The Feather Thief Read online

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  Copyright © 2018 by MJ + KJ, Inc.

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  Illustration Credits

  Here: From Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences by James Marchant (1916); here: Courtesy of the Linnean Society of London; here: Courtesy of the Field Museum of Natural History Bird Collection. Here: Flickr/Francesco Veronesi; here: Flickr/Matthias Appel. Here: iStock/Uwe-Bergwitz; here: © Tim Laman, used with permission. Here: Harper’s Bazaar; here: From Our Vanishing Wild Life by William T. Hornaday (1913). Here: From Our Vanishing Wild Life by William T. Hornaday (1913); here: Photograph by H.B. Thrasher, Courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Museum/Archives at National Conservation Training Center. Here and here: From The Salmon Fly: How to Dress it and How to Use it by George M. Kelson (1895). Here: From The Salmon Fly: How to Dress it and How to Use it by George M. Kelson (1895); here: Courtesy of Spencer Seim. Here, here, and here: Courtesy of Edward Muzeroll. (Here: Photo © Gerald Massey, licensed for reuse under Creative Commons License; here: Courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London. Here: Courtesy of Dr. John R. Hutchinson; here: Courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London. Here: Courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London; here: Courtesy of Anonymous. Here and here: Courtesy of the Hertfordshire Constabulary. Here: Courtesy of the Hertfordshire Constabulary; here: Courtesy of Press Association Images. here and here: Courtesy of Robert Delisle. Here: From The Rod and the Line by Hewitt Wheatley (1849); here: Courtesy of Anonymous; here: Courtesy of David Stenström.

  ISBN: 9781101981610 (hardcover)

  9781101981627 (e-book)

  9780525559092 (EXP)

  Version_1

  For Marie-Josée:

  C’était tout noir et blanc

  avant que tu aies volé et atterri

  dans mon arbre

  Man is seldom content to witness beauty.

  He must possess it.

  Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare,

  Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea

  1979

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  I. DEAD BIRDS AND RICH MEN

  1. The Trials of Alfred Russel Wallace

  2. Lord Rothschild’s Museum

  3. The Feather Fever

  4. Birth of a Movement

  5. The Victorian Brotherhood of Fly-tiers

  6. The Future of Fly-tying

  II. THE TRING HEIST

  7. Featherless in London

  8. Plan for Museum Invasion.Doc

  9. The Case of the Broken Window

  10. “A Very Unusual Crime”

  11. Hot Birds on a Cold Trail

  12. Fluteplayer 1988

  13. Behind Bars

  14. Rot in Hell

  15. The Diagnosis

  16. The Asperger’s Defense

  17. The Missing Skins

  III. TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES

  18. The 21st International Fly Tying Symposium

  19. The Lost Memory of the Ocean

  20. Chasing Leads in a Time Machine

  21. Dr. Prum’s Thumb Drive

  22. “I’m Not a Thief”

  23. Three Days in Norway

  24. Michelangelo Vanishes

  25. Feathers in the Bloodstream

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  A Note on Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  By the time Edwin Rist stepped off the train onto the platform at Tring, forty miles north of London, it was already quite late. The residents of the sleepy town had finished their suppers; the little ones were in bed. As he began the long walk into town, the Midland line glided off into darkness.

  A few hours earlier Edwin had performed in the Royal Academy of Music’s “London Soundscapes,” a celebration of Haydn, Handel, and Mendelssohn. Before the concert, he’d packed a pair of latex gloves, a miniature LED flashlight, a wire cutter, and a diamond-blade glass cutter in a large rolling suitcase, and stowed it in his concert hall locker. He bore a passing resemblance to a lanky Pete Townshend: intense eyes, prominent nose, and a mop of hair, although instead of shredding a Fender, Edwin played the flute.

  There was a new moon that evening, making the already-gloomy stretch of road even darker. For nearly an hour, he dragged his suitcase through the mud and gravel skirting the road, under gnarly old trees strangled with ivy. Turlhanger’s Wood slept to the north, Chestnut Wood to the south, fallow fields and the occasional copse in between.

  A car blasted by, its headlights blinding. Adrenaline coursing, he knew he was getting close.

  The entrance to the market town of Tring is guarded by a sixteenth-century pub called the Robin Hood. A few roads beyond, nestled between the old Tring Brewery and an HSBC branch, lies the entrance to Public Footpath 37. Known to locals as Bank Alley, the footpath isn’t more than eight feet wide and is framed by seven-foot-high brick walls.

  Edwin slipped into the alley, into total darkness. He groped his way along until he was standing directly behind the building he’d spent months casing.

  All that separated him from it was the wall. Capped with three rusted strands of barbed wire, it might have thwarted his plans were it not for the wire cutter. After clearing an opening, he lifted the suitcase to the ledge, hoisted himself up, and glanced anxiously about. No sign of the guard. There was a space of several feet between his perch on the wall and the building’s nearest window, forming a small ravine. If he fell, he could injure himself—or worse, make a clamor that would summon security. But he’d known this part wouldn’t be easy.

