Peregrine

by William Bayer

  As he worked, considered the wounds on his beloved bird, he contemplated his own, the source of his rage, his nihilism, his need to kill.

  It was this wound that he tried to close by identifying with his falcon on attack. In an ecstasy composed of blinding violence there came a moment when he forgot his pain.

  What was this wound? he wondered. Where did it come from? Why did it drive him? Had he been born with it or had it been instilled?

  He felt as if a chain of shackles had been forged within his brain—ideas and urges, feelings and desires linked in a chain of rage and pain. The chain would grow taut, the pressure would build, and then he would seek release.

  For most of his life, classical falconry had been sufficient, but in recent years he had required more and so had invented a new falconry to the measure of his need. This new falconry, still in development, was leading him toward a point he could not yet see. But he sensed an underlying design, a symmetry, and this pleased him, for it meant there could be beauty in the blood, a work of art striving to be born out of a bird soaring between the buildings of the city and the soft throats of young women walking the concrete, waiting to be slain.

  He had completed the imping of the first primary. He turned the lamp away, slackened his concentration, sat back, tried to rest. The work was tedious and difficult. He was weary from the duel, all his subterfuges and deceptions, slipping away to the aerie to release Peregrine, slipping away again to receive her and dress her wounds. It had been difficult to stand beside Pam during the fight, to seem to be neutral when, in fact, it had been his war. And then to attend the tacky party at the station, where, instead of celebrating the art of falconry, they had gloated over their journalistic coup. He had done his best to blend with them, match his behavior to theirs. He knew they liked him, found him affable, and had no notion of what he was inside.

  He longed to explain it to Pam—yes! especially to her!—how imprisoned he felt by his need to control, to mastermind everything, to always prove his mastery. And the other side of that, as well, the opposite, his yearning to be a falcon, a solitary hunter living dangerously, savage and noble, powerful, beautiful, and sleek, cleaving the air, wheeling in the heavens, soaring beneath the stars. A falcon, he would tell her, merely is; it exists, lives to survive, and because that is everything, it is enough. And if she asked him then why he killed, he would reply that he was cursed. Since he could not be a falcon, he had become a falconer; since he could not fly free, be one with nature and divine, he was driven to master a creature who could, then use her to fling down his passion from the sky. When she heard that, he was sure, she would marvel at him, for she would understand: His killings were great romantic gestures, not murders but cryings-out against his fate.

  But even if he told her all of that, they would both know there was more, that despicable wicked thing that terrified him, the swelling he felt when his falcon stooped, the explosion of semen when she ripped out a throat. It was something base that could not be reconciled with talk of passion, defiance, aspirations to nobility. It was a loathsome hunger, a desperate pain inside, a sick wound that would not heal.

  He chose not to think about it; thinking always led him to this cruel paradox. But there was beauty beneath it all, he was sure, art, a masterpiece which he must tear out of himself. Only action would reveal it. And there could be no action until Peregrine could fly true again.

  He had shaped the feathers, matched them to the broken primaries, cut their shafts to fit. Now he began to whittle the bamboo slivers that would connect them to the broken shafts. He concentrated on that now, did not think of Pam, of what he would tell her, of how he would explain. He willed himself not to think, only to restore the flight of Peregrine. He would not rest until her feathers were right. He would work until the dawn.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was at night, driving the streets, that Janek most clearly felt the passions.

  Five days had passed since the duel; there had been no further sightings or attacks. But still the falcon was present, hovering over New York, perhaps more powerfully, he thought, now that she wasn’t seen. Her silence, her invisibility, presaged a more terrible strike. Janek sensed the city was poised upon a precipice of fear.

  Stores were open late; theaters and cinemas were thronged. People who feared to walk the avenues by day felt safe after dark. The falcon, they’d been told, only attacked out of the sun. So in the evenings they jammed the streets while peddlers worked the mobs.

