Peregrine

by William Bayer

  “… quite a story, Pam.” The anchorman was beaming with compliments. “Good reporting, too.”

  “I was really frightened, Hal.”

  “Terrific work, Pam. Excellent job ….”

  The falconer flicked off the set. He stepped over to the perch. The room was dim now; the sun had set. He loosened the traces on the hood, lifted it off the falcon’s head.

  “Excellent job,” he whispered.

  The falcon’s eyes, placid and mysterious, met his own straight-on.

  CHAPTER THREE

  She knew she was good even when she was on the air. Her timing, her gaze, the way she punched in the important words—her performance was faultless, she could feel it, the way athletes said they felt on days when their bodies were in perfect tune, when every movement, every gesture was right and they knew there wasn’t anything they couldn’t do. She had the lead story; Hal Hopkins complimented her spontaneously. She spoke to the audience, not just to the lens but beyond. It was the best broadcast she’d ever made, the first time she’d really let go. She’d dropped her mask and played herself. She felt radiant as she finished up her piece.

  Yes, she’d been good, and the others knew it, too—she could tell before she left the set. Smiles from the studio cameramen. Thumbs-up from the TelePrompter guys. Peter Stone, the Channel 8 weatherman, bussed her and whispered, “Terrific stuff.” Her ear felt a little moist after the encounter, as if Peter had rimmed it with his tongue, which was the sort of thing he did even when he wasn’t drunk. And he was always drunk by the time the news began, waiting to deliver his meteorological report.

  Joel Morris was waiting for her outside the stage. “Wow,” he said.

  “You were cooking in there.” He took her in his arms. “When the show’s over we’re going to Gallagher’s. I’m buying you a steak.”

  She laid her head against him. “I was just standing there, Joel. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to scream. It was the worst thing I ever saw.”

  “You’re strong. You got nerve.”

  She shook her head. “No. I was terrified. And then I told myself: Okay, you’re a reporter. So cover it. Deal with it. And that’s what I did.”

  Penny Abrams, Herb Greene’s secretary, tapped her on the back.

  “Herb wants to see you right after the show. He said be sure and stick around.” Penny grinned. “The phones are lighting up. I think you did it, Pam—changed his mind.” Penny dodged back into the control room. Pam turned back to Joel.

  “This morning he was going to fire me.”

  “After what you just did, he’d be insane.”

  “Can you get me a tape?”

  “I’ll talk to the guys.” Joel stood back. “You’re not thinking of quitting now.”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “That depends on Herb. But if I do leave, I want that tape to show around.”

  She went into the newsroom, crammed with metal desks and TV monitors, sat down, and watched the rest of the show. Some of the writers were watching; others were typing away. Parts of the second half of Channel 8 News were still being written. Downstairs in the editing rooms the back-feature stories were being trimmed.

  To have performed so well was exhilarating, but now she wanted to relax. She made an effort to calm herself, concentrate on the show. Hal Hopkins was blabbing away, his rough face creased with strain. He was a “tough-guy” anchorman, not a pretty boy with air-blown hair.

  She’d known that morning that Herb was right, that her sports work wasn’t good. But now, maybe, she’d proven herself. Penny said she thought Herb had changed his mind. If that was true, then it was some kind of miracle.

  She’d wandered to the skating rink by chance. And then the bird had struck.

  An ugly scene. A girl had been killed.

  Catastrophe journalism—she didn’t like it: a victory for her, a tragedy for someone else.

  The show was winding down now.

  Peter Stone was doing his weather thing, his red mustache bouncing as he spoke. She couldn’t make sense out of all his fronts and pressure zones. There was talk around the station that he made them up.

  Hal Hopkins reported the Dow Jones and the closing price of gold. Pam knew they’d repeat her attack piece at eleven, probably keep it as the lead.