  Crouched on top of the wall, he reached toward the window with the glass cutter and began to grind it along the pane. Cutting glass was harder than he had anticipated, though, and as he struggled to carve an opening, the glass cutter slipped from his hand and fell into the ravine. His mind raced. Was this a sign? He was thinking about bailing on the whole crazy scheme when that voice, the one that had urged him onward these past months, shouted Wait a minute! You can’t give up now. You’ve come all this way!

  He crawled back down and picked up a rock. Steadying himself atop the wall, he peered around in search of guards before bashing the window out, wedging his suitcase through the shard-strewn opening, and climbing into the British Natural History Museum.

  Unaware that he had just tripped an alarm in the security guard’s office, Edwin pulled out the LED light, which cast a faint glow in front of him as he made his way down the hallways toward the vault, just as he’d rehearsed in his mind.

  He wheeled his suitcase quietly through corridor after corridor, drawing ever closer to the most beautiful things he had ever seen. If he pulled this off, they would bring him fame, wealth, and prestige. They would solve his problems. He deserved them.

  He entered the vault, its hundreds of large white steel cabinets standing in rows l
ike sentries, and got to work. He pulled out the first drawer, catching a waft of mothballs. Quivering beneath his fingertips were a dozen Red-ruffed Fruitcrows, gathered by naturalists and biologists over hundreds of years from the forests and jungles of South America and fastidiously preserved by generations of curators for the benefit of future research. Their coppery-orange feathers glimmered despite the faint light. Each bird, maybe a foot and a half from beak to tail, lay on its back in funerary repose, eye sockets filled with cotton, feet folded close against the body. Tied around their legs were biodata labels: faded, handwritten records of the date, altitude, latitude, and longitude of their capture, along with other vital details.

  He unzipped the suitcase and began filling it with the birds, emptying one drawer after another. The occidentalis subspecies that he snatched by the handful had been gathered a century earlier from the Quindío Andes region of western Colombia. He didn’t know exactly how many he’d be able to fit into his suitcase, but he managed forty-seven of the museum’s forty-eight male specimens before wheeling his bag on to the next cabinet.

  Down in the security office, the guard was fixated on a small television screen. Engrossed in a soccer match, he hadn’t yet noticed the alarm indicator blinking on a nearby panel.

  Edwin opened the next cabinet to reveal dozens of Resplendent Quetzal skins gathered in the 1880s from the Chiriquí cloud forests of western Panama, a species now threatened by widespread deforestation and protected by international treaties. At nearly four feet in length, the birds were particularly difficult to stuff into his suitcase, but he maneuvered thirty-nine of them inside by gently curling their sweeping tails into tight coils.

  Moving down the corridor, he swung open the doors of another cabinet, this one housing species of the Cotinga birds of South and Central America. He swiped fourteen one-hundred-year-old skins of the Lovely Cotinga, a small turquoise bird with a reddish-purple breast endemic to Central America, before relieving the museum of thirty-seven specimens of the Purple-breasted Cotinga, twenty-one skins of the Spangled Cotinga, and another ten skins of the endangered Banded Cotinga, of which as few as 250 mature individuals are estimated to be alive today.

  The Galápagos island finches and mockingbirds gathered by Charles Darwin in 1835 during the voyage of the HMS Beagle—which had been instrumental in developing his theory of evolution through natural selection—were resting in nearby drawers. Among the museum’s most valuable holdings were skeletons and skins of extinct birds, including the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon, along with an elephant-folio edition of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America. Overall, the museum houses one of the world’s largest collection of ornithological specimens: 750,000 bird skins, 15,000 skeletons, 17,000 birds preserved in spirit, 4,000 nests, and 400,000 sets of eggs, gathered over the centuries from the world’s most remote forests, mountainsides, jungles, and swamps.

  But Edwin hadn’t broken into the museum for a drab-colored finch. He had lost track of how long he’d been in the vault when he finally wheeled his suitcase to a stop before a large cabinet. A small plaque indicated its contents: PARADISAEIDAE. Thirty-seven King Birds of Paradise, swiped in seconds. Twenty-four Magnificent Riflebirds. Twelve Superb Birds of Paradise. Four Blue Birds of Paradise. Seventeen Flame Bowerbirds. These flawless specimens, gathered against almost impossible odds from virgin forests of New Guinea and the Malay Archipelago 150 years earlier, went into Edwin’s bag, their tags bearing the name of a self-taught naturalist whose breakthrough had given Darwin the scare of his life: A. R. WALLACE.

  * * *

  –

  The guard glanced at the CCTV feed, an array of shots of the parking lot and the museum campus. He began his round, pacing the hallways, checking the doors, scanning for anything awry.

  Edwin had long since lost count of the number of birds that passed through his hands. He had originally planned to choose only the best of each species, but in the excitement of the plunder, he grabbed and stuffed until his suitcase could hold no more.

  The guard stepped outside to begin a perimeter check, glancing up at the windows and beaming his flashlight on the section abutting the brick wall of Bank Alley.

  Edwin stood before the broken window, now framed with shards of glass. So far everything had gone according to plan, with the exception of the missing glass cutter. All that remained was to climb back out of the window without slicing himself open, and melt into the anonymity of the street.

