Peregrine

by William Bayer

  The girl handed him the photos, then pointed out the thongs on the bird. Her fingernails were painted a subtle flesh tone, not a bright primary color that a cop’s wife would likely use. She made a big thing about the postmarks, as if he couldn’t see them for himself. He didn’t mind; she was an “investigative reporter,” a phrase that always made him want to laugh.

  Janek handed the photos and letters to Marchetti, then settled back. He could see there could be something in this case, or just as easily, that it could turn out to be a dud. Better assume it’s big; that’s what Greene and the girl seemed to think. And if it was big, he wanted it, which meant asserting himself from the start.

  “I hope you’re not going on the air with this.”

  “You kidding? Of course we’re going on the air.”

  “Want to hear my reasons?”

  Greene smiled. “Sure. Tell us your reasons. But we’re using this stuff tonight.”

  Again Janek ignored him. Greene was used to having things his way. He turned to the girl. The letters had been written to her. Maybe he could play her off against her boss.

  “In the first place, whoever wrote this stuff sent it to attract attention. Broadcast it and you encourage him. That’s assuming these letters are real.”

  “Of course they’re real. The postmark—”

  “Anyone can make a postmark. All you need is a rubber stamp.”

  “So you think these letters are a fraud?”

  Janek shook his head. “I’m not saying that. But let’s examine them, let’s be sure. For your protection, too. I’d hate to see you broadcast this stuff and end up looking stupid because it was somebody’s idea of a joke. And then there’s the question of encouraging this creep—assuming, of course, he’s for real.”

  “Look, Lieutenant Janek …” Greene scowled. “We don’t think it’s a joke. The guy sent these letters to us. If we don’t use them, he’ll write to someone else, someone at another station who’ll go right on the air with them—who won’t be so nice like us and bother to call you in.”

  “Why do you think he’s writing to you, Miss Barrett?”

  The girl shook her head. “I don’t know. Because I’ve been covering the story, I guess.”

  “Covering it—hell! She’s been on top of it. She’s the hottest reporter in town this week.”

  “If you release this stuff you’re going to start a panic.”

  “We owe our audience. When something happens we put it on. Besides, there’s the First Amendment, and I feel very strongly about that. Maybe you should write us a letter.”

  Greene laughed. “Yeah—I’d like to see a letter asking us for restraint.”

  “I’m just asking you to cool it. Would it help if I said please?”

  “I think it would make a difference to me,” the girl said.

  “Wait a minute, Pam—”

  “Well, he’s got a point, Herb. What if they’re not real? Don’t you think we ought to let him check?”

  Now he had them where he wanted them, quarreling to his face.

  Greene sat back in his chair. “Well— maybe. How long would it take?”

  “Just a couple days. Look—I get your point about another station, but try to see mine, too. Give me a little time to run this down. I’ll find out if the letters are authentic and then see if I can trace them back.”

  Greene was going to give in; Janek could see that in his eyes. But he wasn’t going to do it because he gave a damn about a panic. He had enough of a story already with the Central Park attack.

  “Okay. We’ll hold off. But not too goddamn long. Pam’ll paraphrase, refer to unconfirmed sources. We have to tell the guy he’s getting through. Okay?” Greene looked at the girl, she nodded back, then he stood up and stretched. “That’s the best you’re going to get, Janek. But if someone else starts getting letters, we go for broke. Now, gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me, I got a news show going on at six.”

  Janek led Marchetti to a diner on West Street. They ordered coffee, then sat together in a booth. Marchetti said he thought the letters were a hoax. “It’s someone who works there. He wants to put the girl on. He hears about the attack, writes her a letter, seals it, gets the envelope marked in the mailroom, then leaves it on her desk.”

  “Works pretty fast, doesn’t he, Sal?”

  “You believe this crap about a killer bird?”

  “People train attack dogs. Could be the same idea. Get an animal to do your dirty work.”

  “So, what’s the problem, why all that postmark stuff?”

