Peregrine

by William Bayer

  That was what he wanted from her, to do his bidding at the proper time. So he worked on her, set about to bend her mind, whispered fantasies of flying and hunting, nesting, coupling and nurturing, fantasies that he intoned in an even, steady whisper to distort her perceptions already unraveled because she was hungry and couldn’t see. And the drugs helped, too, kept her in a state of high suggestibility, amenable to his ideas, which he implanted again and again.

  He took over her body when she was in these somnambulistic states, stripped her, caressed her, induced her to moan. He positioned her as if she were a bird, head up, arms at her sides like wings, the cape, her feathers, hanging upon her shoulders, her feet in front as if clinging to a perch. Then he sank his hands into her hair and placed his face against hers, kissing and licking her ears and the back of her neck and, best of all, her throat. He played his fingers upon this part of her, caressing the tendons, feeling the fineness of the flesh, pushing upward against her Adam’s apple and the cartilage there, softly so as not to harm her, to show he treasured this most vulnerable part of her, and yet firmly enough so that she would know, could feel that he could take her life in a second if he wished.

  She was his prisoner, his captive creature, and the aerie where they lived, where his great bird perched and ate, became a temple where he applied the bonds of falconry to her flesh. Restricted in this small room with the triangular window that looked out upon the great city sparkling below, at the peak of this great tower, this soaring steel spire, he practiced all the arcane rituals, the breaking in, the manning, the destruction of her will, and then its rebuilding, by recondite rites of training tested over two thousand years.

  Here he instructed her in submission.

  He pushed portions of her body so she would know what he wanted her to do, to kneel before him, the fine bells tied to her ankles tingling slightly as she quivered in cold and terror. He would bring her head against his groin and hold it there and she would breathe against him. Often he would simply hold her and caress her, being sure she could hear his breathing close against her ear. She must know that he was all-powerful, that resistance was hopeless and that there was security in yielding to his control. He must impress upon her his utter, total willfulness: that he would brook no indecision on her part, no hesitation, no attempt to evade when he showed her what she must do. He worked on her this way, signaling his pleasure when she obeyed and his displeasure when she did not.

  It was easy to instill discipline. A kneading here, a caress there could quickly become a pinch. He could hold her firmly, and when she did not move the way he wanted, could punish her until she corrected herself and obeyed.

  All her reflexes had to be trained this way, and under the constant threat of hunger, too. And afterward, when she had done as he had instructed, when she had showed him her obeisance, then he rewarded her as he would if she had been a bird.

  He incanted a poem to her patched together from the literature of falconry, a poem made especially to her measure:

  Steadfast of thought,

  Well made, well wrought,

  Far may be sought

  Ere you can find

  So obedient as Pamela—

  So courteous, so kind.

  Sharp as talon

  This cactus flower,

  Wild as falcon

  Or hawk of the tower.

  He treated her body to many pressures. He lay upon her, explored, let the effect of the drugs subside so she was conscious of what he was doing, and then watched carefully for those moments when she twisted to get away, thrashed her body to evade him, and when that twisting and thrashing had another meaning—demonstrated her pleasure in being used. He probed her, touched her, used all of her, every orifice, wagged his tongue against her genitals, her nipples, sank his teeth into them, threatening them with sharpness while nipping them with tenderness, too. He did this so she would know she had become the object of his tutelage, so that she would learn what he wanted from her and hasten to give it to him even before he signaled his desire.

  And all the time he intoned to her that she was a bird whom he was training to hunt. He led her to the window and, certain her legs were securely tied to the pipes of the radiator, he bent her backward over the sill so that she was staring up at the clouds. Thus he forced her to look straight into the sky as he told her she would fly there and that he would teach her how. Then he turned her over, fastened her legs again so when he bent her forward she faced straight down. Then he uncovered her eyes and held her above the city by her hair, then plunged her so she would know what it would feel like to be in a falcon’s stoop. And when she was bound again upon the cot he lay beside her and impersonated the tiercel, and then, assuming once again the voice of falconer, instructed her, took her through all the lessons, including flying at the lure, describing how he whirled it around and around and she dove for it and missed and then learned to strike at it and hit. And when she struck it, he would reward her with a morsel of washed meat, and as she ate, he would recite the poem to her again. He took her thus through all the phases of a falcon’s training, making her familiar with him, then flying her to his fist, telling her always that when she was sufficiently trained he would let her fly free and make her kill.

