The Falconer’s Tale. Gordon Kent

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СКАЧАТЬ here—but I’m not sure he’d have much to say to you.”

      “I fired Dave,” Piat said. It came out easily, smoothly—the foundation lie on which he intended to build his castle.

      She was putting leaves in a tea ball. Her hand paused for a moment. “Really?” she said. Her feigned disinterest was the first hopeful sign Piat had detected. “Jack, I’m not sure that you know Eddie very well. He feels that—that you betrayed him.” With her last words, she turned around, teapot in hand.

      “I certainly abandoned him. Yeah. I thought it was for the best. Look, can I level with you?”

      Irene sat. In one motion, she brushed her shapeless bag under her knees and pulled her legs up under her, so that she sat sideways in a wing-backed armchair. She looked like a yoga master. Her smile was social. “My father told me that the expression ‘can I level with you’ always means the opposite. He was a capitalist pig of the first water, but he knew people.” She poured tea into heavy terracotta mugs.

      He was nervous and making mistakes. He shrugged and exhaled hard. “Okay. Point made. I’m done.” He swallowed some tea—good tea. Big gamble. She has to want the money. He must have told her that there’s money. Or I’m out the door.

      She smiled again—but it was a different smile. Secret pleasure. “So—why did you fire Dave?”

      “He didn’t know how to deal with you,” Piat said, from the hip.

      “And you do?” she asked.

      “Irene, I know I have to deal with you.” He just left it there. She wanted to be in control—being in control was one of the things that made her tick.

      She sipped her tea demurely. “What do you want?”

      “Digger’s help. A contact. It’ll require hard work and some lifestyle adjustments for both of you.”

      “Like what?” She leaned forward.

      Piat sensed the intensity of her interest but misplaced it as revulsion. “It’s just cosmetic, Irene. Like a costume. Like makeup.” She wore a little. Not much, but enough to suggest that she had a human interest in her own looks.

      She made a gesture of dismissal with her teacup. “What changes?”

      Piat felt a ray of hope—just a single ray, but as bright as the rare Scottish sun. She was bargaining—her body language and intensity said she was bargaining.

      “Clothes. Haircut. Table manners. Social interaction. Travel.”

      She looked at him over her mug of tea. “And me?”

      Piat smiled blandly. “What do you want me to say? I suspect you’re already pretty good at wearing a string of pearls and chatting with debs. Right?”

      She leaned back, put her feet up on the old trunk that did duty as a coffee table. Her soles were dirty. “I shit that life out of me with the last meat I ate,” she said in a matter-offact voice.

      Irene used words like shit to shock. It had been one of Piat’s first clues to who she was, or might be—that she had grown up with people who didn’t say shit every third word. Rich people. People with culture.

      “I need Hackbutt. I need his expertise with these birds. I know he can do this. And Irene—it’ll help him. He can help change the world, and he can spend the rest of his life knowing that he did it.”

      She nodded, but she didn’t look very impressed.

      “You and the birds—together—have made a more confident, more rounded man than I knew in Southeast. So let him do this. It won’t hurt him—far from it.” Piat tried to hold her eye as he made his little speech, but she glanced away and then back. She’d looked at her photographs, he knew. She had as much as said, What’s in this for me?

      “And I’ll pay both of you, handsomely. I know that you guys don’t run on money, but it’s what I have. Give it to charity if you want.” Most people liked to pretend they didn’t want money. He suspected that Irene would pretend pretty hard.

      He was wrong.

      She swiveled to face him, plunked her bare feet down on the stone floor. “How much money?” she asked directly.

      “Fifty thousand dollars,” Piat said.

      “We’ll need more than that. I’ll need more than that. You pay for my installation—materials, transportation, insurance, chai. The works.”

      Piat shook his head, apparently reluctant. “I’m sorry, Irene. I can’t make open-ended financial commitments. I can offer you a lump sum—I can set a payment schedule. I can’t just say I’ll pay for every expensive hotel you book in Paris—or wherever you get your show.”

      Irene leaned forward over the table, her breasts visible almost to the nipple under her dress, her well-defined arm muscles in high relief. She’s tense. “Fifty thousand each, then.” Her voice was low, a little raspy. “I love the irony—the military-industrial complex paying for my installation. I might have to add some new pieces.” But the tension remained, and only when it was too late did he realize that she was, perhaps unconsciously, trying to set her price too high. She wanted him to say no. She wanted—what? She wanted not to have to follow through with her “art.”

      But by the time he’d understood, the moment was past. He hadn’t flinched at the amount. He’d kept his tone businesslike. “Five thousand each when Hackbutt agrees. Ten thousand each when Hackbutt completes the cosmetic part to my satisfaction. The balance when we’re done. Either way, success or failure—but not until we’re done.”

      She looked at the photographs and then at the front door, as if she were looking for an escape, and said, “You have ten thousand dollars on you?” she babbled. “This is all happening too fast—my God, we just met you—really, I think you’re moving us too fast—”

      So.

      Piat opened his blazer and took out four envelopes. He laid them out on the old trunk. Two said “Irene.” Two said “Hackbutt.” He pointed. “Five thou.” He moved his hand. “Tickets to London. For shopping.” He waved at the other two. “Ditto, for you.”

      “I don’t get all giggly at the prospect of shopping.”

      He knew he had to push. “Deal, Irene?”

      She rose to her feet. “More tea?”

      He drove away from the farm without having seen Hackbutt but with a sense of release from danger. And a little elation. The next part—making up with Hackbutt—would be messy and difficult and emotional, but that was life in the business.

      From a roadside phone kiosk, Piat dialed the number he and Partlow had arranged to use for routine communications and left an eight-digit code that he typed out on the stainless steel keypad. Then he spent three hours counting his remaining money and renting a room in Tobermory. The woman at the front desk of the Mishnish remembered him. He told her he was back for the fishing.

      “Oh, aye,” she said.

      Piat СКАЧАТЬ