He sat down next to Rosenthal.
Aaron was on a call. Janek listened.
“Yeah, we know,” Aaron said. “We know the bird’s out of control.” Pause. “Oh, you think she’s acting on her own. Then who feeds her? Who sends her out?” Pause. “A monster—yeah. Uh huh—’she should be trapped and then destroyed.’” Rosenthal grinned. “Thanks very much. We’ll get back to you. Yeah.”
He put down the phone. “Jesus, Frank, they’re fruits—all of them. You could put them all on the goddamn list. They think the killing method’s ‘amazing.’ ‘Now how’d she learn that?’ they ask. Like they’d like to know the technique so they can teach it to their own little birds. There’s this one guy out in California, thinks he’s some kind of medieval knight. Talks like Shakespeare. Very hard to understand. Wants me to come out and join him on a ‘merry hunt.’”
Janek laughed. Aaron handed him a list. It was short. Janek studied it. The names blurred. “Who’re these people who rate a star?”
“Family up near Albany. Old man and two sons. They all fly the things. Unlicensed, according to the feds. Couple of people said we ought to look at them. Very obnoxious on the phone. ‘We’re calling our lawyer’— that sort of shit. I think they’re just independent. You know the type. Right-wing nuts. Think the government’s into everything.”
“So you’re not getting anywhere.”
Rosenthal shrugged. “Sometimes I think I hear something, but then you got to realize most of these people are crackers anyway. And the ones who aren’t are very uptight.” He paused. “You know, we’re getting stymied, Frank. Maybe it’s all over. Maybe the guy’s just packed it in. I mean it’s funny—no new letters or anything. Some cases just end like that. They fizzle out and there’s nothing you can do.”
Janek nodded. He had felt the squad’s morale begin to sink. He’d heard his people muttering, “Now we need a break.” That old cliché—he hated hearing it; it told him they were running out of steam.
That night he was back on the streets, driving aimlessly through the theater district and up and down the avenues where there were clusters of bars.
There was a spirit of revelry in the mobs, too much laughter, too much back-slapping, something boisterous that didn’t suit the time of year. He knew it had to do with Peregrine but wasn’t sure exactly why. The bird had killed three times, but there were five or six homicides on a normal day. So it wasn’t just the killing, it was more than that—terror, to which a macabre defiance now showed itself in the gallows humor on the streets.
Terror: Maybe that was what the falconer was after. Maybe the girls were mere targets of opportunity in what was really a campaign of collective terror. If that was it, then it made sense now for the falconer to wait, let it all sink in, even subside, then hit hard, maybe two or three times on successive days, and that way turn the city upside down. Or was he wrong: Was it random, not part of any campaign, just something the falconer did when he felt like it, when he happened to get the urge?
That was the trouble—he didn’t know. He hadn’t figured his opponent out. He knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere until he began to think like the falconer, and if the falconer was out of control, then, Janek thought, perhaps the only way he was going to be able to get inside his brain was to go out of control himself.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Pam spent the Saturday after the duel cleaning her apartment. For two weeks she’d let things go; now she vacuumed her rugs, changed her sheets, washed her bathroom tiles. All her exhilaration had been undercut by Nakamura’s suicide. She felt exhausted and emotionally wrung out.
On Sunday she made a pile of clothes to take to the dry cleaners, then watched the first game of the World Series, which took her mind off Peregrine. But as the afternoon wore on, she began to feel restless. At six o’clock, feeling an almost desperate need for company, she phoned Paul and asked if he were free. When he replied that he had no particular plans other than to contemplate the antics of his former wife, she suggested he come over; he agreed, and even offered to bring a pizza if she’d supply the wine.
He strode in like he owned the place, threw his denim jacket at her couch, pulled her best bottle out of her wine rack, scrounged through her kitchen drawers until he found her corkscrew, cut the pizza into slices, prepared a tray, then brought everything out into the living room, from which she’d been watching, wondering how the evening was going to go.
“Big surprise,” he said, “getting invited here.”
