Peregrine

by William Bayer

  He turned slightly, seemed to be scanning the sculpted falconry birds in the niches on the wall. She wanted to ask him why he’d been looking so hard at her, then knew she couldn’t possibly ask him that. She shook her head; she was getting confused. She was there as a journalist, but she was also there as a woman whom he’d signaled he found attractive. There were things he’d said that as a reporter she was required to question him about, and other things to which a follow-up question would be an insensitive affront.

  He turned back to her. He was ready now, he said, fully ready to concede that someone, somehow, had managed to train a falcon to kill human beings, an incredible feat unknown in the entire history of falconry, but which now clearly had been achieved.

  “There aren’t that many of us who could do it,” he said. “Maybe a hundred master falconers in all the world. Janek had me make a list. He intends to run everybody down and start eliminating names.

  “That sounds pretty methodical. I see he’s not the Sherlock Holmsey type.”

  “You’d really like to beat him out on this, wouldn’t you?”

  “Now that I know he thinks I’m insincere—yes.”

  Jay smiled. “Eliminating suspects—I guess that’s what a police detective ought to do. But he didn’t ask me anything about the bird, and that’s where I think you may have some luck, because in my opinion if you could discover where she came from, that could lead you to the man.”

  “And you didn’t tell him that?” She was surprised. Was Jay playing a game with the police?

  He shook his head. “You came to me about the bird black market first. Now if Janek asks me, of course I’ll advise him, but I don’t think he’s going to ask. You and he have different kinds of minds.”

  She remembered that the bird black market had been Herb’s angle, one that he said might win her a prize. It was funny, she thought, the way things worked out: Janek accused her of being inflammatory, but maybe thinking in terms of an angle on the story was the best way to find the falconer.

  “Now how did this gigantic bird come into being? That’s the question I’ve been playing with. It’s occurred to me she might be a hybrid, a cross between a peregrine and something bigger, with the peregrine traits dominant. If she is a hybrid, that points straight toward a breeder, and there aren’t too many of them around.”

  “How many?”

  “Thirty or so. Carl is one, of course, with his Trust for Raptor Birds. But there’re others, bigger operations scattered around at various universities, and other private breeders, too. But then, even if you could find out that she was captivity-bred, you’d still have to connect her to a man. The man who bought her, of course, the man who trained her and who is flying her now. And I don’t think her breeder would know about that; when a breeder sells, it’s usually through a middleman who makes the final sale.”

  He went over his line of reasoning.

  She followed him closely, couldn’t fault his logic in any way. He said he believed that only an eyass bird, a bird taken from the nest before it had learned to fly, could be trained to attack human beings. A passage falcon, a “passager” who’d flown wild and hunted wild for several months, would have presented the falconer with a classical problem—how to make it willing to attack a species that didn’t normally constitute its prey. “Yes, she would have had to be an eyass,” he said, “because only an eyass doesn’t know what a falcon isn’t supposed to do. And if I’m right, then the question of where she was obtained is very much to the point.”

  “On the black market?”

  Hollander nodded. “Either there or she was captured directly from a nest. But think of the odds: A man gets this idea to train a falcon to attack people in New York, so he goes out and tries to find a peregrine nest, which is practically impossible to find these days. Then, by chance, he finds this freakishly huge peregrine nestling, and he captures her and trains her to do this amazing thing. No. That’s too far out.

  “There’s not a chance in ten million it happened that way. No—he was looking for an eyass to train, and remember, he couldn’t be sure his training would take, so he might have tried to find several birds, hoping at least one of them would work out. So how does he go about it? He goes to an underground bird dealer, places his order, and waits until a bird comes along. And when he hears there’s this huge peregrine for sale, he buys her right away. And that’s got to cost him plenty—a bird so large, so rare.” He paused, looked at her. “You see what I’m getting at?”

  Pam did see. It made perfect sense. Find the black-market dealer who sold the bird, find him and you find the falconer, or at least you pick up his trail.

  “And then it doesn’t matter if the peregrine’s a hybrid,” she said.