  “Okay. I was wrong. I take everything back.” Herb looked at her, repentant, from the other side of his desk. They were in his glass-walled office off the newsroom. Pam nodded, forgiveness in her eyes. But was Herb really repentant? She doubted it. He was a gunslinger. He got people to do what he wanted by talking at them tough and fast. He wore shiny suits, had a commanding face, bushy eyebrows, and a great white mane of hair.

  “Leonine” was the word people used when they weren’t calling him a son-of-a-bitch behind his back.

  “‘Course I always knew you had it, Pam. That’s why I took you on. Tonight you came off like a star. Keep that up and you’re going to the top.” He shoved over a copy of the Post.

  “Photo of a stretcher—big deal! With that Japanese material, we got the whole attack. I’ve already had calls from other stations. They ‘wonder’ if we’d like to pool.” He laughed. “Screw them! We’re not pooling this. Film’s exclusive and we’re keeping it that way. Running it down was terrific work.”

  She was proud about the way she’d spotted those Japanese, chased after them and then talked them into giving her the cassette. She’d rushed to a phone booth, commandeered a film crew, then had gone back to the rink and worked up her piece. By the time the crew had arrived, she’d memorized her lines. One take and it was done.

  “So you’re not going to fire me. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Okay, rub it in. This morning I was trying to light a fire.” He smiled at her. “Looks like I did, too. You must be feeling pretty good.”

  She nodded. “I’ve been thinking about this morning, Herb. Some of your advice. Like that business about how maybe I should finger the mike a little bit. Jerk it off—isn’t that what you meant?”

  “Yeah. Something like that.” He grinned.

  “Well?”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Pam. I get carried away sometimes.”

  She stared into his eyes. “I don’t have to do that, do I, Herb?”

  He stared back. “No, Pam—not unless it turns you on.”

  They laughed. Newsroom banter. She wanted to show him she could play tough, too. She wasn’t tough, but at least she could pretend to be. She doubted Herb was taken in.

  She still felt good at Gallagher’s.

  Joel toasted her with his beer. They talked about success and luck, how the one was so dependent on the other and how success was what New York was all about. You worked hard, struggled, and then it happened, or else it didn’t and the city broke you; you went back to your hometown and a mediocre life.

  She remembered the phrase that had come to her in front of CBS: “O city of broken dreams.” She told Joel how it had gone through her head, how desperate she’d felt, how she’d run out of the station to hide in the crowds on the streets.

  “Well, just goes to show you should never give up,” he said. “No matter how low you feel, don’t write yourself off.”

  She looked at him as he ordered their steaks and a second round of beers. He was a sweet guy, and she liked his looks: his unruly tight black curls, his graying well-trimmed beard. He tried to help her, patiently coached her on delivery when they were assigned to coverages together. He was a news cameraman, but he wanted to direct documentaries. She wondered if he’d be good at it—she wasn’t sure.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What’s the big deal, anyway? All this business about being first. Get the story. Get the scoop. I just happened to be there, that’s all. I covered it because there wasn’t anything else I could do. I could just as easily have hollered and screamed like everybody else.”

  “Being first—that’s the news business.”

  “Yeah. According to Herb.”

  “Herb’s a
great newsman.”

  “He’s a bastard.”

  “The two usually go together.” Joel looked at her. “But you’re not like that,” he said.

  She wondered. Maybe she was like that. At the rink she’d certainly felt impelled. She cut into her steak, ate greedily. She was hungrier than she thought. She’d tasted something, a little piece of success, and that had filled her with a hunger that now she needed to assuage.

  After dinner she went with Joel to SoHo. They kissed the moment he closed the door to his loft. Then he came to her a little more slowly than she would have liked, made love with her a little too gently, lay too comfortably beside her afterward. She didn’t mind feeling comfortable, being with someone who knew her body and her needs and whose needs she knew as well. But sometimes she wanted more, particularly this evening. She wanted a lover keyed to her own pitch, a passion equal to her own.

  She rested a while, then got up and started gathering her clothes. He looked surprised.

  “I was hoping you’d stay.”

  “Not tonight, Joel. I want to go home.”

