Peregrine

by William Bayer

  “If I follow you,” she said, “you’re saying that someone’s responsible for this attack.”

  “Well—indirectly. What probably happened is that a falconer got hold of her, put jesses on her and started training her, and then she escaped. Now she’s here in New York and doesn’t know what to do. There are lots of pigeons for her, if she knew how to kill them, but she’s lost the ability to forage for herself. Still, she knows instinctively how to attack— circle high up in the air, fasten onto something, and swoop down. She sees this young woman skating. The way she’s moving is curious and catches her eye. So she goes into a stoop, knocks the girl down and rips her up, and then she looks around—you can see it on the film. She looks around in utter helplessness, because the dead skater’s no use to her at all. So she flies off, still hungry, to rest on a building ledge somewhere. Maybe she’ll start after pigeons. Maybe she’ll fly out of the city and settle somewhere else. Maybe she’ll just starve, which seems rather likely to me, because there’s something helpless in the bird’s eyes after the kill that speaks to me of woe.”

  Pam wasn’t sure she agreed with that. She found the bird’s expression just after the kill terrifying in the extreme. Its eyes spoke to her of blood-lust and rapture and hysteria, not of woe or hunger or helplessness, as Wendel had said.

  “Now that I can see the jesses,” he told her, “I just can’t blame the peregrine. We mustn’t fear birds. We must appreciate them and coexist with them. It’s man we should fear. He’s the most dangerous creature on the earth.”

  Pam escorted him back to the reception room, and as soon as he left, she went to Penny Abrams and asked to speak to Herb.

  “The peregrine story?”

  Pam nodded. Penny waved her in.

  Herb was all open arms and leering grin. He even rose out of his chair and placed his hands on her shoulders, a gesture of affection that was extraordinary for him unless the person upon whom he lavished it had something valuable to give.

  “Great piece last night. What did you think of my talk? Great for morale, huh? The show’s really taking off.”

  “Really?”

  “You bet. Station’s running spots all day boosting our six o’clock. Just got a call from the ad department. They want to do something on you. Sixty seconds or so. A montage. You know: ‘Pam Barrett, reporter, at work.’” He laughed. “You’re at your desk in the newsroom fielding calls. Then you’re out in the city on location. ‘This is Pam Barrett in Brooklyn. This is Pam Barrett at Madison Square Garden. This is Pam Barrett in Rockefeller Center with the latest news on the attacking peregrine.’ Like it? Bet your ass you do. You’re getting to be hot stuff around here. I’m going to be featuring you more and more.”

  He glanced at his watch. Expansive time was over. “Okay,” he said, in his staccato news-director voice. “What’s going on?”

  She spoke as fast as she could, told him what Wendel had said. She mentioned the note she’d gotten, too, but Herb dismissed that with a wave.

  “All right,” she said. “But what do you think about the jesses?”

  “I’d say they prove the bird was owned. Still owned, as far as I’m concerned. Yeah—I like that. I think you got something there.” He pondered a moment. Pam could see he was intrigued. She sat quietly, because she knew that when Herb pondered a facet of a story he was looking for an angle.

  The angle was everything; the pitch was more important than the thing being pitched. “Look,” he said. “There’re all sorts of animal nuts in New York. All kinds of animal freaks. There was this guy, I remember, who had this lion, completely detoothed and declawed, and the guy slept nude with it, this huge hunk of cat. Now let’s suppose this peregrine came out of a situation like that. Like it escaped from some freak falconer’s apartment. Now it’s loose in the city—The Great Killer Bird Is Loose. See what I’m getting at?”

  She nodded.

  “Now, thing is—we don’t want to go with it right away. My strategy is, let it cool down tonight, but have Hopkins mention you’re working on new developments. Tease the audience. Make them think we’re going to show the attack again. Which we’ll do, of course, when we’re ready and we’ve got something else, something new to play, like, say, tomorrow night or Friday, when we come in with the peregrine again this time really hard.”