  “Exactly. And it doesn’t matter whether she was bred in somebody’s breeding barn or in an ordinary nest. It doesn’t matter how she got so big. What matters is who sold her and to whom. So you forget about breeders and concentrate on the black market. Find the dealer and you save yourself a lot of time.”

  “Hawk-Eye—I guess I should start with him, since he’s the biggest one. I need names, addresses, places to leave word for him to get in touch.”

  “I’ve already made a list for you.”

  He handed her a sheet of paper from his desk.

  She nodded her gratitude. “You know what I like about this—I won’t be competing with the police. I’ll be doing my own journalistic investigation on the bird black market while Janek’s sitting around eliminating names.”

  “And you might get lucky. We’re talking about a gossipy little world. I can’t believe a bird this big changed hands without people having heard about it. There’s no point in being a dealer unless prospective buyers know the goods you’ve got for sale.” He paused. “I guess I should tell you I’m up to something on my own. A defense, a way to neutralize the bird, stop the killing at least until the falconer is caught.”

  “I’m sure Janek was interested in that.”

  “He doesn’t believe in a defense. We’re in New York. There’re thousands of tall buildings. You can’t track a falcon here—it flies behind a building and disappears. He asked me: ‘What am I supposed to do? Station men on top of buildings with rifles and have them try and shoot her down?’ He’s right. There’re too many people and too many places for the bird to hide. But I have an idea. Can’t tell you about it yet. It may not work, and even if it does, it’ll take me a few days to set it up. But if things fall into place, you’ll really have a story. Something extraordinary, I promise you.” He smiled at her. “Don’t worry; I’ll call you first.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  As Marchetti pulled into the street, Janek turned and looked back at Hollander’s house. Pam Barrett was standing on the stoop facing the door waiting for Hollander to open up and Janek thought: There’s no way I’m going to get to her. No way I’m going to get her to quit.

  Their encounter on the steps had not been pleasant, and now he blamed himself. He’d made a mistake, had acted hostile when, in fact, he liked her; had criticized her broadcasts when, in fact, he found them powerful.

  He feared for her, had a hunch something bad was going to happen to her, but instead of telling her that, he’d behaved like a father rebuking a brilliant rebellious child, hoping to stop her by his disapproval but, in fact, ensuring that she would carry on.

  He didn’t know why he felt the way he did, why he cared. She was twenty-five years younger than he, and she probably earned three times more. Glamorous, poised, and now she was becoming famous. There was no reason for him to like her. But he did.

  He saw something in her that other people missed—vulnerability behind her poise. She was being used by everyone—Herb Greene, the falconer, the whole fascinated and terrified town. Something told Janek she couldn’t sustain the burden, that she was being enveloped by her story, and that if she didn’t get out of it, she would end up being crushed.

  He tried to put her out of his mind.

  He had too
much else to think about.

  By a fluke he’d drawn the call to go uptown, talk to some TV people about some crazy letters. Now, on account of that, Peregrine was his. The Big Case he’d been waiting for had come his way at last.

  For the first time in years he felt energized, for the first time since he’d killed Tarry Flynn. He could feel himself coming out of the deep-freeze, growing warmer, hotter by the hour.

  The case consumed him. It was his chance to embrace greatness. He was going to solve it; he had to solve it, though he didn’t yet know how.

  Something eluded him. He had the investigation organized. Morale was high. Everything he was doing was correct. But he lacked inspiration, an insight into the falconer’s mind, the key that would open up the case. It was there, the key, waiting to be found, and sooner or later, he knew, as in the old days when he’d been a brilliant young detective, the tumblers would fall into place, the key would turn, and, finally, he would see.

  “Pull over, Sal.” They were heading south on Lexington. Marchetti slammed on the brakes. “Nothing urgent. Just want to talk.” Sal parked in front of a fire hydrant, then turned and waited for him to speak.

  “Remember the other day you asked me something in the diner.”

  Sal nodded. He hadn’t expected to hear about it so soon.