  He terrorized her, too, but carefully, waiting for those times when she was most thoroughly drugged. He brought the great peregrine near to her, took her hand and held it against the feathers of the bird, made her feel every portion of it, her head and throat, her wings and feathers and claws. Pambird came to know the feel and name of every part of Peregrine: her talons, tarsus, and toes, her flanks and breast, her crown, her brow, her cere and nape and back.

  And then her feathers, her primaries and upper tail coverts, her secondaries and middle coverts, her scapulars, her hallux and her flags. He made her breathe the strong scent of the bird, taste the sharp flavor of her beak. He held her against the falcon so her nose pressed down upon the feathers and she could breathe their essence, and then, once, he unmasked her, and set the bird before her and ordered her to meet its eyes and to hold them in hers without blinking. And all of this she did. And the peregrine stared at her, and she stared deeply at the peregrine, as if staring at herself in a mirror.

  And so he trained and terrorized and hungered her and made her into his weapon. He took total possession of her, her body and her mind, knowing always what he would have her do but not telling her what that was. When the time came, she would execute his plan using only her instinct and her training as her guide. If he told her now, she would have time to consider, build up resistance, prepare to refuse. She must act from the center of her being, the limbic kernel of her brain, in accordance with his governance to the specifications of his design.

  He had trained Peregrine, had taught the falcon to do things no bird had done before. So, now, too, he was training Pambird so she would complete his work of art. It was the two of them together, the two birds, that would make the work—the kills that Peregrine had made and the deed that Pambird would perform. There was an underlying logic to it, an inexorable symmetry that thrilled him because it was so pure. Yes, he had great plans for Pambird. Just one stoop, one kill was all. She need not return afterward, would not have to hunt for him again, for she would have fulfilled her destiny, and nothing would matter after that.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Driving out to Wendel’s house, hitting the bumps and potholes on the Major Deegan, nearly sideswiped on the Hutchinson River, Janek was haunted by the thought that in using Pam as a lure he had done a terrible thing. He wasn’t worried about the department, or recriminations from the Chief, or disciplinary hearings, or even press comments that he’d bungled the case.

  What filled him with guilt was the knowledge that he had put her in jeopardy and that now she was probably being hurt.

  The young man from the museum was waiting in front of the house. Janek had called ahead when he’d learned a junior assistant was staying at Wendel’s to tend and feed the birds.<
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  The house looked nice, more impressive, maybe, than what a museum ornithologist could afford. But then, Janek thought, why not? Why should a bird guy have to live like a cop?

  The assistant, Bob Halloran, seemed a steady type. In his jeans and plaid shirt he looked the perfect young naturalist. Janek noticed a No Nukes sticker on his bumper. Mister Nice Guy. Into ecology. Probably jogs, too. Member of Audubon and Friends of the Earth.

  Halloran showed him through the breeding barn. Janek didn’t like the smell. Something sharp and animal, or maybe something else—a sting in the air, a reek of danger and fear. But the birds impressed him. They were strange, especially the owls, the way they perched so quietly, so rigidly, like guardians, sentinels. Janek had difficulty with their eyes. They were the eyes of killers, he could see.

  While Halloran explained captivity breeding, Janek just stared at them, met their eyes, and wondered again about the man he was after, a man turned on by that blank killer’s stare.

  “Carl kept records, didn’t he?”

  “Oh sure. Sure he did.”

  “I’d like to see them.”

  “You mean his breeding notes?”

  Janek shrugged. He was thinking of Pam’s note. “Guess that’s what I mean.”

  Halloran was standing very still, and Janek sensed something wrong in his response. He turned away from the owls, straightened up, and looked Halloran in the eyes.

