The Falconer's Tale (35 page)

But it wasn't. After the silence had extended and extended
and then snapped and been replaced by Piat's own thoughts,
a desire to sleep, Hackbutt put the binoculars on the ground
and said, without turning around, “Irene and I had a fight
last night. She slept in her studio.”

Piat heard a warning in the voice.
About me
?

“I wanted to make love, as a way of—” He waved a hand.
He still wasn't looking at Piat; his eyes were on the nest. He
laughed. “There's an old joke about two newlyweds. They
put a jar at the head of the bed, and every time they make
love for the first year, they put a penny in it. Then, for the
rest of their lives, every time they make love, they take a
penny out. And they never empty the jar.” He shook his
head and pulled at a piece of bracken. “I've always thought
that's the saddest joke I ever heard.” Now he turned to look
at Piat. “We've been together five years.” He went back to
plucking at the bracken.

“Is she still mad?”

“She was never mad. She's thinking of leaving me.” He
smiled back at Piat, his head tilted so that the smile looked
furtive. “I don't think she knows it herself, but it's what she
was fighting about.”

“You can't know that, Digger! She loves you!”

Hackbutt didn't seem to hear. He looked out over the vast
expanse below them, all the way down the mountain, over
the thread of road, the flattened, green land, to the sea and
the islands far off in the haze. “It's like I'm seeing Irene
through a zoom lens, getting smaller and smaller, going
away— I thought it was about you, but I decided that it
wasn't.”

“Me!” He tried to cover, talking fast. “Irene and I got over
disliking each other, