“I like it. But can you get him?”
“Well …” She shrugged. “I can try.”
“He’ll probably want money. Worth five hundred, I guess, if he’s got anything to say. Okay. Try it. If it doesn’t work, all you lose is a little time.”
That night she met Jay at Trattoria da Alfredo, a small Italian restaurant, one of her favorite places in Greenwich Village. Alfredo did not have a liquor license, so Jay brought a grand cru Bordeaux, which did not go unnoticed by the other diners, who eyed them enviously over glasses of Chianti and other wines of more dubious descent. But the waiters were delighted, and so was Pam; again, she was impressed by his cool stylishness.
“Watched you again tonight,” he said. “You’re becoming a regular feature of my life.” There was something flattering about the way he said that, as if he meant not only to praise her broadcast but to compliment her personally as well.
“Well, what did you think?” she asked.
“I thought Carl was a little hard on falconry.”
“You could have been there, too, Jay. I offered you a chance to rebut.”
“I know,” he said. “But for now I think I’ll just stick to my role as your confidential source.”
They laughed. She felt relaxed. At his house she’d wanted to create a favorable impression, establish a friendship while still maintaining some reserve. But now she didn’t feel she had to be on guard. He was easy to talk to, and she admired the quality of his mind.
“Listen, about my call last night.” He nodded. “You said my question was a little strange.”
“I think I said it was peculiar.”
“Well, was it really, Jay? I mean, here we have this bird wearing jesses attacking attractive young women. One time—you called it ‘a freak event.’ But twice? Doesn’t that suggest a pattern?”
He studied her. “I think last night I also told you you were pretty smart.”
“Yes, you did. So is it a peculiar question? Or am I smart?”
“Both.” He smiled. Then he paused, looked directly into her eyes. “It’s a peculiar question because falconry doesn’t work that way. And you’re smart because there is a pattern. One attack is bizarre. Two suggest something else.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe this bird is like that rare lion you read about—the man-eater, the one that steals into camp and kills.”
“Are there birds like that?”
“A bird will defend its territory. There’ve been lots of attacks against people who’ve gotten too close to nests. But seeking out people and killing them—no, there’s no precedent for that.”
“Then is it possible?”
“It has to be. You saw it once yourself. What I can’t understand is why the bird would do it. There’s always a reason when a predator decides to kill.”
“Maybe she’s nuts.”
“Maybe. But predatory birds aren’t murderers, and they don’t kill for sport. A concept like insanity just doesn’t apply. To understand an animal, you have to get inside its mind. Something is impelling this peregrine, and I wish I knew what it was. I’d also love to know how she learned to kill this way, because the method is very strange.”
“You use the word ‘learned.’ Is that what happens? Does a falcon really learn?”
“Yes. And they’re extremely clever the way they watch their parents, imitate them, and then, when they leave the nest, continue to learn through trial and error. That’s why some birds are more successful than others—they learn better, have more talent. And their hunting strategies differ, too. Each falcon has its own. If these birds couldn’t learn from experience, falconry couldn’t exist.”
He was getting closer now to dealing with her question: Could the peregrine have been trained to hunt women, as was claimed in the notes she’d received? But still she felt he was evading it, skirting the issue deliberately, as if somehow it offended his sense of falconry as a pure and noble sport. She decided not to press him, let him circle it, as he seemed to want to do. He had invited her to this dinner so that they could talk it through.
She thought, Maybe he has to convince himself it’s possible, and that’s what he’s doing now.
“I don’t know, Jay—I mean are attacks against people really all that odd? You said birds do attack. The other night you mentioned that Dr. Wendel was once attacked by an owl.”
“That’s the rumor.”
“How did it happen?”
“I don’t know for sure. The way the story goes, he was collecting eggs, he surprised the owl, she felt cornered and lashed out at him in fear. Then there’re other versions. Carl doesn’t talk about it. But whatever happened, it changed him.” He paused. “It’s as if he saw something, maybe the real horror at the basis of predation, and after that he was never quite the same.”
“Well, anyway,” she said, shaking her head, “at least he wasn’t killed.”
“It would be very difficult for an owl to kill a man. You’re talking about an animal that weighs five or six pounds at most.”
“You told me that in Russia there’re tales of golden eagles killing wolves.”
“Yes. And tales in India of tiger-hunting eagles. But these are huge birds, twelve pounds some of them, and they make their weight work by falling from great heights at tremendous speeds. There’s a wonderful couplet by Tennyson about an eagle: ‘He watches from the mountain walls / And like a thunderbolt he falls.’ It’s like that—a tremendous crash. You’d think a bird would be crushed by the collision, but it isn’t; its legs are structured to absorb the shock.”
He was looking at her intently now, gazing into her eyes. As if he’s looking into my soul, she thought. For a moment she couldn’t focus. Then a question came to mind.
“How big is our peregrine?”
“Maybe six, six and a half pounds. And that’s only because she’s enormous; the heaviest peregrines rarely run more than four. But big as she is, she’s not in the same league with an eagle. On the other hand”—he paused—”both victims were small women. About your size.”
She nodded.
“Well, then, that makes it possible, you see, because even an ordinary peregrine could stun a full-sized man if she managed to hit him right. But it’s the killing that bothers me. I don’t see how she learned to do it—rake the throat that way. When peregrines attack other birds, they stun them, then snip their spinal cords with their beaks. But this is a very special technique of killing, and the women weren’t prey. They were killed like prey, but then the falcon left them, just abandoned their bodies and flew off.”
“Why is that so unusual?”
“It’s certainly not like the man-eating lion you read about. Those animals kill, then maul, maybe take a bite or two or have themselves a feast. But this is something else—a gratuitous kill.” He shook his head, looked perplexed. “I can’t figure it out.”
“All right, let’s go back to my ‘peculiar question.’ Could there be someone behind this, someone who trained this bird to kill?”
“That can’t be done.” He spoke swiftly, almost as if he were annoyed.
“Why not?” This time she was going to press him until she was satisfied.
“It just can’t, Pam. It can’t be done. I told you the other night—you can’t make a bird do something she wouldn’t normally do on her own. A falconer can expand her abilities, channel her instincts, teach her a certain amount of obedience, and, the most difficult thing, teach her to return. But he can’t make her want to kill huge dangerous creatures, people many times her size. Falconry is based on a bird’s learned pleasure in killing, a pleasure genetically engraved in order to ensure her survival in the wild. It involves the manipulation of her hunger and her instinct to chase and kill. Hunger brings out the hunting instincts. If the bird’s not hungry, she won’t even want to fly.”
“Okay, I understand. But let’s talk about it another way. You’re a falconry expert. If I come to you and ask, ‘How would you go about traini
ng a bird to attack and kill human beings?’ Now just think about that theoretically for a moment. How would you go about it? What exactly would you do?”
“That’s an interesting question.”
“Well—what would you say?”
“I can’t answer offhand. I have to think about it a while. But, yes, I can imagine possibilities. A certain sort of lure, for instance—we train our birds to strike at game by flying them at a lure. And a certain kind of obedience training based on a special system of rewards. Yes, there could be ways. But it would be very difficult. These birds aren’t like Dobermans or German shepherds. You can’t train them just to attack. They’re not social animals.
“They don’t relate to hierarchies. They don’t imprint on a man as a master they want to serve. They’re loners who live and hunt by themselves. They mate, of course, but they don’t flock together like ducks or geese. They’re opportunistic. The man has to be an adjunct to them—has to give them something they need. I just can’t imagine why a falcon would want to attack a woman when there’re all these delectable pigeons flying around New York.”
He paused. He seemed more comfortable with her question now that she’d posed it theoretically; as if, she thought, when she’d put it to him directly, he’d taken it as an attack against his sport.
