The Falconer's Tale

by Gordon Kent

  “For little ol’ me?”

  “For both of little ol’ you.” She hesitated, holding the storm door open for him. He had to go past her, face to face. Going by, he bent his head and kissed her, quickly, lightly. “Good to see you again.”

  “Edgar’s with his birds.”

  “Good chance for me to talk to him?” Make it a question, he told himself; get on her good side. When she didn’t answer, he said, “What’s your dog’s name?” People like you ought to like their dogs, right?

  “No idea,” she said. “He kept hanging around when we moved in.” She was taking things out of the sack. “Greek honey—well!” He’d found the gourmet shelves at the Island Bakery in Tobermory. “Oh—!” She had something clutched between her breasts. “Porcini cream!”

  “Organic.”

  She gave him an odd smile. “You’re a quick learner.” She pulled out other things—balsamic vinegar, olive oil crushed with blood oranges, a set of hemp place mats. She was pleased, maybe only with the effort and not the things themselves, but she was pleased. “Sure, why don’t you go talk to Edgar. I’ll get naked.”

  And if that wasn’t a peace offering, what is? She made sex so overt, however, he was suspicious. He thought that maybe she was performing her sexuality, not being it. Maybe for her it was like a language she’d learned on paper but couldn’t get fluent in. If so, if they actually got to it, there would be a lot of drama—costumes like crotchless panties, oils and perfumes, sound effects like yum-yums to go with the obligatory blow job and glad cries for orgasm, real or simulated, probably the latter. And afterward, the reviews: You were so good. Was it good for you? Was I good? But maybe it wouldn’t be like that at all. But either way, he already wanted to know.

  He was only going to be with them for a few days, and then he’d be on his way, so it wouldn’t be endangering his own operation if he took what she seemed to be offering.

  He went out the rear door and stumbled because of the unexpected step down. Nobody cut the lawn at Hackbutt’s, but a path was worn between coarse grass and a bed of nettles, which Piat knew from Greece and managed to avoid. He tried to remember how to get to the bird pens; giving up, he shouted, “Digger! Digger!”

  Hackbutt appeared, much closer than expected. “Jack! You did come back!” His hands were covered with red goo. “How nice. I won’t shake hands.” Part of the nettle bed was between them. “I’m cutting up some pigeons.”

  Piat steered around the nettles and joined Hackbutt in the remains of an outbuilding. There was bad smell and a lot of feathers. “Where do you get the pigeons?”

  “A kid shoots them for me with an air gun.”

  “That doesn’t sound so vegan.”

  Hackbutt shrugged. “Raptors aren’t vegans.” He had a bucket on the ground half full of pieces of pigeon, partly plucked, bloody. On a rough table that had started life as something else, he was chopping a dead bird with a cleaver.

  “Can’t they do that for themselves?”

  “Sure. They love to do it themselves. But you got to train them not to do it, so they’ll bring you game birds if you fly them at them.” He whacked off a wing. “Falconry’s a sport. Like shooting. There’s a quarry—in the old days, the object was to bring in game to eat. See, it’s hard to get a carnivore to bring meat to you instead of eating it itself. Like using a tiger for a retriever.” He whacked off the other wing. “You see Irene?”

  “She was off to take her bath. I brought you some sort of veggie stuff. She seemed pleased.”

  “Oh, that’s good.” He swept the edge of the cleaver across the blood on the table, then held the bucket under the edge so he could push the blood into it. “Irene’s a wonderful gal, Jack. I want you two to like each other.” He wiped his hands on a rag. “She changed my life. They talk about people reinventing themselves—she reinvented me. Really. I’m still not much, I know that, but I’m a hell of a lot more than I was.”

  “You were always a good guy. And a good agent.”

  Hackbutt looked pleased and said, “Well—” but didn’t really rise to it. In the old days, he would have been like a cat, doing everything but arching his back. He picked up the bucket and pushed past Piat. “The birds are a full-time job. It’s fun, and I love my birds, but, Jeez, man, it’s your life!”

  He went along the pens, talking to birds he told Piat were immature, making noises to them, tossing pieces of pigeon to them. He strapped a guard over his left arm and enticed a young falcon to perch on it by holding up a pigeon neck with the head still attached, and then he gave it to the bird.

  One of the cages was twice the size of the others. So was the occupant. Alone of the birds, the giant received a whole pigeon. Piat watched as the big bird held the head down with both feet and tore out pieces of meat from the neck, plucking as it went, feathers drifting down and now and then getting stuck to its beak.

  “I thought you had to teach them not to rip the prey to shreds?” Piat asked.

  “She’s different. Jeez, Jack, can’t you see how big she is? Bella’s a sea eagle, Jack. I’m in a program for them. We get the chicks—long story there—and raise ’em by hand, then release ’em in the wild. Helps rebuild the population. They’re nearly extinct. Isn’t Bella great?” Hackbutt smiled like a parent with a bright toddler. “I love my birds!”

  “You told Irene I’d want something,” Piat said.

  Hackbutt was picking up another piece of meat with a gloved hand. “Well—yeah, I apologize, Jack. I just meant—”

  “You were being honest. And you were right. I want something.”

  Hackbutt looked at him and then turned so that Piat could see the bird better. He should have said something like What?, and in the old days he would have, but now he kept his mouth shut.

  “How much did you tell Irene about what you used to do?”

  “Nothing! Honest to God, Jack, nothing. I signed that paper, didn’t I? I swore I’d never say anything and I didn’t.”

  “What did you tell her I do?” He put it in the present tense because he wasn’t going to tell Hackbutt that he was long out of the CIA and in fact a kind of renegade.

  “Nothing.”

  “She must have asked.”

  “Oh, she said something like, ‘Does he work for the government?’”

  Irene was a lot smarter than that, Piat thought, although maybe she was one of those people who paid no attention to the worlds of war and politics and tricky shit. Still, she’d have heard of the CIA. “What did you say?”

  “Oh, I just said, ‘Sort of.’” The sea eagle had finished the pigeon and now snatched the next one from the glove and put it under one foot, then tried to disentangle the other foot from the remains of the head. It looked like a swimmer trying to shake water out of its ear. The mangled head fell to the ground and the bird started on the new prey.

  “Tell you what, Digger.” Digger had been an early code name, from the Digger O’Dell of an old comedy program; it had become a nickname when Hackbutt had become more than an incidental source. “I know that anything I ask you to undertake, Irene’s got to know about—right? I see that. I acknowledge that’s the nature of your relationship. It isn’t usual, but we go back and—you two are bonded, right?” He was talking bullshit, but this was his spiel.

  “Bonds of steel,” Hackbutt said. “I heard that someplace. It says it all. It’s love. It amazes me, but she loves me. Me. Thanks for understanding, Jack.”

  “I do understand, Digger, and I respect it, and I respect you as a man. That’s why I’ll shut up right now if you want me to. I do want something; I want to offer you something, but I’ll keep it to myself and we’ll have a visit and we’ll part friends and that’ll be that, if you want.” It was like ice-skating where you know that the farther you go, the thinner the ice gets: had he now gone too far?

  Hackbutt, finishing with the bird, was offering it its regular perch; it seemed to want to stay on his arm, but he urged it, moving his arm, nudging the perch, and the bird moved
over. Hackbutt picked up the bucket. Down the ragged line of pens, Piat could hear birds stirring as they smelled the blood. Hackbutt said, “I told myself I wouldn’t do any more of that stuff. Not that I’m ashamed of it! But—” He came out of the pen and latched the makeshift gate. “I’m a coward, Jack. It scares me, what could have happened some of those times.”

  Piat had watched him handle the sea eagle, the bird’s vicious beak four inches from his eyes. You used to be a coward, Piat thought.

  “This wouldn’t be like that.” Piat shook his head. The old Hackbutt had merely provided information. He had been that kind of agent—records of meetings, oil contracts, stuff he heard at the bar from other geologists in Macao and Taipei—actually not running much risk but always sweaty about it. “This wouldn’t be dangerous. But I don’t want to push it on you, Digger.” They walked along the pens. Hackbutt stopped at the next gate. “It’s just that you’re the only man who could do it. Correction: the best man to do it.”

  “I don’t want to go back to Southeast, Jack.”

  “This wouldn’t be in Southeast,” Piat lied watching him feed another bird. The older ones, Hackbutt had said, would be flown before they were fed; Piat could see him having to spend all day trying to get Hackbutt to say yes. Still, he made himself go slow. When Hackbutt had focused on the bird for ten minutes and nothing more had been said, Piat murmured, as if it had just come to him, “Doing a big art installation must be expensive.”

  “You better believe it. But worth it.” This bird was restless and maybe dangerous; it flapped its wings while on his arm, and its beak flashed too close to Hackbutt’s face, Piat thought. “Irene’s going to be a household name. She has her own website. But that costs money, yes it does. Just moving an installation around from gallery to gallery costs a lot. Just the insurance! Plus we’ve got ideas for a coffee-table book of Irene’s art, and she’s into video now, maybe a DVD of the making of The Body Electric. She shot a lot of video of me boiling up a dead sheep I found. There’re these great shots of the bones sort of emerging out of the flesh—sort of stop-action.”

  “The galleries pay for that?”

  “You kidding?” Hackbutt laughed. He was wrestling the bird back to its perch. “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “So where’s the money come from? Irene’s mother?”

  “That’s a sore subject.” Hackbutt trudged along with his pail. “Between you and me, they had a big fight. Her mother doesn’t understand about Irene’s art. She hates feminists. We have to do everything ourselves. Irene’s a free spirit.”

  “The project I have in mind might be able to help with that.” Piat caught Hackbutt’s head move out of the corner of his eye, and he said quickly, “Maybe you could support Irene’s art and she wouldn’t have to go crawling to her mother.”

  Hackbutt put the bucket down and folded his arms over his skinny chest. “You better tell me about that.”

  “I don’t want to tempt you to do something you don’t want to do, Digger.”

  “It’s legit?”

  “Oh, shit yes, well, if that’s what’s bothering you— Yeah, this is top-drawer, Dig. Have I ever bullshitted you? You know I was into some shitty stuff in Southeast; so were you, smuggling those parrots—”

  “Irene doesn’t know about that!”

  “I’m just saying, this isn’t anything like that. This is US policy. The most important kind.” He lowered his voice as if he were going to pronounce the secret name of Yahweh. “Anti-terrorism.”

  “I told you, I haven’t got the guts for that stuff.”

  “Not that kind of ‘antiterrorism’. This is sort of social. It’s a matter of contact. And maybe recruitment. You remember how that goes. Shmoozing. If anything starts to go down, the whole thing’ll be moved to other people.”

  “I’m not very social, Jack.”

  Piat knew that, and he was looking at Hackbutt’s wild hair and his scraggy beard and his bloodstained clothes and thinking that anything social was going to take a total makeover. But that wasn’t his problem “You’d be fine.”

  “Why me?”

  It was the moment he had been aiming toward. It was either going to make everything else a piece of cake, or it was going to end it with the finality of the cleaver. He leaned closer and almost whispered, “The birds.”

  Hackbutt didn’t get it. He looked as if he didn’t get it and he said so. Piat, his own arms folded now because he was cold, the early sun behind clouds that were piling over the whole sky, said, “You’re an authority on falconry. No, you are, Dig, don’t deny it. But you also love the birds. That love comes through in everything—when you handle them, when you talk about them. It’s great—it’s nice, it’s a good quality. It’s what makes you right for this project and it’s what would make the project easy for you. See—” He looked up where the sun should have been and saw only a bright smudge behind deepening gray. “The means to make contact with a certain guy is through falconry. He’s like you—he lives for the birds”. Piat hoped it was true. He could push invention only so far.

  “He flies them.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Is he an Arab?”

  That caught Piat off guard. It was an obvious leap—It was the guess on which he was building the tale—but not one he’d expected Hackbutt to make. “You’re getting ahead of me, man. What’s the rule—we find out when we need to know?”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, no—” He put his hand on Hackbutt’s arm and then let go. “It would be meeting this individual and talking birds with him, letting him get to know you a little. Then, if that goes well, then the powers that be maybe would make a bird available to you to give him or something. Then—”

  “What kind of bird?”

  “Well, I don’t know birds, Dig—”

  “Do I get to pick the bird? There are some fantastic birds out there, Jack, I’d give my left nut just to handle one of them! Is that the way it would work?”

  “That’s the way it could work, I guess. You’re the expert here, after all. Sure, I’d think you could maybe write your own ticket about that.” Would Partlow buy it? Did it matter?

  Hackbutt was hot-eyed. “There are some incredible birds out there! But Jeez, man, they cost thousands—I mean, big five figures!”

  Piat knew he was overstepping his bounds. Still, what the hell. “The US is the richest country in the world, Dig.”

  Hackbutt looked away, his mouth working. Was he calculating figures? Almost without voice, he muttered, “Wow,” and picked up the bucket. He unlatched a gate and then turned back. “I don’t want to seem mercenary, Jack, but—Irene’s installation, and everything—what kind of money are we talking? For me?”

  On firmer ground, Piat said, “Fifty thou?”

  Hackbutt’s lips moved: fifty.

  “If you score.”

  “God, I’d love to do that for Renie. God, that’d be great.”

  They went down the pens, feeding and handling birds, Piat lying back, letting Hackbutt think it over. They were heading for the farther pens where the older, trained birds were, and Hackbutt said as if out of nowhere, “Let’s trot it past Irene. I think it’s a fantastic opportunity. Incredible.” He beamed at Piat.

  A woman after her bath was always attractive to Piat. There was something about the skin, which seemed whiter, cooler, enormously tactile. If you added to this the baking of fresh bread, the appeal was overwhelming. He wanted to put her on the rug and go to it. Unfortunately, her husband was standing next to him.

  Irene smiled at him as if they had a secret. “Almost done,” she said. She was back in the day’s long-skirted dress, without jewelry, little makeup that he could see on her broad face. She was a fairly tall woman, not Rubenesque or heavy but strong. Vegetarianism hadn’t made her thin the way it had Hackbutt. “Surprised?’ she said.

  “The bread? I guess I am. I didn’t figure you to cook.” Piat was surprised.

  “I’m a damned good cook. I do great country ham
and shit like that, or I used to.”

  “Bread smells fantastic.” He was laying it on too thick, but the smell of the bread—he pushed his mind back into the role of case officer.

  “Baking bread is an art.” She opened the oven, looked in, poked something. “Did you boys talk?”

  “We did. Now you two need to talk.” That seemed to please her.

  Hackbutt went into the small living room, leaving the two of them in the kitchen.

  She took the bread out and put it on the already littered table. One loaf was a low-mounded oval with coarse salt and something else on the top; the other was more ordinary, but both were beautifully browned and high. “No tasting,” she said. “It has to cool.” She came past him, stopped where he was in the doorway. She kissed him lightly on the lips. “So do I.” She smiled. “All things in good time.” She went out.

  When he left, Piat paused at the dog again. This time, it sniffed his extended hand, then looked at him. He tried to pet it, but it withdrew its head; something like a warning, no more than the sound of the most distant thunder, came from its throat.

  “You’re a tough sell, doggie. Thank God you’re not the falconer.”

  Explaining Irene and her importance (tactically, not sexually) didn’t go down so well with Dave.

  “It was great until she got involved,” Piat said as if he hadn’t planned it that way. “Then I had hell’s own time with it.”

  “What the fuck did you even let her near it for?” Before Piat could answer, Dave shouted, “It’s not the way you do it! You don’t recruit the fucking girlfriend!” His broad face was red. Dave had been to the Ranch and had taken the courses, and so he knew at least in theory how things were done. Piat again had the feeling that he hadn’t put the theory into practice much.

  “This ‘girlfriend’ is different.”

  “You deal with the guy alone and keep her out of it. That’s how it’s done!”

  “There’d be no deal if I had.”