  “To get the drop on those people. They’re ahead of us. We need time to catch up.”

  Marchetti laughed. “All right,” he said. “So what are we going to do?”

  “Investigate.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m going to teach you, Sal. Stick close and learn.”

  Suddenly Marchetti was staring into his eyes. I was wrong, Janek thought. He’s going to ask.

  “Is it true what they say about you, Frank—that you had a partner once and you gunned him down?”

  Janek nodded. “Yeah. It’s true.”

  “Must have been pretty rough.”

  “It was rough. Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime. After we’ve worked together awhile. Okay?”

  Marchetti nodded. “Whenever you feel like it, Frank. And if you don’t feel like it, that’ll be okay, too.”

  He was decent. It wasn’t easy, Janek knew, to be paired with a man like him. But now Sal had said he could deal with it, that he would trust him on faith. That was more than he expected, a lot more than he usually got. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to six. “Let’s go back to the precinct,” he said, “and watch Pamela Barrett report the news.”

  They watched her on the set in the squad room. Other detectives clustered around, made sexual comments about her as she spoke. Janek just studied her, tried to figure her out. She was impressive, he had to admit—she came off like a star, breathy and sensual. Her eyes seemed larger on TV, and she talked in a steamy, high-strung way.

  When she was angry, she was really angry; when she was heartbroken, Janek felt it and believed. Watching her, he was seized with a feeling that startled him because it was so odd. He wanted to protect her, because he felt she wasn’t what she seemed. There was something terribly vulnerable about her, as if she could fall from the emotional high wire she was on, slip and fall and be hurt.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jay Hollander sat in silence after Pamela Barrett’s broadcast, just a few feet away from his hooded bird. He was watching the sun set over the Hudson, waiting for darkness to chase the last shimmers off the river and then fill the aerie slowly with the thick black smoke of night. When he could no longer see the water, when the skyline was transformed from monoliths of granite to glowing spires of twinkling lights, he left the aerie, took the elevator to the street, and began at once to walk.

  Hollander liked to stride the night labyrinth of the city, peering into alleyways, darkened porticos, the faces of passersby. He scanned their features, searched out their anxieties, looked closely for signs of fear. And tonight he was especially alert, looking for tautness around mouths, tension along jaws, grimaces disguised as smiles and fearful eyes.

  He was not disappointed. He passed newsstands, saw the panic headlines on the tabloids. He observed the greed of the news dealers and the shuddering people who grasped the papers up. An actress, a dancer perhaps, rushed toward a backstage door. An older woman burdened with shopping bags descended quickly into the subway, glancing fearfully behind. Everyone seemed frenzied, dashing toward protective space. He felt exhilarated.

  Out of the air, he had created this; out of the blue, out of the sun. His falcon had struck like a bolt of lightning tearing the protective fabric of the sky.

  Around Times Square he slowed his pace to observe the early-evening parade. Prostitutes were coming out of coffee shops. Male hustlers were taking up positions within doorways.<
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  The three-card-monte dealers were out, black men barking the ecstasies of fate and chance. Dope purveyors stalked their customers. A gang of Hispanics roamed Forty-Second Street.

  Soon they would descend into the subways to prey upon the weak.

  The whole city was like this, Hollander thought—a paradigm of hunters and prey. Chicken hawks, middle-aged men who fancied the bodies of teenage boys; gamblers and prostitutes and the plainclothesmen who hounded them; pickpockets and thieves; winos begging for quarters; journalists on the track of stories; actresses pursuing careers. It was a city of attackers and evaders, those who gave chase and those who hid. It was all a hunting ground, and he was the supreme hunter. New York was his game preserve, and his weapon was Peregrine.

  He stood at the base of the Allied Chemical Tower, facing the point where Broadway and Seventh Avenue traffic met. Standing there with all the cars speeding toward him, he felt himself in confrontation, alone against the mob. There had been others, he knew, who had taken on this great metropolis: child molesters, mad bombers, political terrorists. Great manhunts had been played out on these streets by networks of police organized to track and hunt. But the hunt he had in mind, the great hunt he would create, would be bigger and grander than anything that had come before. For while the city hunted him, he would hunt the city. While they tried to chase him down, he would attack them individually from the sky.