“On the other hand,” he said, “if you blooded her a certain way—now this is getting very theoretical—but if you started her off on people, convinced her very early in her life that she could bring one down, could kill a person if she did it a certain way, then, I suppose, she’d lose her fear of a person’s size and the damage a person could do to her feathers and wings if the human prey evaded her first blow and fought back. Now if the falconer set up opportunities for her on the ground and those were the only kinds of opportunities she knew—then, well, maybe she could be persuaded to do something very strange like this, because if you start her training young enough, she doesn’t know what she’s not ‘supposed’ to do. I explained to you that falcons learn from experience.
“So I suppose if you could structure her experience in a certain way, you could obtain unusual results. But really, Pam, this is sheer speculation, because it’s never been done. It hasn’t even been written about. It might have been discussed—I can imagine some falconers sitting around some night with a bottle of whiskey discussing it and swapping ideas. But, believe me, in the entire literature of falconry there is nothing about such a form of training. It’s something that’s never even been conceived of, and that makes it inconceivable to me.”
To her it seemed quite conceivable.
The very fact that he could speculate, come up with notions about how a bird could be trained, blooded, and taught not to fear the size and strength of human beings—that he could do that, improvise on that, was enough to convince her it could be done. And that meant, she realized with a visceral excitement, that she’d found the story of her life.
She didn’t press him further; she’d found out what she’d needed to know.
Now she wanted to discover more about this man who was so immersed in falconry and so attentive to her. She dropped the peregrine and began to draw him out about himself.
His money, she learned, had been inherited. He’d been brought up in Cleveland, where his grandfather had owned a fleet of ships that transported iron ore between the mines in Minnesota and the steel-producing cities of the lower Great Lakes.
“That makes us both Midwesterners involved with steel,” she said. “I’m from Gary. My father still works at the mills.”
He shook his head. “I figured you for a New Englander.” He smiled. “Now everything is coming clear.”
“Really?”
“Sure. The way you broadcast, that belt-it-out style you have. I think it works because you don’t seem like the type. But now that I know your dad pours steel, I understand—that’s where you got your guts.”
She liked him for saying that; it was the opposite of Paul Barrett’s reaction the first time she’d revealed her background to him. “Ah,” Paul had said. “Now I understand: oilcloth on the dining table; J. C. Penney lounge chairs; tattoos on your father’s forearms—you’re Cinderella at the ball.” Then Paul had made her his “project,” determined to guide her and polish her and teach her style. And when he’d finally molded her the way he wanted—into an upper-class Jane Fonda type—he’d married her and begun the needling: “When I met you I thought you were a diamond in the rough, but now I wonder if you weren’t just a rhinestone,” he’d said one time.
She couldn’t imagine Jay being scornful like that, or bitter, or cruel. He was too decent, secure, and self-possessed. She listened carefully as he told her how he’d always been fascinated by birds of prey—eagles and owls and especially falcons and hawks.
“I loved to watch them. I don’t know why. They intrigued me. I can’t remember a time when they didn’t. And when I found out there was such a thing as falconry—I must have been ten or eleven—I could hardly believe it, that men had devised ways of flying these birds and hunting with them, and had done so as far back as ancient Egyptian times. Well, then I was hooked. There was no getting away from it. I had to learn to be a falconer. It became the most important thing in my life.”
There had been a man in Cleveland, an Austrian, a refugee from the Second World War, who ran a little art gallery in Shaker Heights. This man had been a falconer in Europe, had lived on an estate, had flown and trained birds since he was a child.
“I went to him, he believed in my interest, and he taught me everything he knew. My mother never understood— my father died when I was very young. No,” he laughed, “my mother just never understood. All the other kids were out taking tennis lessons, and there I was going out into the countryside with this old Austrian to watch him fly his birds. Maybe I was trying to escape—home, my mother, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I loved what I was learning, all the lore that poured out of that old man. He trapped me a kestrel and showed me how to train her. She didn’t turn out too well, flew away after a couple of weeks. But I learned from that. I went through a succession of birds. By the time I went east to prep school, and, believe me, I was glad to go away, I was a pretty fair falconer for a Midwestern American boy.”