  “I’ve been going through Carl’s papers,” the young man said.

  “Oh? Find something?”

  “He has a lab in the basement of the house. He kept his breeding work separate from his work at the museum.”

  “Well—let’s take a look at his lab then. I’ve seen enough in here.”

  Halloran nodded. They walked back to the house. In the hallway Halloran paused again, and Janek sensed the same thing he’d felt in the barn, a pause that suggested more than hesitation—secrecy and maybe fright.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  The young man stared down at the floor.

  “Better tell me about it, son.”

  Halloran looked up at him. “There’s some trouble,” he said. “Some trouble with Carl’s notes.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “They’re not complete.”

  “That’s not so bad.”

  “He was breeding for size,” Halloran blurted. “Carl was creating freaks.”

  Janek looked at him. “You’re sure?”

  Halloran nodded. Hawk-Eye the dealer. Wendel the breeder—Pam’s notations were starting to make sense.

  They walked down the cellar stairs and into Wendel’s lab. It wasn’t much to look at: a desk; a table with a microscope; surgical instruments; some cages and taxidermy tools. About as impressive as my accordion bench, Janek thought.

  Halloran showed him the breeding notes, explained what they meant; Janek understood, and then things started linking in his mind. Pam’s note about Wendel being the breeder; his urgent message on her answering machine; perhaps Wendel had bred Peregrine and sold her to the falconer.

  “What happened to these birds?” he asked.

  Halloran shook his head. “I don’t know what he did with them.”

  “Did he release them?”

  “There’s nothing in the notes.”

  Janek knew the young man was holding something back. “What happened to them?” he asked again. “Was Carl selling them, or what?”

  And then it came, the breakdown.

  Halloran held his hands up to his face, quivered, then rushed back upstairs.

  Janek followed, found him in the living room on the couch, his head cradled in his arms, tears streaming from his eyes.

  Janek sat beside him, put his arm across his shoulders, and gently coaxed the story out. It took him nearly half an hour to get it straight—how, on an expedition a couple of years before, Wendel had been attacked by an owl.

  After that he’d started acting batty, speaking about the “horror” of predation, and doing curious things like trapping predatory birds, asphyxiating them, and stuffing them himself. Owls first, then eagles and buzzards, short-winged hawks, red-tails and sharpshins, and finally falcons, the rarest species, too.

  And when there weren’t enough of them, when they became too hard to get, he started to breed them himself so he’d have more specimens to kill and stuff. That’s what his files suggested anyway, because instead of release notes there were execution and taxidermy notes. Where were they then, all these stuffed birds of prey?

  Halloran shook his head—he’d searched the house; he didn’t know where Carl had them stashed.

  At six that evening, Janek was sitting in Wendel’s office in the museum waiting for the police locksmith to arrive. It was the same little bald man with the German accent who’d opened up Pam’s apartment. Janek had summoned him to drill out the locks on Wendel’s private lab.

  It couldn’t be a “lab,” Halloran had assured him; he’d showed Janek the same office on the floor below. It was a closet, and no one had the key. Perhaps not a lab, Janek thought, but not a closet either. A secret room, he thought.

  We all have our secret rooms. And now I’m going to have a look at Carl’s.

  The locksmith finally came with his drills and goggles and torch and canisters and set to work attacking the door. “Going to be tough,” he muttered.

  Janek nodded. Secret rooms were always tough, whether they were real or chambers in the mind.

  When the old German finally had it open (he was sweating; the break-in took him nearly an hour), he stood back so Janek could look. That was the protocol: The locksmith did the opening, the detective did the looking.

  But the German didn’t pack up and leave; after all his effort, he wanted to have a look himself. So they peered in together, into Carl Wendel’s secret room, studied its contents, recoiled, backed away. It was a nightmare.

  “Mein Gott!” the locksmith cried.

  Janek feared he might be sick.