  He was disappointed. “It’s so great when you stay over. It’s really fun to wake you up.”

  She smiled. “Thanks. But I’m too keyed up. If I stay I’ll never get to sleep.”

  He nodded. He always accepted her decisions. In the months they’d gone together, they’d never quarreled.

  Sometimes she wondered about that, why he was so passive. She liked him very much, but there was something lacking—a lack of flare and style. She missed a level of excitement, and that made her sad. She knew that because of it their relationship wouldn’t last.

  Out on Spring Street she looked up at the sky. The air was clear. She could see thousands of stars. She walked several blocks, then started looking for a cab. It was nearly eleven. If she hurried she could watch herself on the late news, study her performance, see if she’d really been that good.

  She lived on the top floor of a town house on West Eleventh Street in a single-space floor-through that had been an artist’s studio when the Village had been cheap. There was a skylight; she’d positioned her bed directly beneath it. That way, sometimes, she could see the moon and wake up early with the dawn.

  Her phone was ringing—she heard it as she climbed the stairs. She rushed up the final flight, unlocked her door, and picked it up.

  “Finally.”

  It was Paul Barrett, her ex-husband. “I’ve been trying you for hours.” She detected petulance. She caught her breath and sat down on her bed.

  “If I’d known you were planning to call, Paul, I’d have spent my evening in.”

  “Very funny. You don’t owe me anything. We’re all grown up.”

  At last, she thought.

  “Saw you tonight. You were on fire, Pam. Fantastic. Congratulations. That’s why I called.”

  “Well—thanks.” He could be so damn nice when he wanted to be. If only he’d been like that all the time.

  “I was wondering,” he said. He started to stutter. “I was going to suggest we get together soon for lunch, or …”

  “Well, I usually grab a sandwich. They work us awfully hard.”

  “I know.”

  “Working press.”

  “I work occasionally myself.”

  “You’re a critic, Paul. That’s different. You make your own hours. ‘Criticism’s an art,’ you used to say.”

  “Did I really say that? How pretentious. How unbearably pretentious I must have been.”

  She decided to change the subject.

  Ironic self-mockery was his game. He could go on with it for hours.

  Sometimes it was fun to fence with him, but usually it wasn’t.

  “So—you liked the story?”

  “It was you I liked. The old Pammer, electronic version, steaming away there in my idiot box.”

  “They were excited down at the station. Herb was nice for a change.”

  “Yeah. Good old Herb. I’m sure he was. Anything for ratings. Anything to titillate.” Now he was showing his bitter side, which reminded her of what had gone wrong in their marriage: professional jealousy and his oft-repeated theory that her ambition would turn her corrupt.

  “Look, Paul, it’s getting late.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t plan on boring you.” He paused. “Still seeing that cameraman, what’s-his-face?”

  “Really ….”

  “None of my business. Sorry again. Well, think about lunch. Give me a call. Or dinner, if that’s easier. I promise I’ll be good.”

  She put down the phone. He could be so exasperating. She liked him when he was straight with her but loathed him when he was defensive. He was a good photography critic, one of the best—his writing was clean and direct.

  But when he spoke with her there were too many levels. He exhausted her.

  Now she’d missed the lead of the eleven o’clock. She undressed quickly and slipped into bed.

  Lying there, waiting for sleep, she thought back on the events of the day.

  That tough morning meeting with Herb and then the attack at the skating rink.

  The bird’s eyes—so fierce, so piercing, brown discs in yellow lids.

  That screeching war cry, that “aik, aik, aik,” like a mad Indian with a tomahawk. And then the blood soaking into the ice, darkening it. And the girl sprawled out dead.

  Her mind fixed on the girl. That girl had been herself. She’d been thinking about that just before the attack. She’d forgotten, but now she remembered— how she’d worried about that girl, had sensed her weakness, was afraid she’d fall, had whispered to her to straighten up. Should she have shouted? Might that have saved her? Pam shivered guiltily at the thought that she’d forgotten the girl as she’d run after the Japanese. She felt ashamed of her pride in the way she’d stood up to her own terror, ashamed of the way she’d concentrated on making the story instead of allowing herself to grieve.