  He smacked his fist into his palm.

  “Yeah. We’ll get the art department to blow up the frames that show the jesses. Really big. Put them on slides and back-project so the bird is huge behind you and the jesses can be clearly seen. Then we bring in Wendel and he comes down on falconry. In the meantime, you get hold of a pro-falconry guy, maybe a real falconer, and we put him on and let’s say he denies it—not the jesses, but that falconry’s bad and that a falconer is responsible for the attack. Then we have something going between these guys, a real back-and-forth. You intervene. Moderate. You’re on top of this thing. Okay?”

  “Then what?”

  “Then there’re several ways we can go. You can go out and do a backgrounder on the bird and falcon black market. Dig up anything you can find with birds attacking human beings. And don’t forget responsibility— we’ve got to find someone to take the rap. If it’s a falconer—great, if you can find him. But if you can’t, we got to pin it on someone else. I don’t know who. You find out. Police maybe. Or health department. Wildlife authorities. Whoever the hell’s responsible for this crazy bird flying around. Like the girl’s mother said: ‘Nobody cares. The mayor doesn’t care. The police don’t care.’ God—I love stuff like that. Well, I’ll tell you who cares. Channel 8— that’s who cares. Us! So we go out and find the people responsible and we bring them in and we drag them through the coals. We really do a number on this thing, and meantime keep the pressure on with the viewers that the bird’s going to attack again.”

  He sat back. He looked exhausted.

  This was vintage Herb Greene, Pam realized—Herb putting out all his energy, the Great Newsman at the height of his powers. “Just get the raw material. Bring it in and we’ll orchestrate. Remember—we got the footage, we’ve led every other station, and now we got to stay ahead. We’re the only ones who know about the jesses. Let’s keep it that way until we’re ready to break it Friday night.”

  He winked at her, lowered his voice.

  She could tell he was winding down.

  “You know, if you play this right, Pam, you just might win one of those big-deal TV journalism awards. They always go to the bleeding-heart stories—mistreated-retarded-kids; the-synagogue-they-keep-burning-down. Well, how about poor-little-birds-sold-on-the-black-market-to-falconry-freaks? Or, better still—big-bad-bird-strikes-back-at-man-for-screwing-up-its-reproductive-cycle.” He laughed. “I love it. Fabulous ….”

  Pamela Barret liked to think of herself as a fairly steady person, but she also knew she was excitable and could be manipulated into doing things that normally might give her pause.

  Now she sat back at her desk in the Channel 8 newsroom, amid the swirl of other reporters typing away and working the telephones, and she asked herself if she wasn’t yielding to that weakness, letting Herb push her in a direction she didn’t want to go.

  That same intuitive feel for the news that made him such a great newsman also made him a person who knew which buttons to push to get what he wanted from his staff. On one level, he’d engaged her by sharing his cynical view. On another, he’d sensed her ambition, and had reached her deeply with talk of an award. By dangling that possibility, he’d been saying in effect:

  “There’s plenty in this thing for both of us. Do it right, the ratings will go up, and you may end up a journalistic heroine.”

  An Emmy. A Peabody. Just the notion was having its effect. It stimulated her. She could feel it spinning her around.

  She shook her head, wanted to clear it.

  She didn’t want to be so easily controlled. But still the thought kept coming back: It could happen; there’ve been crazier things.

  It was nearly n
oon. The newsroom was filling up. Reporters were back from their morning coverages around the city. At twelve, the editors would file into Herb’s office to rough out the sequence for the six o’clock.

  The pressure was on; she had to decide. It wasn’t just a story of urban terror. She saw it could be more. There were issues: falconry, protection of an endangered species, manipulation of wildlife. Should she continue to sensationalize, or could she raise the level, hold the story in moral focus while still telling it passionately?

  She felt that she could, that somehow Herb, with his talk of an award, had given her a framework in which to work. She could be passionate without being cheap. She alone had been there; she alone had seen the bird. By the quality of her engagement she could become the formidable journalist she so much wished to be.