  Over the past thirty years he’d seen many things: A man who’d been decapitated; a woman who’d had lye thrown in her eyes. He’d once seen a human baby that had been used in a voodoo rite; it had been punctured with knitting needles, then hung by an ankle in a burned-out building in the Bronx.

  These horrors of the city, its rot and terror, had shaken him differently than he felt shaken now. For it was not just what he saw that sickened him, though the sight was bad enough; it was what it meant, what it said about Wendel, about madness, about the dark recesses of the human soul.

  The smell was part of it, the odors of napthalene and formaldehyde and whatever other embalming agents Wendel had used, which poured out of that closet like heavy smoke filling their nostrils, forcing them back. From there, a few feet into the office, they could see all those stuffed birds packed together, hundreds of them, all birds of prey, standing straight like little trees, a forest of feathers and wings and heads and beaks, gassed, vivisected, stuffed, all blinded, too, their eye sockets blank, not filled with simulated eyes but with dull black sightless glass.

  Behind these hundreds of blind sentinels stood the freaks, the artificial mutations created by Wendel on the stainless-steel taxidermist’s table in his basement lab. There were nightmare owls, with two heads, a “spider owl” with eight legs, headless owls, asymmetrical owls, twisted hunchbacks, amputees. And if the sight of them wasn’t madness enough, a measure of Wendel’s hatred sufficient to sooth his rage, there was the sound of them, too, for all their mouths were open and Janek could hear the silent shrieks of agony that issued from their throats.

  It was these dangerous, all-threatening creatures, these freaks, these dragons, these incoherent griffins that had soared around inside Wendel’s demented brain. His beloved raptors had gotten the better of him—the beauty he had once seen in them, their freedom, their graceful flights, their regal swoops as kings and queens of the sky, had given way in his mind to horror and fear, and finally, to revenge.

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bsp; Which explained, perhaps, the note pinned to his body: “Stuff and exhibit. Label ‘Bird Lover (pseudo)’”; perhaps even explained why he’d been killed, a death he may have welcomed, since it put him out of his misery. Which still didn’t explain why he had phoned up Pam that night and what she’d learned or hoped to learn. Which meant, in turn, that the strange affair of Carl Wendel, his owl and falcon breeding, his madness, his cruel taxidermy, was just another of the bizarre dead ends that blocked the solution to the case.

  Janek stayed in the office after everyone had left—the old locksmith, Halloran, Wendel’s colleagues, ornithologists, even people from other departments who hadn’t known him but heard about his closet and trooped up to see it for themselves. He studied them all, their expressions. Most gaped, some wept, nearly all shook their heads in grief. Who can resist a look at madness, he wondered, the barbarian who lives within?

  Yes, they all have their secret rooms, and I do, too, he thought. But where is the falconer’s secret room? I still must find the key to that.

  He pondered Wendel’s secret room: What did it mean, this spokesman against falconry, this great defender of birds flying free in the wild, so twisted that he took bits and pieces of the birds he claimed to love and composed monsters out of them? What did it mean? Was it any different, really, than the madness of the falconer? On a scale of madness, if there were such a thing, perhaps no different, perhaps the same. But Janek saw a difference.

  Wendel had been dead long before he’d been murdered; the monsters he’d fashioned out of the birds he’d bred were merely models of his dead and twisted self. But the falconer was something else, he was passionate and alive. Yes, he was fighting against the world and he was destroying human life, but there was something, a spirit Janek could envy, a passionate rage against the night.

  It haunted him, this passion in the falconer, as he sat late that night at Wendel’s desk. It was something he had rallied himself against, to vanquish, to destroy, for it had defied his concept of perfect morality, of good and evil, right and wrong. Now, with the abduction of Pam, Peregrine had become more than just a case. It was a test that was measuring him, a trial that was testing his life. He could no longer justify seeking refuge in empty churches, or muttering strange prayers to cleanse himself of the sully, the dishonor of his work. Now all that seemed vain and meaningless. He must solve Peregrine to rescue Pam and also to save himself, so that he would not end up like Wendel—making freak accordions to play the lifeless music of his pain, the muted moans of his despair.