The Falconer’s Tale. Gordon Kent

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СКАЧАТЬ and joined Hackbutt in the remains of an outbuilding. There was bad smell and a lot of feathers. “Where do you get the pigeons?”

      “A kid shoots them for me with an air gun.”

      “That doesn’t sound so vegan.”

      Hackbutt shrugged. “Raptors aren’t vegans.” He had a bucket on the ground half full of pieces of pigeon, partly plucked, bloody. On a rough table that had started life as something else, he was chopping a dead bird with a cleaver.

      “Can’t they do that for themselves?”

      “Sure. They love to do it themselves. But you got to train them not to do it, so they’ll bring you game birds if you fly them at them.” He whacked off a wing. “Falconry’s a sport. Like shooting. There’s a quarry—in the old days, the object was to bring in game to eat. See, it’s hard to get a carnivore to bring meat to you instead of eating it itself. Like using a tiger for a retriever.” He whacked off the other wing. “You see Irene?”

      “She was off to take her bath. I brought you some sort of veggie stuff. She seemed pleased.”

      “Oh, that’s good.” He swept the edge of the cleaver across the blood on the table, then held the bucket under the edge so he could push the blood into it. “Irene’s a wonderful gal, Jack. I want you two to like each other.” He wiped his hands on a rag. “She changed my life. They talk about people reinventing themselves—she reinvented me. Really. I’m still not much, I know that, but I’m a hell of a lot more than I was.”

      “You were always a good guy. And a good agent.”

      Hackbutt looked pleased and said, “Well—” but didn’t really rise to it. In the old days, he would have been like a cat, doing everything but arching his back. He picked up the bucket and pushed past Piat. “The birds are a full-time job. It’s fun, and I love my birds, but, Jeez, man, it’s your life!”

      He went along the pens, talking to birds he told Piat were immature, making noises to them, tossing pieces of pigeon to them. He strapped a guard over his left arm and enticed a young falcon to perch on it by holding up a pigeon neck with the head still attached, and then he gave it to the bird.

      One of the cages was twice the size of the others. So was the occupant. Alone of the birds, the giant received a whole pigeon. Piat watched as the big bird held the head down with both feet and tore out pieces of meat from the neck, plucking as it went, feathers drifting down and now and then getting stuck to its beak.

      “I thought you had to teach them not to rip the prey to shreds?” Piat asked.

      “She’s different. Jeez, Jack, can’t you see how big she is? Bella’s a sea eagle, Jack. I’m in a program for them. We get the chicks—long story there—and raise ’em by hand, then release ’em in the wild. Helps rebuild the population. They’re nearly extinct. Isn’t Bella great?” Hackbutt smiled like a parent with a bright toddler. “I love my birds!”

      “You told Irene I’d want something,” Piat said.

      Hackbutt was picking up another piece of meat with a gloved hand. “Well—yeah, I apologize, Jack. I just meant—”

      “You were being honest. And you were right. I want something.”

      Hackbutt looked at him and then turned so that Piat could see the bird better. He should have said something like What?, and in the old days he would have, but now he kept his mouth shut.

      “How much did you tell Irene about what you used to do?”

      “Nothing! Honest to God, Jack, nothing. I signed that paper, didn’t I? I swore I’d never say anything and I didn’t.”

      “What did you tell her I do?” He put it in the present tense because he wasn’t going to tell Hackbutt that he was long out of the CIA and in fact a kind of renegade.

      “Nothing.”

      “She must have asked.”

      “Oh, she said something like, ‘Does he work for the government?’”

      Irene was a lot smarter than that, Piat thought, although maybe she was one of those people who paid no attention to the worlds of war and politics and tricky shit. Still, she’d have heard of the CIA. “What did you say?”

      “Oh, I just said, ‘Sort of.’” The sea eagle had finished the pigeon and now snatched the next one from the glove and put it under one foot, then tried to disentangle the other foot from the remains of the head. It looked like a swimmer trying to shake water out of its ear. The mangled head fell to the ground and the bird started on the new prey.

      “Tell you what, Digger.” Digger had been an early code name, from the Digger O’Dell of an old comedy program; it had become a nickname when Hackbutt had become more than an incidental source. “I know that anything I ask you to undertake, Irene’s got to know about—right? I see that. I acknowledge that’s the nature of your relationship. It isn’t usual, but we go back and—you two are bonded, right?” He was talking bullshit, but this was his spiel.

      “Bonds of steel,” Hackbutt said. “I heard that someplace. It says it all. It’s love. It amazes me, but she loves me. Me. Thanks for understanding, Jack.”

      “I do understand, Digger, and I respect it, and I respect you as a man. That’s why I’ll shut up right now if you want me to. I do want something; I want to offer you something, but I’ll keep it to myself and we’ll have a visit and we’ll part friends and that’ll be that, if you want.” It was like ice-skating where you know that the farther you go, the thinner the ice gets: had he now gone too far?

      Hackbutt, finishing with the bird, was offering it its regular perch; it seemed to want to stay on his arm, but he urged it, moving his arm, nudging the perch, and the bird moved over. Hackbutt picked up the bucket. Down the ragged line of pens, Piat could hear birds stirring as they smelled the blood. Hackbutt said, “I told myself I wouldn’t do any more of that stuff. Not that I’m ashamed of it! But—” He came out of the pen and latched the makeshift gate. “I’m a coward, Jack. It scares me, what could have happened some of those times.”

      Piat had watched him handle the sea eagle, the bird’s vicious beak four inches from his eyes. You used to be a coward, Piat thought.

      “This wouldn’t be like that.” Piat shook his head. The old Hackbutt had merely provided information. He had been that kind of agent—records of meetings, oil contracts, stuff he heard at the bar from other geologists in Macao and Taipei—actually not running much risk but always sweaty about it. “This wouldn’t be dangerous. But I don’t want to push it on you, Digger.” They walked along the pens. Hackbutt stopped at the next gate. “It’s just that you’re the only man who could do it. Correction: the best man to do it.”

      “I don’t want to go back to Southeast, Jack.”

      “This wouldn’t be in Southeast,” Piat lied watching him feed another bird. The older ones, Hackbutt had said, would be flown before they were fed; Piat could see him having to spend all day trying to get Hackbutt to say yes. Still, he made himself go slow. When Hackbutt had focused on the bird for ten minutes and nothing more had been said, Piat murmured, as if it had just come to him, “Doing a big art installation must be expensive.”

      “You СКАЧАТЬ