The Falconer's Tale (3 page)

“You look good, Dig. Lost some weight, haven't you?”

“Some weight! Sixty pounds, Jack.” His breathing was
getting better and he was able to stick his chest out.
“Surprised?”

“Amazing.”

“Jeez, Jack, you haven't changed. You look just the same.
You look
great
.”

“Little older, little grayer.” He grinned at Hackbutt. Piat
was surprised to find he
was
pleased to see him. Good old,
easy old Eddie Hackbutt. “Let me run you down to the
house.” That was a slip; he shouldn't have admitted he'd
already seen the house. Hackbutt, however, didn't notice; he
was too busy shaking his head and frowning.

“No, no, Irene wouldn't like it. I can't give in like that.
Anyway, I'm just coming up on the big finish—over the hill
and then I sprint to the front door.”

Piat thought that would be worth seeing. Most of his
concentration, however, was on Hackbutt's “Irene.” Partlow's
file had said nothing about a wife, had mentioned only a
“companion,” name unspecified. “Keeps your nose to the
grindstone, does she?”

Hackbutt's face darkened. “No, it isn't like that!” This was
new—he'd grown a spine in fifteen years. “You'll have to
meet her.” And Hackbutt turned about and started his painful
plod up the last hundred feet of the hill before his final sprint.

Piat sat behind the wheel without starting the car; he
wanted to let Hackbutt get home and tell “Irene” about
meeting good old Jack. The house was no more than a third
of a mile away—give the man four minutes. Five, so he could
get out of that T-shirt. And Piat wanted to think: he'd made
a mistake. He'd thought he'd told himself that Hackbutt
would be changed, but he'd thought only that he'd be more
like Hackbutt—fatter, nerdier—and not that he'd have reinvented
himself as a skinny, bearded exercise freak. Or been
reinvented by a woman named Irene, who now took on an
importance that Piat hadn't even guessed at.

Losing my touch. Or getting rusty
.

He started the engine.

Irene Girouard wore a long dress, as if she had something
to hide, but otherwise she was very much in evidence. Piat
thought that her first initial, I, probably summed her up, so
he didn't need the confirmation of the wallful of photographs
that greeted him as soon as he was taken into the house.

“Irene's a photographer,” Hackbutt said. His tone said,
I'm
crazy about Irene
.

The photographs were all of Irene, taken by Irene. Irene's
left eye, Irene's chin, Irene's right knee, Irene's vagina (oh,
yes), Irene's left breast in profile, full front, and close-up,
emphasis on big nipple. Piat decided that the long dress wasn't
meant to hide her but to refer curiosity to the photos.

“I'm doing an installation in Paris any time now.” Her
voice had a hint of something foreign. “I just need to get my
shit together and then it's go any time I say so. Hackbutt's
gathering found objects for me.”

Hackbutt smiled. “Irene's going to be a household name.”

“These are all, mm, you?” Piat said.

“I don't fuck around with false modesty. Yes, that's my
cunt, if that's what you want to ask. The photos'll be assembled
on stuff we've found, mostly animal bones, to make a
humanoid construction. I'm fastening the photos to the bones
with barbed wire from an old fence he found.”

“It's called
I Sing the Body Electric
,” Hackbutt said.

“Whitman,” she said.

Piat thought of saying
Whitman Who?
but didn't, aware
that he didn't like the woman at all, that she was going to
be a problem, and at the same time finding a woman who
took pictures of her own vagina perversely interesting. She
also had a big, hearty, apparently healthy laugh, as if despite
all the photos she was as sane as a stone and he ought to
get to know her. For the sake of saying something, for the
sake of having to put up with her, he said, “Are you going
to cut the parts out of the photos when you, mm, barbed-
wire them to the stuff?”

“God, no, that would be so
calculated
!”

That was just the central hall of the house, as far as they'd
got at that point. There had been introductions, a pro forma
question about something to drink—they didn't drink tea or
coffee, but they had water “from the hill” and juice, source
not given—and then the photos, Hackbutt saying, as if they
were the reason for the visit, “
These
are Irene's photographs.”

