Peregrine

by William Bayer

  The falconer, whoever he was, would lie. Everyone had to be checked out twice.

  Hollander wasn’t exempt, and Janek knew his list was probably incomplete.

  He signaled Aaron as he passed his desk, then went to his own and looked through his reports. There was forensic stuff, analysis of the letters, the origins of the paper, envelopes, and ink, a report that said the spittle used to lick the postage stamps showed A-type blood, useless information, the type of half the people in New York.

  Marchetti came in.

  “I want a map, Sal. Manhattan. Big so we can plot the locations of the attacks. You’re my one-man art department. Get a plastic overlay so I can mark it up.”

  Marchetti went out to scrounge a map. Rosenthal came over and sat down. He was a balding, husky man in his mid-forties, confident and thorough, a little slow on the street but superb at interrogation, with an ear tuned to lunacy.

  Janek explained the list. “Break it down into three groups—possibles, impossibles, and likelies, which should include anyone who sounds a little funny or who doesn’t answer or who isn’t where he’s supposed to be. According to my expert, we’re looking for a falconry genius. All falconers are supposed to be licensed, but some of them practice illegally and we don’t even have their names.”

  “Oh, that’s great, Frank.”

  Janek nodded. “Knew that’s what you’d say. Look, Aaron, you just might luck into something. You hear the inner voices. You’re the best guy to run this down.”

  Rosenthal smiled. That was the kind of poetry he liked—”inner voices,” that was pretty good. Inner voices were what a detective was supposed to hear, but not too many did.

  “What about fanatics?”

  “No good unless they’re falconers.”

  “No. I mean off the list.”

  “Of course. They’re likelies. Sure.”

  “What do you think, Frank?”

  “Same thing you’re thinking.”

  “Rape.”

  “Yeah. Three victims. No relationship between them, but common physical traits. All young and small and attractive, all killed violently. And then he writes letters about it, which, if he hadn’t, we wouldn’t know for sure there was a man behind it all. Writes them to a girl, too, same type, attractive and petite, writes arrogant confessions and veiled taunting threats.” Janek shrugged. “The police shrink’s done a psychological profile. Haven’t read it yet, but right now, if you’d ask me, I’d say this is a power thing, some kind of crazy murder-rape with the bird like the extension of his cock.”

  Janek was glad he’d chosen Rosenthal. Aaron could smell hysteria, repressed violence, and rage, which didn’t mean he was infallible, because no one was. But without the sixth sense, the hunch, detective work couldn’t be done. If it didn’t depend on hunches, you wouldn’t need detectives, you could use computers, and then you wouldn’t solve very many crimes, because it took a human mind to understand a human mind.

  Janek circulated through the squad room, checked the work charts, spoke briefly with each of the men. Then he went downstairs to see Wilson.

  “Got yourself a big one, Frank.”

  Wilson sat back in his chair. He was a uniformed captain, black, the precinct commander, a political cover-all-your-bets type of officer—Janek didn’t like him very much. The line of authority was from the chief of detectives to Janek to the squad, but since they were in Wilson’s precinct, Janek kept him informed, and in return Wilson gave him back up on request.

  “So—how is it going?”

  “The damn telephones are driving us nuts. The crazies are phoning in. I need uniformed men to screen them out. I’ve got good detectives up there, but the calls are taking up all their time.”

  “What would you do with them instead?”

  “Get them out looking for the bird. All the attacks are in midtown. I’m getting a map. We have to check out the tall buildings, penthouses, garden and terrace apartments, water towers and roof structures, wherever somebody could keep a bird that size and it wouldn’t be seen flying out, wouldn’t be noticed coming or going from the ground.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  “The attacks come during the day. My expert tells me falcons fly in daytime; it’s owls that fly at night. But how the hell can a big bird like that fly into midtown in the middle of the day and no one sees it until just before it hits? And then it takes off and disappears. It’s got to live around there. The guy’s keeping it someplace that’s difficult to see. We need a helicopter to go in and photograph the roofs.”

  Wilson coughed and brought his chair forward, a signal he had something to say.

  “You know this Herb Greene at Channel 8?”

  “Yeah, I know him. A real pimp.”

  “Well, he seems to know a lot of people. He’s buddies with the borough president and some city-council broad. Anyway, he’s complained. Says you’re abrasive, says you were rude to Ms. Barrett, too.”

  “That’s true, Tom. I was.”

  Wilson shrugged. “Take it easy, Frank. Those people are entitled to report the news. And they did cooperate. They did hold off a couple of days. I’d just as soon not have public affairs on my back, okay? So …” He stood up. “I’ll get you uniformed people to work the phones, and I’ll arrange a helicopter, probably tomorrow afternoon. Anything else— let me know. This thing’s got to be solved pretty soon. At Rockefeller Center today the secretaries were walking the concourse underground. Afraid to go outside. Jesus, Frank ….”

  Wilson shook his head.

  On his way back up to the office, Janek ran into Marchetti wrestling a huge map up the stairs. Janek helped him. “You work fast, Sal. Where did you find this thing?”

  “In the storeroom. Where else? There’s always a map around.”

  When they set it up at the far end of the squad room, Janek looked at the overlay. There were markings in red and yellow crayon. He remembered the map now. Wilson had had it in his office during a rash of bank robberies the previous spring.

  After Sal scrubbed off the plastic, Janek marked in the sites of the attacks. Bryant Park, Forty-second between Fifth and Sixth; Rockefeller Center, Fiftieth just west of Fifth; and Central Park on the East Drive near Eighty-second. A straight line right up the center of Manhattan, not too much deviation, always in an open space. He studied the configuration. Forget Queens, Brooklyn, the other boroughs, he thought. Concentrate on midtown until the pattern breaks.

  So Herb Greene had bitched to the borough president. Wilson had been more upset than he’d let on. Greene was the type you didn’t mess with if you were smart. And I’m not so smart, Janek thought. If I were smart, I’d be a hell of a lot further along.

  He knew the only way to handle a case like this was to fall back on classical investigatory techniques.

  Who are we looking for? What’s he like? Where are we likely to find him? What lines of investigation can we start that may intersect down the line?

  A methodical elimination of suspects and locations was the proper method of attack. But he knew that wasn’t enough, that he needed something more, luck maybe, and inspiration—he had to live, eat, and dream the case until he found the key.

  By ten o’clock he’d read everything including the police psychiatrist’s report—better than he’d expected, though it contained little he hadn’t intuited himself.

  “Okay,” he said suddenly, rising from his desk, striding through the room.

  “This is bullshit. Turn off the phones. Wilson’s men can hear about it tomorrow when they start fielding our calls.”

  He had their attention. They were glad to be free of all that lunacy.

  “Starting now,” he said, “the only callbacks we’re going to make are falcon sightings in Manhattan. Why? Because that’s where the attacks take place. Yeah, the bird could come in by van or something, but I just don’t see it that way. Too complicated. Too fancy. The bird’s living somewhere near where she attacks. The guy who owns her has her stashed someplac
e, so we’re flying a helicopter around tomorrow and we’re photographing roofs, and then we’re going to do photo analysis the way they do down at the CIA. We’re going to ask ourselves where we’d stash a bird if we were running this thing, and then we’re going in and look, and we’re going to start eliminating locations until we find this fucking bird. Meantime, Rosenthal and Stanger are working a list of falconers and I’m going to get them some help on that. Anyone capable has to be considered. So those are our two lines: where the bird lives and who’s got the know-how to bring this off.

  “Now remember something—this is a manhunt, not a bird-hunt. We’re looking for a bird so we can find a man, not the other way around. Motive—we don’t know. He’s certainly a psycho, and he’s stylized. He’s intelligent, talented, cunning, a hunter, but he has a weakness, he needs attention, has to confess to Pamela Barrett because he gets a charge out of seeing her wrought up on the tube. For now, that’s not going to help, but it might help later on. Forensic? Nothing. The bird’s the weapon. No shells, no ballistics, no ammo stores to check. So we’re going to concentrate very hard on locations and falconry expertise with the hope that sooner or later that’s going to produce a name.”

  He could have slept at the precinct.

  There was a bunkroom in the back which a lot of the men used when they were working late, or, sometimes, just because there was trouble at home and they didn’t want to face it for a while.

  But he didn’t like the bunkroom, it was narrow and drab, and he needed to get away, so he went downstairs, got into his car, and started to drive uptown.

  It was raining lightly. He passed a church on Eighth Avenue, a run-down working-class church named for a Polish saint. It was the sort of church he liked, had the right sort of seedy appeal. So he parked and walked back to it in the rain expecting to find it locked.

  It was open. He walked in. There wasn’t anyone in sight. A few dim lights lit the front. He could make out a yellowing alter cloth and a plastic crucifix, could hear the patter of rain upon the roof.

  He moved down the center aisle to the fifth row from the front (Why did he always pick the fifth row?) and turned to the right (He always sat on the right. Why?), and it was just as he’d hoped it would be, the kneeling stools worn and uncleaned, and he was especially pleased there was nobody about, so he sat down, just sat there for a minute or so, and then, when he was ready, he knelt.

  It wasn’t a real prayer that came to him, no “Our Father,” no words. Just a picture of a beautifully shaped tree bare of leaves bending in a rainstorm and then a cloud lifting behind it and the sun suddenly shining through.

  That’s what so many of his prayers were like—a scene, an image. He was looking for God, or for virtue, had a theory that he could discover both if he concentrated hard enough on natural things—a tree, a blade of grass, a leaf.

  Find that virtue, that perfect morality, and fill himself with it, and then he would feel clean and virtuous himself.

  I am sullied, he thought. Help me to cleanse myself. Grant me virtue. Allow me to see and understand.

  Later, driving home on the wet slick streets, he thought that he was a strange man, a very strange detective, and that if the department knew how strange he was they’d get rid of him very fast.

  His apartment was in the basement of a brownstone on West Eighty-seventh.

  He had a private entrance beneath the steps that led up to the house. The lack of light didn’t bother him since he was rarely home during daylight hours. The tightly barred windows reminded him of jail cells.

  He had little furniture; what he had he’d bought cheap at the Salvation Army—an iron bed, a beaten-up desk, an easy chair upholstered in crumbling leather. It could have been a graduate student’s apartment, but there were no posters or pictures, no stereo, and there was something a graduate student would never have—a large workbench and innumerable tools hanging from a pegboard behind it.

  There were three accordions arrayed on the workbench in various stages of repair. This was his only hobby, though he rarely indulged in it. The bench and the tools and the accordions (there were ten more in one of the closets) had been inherited from his father, who’d been an accordion maker in Prague and had continued the work in a repair shop on Lafayette Street after he’d immigrated to the States. Janek liked accordions, liked the complicated way they were made, the interconnection between so many elements which resulted, when everything was working, in a weary melancholy sound. His wife, Sarah, had loathed them and had made him keep the bench in the basement of their home. It had been the only thing he’d taken besides his clothes when he’d left her. Now he kept the bench in the open in his basement apartment and Sarah had their whole house to herself.

  She wanted him back, had even offered him the living room as a workshop if he returned. She’d put up with his accordions, his moods, his sleepless brooding guilt. He was not tempted.

  They hadn’t spoken in a year.

  He made some coffee—no point in trying to sleep. He took off his gun and handcuffs, placed them carefully on his dresser beside his wallet and his keys. Then he settled back into his easy chair, closed his eyes, and tried to think.

  His excursion into the Polish church had calmed him, and now again his mind turned to the case. There was something in it that connected to his own life—he’d felt that after he’d talked to Hollander and again when he’d read the police psychiatrist’s report. He didn’t know what it was; now he wanted to find out. He pulled out the psychological profile, reread it carefully. There had been things in it that he had found astute and also something that hadn’t rung true to him at all:

  WE ARE SEARCHING FOR A MAN WITH DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR, WHO, AT ALL COSTS, MUST AND WILL PROTECT HIS PRIDE. HE BELIEVES HE IS A GENIUS WHO HAS ACCOMPLISHED AN IMPOSSIBLE FEAT, A SUPERMAN WHO HAS DONE SOMETHING NO OTHER MAN HAS DONE BEFORE.

  THE LETTERS TO MS. BARRETT INDICATE A STRONG INNER NEED TO GAIN CREDIT AND TO CONFESS. THE FALCON DISGUISES HIS NEED FOR CONFESSION BY WRITING LETTERS WHICH PURPORT TO HAVE BEEN WRITTEN BY HIS BIRD. THUS HE TRIES TO DISASSOCIATE HIMSELF FROM HIS CRIMES: THE BIRD DID THEM; HE IS NOT RESPONSIBLE. (“THE FORCE THAT IMPELS ME IS TOO STRONG TO RESIST.”)