“You’re always saying we should stay in touch.”
He filled their glasses. “What happened to camera-face?”
“Joel and I stopped seeing each other for a while.”
“Congratulations. Who’d you throw him over for? Old Slapshot, that hockey player you were dating on and off?”
She laughed. “Haven’t seen Old Slapshot in months.”
“Somebody else then?”
“Guess I’m in between.”
He raised his eyebrows, mocking his own interest. “But you like the jocks, don’t you? Must know an awful lot of them by now.”
“I do like them, Paul. They’re so— instinctive.”
“Yes. As opposed to us intellectual types. Actually, I was thinking about joining a gym.”
“One way to work up a sweat, I guess.” She picked up a wedge of pizza, ate it, licked the cheese-tomato topping off her lips. “So—what’s new in photography?”
“Pho-to-graphy—hmmm, let’s see. Well, there’s a show at the Zorthaler. Close-ups of genitals. Lots of pubic hair around the edges. Kind of fuzzy-like.”
“Sounds disgusting. We certainly live in different worlds.”
“I wouldn’t say yours was any less bizarre. I mean, what with bird duels and stuff.”
She looked at him. He was a good-looking man, and there was that cutting edge in him she’d always liked, except when he took it too far, used it to destroy her confidence and self-esteem.
He was staring at her. “I’m getting the message, Pammer.”
“What message?”
“All that Tom Jones clowning with the pizza. All that licking around your chops.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Horny—aren’t you? I knew that’s why you called.”
“Oh you did, did you?”
He nodded. “Sunday-night servicing—that’s what you want. So you can go in to work tomorrow and face The Week That Was.”
Sex with him was always a comedy; it certainly wasn’t romantic. A battle of the sexes, a fighting kind of sex, with him trying to pin her down and her twisting and squirming to get loose. When, finally, she yielded, they were both panting and sweating from the struggle.
He had an athletic body, though she could never figure out how he maintained it, since she never once saw him run when he could walk, or lift anything if he could slide it, or stand if he could sit. But he was firm and handsome in that British between-the-wars look of his, with his hair hanging across his forehead like a young Stephen Spender or Auden or Isherwood. And for all his talk, he shut up once he started making love. Then it was groans and moans as they strained against each other, whimpers and howls as they fought, deep breathy sighs as they relaxed. “When you have sex with me,” he used to tell her, “at least you know that you’ve had sex.”
He was right on that—she knew she’d had sex, which was more than she’d known with Joel. Paul, in any case, was fond of such formulations, used to say similar things about Hitchcock films and paintings by Francis Bacon.
“At least you know you’ve seen a movie,” he’d told her after they’d watched a restored print of Vertigo. “You may not like it, it may not be pretty, but at least you aren’t bored,” he’d said when they went to a Bacon show at MOMA.
She wasn’t bored. She felt good afterward, opened another bottle of wine, which they drank, still naked, on her bed. He entwined his legs with hers, stroked her breasts, said, “You’re still a tremendous piece of ass.”
That sent him into hysterics. He spilled wine on her sheets. “Maybe this big star bit you’re on is good for you after all. Your dialogue’s getting snappier. You’re not so proper like you used to be.”
She looked at him. Had she been proper, the uppity girl he’d wanted to “dirty up”? Or, even a better question, had she asked him over tonight because she wanted him to dirty her up?
He took her face in both his hands, held it still, stared deeply into her eyes. “The Driven Woman. The story’s everything. Nothing else matters. That’s the deal, right?”
“It’s a great story, Paul.”
“Sure it is. And now it’s taken over your life.”
“Maybe.”
“It has. Tell me about it. What really turns you on?”
For a moment she was at a loss. “I don’t know. It’s so damn fascinating. I have to see it through. Just imagine what it would be like to interview the falconer. Ask him why he’s doing this. Find the answer, get it straight from him. I’m waiting for that. When he does talk, if he does, then I think he’ll talk to me. He sends me letters, after all.”
“Herb still got you convinced you’re going to win a prize?”
