Peregrine

by William Bayer

  He walked the streets that night, didn’t want to drive his car, wanted to feel the pavement beneath his soles, the hard texture of the city, its scarred sidewalks and pitted curbs—he wanted to feel, to know the pain, the meanness of those streets. He must have paced for hours up and down the avenues and across the side streets of the Upper West Side, treading his way at a steady gait back and forth from Seventy-ninth to Sixty-third, then back uptown to his building on Eighty-seventh. There was so much to think about, so many strands to unravel and examine. And something nagged at him, a glimmer he had of a solution, something so small he had difficulty sifting it out from all the data stored in his mind. He’d studied falconry, read the books, looking for something, a key, a secret—something that would give the falconer away. It was there— he was sure of it. He knew it was there in the art of falconry. He thought and thought. He must find his invisible antagonist. He had the knowledge to find him if he could only sort it out.

  So Janek walked for hours, and then, even when he was home and his feet were sore and he’d filled his bathtub with hot water and sat on a stool and let his feet soak so the soreness would go away, even then he searched for that glimmer of knowledge, sifting through everything, the letters, the killings, the sites where they’d occurred, everything he knew, the hood, Wendel’s barn, the strange words on Pam Barrett’s legal pad, trying to isolate the fact that would give the falconer away.

  He finally went to bed. It was after three A.M. He managed to sleep a couple of hours before waking and going out to walk again. The streets were empty and dirty. The wind was blowing, and pieces of newspaper, gum wrappers, discarded cigarettes were flying about, landing, sticking to the benches in the middle of Broadway. Some old men were out, insomniacs, and working people, the ones who baked the bread and stoked the furnaces, and a few young couples on their way home from nights spent at discos, wearing electric-colored shirts that form-fit their torsos and jeans that clung to their behinds. And then it came to him, for no reason leapt suddenly to the forefront from all the background noise—that single little fact, that thing he knew and had forgotten which had bothered him since the night before. It was there in his unconscious, an idea, and he knew now there was a chance, not a great chance perhaps, but nevertheless a chance that he could find what he was looking for if he looked in the proper place. So he went home and shaved and showered and dressed, and then he made the calls that were necessary, even though that meant waking people up.

  At eight that morning he was sitting in an editing room at Channel 8. A young man was with him, an assistant film editor whom Penny Abrams had called in on his behalf. The boy mounted up the footage of the Rockefeller Center attack and ran it for him slowly, frame by frame.

  After Janek had seen it twice he shook his head. “You’re sure that’s all you got?”

  “That’s it, Lieutenant. That’s what we’ve been putting on the tube.”

  Janek nodded. “But it was shot on a cassette?”

  “Yeah. I guess it was.”

  “A cassette runs ten minutes. This piece runs maybe three or four.”

  “Maybe he didn’t finish shooting it off.”

  “Then there should be blank film at the end. And if he did shoot it out, there should be exposed film from before the attack. Maybe it got cut off because it didn’t boost the story and now it’s just sitting around here someplace gathering dust.”

  “Well, I’ll take a look,” the boy said.

  He left; Janek waited on the stool in front of the machine. Ten minutes later the boy came back. He held a small roll in his hand. “You were right. There was stuff at the head. Mr. Greene cut out what he liked. The rest’s been sitting on the shelf.”

  He threaded it up and they looked at it, typical tourist footage of Rockefeller Center, full of pans and zooms. The Japanese businessman must have been impressed by the skyscrapers, because he kept making shots that started on the skaters and then tilted up the buildings to the sky.

  There were pans, too, of the people standing behind the balustrade that surrounded the sunken rink. It was these that interested Janek because of the fact he’d remembered about falconry—that the falconer had to be there to show the bird its prey. The attack had been specific, directed against a particular type of girl. That meant the falconer had to be near the rink to point the skater out.