  She knew she’d have to collect lots of material and be prepared to move quickly if the bird attacked again. She doubted that it would—Wendel had seemed so certain—but the point now was to use the attack to explore more important things. The black market, for instance—it would have meaning now because of the peregrine.

  She called the research department, asked them to find her a falconry expert, then called the art department and asked for slides of the frames in which the jesses could be seen. She ordered lunch, and while she waited she called Carl Wendel and arranged a taping date. She booked the taping studio, then called the city health department. She asked to speak to someone about the bird.

  The responsible parties were out to lunch. “Have them call me,” she said. “This is Pam Barrett, Channel 8 News.” She could hear the secretary at the other end pause, then suck in her breath.

  Joel stopped by her desk. He was sweaty and fatigued. “Been out all morning on a fire. Landlord arson. A block of tenements in the Bronx.”

  They shared her sandwich; Joel ordered another, and they shared that one as well. They had an early-morning assignment together, a football scrimmage drill. It would be her last sports piece for a while, since she’d be working full-time on the peregrine.

  “Look at him strut!” Joel gestured with his head. Pam looked up to see Claudio Hernandez walking by her desk. “I was with him all morning. What a gigantic pain.”

  Claudio was Channel 8’s resident Hispanic. Herb had hired him out of L.A. He’d been a Golden Gloves boxer, then studied journalism at U.S.C. Although he was a Chicano, almost all his pieces had to do with Puerto Ricans. Herb didn’t think it made much difference. “Spic is spic,” he said. The research department called back. They’d found her a falconer. His name was Jay Hollander, he lived in Manhattan, and he was one of the top falconry experts in the world. He’d see Pam that evening, but on background-only at first. If she was serious, he’d be happy to help her. She was invited to his house for an after-dinner drink.

  The phone rang again. It was the health department spokesman. Joel stood up—he had to run. She blew him a kiss, then punched the button on her phone.

  “We handle rats and roaches,” the spokesman said, “and sometimes dogs and cats. Birds—if they’re caged. We inspect the pet stores, of course.”

  “What about animal bites?”

  “Yeah, we have a section for that.”

  “Well, since this bird tore out this girl’s throat, I’d say that section was involved.”

  “No, Miss Barrett, it is not involved, though, of course, we have processed a report. A wild bird flies into the city and kills someone and then flies out. We are not responsible. It came in by air.” He paused. “You could try the F.A.A.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I thought so. You’re not going to hang this one on us.”

  “Who can I hang it on?”

  He paused again. Every conceivable event was in some city department’s jurisdiction. She imagined him thumbing through his city government telephone book.

  “Frankly, I haven’t the slightest idea. The sky’s full of birds. Seagulls and pigeons—they’re flying all over the place. They come and go. They cross municipal and state lines all the time. I don’t see how we can be responsible for what they do, unless, of course, the bird has been designated as a pest.”

  He was a bureaucratic imbecile, but she took notes anyway—she might be able to use them later for comic relief.

  But then it occurred to her that a dog owner is responsible when his dog attacks and bites. If the peregrine was owned, as Wendel said the jesses proved, then by the same principle the owner—the falconer—would be responsible, and that meant tracking him down, which probably meant talking to the police.

  She was immersed in this train of thought when her telephone rang again.

  It was the station art director. He wanted to discuss an idea.

  “We’re making up those slides you ordered, and we’re thinking about a story logo, too. Something that says ‘big killer bird’ that we can project behind when you talk.”

  He was referring to one of the gimmicks on Channel 8 News, the screen behind the “Eyewitness Desk.”

  When a reporter covered a story in the field, he introduced his report from this desk. Behind it there was a screen. Slides were projected onto it from behind—usually an action still from the story itself. But in some cases, especially when the story was a continuing one, the art department worked up a simple, powerful graphic image that reminded the audience what the story was about.

  “We were playing around with some ideas,” the art director said, “an outsized silhouette of the bird or maybe a close-up of her claws. But when I looked at the film again, I thought of something else. I was really scared by her eyes. I thought we should concentrate on them.”

  “You mean the two eyes staring straight out.”

  “Actually, I was thinking about a profile. One huge ferocious eye. Powerful, you know—all-seeing and voracious. By using the profile, we get a chance to show the beak.”

  “Sounds great,” said Pam. “Of course it’s up to Herb.”

  “Yeah. Of course. But I wanted to consult you first. I didn’t want to mess around with it behind your back.”

  She thanked him, and after she hung up she realized the importance of what he’d said. She’d never been consulted about a graphic before. That she was this time was a signal that she was no longer regarded as just the girl who interviewed the jocks.

  When the research people gave her Jay Hollander’s address, she’d expected to go to an apartment. But when she arrived that night on East Seventieth Street, it turned out to be a sumptuous town house on one of the best blocks in New York.

  Hollander was a tall, assured, good-looking man in his early forties with gray eyes and perfectly groomed dark hair. They shook hands, he smiled at her warmly, then led her upstairs to his library, which looked out over a garden in the back.

  The library was impressive. An entire wall was devoted to his collection of falconry books. When she asked to see them, he pulled some of them out.

  “Most are in English and German, the two great falconry languages,” he said. “But I also have books in Persian and Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch. There’s hardly a country where falconry wasn’t practiced, and one of the interesting things is the similarity of the material—how to obtain a bird, ideas about training—all the worthwhile lore is confirmed again and again.”

  The wall facing the bookshelves was covered with framed paintings and prints, all of them showing falconry scenes. There were hand-illuminated pages from medieval manuscripts of men and women on horseback carrying hooded hawks on their wrists, and delicate paintings of court falconers kneeling before kings and offering them exotic hunting birds. A portrait of Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen hung above the fireplace. Hollander identified him. “His De Arte Venandi Cum Avibus—’The Art of Falconry’— is our greatest text. The man thought of nothing else. He’s the exemplar of our sport.”

  But it was the third wall, the one that faced the garden windows, that fascinated Pam the most. Here were displayed life-size sculptures of h
awks and falcons, each resting in a separate niche.

  He named them for her. “Saker. Merlin. Luger. Goshawk. Cooper’s hawk. Icelandic gyrfalcon. Peregrine.”

  She paused before this last sculpture.

  “Was the one you saw marked like that?”

  She nodded. “But much bigger.”

  “That’s a male, a tiercel. The female peregrine is a third again as large.”

  “I think the bird I saw was maybe twice this big.”

  Hollander frowned. “Yes, Carl told me. Did you bring the photographs?”

  She handed him the blow-ups made from the film, watched him as he studied them. He struck her as an interesting man, a little formal, clearly rich, obviously immersed in falconry.

  The research people had called him one of the great experts in the world.

  She didn’t doubt it now that she’d seen his library. But as she observed him, she realized she’d been struck most by something else. It was what he’d said about Frederick II: exemplar—an unusual word. An “exemplar” was a person regarded as worthy of imitation. He might have said “role model”; “exemplar” implied a real adulation, almost religious in its intensity.

  “I didn’t know you’d talked to Dr. Wendel,” she said.

  “Oh, yes. He called me yesterday.”

  “I kind of got the feeling he disliked falconers.”

  “He hates us.” Hollander smiled. “But not personally. We’re civilized enemies. We talk.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Just that he saw jesses and that the bird was very big.”

  “Do you agree?”

  “Hard to tell unless I see her. But she looks extraordinarily large.” He glanced up from the photographs, met Pam’s eyes. “Tell me, what did you think of Carl?”

  “Well—he seemed to know his birds.” She felt uncomfortable with the question. She’d come to question him, not be quizzed herself.

  “Yes he does, and he was right. There are jesses.” He turned back to the photographs. “But this idea of his that this bird was twisted by a falconer—that’s just absurd.”