“It’s funny—for a while he really had me going with that. But now it’s more. I don’t even think about a prize. I’m interested in the man, the kind of mind that could conceive of a thing like this. And also why he threatens me.”
“Any idea what he’s like?”
She shook her head. “Can’t imagine. Strange and wild. Or weird—a homunculus. Or maybe very ordinary, the sort you’d never notice, with a baby face and haunted eyes.”
“But something attracts you? You don’t seem all that scared.”
She nodded.
“What? Tell me what?”
“I think it’s his—passion. I feel pulled toward him. I need to understand him. I honestly don’t know why.”
“Well, I hope you nail him, sweetheart. Really do. I hope you get what you want out of all of this.”
He was acting fairly decent then, sincere, straightforward, the way she liked him best. So she was a little sorry when he said he had to go. But at the door he reverted to his other self.
“Better buy some laundry rope.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Fun to play with.” He winked at her. “Next time I’ll tie you up.”
Monday and Tuesday were uneventful.
There was a sense around the station that they’d done something extraordinary, and a letdown, too, because they didn’t know how to follow up. That was the trouble when you hyped a story: You had to go further each time, push harder, sensationalize even more. It was like taking heroin—each dose created a higher threshold of boredom, so the next dose had to be bigger still, or else the addict—in this case Herb’s “element”—would switch channels for a better high.
Jay phoned her on Wednesday. “Let’s have dinner,” he said. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“You saw me all last week.”
“I know, and I got used to it. I miss all the excitement. What I mean is—I kind of miss seeing you.”
What a nice thing for him to say. She wondered why she hadn’t called him on Sunday instead of Paul. Of course with Paul she was sure of having sex.
But sex with Jay might have been even better. She certainly liked him better.
They agreed to have dinner on Friday night.
That evening she tried to read but couldn’t concentrate. She was impatient, waiting for something to happen, a new insight into the story, an adventure, even an attack. She turned on The Tonight Show, watched halfheartedly. Then her phone rang.
She jumped. She didn’t expect a call so late.
“Pam Barrett?”
“Yes?” It was a man’s voice, gravelly, intense.
“Got word you want to talk to me.”
She knew immediately who it was.
“Hawk-Eye?”
“Uh huh. So tell me—what’s the deal?”
She explained about the interview and the fee.
“I don’t spit for money like that.”
“That’s a good fee for an interview.”
She was suddenly alert. She wondered which of the dealers had passed the word. She suspected Brodsky, though she wasn’t certain why.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Let’s meet informally, check each other out. I gotta see you’re on the level before I agree to anything.”
“Well, sure, okay. When would you like to meet?”
“How ‘bout later tonight?”
She hadn’t expected him to move so fast. “All right,” she said. “But what’s the big mystery? Of course I’m on the level. I don’t want to buy a falcon. There’s nothing illegal in any of this.”
“There’s stuff going on here, Pam, you evidently don’t know about. You live in the Village?”
“Yes.”
“Wait on the corner of Sixth and Eighth. I’ll be there in an hour.”
She wondered what “stuff” was “going on” that she didn’t “know about.” She thought of calling Paul, asking him to stand near and keep an eye on her, but she knew he’d be no use, would probably try to horn in and screw it up. She decided to do what Hawk-Eye said and take her chances.
This can’t be all that heavy, she thought.
By 12:30 she had stationed herself on the southwest corner of Sixth Avenue and West Eighth Street. It was one of the more tawdry intersections in the Village, active twenty-four hours a day. Traffic streamed by. People were buying newspapers at an all-night newsstand. A midnight jogger darted across the avenue. Gays strode toward Christopher Street to cruise.
After waiting fifteen minutes, she began to wonder if she was being watched. Wasn’t that the usual method, to watch the person, see if there were cops or other people around before making the approach? By ten of one she was impatient. She felt awkward standing on the corner as if she were a whore. She was glad no one recognized her, but she was tired and wondered if she’d been set up. Maybe this was a test—Hawk-Eye testing her goodwill. She thought about going home, decided to stick it out until one.