There was more of Irene throughout the house, Piat
learned. Nobody picked up after him/herself, apparently, so
parts of both of them were left where they fell: the living
room, just to the left after you came in the front door, was
thick with art magazines, falconry paraphernalia (Piat had
bought a book in Glasgow, so he recognized the jesses, at
least); batteries, probably used; a battery charger, plugged in
but empty; a sizable number of animal bones; a plate that
had held something oily. Four spindly plants in the windows,
yearning for a sunnier climate. The kitchen, next behind the
living room, was furnished mostly in dirty dishes, a camera,
burned-down candles. Piat, himself scrupulously neat,
wondered if he'd dare to eat anything that came out of it.
On the right of the central hall were, first, a small bedroom
(“You're going to stay, aren't you, Jack?”), then a closed door
that led, he supposed, to their own bedroom, which he hoped
they wouldn't show him. He imagined dirty laundry in
shoulder-high heaps. At the end of a corridor, another closed
door hid what Hackbutt called “Irene's studio.”

Then it was out to see the birds, which were to Hackbutt
as the photos were to Irene. They were hawks and falcons,
different types that Piat couldn't distinguish; hooded, silent,
they sat on perches and occasionally turned their heads.
Hackbutt insisted on feeding two of them for him to watch,
and he demonstrated their training with one of them and
an old sock that was supposed to represent a rabbit. Hackbutt
almost had a glow around his head; his eyes were those of
a fanatic. Partlow, he thought, had chosen well—if Hackbutt
could be recruited.

“I
wish
I'd known you were coming,” Irene said when
she'd decided they had spent enough time on the birds. “We
could have had lunch.”

“I thought I might take you to lunch.”

She laughed that big, healthy laugh. “Oh, Christ, you can't
do
that in this godforsaken place! We don't eat human food.
We're fucking vegans, nutcases. I go in a restaurant here and
the smell makes me barf before I sit down!”

“Maybe,” Hackbutt said, “maybe, honey, we could have a
salad or something.”

“I don't think Jack is a salad type.” She looked Piat up
and down. “He looks like a carnivore to me.”

“Raw buffalo, mostly,” Piat said. He added no, no, he
wouldn't stay; no, thanks; no; but he had some things for
them in the car he'd meant to bring in. Just sort of getting-
reacquainted stuff.

He hadn't known why, but he'd thought Hackbutt would
be poor. On a city street, Hackbutt could have passed for one
of the homeless, but in his own context, he looked
right
, neither
poor nor rich, certainly not needy. And Irene, no matter what
she was now, had known money, he thought. The accent, a
casual remark about “when I was at McGill,” a long-cultivated
air of rebelliousness without penalty—no starving in garrets,
please—told him she was doing a trapeze act over a very safe
safety net. And the net, it turned out, was named Mother.
“Oh, Mother sent that in her last Care package,” she said of
a CD player. Said it with contempt, but then socked a CD into
it and said she hoped he liked bluegrass. He didn't, in fact,
but knew it would do no good to say so.

He brought in the plastic shopping bag he'd filled in a
supermarket in Oban, feeling not like Santa Claus but like
the guest who's brought the wrong kind of wine. He'd been
wrong about Hackbutt; he'd underestimated him. Now he'd
pay with the embarrassment of the wrong gifts.

“Oh, friend, this is
so
wrong for us,” Irene said as she took
out a tin of pâté. And the crackers. “God, they've got
animal
fat
in them!” And the Johnnie Walker black, which had always
been his gift to Hackbutt in the old days. “Oh, Eddie doesn't
drink anymore, do you, sweetie? Ohmmmm—” Big wet kiss.
Ditto the Polish ham, the smoked salmon, and the petits
fours (white sugar
and
animal fat).

“You think I'm a nut, I know you do,” she said. She ran
her fingers through her long, untidy hair. “You're right. I
am. I'm a crank. I've turned Eddie into a crank.
But we're
fucking healthy!
” She grinned. “And I do mean
fucking
healthy.”
Hackbutt looked shy.

Piat decided things were awful and it wouldn't work. Dumb
Dave wouldn't be able to run Hackbutt with Irene around;
Irene would be running Dave in about twelve hours. But if
it didn't work, at least not to the point where Piat got Dave
and Hackbutt together, he was going to lose half his ten thousand
bucks.

“Actually,” Piat said when Hackbutt went off to the john,
“actually, Irene, you've thrown me a curve.”

She smiled. Whoopee.

“What I mean is, I have a sort of, um, business to talk to
Hackbutt about.”

“Oh, Jeez, I never would have guessed.” She gave that big
laugh. “Sweetie, of
course
you've got business to talk to Eddie
about! The first thing he said when he got your card was,
‘He'll want something.'” She tipped her head, smiled with
her eyes a little scrunched up as if he was giving off too
much light, and played with her hair. “What kind of thing
do you want?”

“You his agent?”

“I'm his damp crotch, and don't you forget it. Look, Jack,
Eddie's a wonderful man, but he needs somebody to take
care of him. Don't come here thinking you can push him
around. Okay?”

“I never pushed him around in my life.”

“Somebody did.”

Piat opened his mouth to say something that would have
been ugly, then thought better of it and leaned back—they
were in the small living room, he on the sofa in a bare spot
in a pile of mess—and said, “What did he tell you about
me?”

“He said you were a great guy.”

“That sounds right.”

“But he won't tell me how he knew you, so that part
doesn't sound so great, does it?”

“We used to bum around together in Southeast.”

“Southeast?

“Asia.”

“Yeah, he said he knew you from Macao. So, what
did
you two do together?”

“This and that. Some deals.”

“You were in oil, too?”

“I was in a lot of things. We just bummed around together,
had some laughs, some drinks.” He thought he'd launch a
trial balloon. “Some girls.”

She didn't like the balloon. “Eddie didn't know his cock
from a condom till he met me.” She gave all the signs of
talking a better sexual game than she actually played, he
thought. But you never could tell.

Piat shrugged. “We were guys together, how's that? Pals.”

She looked at him. She put her chin up, ran her fingers
through her hair. She said, “You look to me like bad news.”
She laughed. “I like that in a man.”

By then, Piat was hungry and annoyed, and when Hackbutt
came out of the bathroom, he said he had to go. Both of
them protested, but he could see that she wasn't going to
let him talk to Hackbutt alone, and there was no way he
was going to go into his recruiting pitch with her there. He
could see Partlow's five thousand growing wings. He was
damned if he'd let it fly away. “I'd like to come back,” he
said.

Oh, great, yes, great idea, sure!

He gathered the handles of the shopping bag in his fingers—
they absolutely didn't want the stuff—and said, “I'll come
back tomorrow; how's that?”

Oh, sure, wonderful idea, yes, they'd even have lunch.

“But I want to talk to Digger alone.”

That was not so well received. Hackbutt looked pained;
she looked insulted.

“I need one hour with Hackbutt. Then he can talk to you,
Irene, and then the three of us can talk, but first it's just him
and me, and the girls have to stay at the other end of the
dance floor. Nothing personal.”

Hackbutt said, “Honey—” and looked at her. His face was
flushed, as if he liked being fought over.

She said, “Just gonna be guys together?”

“Something like that.”

“Unless you can offer him eternal youth and a lot of really
cute chicks, I can make him a better offer than anything you
can say. Can't I, sweetie?”

“It isn't a competition.”

She looked at him and then at Hackbutt and then at Piat
again, and she fluffed her hair and said, “I need a bath,
anyway. An hour'll be about right.”

They all smiled and touched each other and said tomorrow,
then, right, yeah, tomorrow. And Piat went out to his rented
car, but to temper the humiliation of seeming to have been
chased away, he detoured by the dog.

It was still lying with its head on its paws. It watched him
come, then cringed when he put out his hand. Piat squatted
and extended the hand, but the dog pulled back, then got
up and went into its hovel, dragging a length of chain behind
it.

Frowning, Piat made his way to the car, still feeling like
an asshole because he was carrying back all the gifts that
Hackbutt was supposed to be pathetically grateful for. And
because Irene had made it very clear just who was Hackbutt's
real
case officer.