  Janek saw Peregrine T-shirts for sale, huge piercing eyes stenciled on their breasts. At Union Square he saw a crowd assembled around a preacher standing on a bench. He stopped his car, strained to listen. “The end of the world,” screamed the man, his gray beard and locks flowing wildly in the wind. “The peregrine is apocalypse. Repent, sinners, or be damned.”

  There were other ersatz preachers addressing different clienteles. Their messages varied: The falcon was satan; the falcon was an instrument of God. They all screamed and showed the whites of their eyes, which glistened feverishly in the night.

  On Broadway he saw a man selling little paper bags. “Pepper! Pepper! Throw pepper at the falcon! Blind her—throw pepper in her eyes!” People were buying the bags, and canes and umbrellas from another man farther up the block. “Fight off the falcon! Use a cane!” he yelled, while a rock ballad boomed out of a record shop across the street: “In the city’s canyons the falcon flies/A girl looks up. Too late—she dies … .”

  All the madness that had flooded into his office until he’d moved the phones to the precinct basement, all of that was now loose in the streets, he thought, and on the airwaves, too. As he drove, he listened to the call-in radio shows:

  “They should put out a poison.” It was the voice of an old man. “Spray the rooftops. Send in the choppers. Defoliate the parks like they did, you know—in Vietnam.”

  “I was in Nam,” said the next caller. “I tell you that crap doesn’t work. I got buddies who got cancer from Agent Orange. You can’t go for a military solution. You can’t solve this thing by force.”

  “Any suggestions?” asked the call-in host. He had one of those smooth voices Janek didn’t like. His listeners were imbeciles; he was contemptuous; some of them amused him, but mostly he was bored.

  “Why do I got to come up with the answer, hey? I’m just telling you what I know.”

  The next caller was a woman. Janek imagined her lying on a gold-tasseled bedspread in a brick development in Queens where the planes rattled her windows all day long, her life a cacophony of the vacuum cleaner, call in shows, and screaming jets.

  “The fella who controls this bird—”

  “The falconer. Yes?” The host liked to keep the dialogue on track.

  “Well this fella—he’s after all these women. They say he hates the female sex. I was just wondering—maybe his mom was real mean to him. Or his sister. Or maybe his aunt. Maybe some teacher slapped him once or something. So now he’s got to get things even, if you see what I mean.”

  “You mean revenge. You think this is psychological?”

  “Sure. Something like that. Why else would a person do such an act? Maybe if we could find out who he is and sort of fix things up, you know—”

  “Uh huh. Thank you very much. Hello?”

  Another voice: “That lady who was talking—”

  “The psychologist. Yes?”

  “She sounds like she sympathizes with this guy. So what I want to know is, what sympathy did he ever show for any of those girls?”

  “He ought to be crucified,” said another caller.

  “Staked out on an anthill.”

  “Burned at the stake!”

  When it got too crazy, Janek flicked the radio off. But when he got home that night and turned on his TV, there was a roundtable discussion on the educational channel: the Chinese-American psychoanalyst David Chin; Winthrop Caldwell, a “backlash” environmentalist; and the naturalist Sven Jorgensen, famous for his campaigns to save seals
, porpoises, and whales. Dr. Chin spoke commandingly of mass hysteria and archetypal threats: The falcon, he said, had aroused a “dark atavism”; she inspired terror because of what she symbolized out of all proportion to what she’d actually done.

  Caldwell deflected the issue: “We must learn to balance the needs of people against the needs of animals in the wild. Perhaps it’s time to ask if we’d be better off if some of these predatory creatures were just allowed to go extinct.”

  Janek half listened as they prattled on, the argument growing fiercer as Chin insisted on his Jungian interpretations while Caldwell spoke for the need to feed a hungry world.