  BUT SINCE HE IS INTELLIGENT AND KNOWS THAT NO ONE WILL BELIEVE HIS FALCON WROTE THE LETTERS, HIS DENIAL OF HIS GUILT IS COMPLICATED BY THE ADDITION OF PSYCHOPATHIC IRONY: “I AM A FALCON. I WATCH YOU FROM THE SKY. WHEN YOU SPEAK TO ME MY FEATHERS RUSTLE.” HE IS SAYING THAT HE OBTAINS AN ERECTION INSPIRED, EVIDENTLY, BY THIS FEMALE REPORTER’S AWE AND FEAR.

  ”PERHAPS I SHALL PUNISH YOU AS WELL” IS HIS THREAT TO TAKE THE LAW INTO HIS OWN HANDS. THE MOST STRIKING THING ABOUT HIS PERSONALITY IS HIS REPRESSED VIOLENCE AND RAGE. HE SEES HIMSELF AS AN EXEMPLARY VIGILANTE WHO STALKS AND THEN EXECUTES HIS VICTIMS IN A VIVID, DRAMATIC, AND EXTRAORDINARY WAY….

  It was that word “vigilante” that was wrong—Janek saw that now. The falconer was no more a vigilante than Tarry Flynn had been. He was a man, like Tarry, who had lived so close to violence that, finally, he had been consumed. That, Janek thought, was an insight: The falconer was akin to a cop gone wild. Maybe that’s why he’d told Sal about Tarry that afternoon. For Hollander had described falconry in a way that reminded Janek of what it meant to be a cop.

  He thought about it. Falconry, after all, was a controlled form of violence, a ritualized hunt highly constrained by the equipment, the licensing, the game season, the limitations of the training, and the skill of the falconer and his bird. A policeman’s life was violent, too, and also highly circumscribed— by laws, procedures, and regulations, ritualized by rules pertaining to the use of his weapon, to evidence, seizure, search, and arrest. A cop went bad when he forgot these rules, allowed things to get “personal,” thought his shield was a license to kill.

  So, Janek thought, I am hunting a man of great repressed anger who once found a respectable outlet for his violence in falconry. But now his anger has taken over, the normal restraints of his sport have broken down, and all
that is left in him is violence. He’s like a rogue cop, like Tarry Flynn.

  Suddenly, for the first time, he felt an identification with the falconer, that alliance which must always exist between hunter and quarry, detective and criminal. And he hated the falconer, too, because he represented the haywire cop who lived inside all policemen, who lived even inside himself.

  He examined the circles beneath his eyes while he brushed his teeth. There were large gray rings of worry and fatigue. Later he lay in bed with the lights off and the window open a foot so there would be a breeze on him while he slept. He listened then to the sounds of the city, the faint and inconstant movement of traffic, and the more biting sound of private cartage trucks grinding up garbage set out in front of the cafés and restaurants on Broadway. It was comforting to think of those trucks gobbling up those black polyethylene bags, so slick and oily looking, full of leftovers and debris.

  He didn’t know why exactly, supposed it was because the trucks seemed so animal, actually did seem to eat the trash, devour it, with a crunching finality that reminded him of sharks.

  And being a detective, he knew that there could be more than trash inside those bags—that there could be weapons, ammunition, drugs, evidence removed by criminals, that there could even be bodies, dismembered or whole, thrown out to be ground up, evidence of crimes that had been committed and of which there would no longer be any proof or trace, crimes that needn’t be investigated because they were and would forever remain unknown.

  He was near to falling asleep when his thoughts turned back to Pamela Barrett, the reaction of the other detectives to her that night they’d all watched her on the squad-room set.

  She was so hot, so sensational, they’d reacted to her with lust. And he remembered, too, the concern he had felt for her, his desire to protect her, which had filled him so unexpectedly.

  What was the connection between her and the falconer? Why had he chosen to write to her? Perhaps the falconer sensed her vulnerability; it attracted him and stirred him up. He’d said something like that in his speech to the squad. “He gets a charge seeing her all wrought up on the tube.” Yes— he’d said something like that, and he believed it, except he knew that there was more. They stimulated each other.