  “There’re two ways to tell it. The long way with all the shadows, and the short way, just the facts. Here’s the short version. Tarry Flynn was my partner. We were a great team and personally very close. We made a lot of big cases together, including a famous one, a triple rape in a brownstone that was in the papers for weeks. Tarry was a great detective. I’d say he was better than me. He could anticipate and he could improvise on the spur of the moment whenever things started going wrong. The other thing about him was that he was going nuts.

  “Slowly, so slowly I didn’t notice; but he was really going mad. He talked about how he couldn’t stand it when we made a solid case and some junior D.A. blew it or some slick criminal lawyer turned it around and some creep walked out of court. He didn’t just protest about it, didn’t just complain. It made him furious. It distorted him, and sometimes he’d go out of control. He’d say he was going to do something, he was going to administer justice. I didn’t take him seriously. You’ve been around— you’ve heard that kind of talk. Usually it doesn’t mean anything, but with Tarry it did. He meant it, he was serious, and that was something I didn’t discover until it was too late, much too late.

  “There was this minor hood named Tony Scarpa, the kind of creep you could really hate. We brought him in a couple of times, it would look like we had him, and the next thing we’d know he’d be back out on the street. Whenever we ran into him he’d razz us, boast about his connections in the mob. ‘You’re never going to get me, you guys, so you might as well forget it and lay off.’ ‘Sure, Scarpa,’ we’d tell him. ‘We’ll lay off—until the day we get your ass.’ He’d give us the finger and we’d give it to him back. I always laughed, but Tarry didn’t. He just got very mad.

  “‘I really am going to nail him, Frank,’ he told me. ‘When I do, he’s not going to get away.’ I still don’t know why I didn’t listen to him, hear what he was saying underneath. If I had, I could have gotten him help, but I didn’t, and the next thing I knew he was setting Scarpa up. I can’t tell you the whole thing now—it would take me a couple hours. The point is that Tarry went completely out of control. He was living very close to the edge, and he just flipped out over Scarpa, became obsessed with him, and by the time I figured out what was going on we were in a coffee warehouse on Desbrosses Street, it was three in the morning, Tarry had a stolen thirty-eight pressed against Scarpa’s forehead, and Scarpa was on his knees begging for his life.

  “‘Don’t do it, Tarry,’ I told him. ‘You won’t get away with it. You’ll ruin your life.’ ‘Fuck it, I don’t care,’ he told me. ‘I’m going to blow this scumbag’s brains against the wall.’ I tried to reason with him. ‘Where does it end?’ I asked. ‘Is this creep the only one or are you going on from here?’ The more I talked, the madder he got. He was going to kill Scarpa, make it look like a gang execution, and then there’d be one less pest stinking up the streets. ‘Can’t let you do it,’ I told him. ‘Just walk away, Frank. Just walk away,’ he said. ‘I can’t do that, Tarry,’ I said, and I started towards him, and next thing I know he’s shot Scarpa but he hasn’t killed him, Scarpa’s writhing on the floor, holding the side of his head screaming, and then Tarry’s going completely nuts. He’s kicking at Scarpa and shooting, too, shooting at both of us. At me! He’s spraying lead around, and there was nothing else for me to do but stop him—which is what I did.

  “And you know what happened? Tarry was killed and Scarpa lived. He recovered and told what happened and I got a commendation. You got that, Sal, I got a fucking commendation for killing my partner and trying to get him to spare this lousy little hood. And Tarry Flynn got a stinking little funeral, not an inspector’s funeral like he deserved. And I went into Internal Affairs for five years and made lieutenant and there’re still some guys who won’t talk to me, who turn their backs when they see me or leave the room when I come in. And you want to know something else? Three years later Tony Scarpa was executed by his own people for some dirty double-cross. It was summer. They put his body in the trunk of a car and parked it in a lot at Newark Airport and it just cooked in there for a couple of weeks before somebody noticed the smell and reported it and they found him all curled up and dehydrated, sort of on the crisp side, if you know what I mean. And when they autopsied him, they found the scar on the side of his head from the time when Tarry Flynn tried to blow his brains against the wall.”