  “Look. There’s Pam!” The assistant froze the frame, pointed to Pam on the screen. Janek studied her. There was a curious expression on her face, of pain, perhaps, or bitterness—he couldn’t tell.

  They ran the film some more, back and forth, frame by frame so he could study every face. There was one that stood out, a man wearing a bright orange tam-o’-shanter, striking and unusual in that crowd of nondescript tourists. The man was wearing mirrored sunglasses. It was difficult to make him out. But a few seconds later, when he turned and showed his profile, Janek brought his fists down hard on the machine.

  It was Hollander—no mistake. And he was looking at Pam. She was looking down at the rink and he was staring straight at her. Incredible!

  Hollander had been there—this was the proof; he’d been the falconer on the ground. He’d worn that bright orange cap so the falcon could recognize him. The glasses? To disguise himself or to signal the bird—probably both.

  Hollander. His own expert, a man who had the necessary expertise. He’d been there just seconds before the bird had killed, and he’d been looking at Pam, which made the link Janek had never understood. Those notes he’d written her, those taunts and threats, that Pambird stuff, those protestations of his love. Janek had never been able to figure that out. Why her? Why Pam? he’d asked himself so many times.

  Here, finally, was the answer: Hollander had seen her that day, sized her up, maybe considered her as prey. Then something had changed his mind.

  He’d chosen the skater, but still he’d considered her, and all these weeks since he’d been after her, and now somehow he’d captured her alive.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  She was hungry, very hungry, could feel the pangs of her hunger, sharp spasms shooting through her body, gnawing at her brain. The peregrine was hungry, too. The bird’s flappings and rustlings and scratchings invaded her consciousness—she was aware that the great falcon was starved, and that redoubled her own hunger, for it made it impossible for her to put hunger out of her mind.

  Jay’s whisperings fascinated her. He was grandiose, boasted that he was the world’s greatest falconer, “a great artist,” he called himself, his work “a masterpiece.” She feared his inflated sense of self. He was so unpredictable, so dangerous. But there was a part of her that liked the danger—when he lay his fingers upon her throat.

  There was another voice she heard, the taunting wooing voice of the letters.

  She felt seduced when he raved he would carry her into the sky, turn with her beneath the sun, snatch her up, caress her throat with his talons, make love to her upon a gnarled limb of an ancient tree or upon a rocky crag overlooking a wild stream. He seemed so fanciful then, so sweet, that his threats seemed merely rhetoric. She could feel the touch of his wings. His caresses made her tremble with desire.

  “Don’t know when I lost control,” he whispered. “Perhaps … perhaps always. It’s not so simple as it looks— the falconer on the ground, the falcon turning, wheeling against the clouds. The bond is there—invisible. I control her, guide her. She is like a kite on a string. I am on that string, too, at the other end of it. I hold her but she pulls me. I must move to stay beneath her as she flies and hunts. And then that string becomes a wire tight and taut, and then suddenly a current flows. From me to her and from her to me, back and forth, faster and faster, until the charges are bolts of lightning flashing, ripping up and down the wire. The bond’s so tight I can ride it to the sky. When the birds attacked, I was always with them. We falconers aren’t just watchers—we’re hunters, too, you see. We fly. We stoop. On the ground I felt like nothing. But once she flew, I flew, too, inside her bre
ast. I saw the world through her eyes. Killed with her claws and beak. I lost myself those times, I guess. Yes—I became my birds ….”

  It was a cry, she felt, and it moved her deeply—a great crying out against having been created merely as a man.

  “Control. Control. You think you have it most when it is lost. You feel powerful, mighty, godlike. And then you find you are nothing. Merely man and lust. I so wanted to be falcon, to have power, blinding speed and power. To live in delirium. To leave all things behind—to become force, be savage, purified. To be thunder and lightning, to fling down death and danger, molten fire. To be—the sun. For she is … Helios. She glints like the sun. To be touched by her is to be burned and seared and sliced … by light.”

  He paused. His voice had run out of ecstasy. When he whispered again she heard something else—his grief, his sorrow, and his pain.

  “But always there was the rancid thing, that awful, horrid thing of earth. Not of sky, not of blue, but of the mold, the soil, festering, putrescent—sex. I see now it was always that. She was me, my avenger. She skewered and thrust for me. She shot out for me. When she plunged I came. Her fire, her power was my explosion. I always felt aroused when I watched a kill, and with Peregrine—more than aroused. She killed the girls for me. She could do what I could not. That was the art of it. That’s why I had to capture you, Pambird. To see it to its end.”

  Starved, hooded, bound and gagged and whispered to, told how Peregrine was trained, the ingenious tricks he’d used, the training methods he’d devised, the steps he’d inserted, the special lures he’d invented out of store mannequins, and then the killing method, how he’d taught the falcon to stun and then go for the throat—hearing all that, she felt herself drawn in. An animal instinct welled up. It was clear, so clear—one either killed or was killed oneself. One was either falcon or prey. There could be no middle ground.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  They spent the entire day searching Hollander’s house, all the men in Janek’s squad. They went through every drawer and cupboard, took down every falconry book and shook it out. They searched the basement, the attic, the closets, the kitchen, under the rugs, behind the pictures—there wasn’t a place they didn’t look. And for all of that, a tedious rigorous painstaking search, they didn’t come up with anything except the single slip of paper sitting on Hollander’s desk, the first thing they had found when they came in, the only thing to be found, Janek realized at the end.

  Now it was dark, nine o’clock. The search was complete. The men had left and Janek was sitting alone in Hollander’s library staring at the note:

  STILL LOOKING FOR THE BIRDS? STILL LOOKING FOR P&P? THEY’RE IN THE AERIE, JANEK. EIGHT EAGLES GUARD THE NEST.

  A cryptic taunt, and it infuriated Janek; he was sitting there wondering why. It wasn’t that it was cryptic.

  “Eight eagles guard the nest” was childish stuff; sooner or later, he knew, he’d figure it out. Was it the “P&P” part? Peregrine and Pambird. That shorthand was enraging, so smug, so cool, so annoying because it was so familiar, as if, because they were insiders, Janek would know what Hollander meant by “P&P.”

  But it was more, something not even in the note. It was, he finally decided, the note itself. Because the very fact that Hollander had left him a note meant that Hollander expected him in the house.

  Yes, that was what angered him. It meant that everything he’d done, even going back to look at the head of that strip of film, had been anticipated, and since his actions had been anticipated, then, by inference, any further actions he might take were anticipated, too.

  Hollander wanted him to discover the “nest,” to understand the cryptic meaning afterward, when everything was finished and Hollander had done with Pam whatever he was planning to do, so Janek would rap his forehead with his fist and cry out: “Why didn’t I think of that before?” Yes—that was it: He was a pawn in Hollander’s end game. He was being toyed with. In Hollander’s eyes he was a fool.

  Janek didn’t like it, and he didn’t like the fact that it made him mad. Maybe that was the intention—to make him angry so he would continue to play his fool’s role and Hollander could obtain the denouement he’d written and was working to bring to life.

  It had all been a game—Janek saw that now. All of it: the notes to Pam; the suggestions; the falconers Hollander had named; his suppositions about how the bird could have been trained and the sort of place it might be kept. Even the Nakamura episode, which Hollander had engineered so he could have his orgy of bird blood above the park. The cardboard falcon on the roof. The note pinned to Wendel, which had led Janek to Carl’s secret room. It was all so clever: leaving the falconry hood on Sasha West but wiping away the fingerprints; using the name Fred Hohenstaufen when he’d ordered the hood; and now this—”the aerie …. Eight eagles guard the nest.”