  But when Sven Jorgensen began to talk, Janek attended to the screen. This gentle elderly Swede had something serious to say:

  “What has happened is certainly terrible.” Jorgensen spoke in modulated cadences, his English honed on the environmental issues of three decades. “Nothing can excuse the murder of these women. And nothing can ever excuse the disgraceful exhibition promoted by a commercial television station in Central Park. But still we must ask ourselves why this is happening and what it really means. Man has nearly destroyed the peregrines. These magnificent creatures have been poisoned by chemicals which we have recklessly sprayed upon the earth. I know that there are those who say this bird is the captive of a madman, that she is only a weapon and has no mind of her own.

  “But I ask myself whether this is entirely the case, whether this bird is not lashing back at us for the falseness and cheapness of our culture, whether she is, perhaps, a harbinger of natural forces which are turning against us in retribution and self-defense. We live here in an out-of-scale city that defies nature and dwarfs mankind. We live like animals in cages; we are people in a zoo. Our buildings are too tall. Our artifacts are ugly. Our music is atrocious. We are alienated by our machines. By meddling with the balance, we have set the forces of nature askew. Cells go wild. Cancers grow and proliferate. Creatures grow huge and rebel. There is a madness in the air today, a madness brought on by man. We must give thought to these issues. Perhaps this huge falcon has something to tell us. Perhaps we can find a lesson in this tragedy—to realign ourselves with what is natural, to give up our culture of poisoning and slaughter, to leave this monstrous city we have created where we now find ourselves threatened by a bird who would normally be our friend.”

  Janek did not rest well that night. He twisted and turned, grappled with his pillows, flung himself from side to side. Finally, when he heard the cartage trucks grinding their way down the avenues, he was able to snatch himself some sleep.

  He rose at five, made himself coffee.

  It was dark outside. There was nothing to do—no newspaper to read, no wife to embrace and kiss. His life seemed empty. He had no one, nothing, not even an idea to adore.

  He took his coffee to his workbench, started fiddling with a broken accordion. He thought of his father working silently all day, his lips pursed as if he were whistling to himself. On Saturdays, Janek would sit in the shop upon a stool and watch his father work. There had been an old street accordionist with a monkey who came to the shop each week, his instrument so old and frail it was always in need of repair. The monkey was trained to shake hands—every Saturday Janek tried to avoid its clasp, would sit with his hands beneath his thighs so he would not have to touch the scabrous gnarled little paw. But always he would end up giving the wretched animal a shake. After his father told him the monkey was the only creature the old accordionist loved, Janek could not resist the awful outstretched little hand.

  He wanted to love, to feel passion, to transcend his barrenness. The places and people that attracted him were ugly to everybody else—places that were stale, people who were bereft.

  He glued some keys, repaired a tear in a bellows, cut a new reed, repaired a split one, tried out the instrument, couldn’t correct its pitch. It didn’t matter—it was just his hobby; he wasn’t committed to it the way his father had been. His father would not leave his bench until he was satisfied that an instrument was right. Janek envied him the completeness of his work; his own was so incomplete. Out of thirty cases, maybe six solutions, two or three convictions at best. Cases overlapped, were left unsolved, were placed back in the files. But the tough ones haunted him, like an unfinished accordion lying open upon a bench.

  At eleven he was sitting in the office of the chief of detectives, summoned to give a briefing. Hart was a Buddha, impenetrable, placid, fat, his gray hair shaved nearly to his scalp. He listened, but he didn’t react. His words rolled out in a monotone, high-pitched and grave.

  “I know you’re doing everything you can, Frank. Can’t fault your approach. But we got a situation here where joggers are afraid to run, where sandwich sellers are screaming bloody murder because people won’t eat out in the parks. Yesterday two conventions cancelled—psychiatrists and academics. That’s a thousand rooms. You know what that means.”

  Janek knew: Business was off— hotels, restaurants, theaters. He thought, Next thing Hart’ll tell me “the mayor’s bitching” and “the press is out for blood.”

  “… thing is, Frank, we got to look like we’re doing something. Double the squad maybe. Something like that. This Barrett woman called me twice yesterday. I told her to talk to you, but she says you don’t return her calls.”

  “I’m running an investigation. I don’t have time for journalists.”