  There was silence for a while and then Marchetti spoke. “Well, you had to defend yourself, Frank. I don’t know what else you could have done.”

  “I could have aimed better. I could have hit him in the hand.”

  “The bullets don’t always go where we aim them, Frank.”

  “That’s right, Sal. They don’t.”

  Marchetti gassed the car. He’s okay, Janek thought. And here I am, with a fabulous case on my hands, and I’d better get back on it and start redeeming my life for that time when the bullets didn’t go where they were aimed.

  Sal dropped him off in front of the precinct. He could hear the uproar as he mounted the stairs. The walls of the stairwell were dirty, covered with graffiti; there was a smell of cigarette smoke and stale cigars, the stench of a run-down precinct, dirty walls he’d looked at and unhealthy air he’d breathed for thirty years. But he loved the slumminess of back-room precinct offices. He didn’t feel at home in the cool electronic atmosphere downtown.

  There was something good about the grubbiness, something that spoke to him of New York, its decay, its blight, and he felt the same about a prayer stool that was newly reupholstered, preferring the seediness of worn velvet filled with soot and dust.

  He paused outside the office. It was six o’clock, the second shift had been on since four, and he listened to the phones ring and the patient voices of his people answering them, and then he moved into the doorway and beheld his domain. There were ten metal desks lined up, five on either side, staggered as if they grew out of the walls, and his own at the far end standing free in the corridor formed by the others, a wooden lieutenant’s desk befitting the chief of a special investigative squad.

  A couple of men waved at him, then turned back to their phones, which hadn’t stopped ringing since Channel 8 had given out the number on the air. It was as if the entire city were calling in with sightings and reports. People were frightened, shooting pigeons and seagulls, robins and sparrows, anything that flew, shooting them with unregistered guns. The city had gone falcon-crazy, and now all the craziness was funneling into Janek’s room. He listened:

  “Yeah, lady. Uh huh. You say he’s got a crocodile in the basement. Yeah, give me the address. Uh huh. Well, you know actually we’re looking for a bird ….”

  “Like an
eagle? How big would you say? About nine or ten feet long. Uh huh. You saw it flying past. It seemed to glow in the dark. And it had fins. Uh huh….”

  New York, Janek was learning, was filled with exotic wild animals. There was a report of a sculptor in Tribeca who kept a pair of great horned owls.

  It turned out these were stuffed. A woman said she knew of a bear tethered (he liked that word, “tethered”) inside her neighbor’s Bronx garage. And when his men went out they did find creatures: a half dozen turkeys in a basement in Harlem; a tiny leopard owned by a woman on Morningside Heights. So much illegal wildlife, and misunderstandings, too: wooden models of birds mistaken for the real thing; a child wearing a headdress mistaken for the peregrine falcon; stuffed birds that looked real when viewed through dusty windows from the tenement across the street.

  And then there were a lot of reports based on nothing: practical jokers’ calls; accusations because someone wanted to make trouble for someone else; hang-up calls; crank calls from mad women with theories about where the falcon lived (in the maze beneath Grand Central Station; in the Lincoln Tunnel; in the empty space beneath the Queensborough Bridge); and drunks who spoke very slowly and carefully from pay telephones near the men’s rooms in bars, where you could hear the laughter in the background and the tinkle of glasses and a jukebox. They had “secret information” and “information of vital interest to the police” and an “idea” or a “theory” and they wanted to come in and whisper it into an important person’s ear. It was wild. Janek was disgusted by it—it didn’t help, just took up time.

  But he reveled in it, too, because it was cacophony, the music of New York, the sound of the city’s vulnerability and pain.

  Now he needed a good man to check out Hollander’s list. It wasn’t long—a hundred names—but it would require a lot of work. He looked around the office. Aaron Rosenthal, a good office detective, methodical, was the right sort to run down a list. Jim Stanger, though he wasn’t as good as Rosenthal, would take longer and wasn’t so fast at focusing a call. He’d use Aaron, then put Stanger on to follow up.