  We’re all so fragile, she thought. Life is so fragile. It could have been me. That bird could have plunged down on me.

  When she came into the newsroom the following morning, she expected to be assigned another sports piece. She wasn’t the station’s sports announcer— her coverages supplemented his. She concentrated on interviews: What did the players feel? What were their gripes? What were they really like?

  But when she reported to the sports editor, he told her Herb wanted her for something else. She was to see Penny Abrams right away.

  “Herb wants you to do follow-ups on the bird story,” Penny said. She was a buxom young woman with a moon face and curly hair. She was always trying a different diet, but nothing worked—she was addicted to milkshakes and nibbled French fries as the pressure built daily toward six o’clock. “This morning you interview the dead girl’s family. This afternoon you tape with a bird expert from the American Museum of Natural History. Herb wants a sob piece on the girl and he wants you to be very tough about the bird. What kind of bird is it? Is it coming back? Why did it attack? That sort of stuff.”

  “Sounds like he doesn’t want to let this go.”

  “Absolutely not. It’s been a long time since we got so many calls. People want to see the attack again.”

  “So that’s it. He wants an excuse to rerun the attack.”

  Penny nodded. “You may be doing the lead again tonight.”

  She knew what that meant: If no hot news story broke that day, she’d be on again first at six. And even if she didn’t lead off, she’d have a major hunk of the broadcast—a good five minutes, maybe more. Now she had a chance to show that her eyewitness report wasn’t a fluke, that she could follow up on a story, string it out and make it bleed.

  The girl who’d been killed had been a secretary. Her name was Lenore Poletti. She’d lived with her mother in an Italian section of Brooklyn near the Verrazano Bridge. The apartment was filled with relatives and a priest.

  Though the station was making a contribution toward the funeral, Pam felt like an intruder. She wanted
to make the interview brief. But then she noticed that the crew’s presence didn’t bother the family. They even seemed pleased by the intrusion, as if, somehow, it certified their grief.

  Mrs. Poletti wore black and dabbed occasionally at her eyes. She became visibly more emotional as soon as a microphone was clipped to her dress.

  When Pam told her the substance of her questions, the woman paused as if preparing lines. Then, when they were ready to shoot, Mrs. Poletti began to weep. When Pam saw what an actress she was, all her qualms gave way. If Herb wanted a sob story, she’d give him a sob story. She asked a few questions about Lenore, learned she’d always loved to skate, that she’d been waiting anxiously since Labor Day for the rink to open so she could practice during her lunch hours as she had the year before. As for the bird, Mrs. Poletti was full of indignation.

  “They shouldn’t have let it happen,” she said. “They shouldn’t let big birds fly around loose like that. Someone ought to do something. The police. The mayor. But what do they care? That’s the trouble these days. No one cares. The city’s full of all these rapes and murders and now they got killer birds downtown ….”

  After the interview, Pam asked to see Lenore’s room. An uncle escorted her.

  Lenore’s graduation picture was on the bedside table and her framed diploma from a secretarial school was on the wall. There were other memorabilia and a plastic owl on the dresser. An Ice Capades poster was Scotch-taped to the back of the door. The cameraman panned the room. On the way back downstairs he whispered to Pam that he’d ended his shot on the owl. That way, he explained, the film editors could cut away from Mrs. Poletti, keeping her voice over the shot of Lenore’s room; when Mrs. Poletti said “killer bird” the camera would rest upon the little owl.

  A pretty shallow irony, Pam thought, but she didn’t say anything; the whole coverage made her feel sad.

  Back at Channel 8, Pam checked her desk. There were lots of phone messages from fans. She’d been getting hostile mail from sports freaks who didn’t like her interviews, but today there were a couple of sweetheart notes about her coverage of the bird attack and a curious letter, handwritten in capital letters, which didn’t make much sense: