Raptor

by Judith Van GIeson

  “That’s called mantling,” said Leo. “It’s her way of keeping her food to herself.”

  Mimi was fascinating, but she was not the falcon of myth and legend for which people are willing to kill and pay a lot of money. Even Leo seemed disappointed. “There are no good hawks and bad hawks,” he said. “You can say that about people, but not about hawks, hawks just do what they do, but my Mimi is well trained. I trained her myself. She’s loyal, too. She’s not gonna fly away from me on some winter wind.”

  But there’s a price for loyalty. Mimi wouldn’t stun wolves and dive at speeds of two hundred miles an hour. She was a female, but she wasn’t big and she wasn’t white either. She was a kestrel, the falcon of commoners, not of kings.

  We left her to her mouse, went back out front and sat on a split-rail fence. “I’m gonna be real sorry if they send March away,” Leo said. “Real sorry. March is a good guy and all heart from the belt up. His life wouldn’t be worth a damn in a federal prison. There are too many people inside already who are there because of him. Anyone knows him knows he didn’t kill Pedersen, or anybody else either. Betts knows it, too. He’s got some other reason for locking March up.”

  “That thought occurred to me, but I don’t know what the reason is, do you?”

  “Guess you’d have to ask Betts that.”

  “I did. I didn’t get an answer.”

  “He can be a tight-lipped son of a bitch when he wants to be. I don’t suppose he told you what Pedersen’s been up to either.”

  “Only the obvious.”

  “Pedersen was pretty obvious, all right, and so’s that damn government. Well, here’s the way I see it.” He hitched himself up higher on the fence, settling in for a good yarn with himself exactly where he wanted to be—the center of attention. “Sandy was a fool. He got himself arrested for dealing in elk horns a few years back and you got to try real hard to get arrested by the federal government for anything, especially that. He was sent up for three years, out in six months—parole. No sooner does he get out of the pen than he’s driving a new Buick, visiting every bar in Montana, talking about the raptors he’s got to sell. He’s got peregrines, he’s got gyrs, he’s even got bald eagles for the Indians, and he’s looking for buyers. Pretty soon he starts calling up falconers all over the West and then before you know it, he’s snooping around here telling me about this gyrfalcon, largest, whitest falcon in the sky. Can stun a wolf, did you know that?”

  “Yes, in the Middle Ages they were used to hunt wolves.” If he’d heard me, he didn’t let it show.

  “It’s a passager bird, he says, just the right age, the most beautiful bird he’s ever seen and he wants to sell it to me. There’s no way you could come by a bird like that legally.” He shook his head, took the cowboy hat off, put it back on. What would that do to a man with a Fay and a Mimi?

  “It was like bringing Marilyn Monroe around and asking if she could spend the night,” he said wistfully.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I’d think about it, but it’s illegal to buy and sell raptors and the price he was asking was a whole lot more than I could afford anyway. So what’s it sound like to you?”

  “It sounds like…”

  “A sting operation. Damn right and Pedersen was about as subtle as a buffalo. Could hear him coming a mile away with your blinders on. The second time he comes out here to talk to me a cherry picker is right behind him. It sets up out there like it’s playing with the phone lines, but there was nothing wrong with my phone. I called the phone company just to make sure that it wasn’t their truck. It was the feds trying to tape my conversation with Pedersen. They didn’t get nothing from me but a suggestion of what else they could do with their money.”

  The fence railing was digging a channel into my butt. I stood up. “Betts lied to me.”

  “No he didn’t. You think about it for a minute. I know Betts pretty well. Maybe he didn’t tell you the whole truth, but he didn’t lie to you either.”

  What had Betts said? “I am not concealing anything about your client.”

  “Just last Friday Pedersen calls me up again and tells me he’s got an offer for a hundred thousand dollars and he’s giving me one last chance to up it and get the gyr. That’s a whole lot of money for a bird, but I guess there was someone around ready to pay it because I stop hearing from Pedersen and the next thing you know he’s dead. The government’s trying to entrap someone, but whoever it is didn’t kill him.”

  “Why not?” He heard what he wanted to. He looked down from his railing, at me, at the ground. He was the almighty man, I was the little woman. The egos of middle-aged men never cease to amaze me.

  “Because they didn’t get the bird.” He spoke slowly like he was teaching me the language.

  “So?”

  “So, if they didn’t get the bird, the government hasn’t got anything on ’em, and there’s no reason to kill Pedersen. Anyway anyone who really wanted that gyr would get it first and kill Pedersen later, don’t you think?”

  “Not necessarily. Maybe the killer knows how to trap the gyr, or can find someone else to do it. In the eyes of the law anyone who negotiated with Pedersen would be guilty whether that person actually purchased the bird or not. It could be a falconer who found out Pedersen had set him up and wanted to get rid of the source of the evidence.”

  “It wasn’t a falconer, I’m tellin’ you. There are plenty of other people around who hated Pedersen’s guts. That man had it comin’ and goin’.” He climbed down from the fence. “You give my best to March. Goodness is a rough trail, especially where he is. And don’t forget to say hello to that girlfriend of his, Kate.” He grinned. “Now there’s a woman with spirit. She can park her boots under my bed anytime she wants to. I like the way she moves, like she’s carrying an armful of puppies, and I like the way she drives tearing up the highway like a bat out of Carlsbad.”

  “I hear she speaks well of you, too.”

  “I bet she does, but I’ll tell you something. She hated Pedersen’s guts and she’s got a lot more traps in her shed than I got here.”

  8

  SO OUR GOVERNMENT was out trawling for poachers. When they spread the net they would pull in a dolphin (the prince) along with the tuna (Heinz). That could explain why Betts wanted so badly to get someone in jail for the murder. Pedersen had been a government operative and the government does not take kindly to the murder of one of its own.

  A mile or so beyond the iron archway of the L&W I pulled off the highway and picked through the tapes in March’s glove compartment until I found a map. Freezeout East, where the prince was staying, was only fifty miles north. Hadn’t he asked me to call as soon as I spoke to March? Betts acted fast; it might be our last chance to talk before he pulled in the net. I couldn’t imagine the prince in jail, even a minimum security country club where he could bring his own servants and perfect his golf game, but Heinz was the kind of operator who could make himself at home in prisons all over the globe and probably already had. Maybe that was where he’d learned his English.

  I headed north, alone with my sharpened perceptions, through the wide open spaces of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, the purple mountains’ majesty on my left. The Blackfeet are a plains tribe famous for a dance in which they rip the flesh from their chests. How different they are, I thought, from the peaceful Pueblo tribes of the Southwest. The Plains Indians were the warriors, the Pueblos were the farmers; the hawks, the sparrows; the predators, the prey. Maybe there was something about the wide openness of the plains that brought out predatory instincts. More likely it was the other way around. The narrow valleys around the Rio Grande, with their temperate weather and soft cliffs that face south to provide sun in the winter and shade in the summer, brought out latent cultivating instincts. After all, man was a hunter for hundreds of thousands of years before he planted his first kernel of corn.

  I don’t live far from the Rio Grande but it hasn’t brought out any desire to garden in me. I ha
ve a cactus that has forgotten whatever it knew about water and a Kid who doesn’t require a lot of tending either. Does that make me a hunter? When you think about it, the hunter has an interesting relationship to the natural world. She waits and watches and enters the mind of the prey. Her senses are sharpened but she’s not really alone because she is always relating to her intended victim. There is a mythological dimension to the hunter, the sense that she has a special wisdom, but what does she know except her victims? It’s the hunter with her knowledge of the interconnectedness of species who wants to preserve them, if only so they’ll be around in sufficient quantity to kill. The hunter understands that nature has a carefully worked-out system of checks and balances, or did before man came along. Predators keep the herd healthy by killing the old and weak. They also keep any one species from destructively multiplying. To cultivators, however, predators are pests to be gotten rid of.

  The Freezeout East Hotel stood at the edge of the Rockies, one of those places built by the railroads in their heyday to lure tourists from East to West. It was a massive building supported by uncut logs about six feet in diameter, an Adirondack camp magnified a few hundred times. It wasn’t the peak season and the only vehicles in the parking lot were the prince’s red Mercedes and a couple of pickup trucks. I was hoping to have a few words alone with Heinz, but didn’t know how I’d manage it.

  I parked the van, walked up to the porch and let myself in. The place was as big and empty as the hotel in The Shining. Down some back corridor I expected to find a crazed Jack Nicholson sitting alone at his desk typing maniacally, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” There was no one to be seen at the front desk or anyplace else.

  If I were the predator and Heinz the prey, how would I track him? I tried to enter the mind of a polyester fellow who negotiated in the international black market. Where would he be at dusk of a November day? In the bar, of course, but this bar was closed. I tried again. My prey would be frustrated, angry, in need of escape. That would place him in his room with a good detective novel or bad TV. Stalking the prince was easier. At sundown he’d naturally be in his room, prostrating himself toward Mecca and praying to Allah.

  I walked up the stairway, down a long carpeted hall, silent as my running shoes could be. There was nothing but more silence behind the first ten pine doors, but then my efforts were rewarded, and I head a guttural, mystical mumbling. The prince at prayer. I didn’t think Heinz was servile enough to sleep on the carpet outside the master’s door, but I didn’t think he would be far away either. I stopped at the next doorway and eavesdropped on the relentlessly cheerful, international language of a TV commercial. I knocked.

  Heinz came to the door holding a glass with something dark brown and unappetizing inside. He was wearing polyester pants and a shiny shirt. His face had a mashed-in, flattened look as if he had just walked into the door. He had pale skin, clipped hair and flat reptilian eyes, a man who’d be at home wherever snakes meet. “Ms. Hamel,” he said, attempting a smile.

  “I’d like to talk to you,” I said. “Do you think we could go downstairs? I wouldn’t want to disturb the prince while he is saying his prayers.”

  “Of course.” The smile didn’t make it; the flattened-out bones were working against the lips. His eyes brightened, though, with the obsequious glow of an operator about to make a deal. He thought I had come to tell him that March wanted nothing better than to hasten the extinction of another species and possibly replace present counsel with Dwight Stillman.

  Heinz followed me down the hallway and the stairs, obviously accustomed to stepping lightly. If I hadn’t turned around occasionally I never would have guessed he was there.

  We arranged ourselves on a sofa in the lobby where some invisible person had turned on the lights, illuminating the massive beams crisscrossing the peaks of the cathedral ceiling.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” I said.

  “The prince likes to be comfortable.” The lips persisted, the bones yielded, and he managed a stiff grin. “So your client has decided to accept our offer.” He didn’t bother to make it a question.

  “Not exactly. He wants to know a little more about the prince before he makes up his mind.” Maybe the words weren’t March’s, or the thoughts either, but the goal was. “If he is going to take a great personal risk by escaping from jail to get the prince his bird, he’d like to know exactly why the prince wants it.”

  “Prince Sahid is the second son.” He stopped as if that explained something.

  “So?”

  “His father, the king, is dying. Cancer. But nobody knows this, only the sons. The king loves falcons and he wants more than anything in the world to have a white female. There will be a big party for him next month. The prince wants to give him his dream—the bird—before he dies.”

  “And he probably also wants to get his fair share of the inheritance, too,” I thought out loud.

  “It’s not like that. In Saudi Arabia people respect their parents. The prince is very good to his father.”

  Good to his father, bad to the gyr. The prince was thinking locally but not acting globally. “Have you been working for the royal family long?”

  “This is the first time.” There was a slight twitch at the corner of a hooded lid. It was a big-time career move, naturally he was eager to succeed.

