by Gordon Kent
“No,” they said together.
“Then we don’t need this one.” Piat crumpled a W-2 invoice form he’d downloaded. He’d always thought it funny that US agents paid income tax on black ops money, but they did. “Contract. Security agreement. Confidentiality. These don’t constitute a security clearance, just an arrangement. Okay?”
“We have to sign,” Hackbutt said to Irene. “It’s okay.” He was reassuring her from his years of experience as an agent, and he sounded fatuous. She, however, was reading the whole document and not listening to him. Looking for a reason not to sign, he thought, but there was a resignation about her that suggested that she was simply going through the motions. If the idea of actually putting her art on display frightened her, another part of her very much wanted to do it. That part, he guessed, had already won.
Piat had looked at her website. She actually had a small reputation, had done “installations” in Auckland and Ontario and Eastern Europe. But the website hadn’t been updated in three years, and he wondered if she really was an “artist”—he couldn’t think of the word without the quotation marks—who’d run out of ideas. Or whatever it was that “artists” had in their heads.
At any rate, she signed. Looking unhappy. But sexually interesting.
When they had both signed, Piat handed out envelopes. “Five thousand each. Okay?”
He’d made a mistake, and he saw it too late. Hackbutt’s face froze and his skin got blotchy again. He followed Hackbutt’s eyes and saw that Hackbutt only now realized that Piat was paying both of them, and that as much as that made sense to him and to Partlow, it wasn’t the right move for Hackbutt, who wanted to give her the money himself. Without much of a pause, he turned to Irene. “Hackbutt wanted you to have this money for yourself. The contract’s with him—but he wouldn’t do it without you. And I’m sorry to be so crass with both of you but, Digger, you remember that we have to play for the bureaucrats with money. I can get you more for both than I can get just for you, Digger.” He said it all so smoothly that Hackbutt’s face was calm again before he was done.
Hackbutt smiled shakily at Irene. “I thought I’d get to give it to you myself,” he began, but she launched herself out of her chair and embraced him. In seconds they were locked together, kissing like teenagers.
Piat busied himself collecting the documents. After ten seconds he said, “Okay, kids. Really.”
Irene pulled herself free and shook out her hair, laughing. Hackbutt laughed, too—a real laugh, not a giggle.
Piat smiled with them and opened a calendar. “Digger—you first. You need clothes.”
Hackbutt nodded. “Irene’s been telling me that for a year.”
“Now Uncle Sam’s paying. Irene may need some too. It’s too early to tell you the whole ball of wax—you know the rules, Digger. But let’s just say you’re going to meet some rich, powerful people. You have to be ready to be with them. Okay? I don’t expect you to become James Bond, but I need you to look the part and act the part.”
Hackbutt crossed his arms, his scrawny elbows showing through rents in his ancient sweater. “Jeez, Jack. I’m not good at social stuff.”
Piat looked at him without mercy. “If this were easy, we wouldn’t be paying so much money for it. Okay? This is go-no-go stuff, Digger. You have to do the social stuff. We’ll have training for it—practice, role-play. Just like in Jakarta. Okay? Same for Irene.” He tossed the last in because he wanted Hackbutt to feel that he wasn’t alone in being targeted.
Irene’s frown caused her eyebrows to make a single, solid line on her face. Piat didn’t know her facial expressions yet. Tension? Anger? Hard to know.
His eyes roved down his list. “Right now, I’m mostly focused on clothes. Digger, can you wear some real clothes?”
“Like what?” Hackbutt sounded suspicious.
“Wool trousers, for a start,” said Irene. “Green like your eyes, Eddie.”
Piat felt as if Irene were speaking lines he’d written for her, except that he hadn’t. What a fool Dave had been to ignore her. “Exactly. Clothes. I don’t want to overdo it—you’re an American, you’d look silly in breeks—but the Arab idea of a Western gentleman is an Englishman. I need you to look the part.”
“What’re breeks?” Hackbutt asked.
“Knee breeches. For shooting.” Piat paused to see if Hackbutt would respond.
“Sounds kind of faggy,” Hackbutt muttered. He clearly thought Piat was making fun of him.
“You both have to eat meat. Not all the time. Okay? But enough so your systems don’t reject it.”
“No way,” Hackbutt said. “I’ve given all that shit up.” He looked at Irene for confirmation.
She gave Piat a considering look. “I won’t eat pork. Lamb or beef I can probably hack.”
Hackbutt stared at her.
Piat nodded. “Fair enough. Okay. I won’t hide from you that our target is Arab. He won’t eat pork, either. It’ll probably actually help his subconscious cues with you two if you don’t eat pork. Fine. Pork’s off the training menu. Anyway—you’re game for the clothes and food. Right? Okay. Conversation.”
Hackbutt all but cringed. Irene put a hand on his knee.
“Here’s the plan. We three eat together three nights a week. Okay? At dinner we play a game. It goes like this. Irene and I speak only when we’re spoken to. Understand, Digger? We’ll answer questions. If encouraged, we can respond and ask questions of our own, but otherwise, we just sit there. Boring dinners, Dig, unless you come to them with some prepared topics and you get them started.”
Hackbutt looked back and forth between them. “Why you and Irene? I mean—when does Irene get the training? You’re not helping her.” He trailed off.
Piat nodded, wondering just what to say.
Irene picked up the ball immediately. “Sweetie—I know how to make conversation. How the hell do you think I deal with agents and gallery owners and buyers? It’s you, dear man, who can’t make small talk with a telemarketer.”
Hackbutt nodded. “Why would anyone want to make small talk with a telemarketer?”
“And three days a week you give me some training with the birds,” Piat said.
Hackbutt sat up. “Really? That’s great, Jack. I didn’t know you were interested!” Then more slowly, “Oh, for the op, you mean.”
“I have to travel with you. I’ll be with you most of the time. So I need to know enough to pass.”
Hackbutt frowned. “The birds’ll know in a second if you don’t want to be with them, Jack. If you’re—afraid. Or fake.” He realized what he’d said. “Oh, Jack—sorry.”
“Why? Why be sorry? You’re right. But let me have a go at it. They’re beautiful and I imagine I can make my way.” In fact, Piat was not at all sure he’d be steady with those killers flashing their beaks a few inches from his nose, but he had to try, and he’d done worse in the line of service.
Later at the car, Piat nodded toward the dog and said, “Why’s he so unfriendly?”
“Is he unfriendly?” Hackbutt looked at the dog as if he’d never thought about it. “He’s a nasty animal.”
“Well, shy.”
“Before I knew what he was like, I left the gate open and he got in with the birds and scared them. He went crazy—running around and barking and stressing them. I kicked his butt right out of there.” He was proud of himself. “I mean, I kicked him.” He thought about that, apparently with satisfaction, and then said, “Then I chained him up.”
“Do you walk him?”
“Annie does. Sometimes.”
“Who’s Annie?”
“Oh—a kid who helps with the birds sometimes. Sort of an apprentice. She likes the dog. I’ve told her, if that dog gets in with the birds again, I’ll take my shotgun to it. I won’t have the birds stressed.”
Piat suppressed the things he might have said.
Over the next couple of weeks, Piat, coming every other day to the farm, made more progress with the dog than he did wi
th Hackbutt or Irene. The falconer didn’t want to become a social creature, it turned out, and he dug in his heels; Irene didn’t want to be an agent and stayed in her “studio;” the dog, on the other hand, wanted to be a real dog, and he accepted Piat’s fingers, then his hand on his head, and then a caressing of his ears. After several days of it, Piat took him off the chain and opened the derelict iron sheep fence and let them both through and up the hill. To his surprise, the dog stayed at his left knee.
“Don’t you want to run?” Piat said. The dog looked up at him. The dog expected something but couldn’t tell him what.
“Run,” Piat said. “Get some exercise.”
The dog looked at him.
“Run!” Piat said. He made a sweep with his arm to suggest the openness of the world, and to his surprise the dog took off. Later experiments showed that it was the gesture. All he really had to do was point ahead, and the dog went; if it went too far, he found he could whistle it back—it would dash to his feet and then sit, head up, ears alert.
“What does he want?” Piat said to his new friend, the owner of the tackle-and-book shop. He’d made the shop part of his off-duty routine, cruising the books every few days and usually buying something. “The dog comes back and sits and looks at me and I don’t know what to do.”