  * * *

  • • •

  I was waist-high in the Red River, which slices through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains just north of Taos, New Mexico, when I first heard the name Edwin Rist. My fly-line was midcast, hovering energetically over the current behind me, ready to shoot forward in pursuit of the golden-bellied trout that Spencer Seim, my fly-fishing guide, had assured me was hiding behind a car-size boulder in the middle of the stream. Spencer could sense fish behind logs, through the white froth of fast currents, in the blackness of deep pools, and in the chaos of swirling eddies. He was certain that a fourteen-incher was fanning a foot below the surface, waiting for the perfect fly if I could cast it right.

  “He broke into a museum to steal what?”

  Distracted by what I’d just heard, I blew the cast, slapping the line against the water and sending any trout below darting off. “Dead birds?” Until that moment, we’d spoken only in hushed tones so as not to scare off the fish, approaching each hole as deftly as possible, mindful of the sun and where it might throw our shadows, but I couldn’t contain my disbelief. I’d just heard one of the strangest stories of my life, and Spencer was only at the beginning of it.

  Normally, nothing could break my concentration on the river. When I wasn’t fishing, I’d count the weeks and the days until I could pull on a pair of waders and slosh into the water. I’d leave my cell phone in the trunk of the car to buzz until its battery died, keep a fistful of almonds in my pocket to ward off hunger, and drink from the stream when thirsty. On good days, I’d spend eight straight hours working my way up a river without seeing another human being. It was the only thing that brought calm amid the storm of stress that had become my life.

  Seven years earlier, while on vacation from my job coordinating the reconstruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah for USAID, I sleepwalked out of a window in a PTSD-triggered fugue state and nearly died. I was left with broken wrists, a shattered jaw, broken nose, and a cracked skull, with scores of stitches across my face, to say nothing of a newfound fear of sleep and the tricks my brain might play on me during the night.

  During my recovery, I realized that many of my Iraqi colleagues—translators, civil engineers, teachers, and doctors—were being hunted and killed by their own countrymen because they had “collaborated” with the United States. I spoke out on their behalf in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, naïvely thinking that someone in power would swiftly fix things by granting them visas. I hadn’t anticipated the thousands of e-mails that would soon flood in from Iraqis imploring me for help. I was unemployed, sleeping on a futon in my aunt’s basement. I didn’t know the first thing about helping refugees, but I started a list to track the names of everyone who wrote to me.

  Within months, I launched a nonprofit organization, the List Project. Over the coming several years, I wrestled with the White House, cajoled senators, rallied volunteers, and begged for donations to keep my staff paid. Though we managed to bring thousands of refugees to safety in the United States over the years, it was clear that we would never be able to help everyone. For every victory, there were fifty cases stalled in a federal bureaucracy that treated these interpreters, the moment they fled Iraq, as potential terrorists. By the fall of 2011, as the official end to the war was drawing near, I felt trapped in a cage of my own creation. There were still tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans running for their lives. It could take a decade, maybe even several, to get them out, but I never managed to raise enou
gh funds for more than a year down the road. Once the war was “over” in the minds of the American public, it would only be harder.

  Whenever I felt like giving up, I’d get another desperate appeal from a former Iraqi colleague and grow ashamed of my weakness. But the truth was, I was exhausted. Ever since the accident, I couldn’t fall asleep without distracting myself, so I queued up an endless sequence of the most boring shows I could find on Netflix. Every morning I woke to a new tide of refugee petitions.

  Unexpectedly, fly-fishing became a kind of release. Out on the river, there were no journalists to call or donors to beseech, just currents and insects to study and rising trout to tempt. Time took on an unusual quality: five hours would pass in what felt like thirty minutes. After a day in my waders, I would close my eyes and see faint outlines of fish fanning dreamily upstream as I drifted into a deep sleep.

  It was such an act of escapism that had deposited me on that mountain stream in northern New Mexico. I’d hopped into my beat-up Sebring convertible and driven from Boston to Taos to work on a book about my experiences in Iraq at a small artists’ colony in town. Writer’s block rolled in on the first day. I didn’t have a book deal; I had never written a book before; and my narcoleptic literary agent was ignoring my increasingly anxious requests for guidance. Meanwhile the list of refugees kept growing. I had just turned thirty-one and didn’t know why the hell I was in Taos, much less what I was supposed to do next. When my stress peaked, I searched for someone to show me around the local rivers.

  I met Spencer at dawn at a gas station just off State Highway 522. He was leaning against his tan 4Runner, its BIG LEBOWSKI bumper sticker faintly visible beneath the mud: “Not on the rug, man.”

  In his late thirties, Spencer kept his sideburns long and his hair short. He had an infectious laugh and, like the best guides, an easy way of conversing. We hit it off immediately. As we worked the river, he refined my cast and went on at length about the life cycle of the various insects in the area. There wasn’t a scrub or mineral or bird or bug the former Eagle Scout couldn’t identify, and he seemed to know every trout on a personal basis. Caught that bastard last month on the same rig, can’t believe he fell for it again!