“What did Cagney say?” Margaret replied. “‘They pay me for the waiting, I throw the acting in for free.’”

From somewhere down the hall came a horrifying high-pitched shriek.

“Sweet Jesus, what in the hell?” Charlie asked as Margaret rushed toward the scream. Before she could make it far, however, a wheeled Madagascar cage was pushed around the corner. Inside perched a plump white bird with a long fleshy wattle.

The bird regarded Margaret with cold black eyes, then opened its beak to form a giant black diamond and let out another piercing scream, the loudest that Margaret, in all her years in zoology, had ever heard. It sounded almost like an air-raid siren, a warning for the town populace to run and hide.

Cast and crew on the set behind her filled the air with curses and complaints, but Margaret relished the moment.

The slender woman pushing the cage smiled mischievously. Her dark brown hair was in a tight bun, and she wore large-framed glasses, but underneath the professional exterior she exuded charisma. “It’s a special delivery for Mr. Frankenheimer,” she said.

“Margaret, this is Symone LeGrue,” Frankenheimer said. “My bird girl.”

“Bird handler,” LeGrue corrected him.

Though her zoological expertise was restricted to animals with four legs, Margaret had become a gifted amateur ornithologist over the years. “Wait,” she said. “I know this breed of bird. It’s from somewhere in the Caribbean, right?”

“Yes!” said LeGrue excitedly.

“A white, a white—” It was right on the tip of Margaret’s tongue. “Darn it.”

“A white bellbird,” LeGrue said.

“Right!” said Margaret. “From the Guianas! I just read about them in Birds of the Caribbean!”

“Robert Porter Allen, my hero!” said LeGrue.

“Sainted savior of the spoonbill,” said Margaret.

Charlie joined the group and listened intently, impressed, although he had zero idea what the two were talking about.

“Symone brought me all the sparrows and canaries for Birdman of Alcatraz,” Frankenheimer said. “Comes out this summer.”

“Right, looking forward,” said Charlie. “Love Lancaster.”

“But there are no birds in Manchurian Candidate,” Margaret noted. “Not in the screenplay we got.”

Frankenheimer shrugged. “The garden-club scene, I told Symone we were playing around with different ways to make it extra-weird. She said she had a spectacularly strange bird to show me, one that American audiences had never seen before.”

“You look familiar,” LeGrue said to Margaret. “Are you in animal training?”

“I wouldn’t call the canaries and sparrows you brought us particularly trained, Symone,” Frankenheimer joked. “I gotta finish up here. You can bring that to my dressing room, Evans will show you the way.” He pointed to a young woman with a broad smile.

“I’m a zoologist,” Margaret told Symone. “Margaret Marder. I do some teaching at Barnard. You’re a bird trainer?”

“My team does all animals, but I’m mainly birds,” LeGrue said. “Right now we’re doing the new Hitchcock up in San Francisco. It’s nuts.”