“It sounds like quite a good dog. Probably a herder: you get a lot of those here. They’ll herd anything—sheep, children, ducks. Quite smart, is he?”
“Well, he sure seems to know things I don’t.”
“Ye-e-e-s.” The man stroked his long, unshaven chin. “Sounds as if he’s been trained and expects you to know the signs. Or partly trained, perhaps—young dog, is he? Tell you what, carry a few treats in your pocket; try one on him when he sits down like that. He may be used to the odd reward for coming back. Not every time, mind—if you do it every time, he’ll use it as a dodge to gorge—but often enough.” He talked about hand signals that the dog might know. “Friend’s dog, is he?”
“They neglect him.”
The shop owner laughed. “Mind he doesn’t become your dog, then.” He grinned. “You know what Kipling said.” He waited. Then: “‘Don’t give your heart to a dog.’”
“Kipling also said, ‘He travels the fastest who travels alone.’ I travel fast.”
But he bought a packet of something called Bow Wowzers, and when he gave the sitting dog one, a new relationship was forged. He became the replacement for some earlier man, the trainer, the giver of treats, the divinity. The dog ran for him, returned for him, herded for him, waited for him. Every day.
It was Annie who gave him a name. “I call him Ralph,” she said, “because it’s what his bark sounds like—Ralf! Ralf!” Annie was perhaps sixteen, not pretty, but, despite her big shoulders and heavy hips, she had the kind of complexion that was imitated in decorating china figurines and postcards. She also appeared to be as strong as an ox, and her handshake was firm. She was more or less Hackbutt’s apprentice, apparently as daft about falcons as he was. If she felt any jealousy of Piat over the dog, she certainly didn’t show it. She was basically a good kid who liked animals.
“Ralph,” Piat said. The dog wagged his tail. What the hell, he’d be Ralph or Emily or Algernon if this man would just be his human being.
Piat bought Ralph a green tennis ball. And then a chewing toy.
Irene was sardonic about Piat and the dog. Amused, but sardonic. In fact, he didn’t see her as much as he’d expected to, as much as in fact he’d hoped. He found himself responding to that tall body, the more so as she toned down her sexual advertising—the shock words, the wet kisses with Hackbutt—as Piat became part of her landscape. Whatever her fears of her “art” were, she’d grasped the nettle. Every day he came to the farm now, she was “working.” Mostly, she was shut away in her “studio” and he didn’t see her, and he increasingly found he wanted to. He sensed that increasingly she didn’t want to see him.
In his hindbrain, he wanted to see more of her. In his professional brain, he was satisfied that she kept her distance. When he was bringing Hackbutt in to Partlow as a one shot, the thought of fucking her had been exciting, but Piat had rules, and one of them was that sex and operations didn’t mix. This was his operation now.
The rules didn’t always penetrate his hindbrain.
When she came out of her isolation, it was to cook and take part in the training sessions, which started by not going very well and then got worse.
“I don’t know how!” Hackbutt’s voice would quaver like the whine of a housefly. “Why won’t you talk to me?”
Piat, Irene, and Hackbutt were silently eating their way through a curry with some shreds of lamb, Irene’s first attempt to add meat to their diet. The food was simple but good. The conversation was nonexistent. So far, Piat had managed only three kinds of interaction: silence, a harangue from Hackbutt about falconry, and a harangue from Irene about overwork.
Piat kept eating. Irene looked at Hackbutt for a few seconds, flashed him a smile, and went back to her food.
“You’re both picking on me.”
Piat smiled. “Nope. This is training. Listen up, Digger. First, a pep talk. Okay? We’ll get one shot at this guy. Think about that. We’re going to spend a fuck of a lot of money and time to get you near this guy one time. You’re going to have to get through to him. One time. In about fifteen seconds. Okay? It might be at dinner. It might be in a parking garage. It might be a line at an airport. One time. Okay?”
“I can’t!” Hackbutt’s voice had a whiney tone that Piat realized had been absent on the hillside with the birds, but it was familiar from the old days.
“You can. Okay? Now, a demonstration. Irene, may I have some wine?”
Irene picked up the bottle, a French white, and filled Piat’s glass.
“Thanks. Pretty good wine.”