  As Janek worked to rid himself of anger, tried to think coolly about what he ought to do, he realized that by writing him the note Hollander had burned all his bridges behind. By exposing himself he’d given up everything—his wealth, his house, his collection of falconry paintings and prints, his fabulous library of falconry books. And that meant that Pam was in terrible danger, for Hollander was now the most dangerous sort of man—a man who didn’t care that he’d been found out, a man with nothing left to lose.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  He woke her at midnight. “Dreaming, Pambird?” She nodded. “Dreaming of what?” he asked, and then, because she was gagged and could not answer, he answered the question himself. “Of food,” he said. “You’ve been dreaming of food.” She nodded again. Did she smile? He couldn’t be sure, for the hood covered her eyes and the gag strap covered her mouth. But he thought he saw a contraction in her cheeks which reminded him of the way she looked when he’d seen her smile before.

  He let her sleep another hour, watching her, studying her all the while. This time when he woke her he brought his face beside her ear. “Will you fly for me, Pambird?”

  Slowly she nodded—she was still half asleep.

  “Will you be my falcon, my huntress, my peregrine? Will you hunt for me and kill?” She nodded again, and at that he let her return to sleep. She would sleep deeply now. He had kept her up for hours, had scrambled her sense of day and night, had kept her blindfolded except for a few minutes when it was dark and he wanted her to look at Peregrine. He gazed at her. He was satisfied. He had reduced her to the proper state. He knew that her training was nearly at its end, that his design was nearly complete.

  Now there was something important he must do, attend to Peregrine. He moved to the perch, caressed the falcon, whispered to her, gently stroked her feathers, then took her onto his wrist. He moved slowly about the room with her, holding her near to him, always gentling her with soothing words. He carried her to a corner, let her down upon the feeding shelf, then went to the closet, opened the cage, and pulled out a quail, the last. He brought it back to her, unlaced her hood, gently pulled it from her head. And then he fed her, watched as she ate, pulled the bird apart with her talons, devoured the meat, used her beak to clean and scrape the bones.

  When she had finished, he let her rest, then took her again upon his gloved fist. He carried her to the triangular window, sat down, then placed Peregrine upon the left arm of his chair. Tears sprang to his eyes as he brought out his falconer’s knife and carefully, ever so carefully, cut the jesses from her legs. It wrenched him to remove these symbols of his ownership, but he knew that he must cut them off. And as he did, a favorite line from Othello came into his mind.

  He spoke the words softly to himself, savoring the poetry: “Though her jesses were my dear heartstrings / I’d whistle her off and let her down the wind / To prey at fortune.”

  Peregrine was restless. She had known the jesses all her life. She twitched her legs, clawed at the arm of the chair—she must sense, he thought, that a new phase of her life was to begin.

  There was no reason to linger now, to postpone what he must do
. He coaxed her onto his wrist again, stood up, brought her to the window.

  “Fly!” he whispered. “Fly! Fly! Fly out! You’re free!” And then he leaned out, raised his fist and held her to the wind.

  The great falcon hesitated, turned her head, looked at him, met his eyes. He nodded to her and she turned back, sniffed the air, then raised her wings and sailed off into the night.

  For a long time he stared after her, though in seconds she was lost from sight. If only I could fly away, too, he thought. But that was impossible. He must stay and see the story to its end.

  He turned back to the room, walked close to Pambird, looked down upon her as she trembled slightly in her sleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Janek left Hollander’s house at two in the morning. The press people who had been waiting had given up long before.

  Stepping out onto Seventieth Street he felt the chill in the air. Indian summer was over; soon winter would begin. The trees, nearly naked, looked bereft.

  He felt defeated. Peregrine was his great case. He had immersed himself in it, done his best, but in the end had failed to comprehend his quarry on the deep psychological level by which he’d hoped to solve this great case of his life. He was up against an opponent whose mind he could not fathom, a man who operated on a different scale, who dealt in broad dramatic strokes. Janek felt mediocre in comparison; he took pleasure in the intricate mechanisms of accordions; he wasn’t able to comprehend the grand gestures of a man who dealt in falcons and in death.