  It was a powerful vision, and it filled him as he left Times Square and the crowds. He strode past excavations gushing steam and looked up at great buildings crisscrossed by beams of light. He found the one that housed his aerie and thought of Peregrine up there on her perch. She sat in hooded darkness, well fed now, filled, content.

  But in a few days she would become hungry again, and then she would join him on another hunt.

  As Hollander walked uptown toward his house, his thoughts turned from the bird to Pam. It was so strange that he had met her after sparing her that brilliant noon beside the rink. And now he was glad he had not killed her, for she was carrying his message while falling under his control. In her broadcast she had made oblique reference to his letters, signaled that she knew he was watching and that his letters had made her afraid. Yes, he liked her, enjoyed watching her, enjoyed seeing her aroused, enflamed.

  She was wild, but he could make her obedient. There was great emotion in her, which could be lovingly channeled, which could be made beautiful if she were tamed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  At dinner that night after the broadcast, Pam apologized to Joel for having spoken harshly to him in the van. He smiled, said it hadn’t bothered him. He said she’d just been hysterical, wrought up over the girl in the park and her problems at the scrimmage drill.

  They left the restaurant, took a walk.

  It was the theater rush hour. The streets were clogged with taxis and limousines. Crowds milled under the marquees. He took her arm as they passed a newsstand. A headline caught her eye: KILLER BIRD STRIKES AGAIN. She wondered: Was she really dealing with a disciplined bird?

  Hollander had said you couldn’t train a falcon to kill a cat, so how could someone train a falcon to attack a woman skater or a girl jogging through the park?

  There was something else that bothered her. She mentioned it to Joel as they taxied downtown. “Both the victims girls. Young and pretty. Is that a coincidence or something more?”

  “Well, I don’t think it made much difference to the falcon. I don’t see him as a sex maniac, do you?”

  “The falcon’s a she.”

  “Oh, a lesbian!” Joel laughed. “He. She. It. Who cares? Whatever the sex, it’s just a bird.”

  She turned to him. He wasn’t interested, and now, suddenly, he struck her as second-rate. He was grinning. He had things planned. They would go to his loft and screw. But she didn’t feel like that, going through a charade then facing his hurt feelings when she left. She wanted to go home.

  She feigned a yawn. “I’m tired, Joel. What a day! You’d better drop me off.”

  He nodded sympathetically, gave the cabbie her address. “We’re so great together,” he said as they approached her street. “We’re really a terrific team. Like this morning, the way we worked together in the park. And I know your sports-violence piece can be terrific, too. Just let me coach you. Don’t fight me all the time.” He kissed her good-night. She got out of the cab, stood on the sidewalk, and watched it speed away.

  Was she being too hard on him? she wondered. He wasn’t like her, wasn’t obsessed with being first and best, or capable of understanding the kind of transcendence she felt now when she was on the air. He was a good TV news cameraman, and she was an ambitious reporter riding a fabulous story. They didn’t belong together anymore.

  She didn’t have the heart to tell him; better, she thought, to let their relationship fizzle out. They were colleagues; they could still go out on coverages. But this affair they’d fallen into because they worked together and the work took up a lot of time and there wasn’t time to meet other people— that, she knew, would have to end.

  Later that evening she telephoned Jay Hollander, asked him if he’d watched her report at six.

  “Of course,” he said. And then with a certain awe, “You know, you really belt it out.”

  She couldn’t tell him about the letters. She and Herb had promised Janek they wouldn’t spread that around. But she wanted to find out if a bird could be trained to attack a person. There was no way to be subtle about it. She just had to come out and ask.

  “Listen, Jay, we know the peregrine’s wearing jesses. And we’ve been assuming she belonged to someone and got away. But is it possible she could have been trained to do all this? You know—that someone’s still hunting with her now?”