Falconry was obscure in America then. The renaissance of the sport had yet to come. Jay had been one of the few members of the North American Falconer’s Association, and he’d traveled all over the country, to Montana and Colorado and the Dakotas, despite his mother’s objections, to attend the hawking meets.
“Then I began to see the dimensions of it. The Austrian was good, but I met men who were truly great. Europeans, most of them, educated men, zoologists and ornithologists, people who knew the literature and who could do amazing things with birds. I remember the first time I ever saw a peregrine falcon take a bird in flight. I was amazed. The beauty of it. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I thought it was,” he paused, “a work of art.”
When he went out to Colorado to go to college, he took up the sport in earnest. “I learned to fly a brace of birds, a pair, and I hunted from horseback with a dog, a complicated matter because you’re dealing with three animals at once. I spent a summer working on that, learning to do it right. I finally managed it through trial and error and by studying, reading the old masters’ books. I began to assemble my library then, and I’m still working on it now.”
“There’s no end to it, is there? It sounds so obsessive.”
“Oh, it is,” he agreed. “Falconry is totally obsessive. It takes hold of you, and if you’re ready you start and you begin to delve. You lose yourself. Nothing else matters. And if you’re an obsessive type like me, you find you’re hooked for life.”
Again, as on the first night they’d met, Pam found herself dazzled by his commitment. Here was a man who’d found something that he loved, and now he lived for it—it was the ruling passion of his life. And as always when she met someone like that, she found herself drawn in
.
Yes, she thought, as Jay walked her home, this was a most attractive man.
Cool, assured, but glowing with a fire inside, so superior to the cutthroat types she was used to dealing with: people trying desperately to get on TV, using the medium for self-promotion; ambitious, competitive colleagues out for stories; Herb Greene with his cynical outlook and his instinct for the sensational; the voraciousness of everyone, performers and viewers in the daily drama of the human race that was called, in her profession, by that all-encompassing euphemism—”The News.”
They paused outside the downstairs door to her house, and then she knew Jay was going to kiss her, could sense that he was and that she wanted him to, wanted to feel his lips press against her, feel his arms circle her body and his hands embrace her from the back.
Yes, she wanted that, felt a yielding within, as if some barrier inside had melted away. She poised herself and then she was surprised—his lips barely touched her forehead; there was a moment of gentle contact, he stood back from her, smiled, said good-night, then turned and walked up the street.
She spent a quiet weekend staying close to home. She avoided Joel, cleaned her apartment, read one novel and half of another. She wanted to come down from the high of the previous week, find her bearings, get some perspective on her work. She knew the peregrine story was big, but she didn’t want to think about it too much. She needed a respite from all the wild things that had happened. By Monday morning she was calm, ready to take it up again.
She recognized the hand-lettering at once. The letter leaped at her from the pile on her desk. She wondered if she should wait to open it—if there were fingerprints, she might smudge them away. But then she realized the envelope had been handled by the office mailboys and God knows how many other people around the station, and that, in any event, the person who was writing her wasn’t careless—he’d have wiped his letter clean.
DEAREST PAM:
HAD A NICE FEAST AFTER MY OUTING, A LOVELY FEAST, MY REWARD. BUT NOW I AM GETTING HUNGRY AGAIN. SOON I SHALL HAVE TO FLY OUT AND KILL. TOO BAD FOR ALL THE PRETTY YOUNG GIRLS WALKING AROUND NEW YORK, BUT IT IS IN MY NATURE TO HUNT THEM DOWN. THE FORCES THAT IMPEL ME ARE TOO STRONG TO RESIST.
Peregrine Page 8
