tone.
"I'm Lionel Bierne, from the Seattle field office. I trust you had a
good flight."
"Yes," Scully said, "thank you, Agent Bierne. Would you mind if I
had a look at the body?"
"Of course not," said the tall agent, picking up on her tone. "Please
follow me. And watch your step, there’s some glass and debris on the
ground."
Mulder watched her follow the other man to the far side of the room
and through a door. He felt the eyes of the remaining men on him, but
shrugged it off and began looking around.
The first thing he noticed was the lack of overhead lighting. A fan
hung still from the ceiling, but there were no fluorescent tubes or
incandescent fixtures jutting out from the plaster. Instead, the
room was bathed in yellow light from a variety of desk lamps
scattered around the room, mostly green glass banker’s lamps and a
few milk glass hurricane lamps. A tall, heavy-looking brass floor
lamp stood in a corner next to a potted palm. All the lights were on,
but the room remained dim and shadowy. Mulder wondered how the
occupants were able to see enough to work.
The room was about twenty feet long and quite narrow. At the end
where he stood, two desks sat in each corner so each occupant would
face the rest of the room and each other. The surfaces looked worn.
One desk was covered in papers – journals, sketches, printed articles
and handwritten notes. The other desk was neat as a pin, not a
paperclip out of place. Mulder wondered which desk belonged to whom.
He walked over to the messy desk and pulled out a sketch at random.
Cryptic illustrations of what looked like spirals, tubes, and circles
were labelled with even stranger words like bursa copulatrix and
medial galea. The agent frowned and rifled through the remaining
stack of papers for anything personal that would tell him more about
the owner of the desk. There was nothing. No photographs, no
receipts, nothing like what they usually found in someone’s desk.
With a bit of frustration, Mulder strode away from the desks down to
the other part of the room. What looked like a heavy oak table sat
in the middle of the area surrounded by six chairs. A fairly large
Tiffany lamp stood in the middle of the table, probably used either
for dinner, or more likely small conferences. But on the walls around
the table were what really made this office different from the others
in the building.
Hundreds of frames, each containing half a dozen winged insects held
to the white cardboard backing with sharp and cold steel pins.
Insects that spanned the colours of the rainbow – glossy red lily
beetles, cases full of beautiful orange and black butterflies,
enormous yellow striped Asian giant hornets, iridescent green scarabs
and blue morphos and surreal purple grasshoppers. Each were neatly
labelled in calligraphic ink, the more recent ones bearing
typewritten labels in a plain and narrow font. Liloceris lilii,
Danaus plexippus, Vespa mandarinia, Scarabeus zambesianus, Morpho
peleides, Chorthippus parallelus. The names were as exotic as their
bearers, rolling off his tongue in strange syllables as he mouthed
the words to himself.
At the end of the narrow room was another door, half-glassed like
the first, through which Scully and Bierne had passed. He could see
the bright, cold glow of fluorescent lighting through the frosted
glass, so unlike the warm incandescent glow given off by the bulbs
in this room.
He took a quick glance around, intending to join his partner and the
other agent in the laboratory portion of the office. The last third
of the little collection was dedicated entirely to the genus Danaus,
as evidenced by their little cards. Butterflies in every conceivable
shade of orange, from yellowy golden orange to rust red and the
brightest, purest shades in between. Danaus plexippus, Danaus
genutia, Danaus petilia, Danaus chrysippus, Danaus eresimus, Danaus
gilippus. Some of them bore extra names underneath their Latin ones,
names like Common Tiger and Lesser Wanderer and Soldier Queen. The
contradictions amused him.
He moved away toward the back of the room when a particular specimen
caught his eye. It was labeled Danaus plexippus like many others
were, but it seemed out of place to him. It was smaller than the
others, more delicate and fragile, as if the slightest puff of air
would cause it to disappear in a cloud of butterfly dust. Yet its
colours were brighter, more vivid against the sterile white
background than those of the other butterflies. And its wings were
the exact same colour as Scully's hair. His mind recalled the
iridescent glimmer of her hair in the sunlight when he'd teased her
about procreation and touched the warm fabric stretching across her
back.
Mulder could be a morose bastard at times, but he wasn't usually one
to wax poetical. He liked sports, he liked joking around with his
partner and eating cheeseburgers. He didn't generally stare at dead
pinned butterflies and see her embodied in them. But butterflies
didn't usually have her name, or the orange-yellow-red flame tones
of her hair in their powdery wings.
"That one's my favourite," came a gravelly voice from behind him. "I
collected it in Madeira. A beautiful specimen, isn't she?"
The man who spoke was old, maybe seventy years or more, and if
possible had a nose larger than Mulder's own. He resembled Albert
Einstein, but with less hair.
"I'm Marius Biezanko," the man said, proffering his hand to Mulder,
who shook it.
"It's good to meet you, Dr. Biezanko," Mulder said. "Though the
circumstances leave much to be desired."