  There was a pause. “Well, that’s a pretty peculiar question.”

  “It occurred to me tonight. Look— here’s this big falcon flying around New York. You said she’d probably be a hundred miles away from here by now. But she strikes again today, the same way, the same method of killing, the same attack out of the sun. That’s a pattern, even if she did do it just twice. So is it possible? Could someone still be in control?”

  “You’re a very smart reporter,” he said. “I think we’d better talk.”

  “Am I on to something?”

  “We’ll talk about it. Let me take you to dinner tomorrow night.”

  They made a date, but afterward she wondered why he hadn’t suggested lunch. Dinner implied more than business, something personal, a relationship. But then she thought, Maybe that’s what he wants, maybe he finds me attractive. She was pleased, because she was interested in him beyond his role as her expert on falconry.

  In the morning, she decided to start in on the bird black market—she needed material in case the story cooled down.

  The point was not to let it die, to keep warming it every day. She called the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, made an appointment with the deputy chief of the investigative branch. The offices were in a glass brick building in Queens near Kennedy Airport. They were typical federal offices: steel-gray desks with in-boxes and out-boxes, pictures of the beaming president, and an American flag inside the door.

  Bruce Harmon, the deputy, reminded her of sincere naval personnel, the sort with flattop haircuts assigned to show reporters around a ship. He was happy to brief her about bird black marketeers. There was a craze on for parrots, he said. “Exotics, psittacines, songbirds—that sort of stuff. There’re organized rings that smuggle them in from South America. Collectors, too, of course. People bring them in in their pockets. We found one at customs the other day stuffed in with a baby in a crib.”

  The market for raptors was small, he said, but the amounts of money involved were large. “There’re a few owl dealers and a couple of guys who deal in falcons and hawks. The big buyers are in the Middle East. Here we’re just a transit point. The birds come in from Canada or Alaska, Iceland and Greenland—goshawks, gyrfalcons, tundra peregrines. The Arabs�
�ll pay anything for what they want. Sometimes they send someone over here just to see what’s available and if there is something, the guy’s flush with cash and ready to deal.”

  “Ever hear of Hawk-Eye?” she asked. She kept her voice level, wanted Harmon to think she knew more than she did.

  He laughed. “Heard of him? I got a file on him about as thick as the telephone book.”

  “Who is he, anyway?”

  “Just wish we knew. We got a description, but we’ve never actually seen the guy. We’ve tried to set him up. God knows we’ve tried. We even had a scam going for a while. Had an agent posing as a buyer for some Saudis, putting out word he wanted to meet. The idea was to string Hawk-Eye along until he took money and produced a bird. Then—bang! Nab him! An airtight case. Not a bad idea, and our man actually talked to him on the phone. We had a motel room all wired up, one-way glass over the dressers, everything. But came time for the meeting, Hawk-Eye didn’t show. He called, told our guy he knew he was a phony, and then he just hung up. Must have smelled a trap or something. Maybe he was tipped. Anyway, we’ve never gotten that close to him again.”

  Harmon’s description of the scam gave her an idea. “How did you reach him?” she asked.

  “Oh, put out word, you know. With everyone. The legitimate dealers. The semi legal ones. The whole falconry crowd. Sooner or later it got back to Hawk-Eye. He just didn’t fall for it. I don’t know what went wrong.”

  When she got back to the station, she took her idea to Herb. “Why not set up our own deal,” she said. “Put out word we want to meet with Hawk-Eye, not to buy but just to talk. There’s nothing illegal about that. We just want an interview. He wouldn’t be scared off—we’re not law enforcement; we’re not the feds.”

  “Yeah.” Herb savored the notion. “The old silhouette and voice-filter show.”

  “Right. Back of his head to the camera. Strong hard lights on me. We’d disguise his voice so it couldn’t be printed or taped. Maybe show some of his profile so people can see his nose is like a hawk’s.”