Then she heard a man’s voice, the gravelly voice from the phone, just behind her ear.
“Pam Barrett?”
She turned, recognized him at once.
He fit Bruce Harmon’s description perfectly, his face gaunt, his eyes piercing, his nose hooked. He even hunched over a little as if he were waiting on a branch to make a strike.
He was wearing a soiled raincoat. He looked about fifty years old, and there was something harried about him, as if he were worried or afraid.
“Hawk-Eye?”
He nodded. “Sorry I’m late. Let’s go someplace and talk.”
He led her to a McDonald’s on West Third. They ordered coffees, then took them up to the deserted balcony floor.
She was glad she hadn’t had to meet him in an underground garage or down a dark alley somewhere. But sitting with him now she didn’t feel threatened—there was something sympathetic about him despite his ugliness. When they sat down, she examined him more carefully. He looked almost cadaverous beneath the fluorescent lights.
“I was kind of surprised to hear from you. I’d just about given up.”
“Word gets around.”
“I guess it does. Someone told me you were ‘laying low.’”
“This isn’t a good time for a man who deals in falcons and hawks.”
“Oh?” she asked arching her eyebrows, working for the disingenuous quality she admired so much in Mike Wallace’s interviews.
“You know what I’m talking about. This killer peregrine could put me out of business. The falconry community’s frightened. They think there’s going to be a ban.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” she said. “Sooner or later the police will catch this falconer and then things will settle down.”
Hawk
-Eye inspected her closely, stared into her eyes. “I wonder if I can trust you.”
“Of course you can trust me.” Did she look untrustworthy? “If we make a deal, I certainly intend to keep my side.”
“I wasn’t talking about the interview,” he said. “I’m not sure I want to do that now.”
Oh, no! She could feel him slipping away. “Why? What’s the matter? No one will see your face. You’ll never be recognized. We’ll even change your voice.”
He continued to gaze at her for several seconds, then he looked down into his cup.
Don’t panic, she told herself. You can handle this guy. She knew he wanted to talk—he’d called, set up the meeting, implied he had something to say. “There’s stuff going on here you evidently don’t know about”—he did have something to tell her, but for some reason he was afraid.
“All right,” she said, knowing she had to earn his confidence, “let’s forget about the interview. I’m not even sure it’s such a great idea.”
“Why? Why do you say that?”
“It’s the paying—it goes against my grain. It’s one thing to develop information, but to pay for news …” She shook her head. Now, suddenly, he seemed interested. He’d looked up, was studying her face again.
“Journalists’ ethics—I’m a true believer. I’d go to jail before I’d reveal a source.”
“You’d really go to jail?”
She knew she had him. “Sure,” she said. “If someone talks to me, leaks me a story or gives me a tip, that’s confidential, like talking to a lawyer or a priest. Anyway, I didn’t come here to talk about myself. I’m interested in you. How did you get into this business? Everyone seems to know about you, but no one knows who you are.”
He nodded. She knew she’d made the right move, established a basis for his trust. He sighed and then began his tale. It was strange, not only on account of the events described but because of what it told about himself.
“I’ve been in this business since the late sixties. Before that I was a bum. Twenty years as a seaman in the Navy, retirement at thirty-eight, then half a dozen years just bumming around the world. Thailand, Laos, Ceylon, Pakistan—you name it, I lived there for a while. It was in Pakistan that I got started with the birds. I met a Pakistani who kept falcons, and he taught me how to fly the things. I sort of liked it. Not like some of them, the fanatics. But it was fun, something to do. There’re all these bird markets over there, you know, with incredible birds for sale. In those days you could pick up a good peregrine for fifty or sixty bucks. A friend asked me to buy him one. I did, shipped it to him in Honolulu, went through all the paperwork—no problems, no sweat. In those days all they cared about was health, would the bird bring in a disease. Then the eggshell-thinning thing came out and peregrines landed on the endangered list.
Peregrine Page 17