  Heinz waved his hand, a gesture he had probably picked up from his boss, only he lacked the prince’s natural grace and long fingers. Heinz’s own fingers were short and stubby and his nails bitten down. “Money is no problem, you know.”

  “But my client’s health could be. After all, the last person who tried to remove that bird from its nest took a high dive into an empty pool and that was after he’d had his face blown away.”

  Did he believe March had committed the crime? Did he not? I was curious to see his reaction, but there wasn’t one. “I assume that the day Pedersen died he had gone to the aerie to get you the bird,” I continued.

  “That was our agreement.”

  “You trusted him?”

  “Not exactly. Pedersen was playing with us, trying to get the price up. We made him an offer and he said he had to think about it. Then he came back and said he had a better bid. The prince went to school in England. He never learned to bargain like the old man. Everybody says bargaining is natural to the Arabs but they have to be taught like everybody else, and the prince was never taught. Every time Pedersen comes back, the prince offers more. He is an impatient boy and he doesn’t care how much he spends, but it’s bad for my reputation to pay too much.” His reptilian eyes got a few degrees colder. “I did not like Pedersen. He was a liar. I prefer to deal with someone I trust. Your client is honest, right?”

  “As honest as can be.” Pedersen provoked interesting reactions in those who knew him, a fool to some, a knave to others, like the Koshares at Pueblo ceremonials who paint themselves in black and white stripes and weave among the dancers, acting like clowns while they draw the heat from the crowd. Heinz was telling me too much. Maybe it was the confidence my professional manner inspired, maybe it was the poorly developed ingratiating skill of a naturally uningratiating man. “But you did trust Pedersen to bring you the bird?” I asked.

  “In the black market once an agreement is made it is an agreement. We don’t have lawyers or courts. You give your word, you keep it. If you don’t…”

  You get your face blown off and fall from a great height. He didn’t need to elaborate. “Do you think Pedersen was betraying another bidder by promising the gyr to you and that’s why he got killed?”

  “You want to know what I think?” It didn’t sound like he was asked very often. “I don’t think there was anybody else. I think Pedersen was making another buyer up. Who else would pay a hundred thousand for a bird? I think the person who killed him was a conservationist. They care about animals, but they don’t care about people. If it was your client, I would say congratulations to him except that he has kept us so far from getting the
bird.”

  “So you were going to meet Pedersen Wednesday night and get the gyr?”

  “Yes.” He was beginning to get suspicious of my direct examination. The hoods over his eyes lowered.

  But I only had one question more. “How were you going to get her out of the country?”

  He shrugged. “No problem. The prince had diplomatic immunity. He can take out anything he wants in his diplomatic pouch. Customs will not bother the prince.”

  Betts’s eyes would flutter when he found that out.

  “Good evening.” Those words were spoken regally by His Majesty, who leaned over the rustic balcony and smiled at me from the second story. “So your client has decided to work with us.”

  “We’ve been discussing it. Why don’t you come down so we can talk.”

  The prince walked down the stairway. With his slender boyish figure, he had a natural elegance even without the robes. This time he wore a white shirt of the finest cotton, a number of gold chains, and Ralph Lauren jeans.

  “Ms. Hamel and I have been having an interesting discussion,” Heinz said.

  “I’m certain you have,” said the prince. “Have you agreed on terms?”

  It’s tough to have a job where you represent someone as an agent, a lawyer or a black marketeer. When you get right down to it, the person you are representing almost always thinks he can do it better himself. The prince already seemed eager to get rid of Heinz.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “My client’s first concern is for the welfare of the bird. Before he will even consider your offer, he must know how the gyr will be treated.”

  “Excellently,” said the prince. “My father has the best falconers in Arabia. Their families and ours have been intertwined for generations. If the welfare of the gyrfalcon is his only concern there is no problem. She will be treated like a princess—even better, she will be treated like a prince.” He threw his transparent ball way up into the beams and clapped his hands. “So, if we have an agreement we must have some coffee to celebrate. Heinz, would you see if you can find some?”