“Better than anything we ever saw in the States,” Hackbutt replied.
“It’s the European Union,” said Piat. “In Greece, in Scotland, wherever—French wines, German wines, Greek wines even. Look at that little store in Salen—the whole thing is smaller than a corner store in Manhattan, and it has a selection of wine you’d have to go to some ritzy liquor store to buy.”
“At French prices, too,” Irene said.
Piat turned to Hackbutt. “I could branch out now. I could easily turn my bottle of wine into a rant against the agricultural policies of the EU. Or in favor of the no-borders policies of the EU. A rant against the Bush administration. A harangue about wine. A dissertation on grape cultivation. Those are all monologues—sometimes good to start a conversation, but not really social—not nice. So what I really want to do is pimp you guys to talk. So I say—to Irene.” Piat turned away from Hackbutt. “Have you been to France?”
“I was at the fucking Sorbonne,” she said. She smiled bitterly. “For a little while, anyway.”
Piat wondered what they talked about when he wasn’t there. “The Sorbonne?” he asked. “Where’s the Sorbonne?”
“It’s a university in Paris. I studied art—Medieval art, modern art. You’ve never heard of the Sorbonne?” Irene’s eyes narrowed as she realized that Piat was mocking her. “Fuck you.”
“No—no, really.” Piat laughed and shook his head. “Digger, it’s better to ask questions than to know the answers. It makes for better conversation. Okay? You see?”
Irene’s hands were in her lap—she looked angry, and Hackbutt’s eyes were on her, worried and annoyed.
Hackbutt said, “Yeah, I see that you’re making connections. With whatever she says. Whatever. Except you’re pissing Irene off, which pisses me off.”
Piat decided that he had drunk too much wine and was trying to move too fast.
He leaned forward. “It’s a game, Digger—but it’s a game you play with the other people, not against them. You have to listen to play. It’s not about dominance. Not about winning. Just about being there.”
Hackbutt nodded without understanding. “Sure,” he said.
Piat ran a hand through his hair. Irene was sullen, as if she’d been wounded by a single shot. A stupid mistake on his part. “Digger, do you feel different when you’re with your birds?” he asked.
“Sure,” Hackbutt replied. The “sure” had a whole different content.
“Maybe you should treat us as if we’re birds,” Piat said.
Him and his birds. Maybe he’ll do better when we get to London, away from the goddam birds and all this gloom. He saw that he’d made a mistake by not taking them to London as soon as they’d signed on. New clothes, a haircut, a new environment, and Hackbutt would see a new self.
But Irene’s “art,” which should have solved a problem by pleasing her, became a problem because it took so much of her time. Because she made it take so much her time.
“I’m not allowed in there,” Hackbutt said one day, nodding toward the closed door of the room she called her studio. He gave a perfunctory guffaw for machismo’s sake, but the truth was that he adored Irene and thought her creative life was an overawing mystery. “Something I couldn’t do in a million years, Jack! And all out of her head. Like a frequency she hears and I don’t.”
“Do you understand the stuff she does?”
“Understand? Oh, no. Well, not really. I don’t have the—I’m not artistic.”
Then one day Piat let himself in the front door and walked through the house, expecting Hackbutt but not finding him. For the first time, Irene’s door was open, a sound like a blender coming from it. Piat moved down the corridor on tiptoe (why? was he afraid of her?) and peeked in.
She was drilling holes with a battery-powered drill. She had on a man’s cargo pants and a checked flannel shirt and a tool belt, and she was leaning into the drill to push it through a sheet of metal held in a big vice on a workbench that took up the whole end of what had once been the cottage’s parlor.
Piat looked the room over. No furniture. The wall above the bench was hung with tools on nails and hooks; another wall had a dozen sketches taped to it; the floor was littered with heterogeneous junk, although even a glance suggested that some sort of order might be possible. He saw animal bones, a dead seagull, part of a baby carriage, greasy parts of what had once been a car engine. A puddle of what looked at first to be dog turds, then finally made sense as condoms, not necessarily unused. In the midst of this, a bulbous something heaved up from the floor like a mound of jelly, shining, repellent, monstrous. He focused on it and saw that it was fiberglass, the stuff they make boats out of.