  “Make time. She’s turning this into a sex-politics deal, like it’s only females who are threatened and we don’t give a shit.” Hart laughed.

  At three he was in a police chopper nose-diving around midtown. Pam Barrett was squeezed next to him, her knee against his, her cameraman crouched behind. Janek talked to her through his headset, gestured at the array below. She nodded as he spoke.

  “Uh huh, uh huh,” she said. The blades whirled. The wind ripped across his face.

  “Roofs, chimneys, water towers, smokestacks, gardens, air-conditioning machines, awnings, incinerators …”

  “And statues, too,” she said, pointing at a terrace. “Flower boxes. Decorative arcades. Solariums. Gazebos. Yeah, Janek, I can see them all.”

  He turned to her. She was grinning at him, evidently enjoying the trip. “You see what I’m up against,” he shouted. “No way we can go in and look at all of that. We need warrants for the private places unless the people want to let us in. The top of the city’s complicated. It’s a city in itself.”

  Was she listening? She was pointing out structures to her cameraman, framing shots for him with her hands.

  The chopper hit a draft; the pilot pulled up and out. Janek glanced at her. She’d turned pale, looked like she might be sick. He raised his eyebrows and pointed down. She nodded—she’d had enough.

  They had coffee at the Battery Heliport. The waitress recognized her, set down her cup carefully after slopping his.

  “So what do you do, Janek? Just fly around up there and peek?”

  “After we photographed midtown we found a couple of officers who did photo analysis in Vietnam. They look at the pictures, and when they see something, we go up in elevators and check. But that doesn’t mean much, because the bird could be in an apartment, flying out of a window near the top of a building, say, but not necessarily from the roof.”

  “Wouldn’t someone see her?”

  Janek nodded. “Of course that’s what we hope. Someone has to know something. This man isn’t isolated. Sooner or later, if the bird flies again, someone will connect him up.”

  “The bird will fly.”

  “So you can have a story?”

  “He’s sent her out four times. I don’t think he’s going to stop.”

  “Maybe she got injured in your little duel.”

  “Jay says she wasn’t hurt that much, that the falconer can fix her up.”

  “We’ll be waiting for that.”

  “So will I.” She stood up. “You know, you’re not really a bad guy, Janek. Maybe a little brusque at first, until your sterling qual
ities begin to show.” She nodded at him and left.

  He had another cup of coffee and rubbed the outside of his knee. She’d pressed against him hard when they’d been in the air. He could still feel the pressure. She’s going to get hurt, he thought.

  The walls of his office were covered. “Just like the movies, Frank,” Marchetti said. There were pictures of buildings, aerial photos, stills taken at the duel, a chart showing falconry gear.

  He’d drawn grease-pencil circles on the map around the sites of each of the strikes. The places where the circles overlapped (he’d used a ten-block radius) were zones where their scrutiny was supposed to be intense.

  Pacing the walls now, looking at the photos, he could see a hundred thousand places for the bird to hide. Hell—a million places. The thought depressed him. The possibilities were endless. He wasn’t going to find the falconer this way.

  The investigation had taken on a life of its own. His men walked in and out. Calls came through, were answered; men were dispatched to investigate.

  Rosenthal and Stanger and now two female detectives talked to falconers all day on the phones. There were no important decisions for Janek to make, no new leads, no new directions in which to go. He felt stalled. He’d looked at the duel footage and the Rockefeller Center attack footage half a-dozen times, saw the falcon plunging down like a fighter plane, crazed, killing. The only thing he’d noticed was that the three attacks had taken place in unobstructed space. There weren’t many parks, so he’d stationed two men on the observation deck of the Empire State Building during daylight hours. “The dodo shift,” Marchetti called it. They watched the green spaces through binoculars. When they saw something, they were supposed to radio in.

  And then what? He wondered. Launch the choppers? Chase the bird around? At least that way he might be able to narrow the area down. That would be something, he thought. But he didn’t have much confidence.