Marius nodded. "I've told the police a dozen times, but I have no
idea why anyone would want to kill Joseph. He was an old man, like
me, who loved butterflies. We are dinosaurs, Mr. Mulder, we aren't
even active in the lepidopteran circles any more. We are a threat to
no one..." his voice faltered. Mulder wished that his partner were
here. It was a little ironic, since he was the psychologist and she
dealt with mostly dead bodies, but she had a way with people,
especially the elderly, where she could calm them with a single
touch. He patted Biezanko's shoulder awkwardly.
"Well, it's possible that it was a random target," he said. "You
have some expensive equipment here, I’m sure..."
Biezanko was already shaking his head. "Just some microscopes, and
none of them are missing." He paused for a moment, then asked rather
abruptly, "Do you want to look at her?"
"Her...?" Mulder asked. He had already turned his gaze back to the
butterfly in the frame.
"Dana," Biezanko said simply. Mulder jerked his head around to look
at the man and his mouth opened to question him sharply, but the man
was already reaching up over the agent's dark head, unhooking the
case from the wall and unlatching its glass face. He was talking
about the goddamn butterfly.
"Mr. Biezanko, I really don't think..."
But the old man had already gently lifted the delicate insect from
the case and placed it in Mulder's cupped palms. "You seemed quite
taken with her," he observed.
Mulder looked at the dried-out, paper-like insect in his hands. He
turned it this way and that, admiring the glimmer of light off its
scales and the fine sharp lines of its antennae that were echoed in
the branching black pathways running across its wings.
"Yes," Mulder admitted reluctantly. "It - she reminds me of someone."
"They travel over three thousand miles, you know. Such a long
distance for such thin little wings."
Mulder tilted the butterfly in his hands. Indeed, the width of the
wing had to be less than a millimeter.
"Three thousand miles..." the entomologist continued, "and they never
return home. Most don't even live long enough make it to their
destination. But their children carry on, and their grandchildren,
until the last generation has made it safely south for the winter."
"They start on a journey that they know they will never finish,"
Mulder mused. "Why?"
The old man reached out with trembling hands and placed them over
Mulder's own, trapping the butterfly between them. "Hope for the
future, Mr. Mulder," he answered.
A sound of footsteps came up behind Mulder and he smelled the clean
and airy scent of his partner as she spoke, "Mulder, what have you
got there?" There was amusement in her voice.
"Um," he said, "it's nothing." He hastily gave the butterfly back to
Biezanko, who pinned it back into its box. "Scully, this is Dr.
Marius Biezanko."
"Dana Scully," she said, shaking his hand. "It's nice to meet you.
I’m so sorry about Dr. Duponchel."
The old man held onto her hand for a moment. "Dana Scully, did you
say?"
She looked up at her partner, quirking her lips, then back at Marius.
"That's right."
"Oh," he said softly. He stepped backward and picked up the case of
butterflies, pressing them to his chest. "Oh yes, I see." He turned
to Mulder and offered him the case, "Perhaps you'd want to keep
these then, Agent Mulder?"
Mulder looked from Scully's curious face, haloed by her bright hair,
to the six pinned butterflies that glowed in the dreary light from
the window. "Thank you, Mr. Biezanko," he found himself saying, as
he reached out and took the frame.
"Agent Bierne has given me your phone number at home," Scully said
to the old man, watching their exchange. "We will be in contact with
you shortly... we'll have some questions for you about Dr.
Duponchel."
"Of course," Biezanko nodded sadly. His gaze left them and followed
the stretcher and sheet-covered body as it was carried past him and
out the door. "I'll be talking to you later, then." He turned his
back to them, under the pretense of rearranging the remaining frames
to cover the empty space.
"Mulder," he heard the woman – Dana – say as they walked away, "look
at what I found on Duponchel's body..."
Biezanko turned away from the wall to watch them leave. She was
holding a plastic tube, inside of which rested a fat, fuzzy bee. He
recognized the specimen, of course, as being one of the new hybrid
species that his long-time partner and friend had reluctantly been
recruited to work on. Duponchel had had his misgivings from the
beginning, but his daughter’s business had fallen on hard times and
the doting father had felt compelled to take the extra income to
help her. There was no doubt in Biezanko's mind that his friend's
death was intricately involved with the smooth-talking, malodorous
man who brought him samples to work on, but Biezanko was smarter
than his friend. He'd grown up in a country where to know too much
was to know your own death, and he did not intend to reveal any
knowledge of his friend's business dealings, lest they share the same
fate.
Biezanko watched as the tall agent escorted his smaller partner out
the door, joking now about coffee and the rain, and the lepidopterist
saw that as Mulder's hand fell away from her lower back, he left
behind a golden orange handprint of butterfly dust.
***
end.
tory_anderson@yahoo.com
www.geocities.com/tory_anderson
(
geocities.com/vienna/stage) (
geocities.com/vienna)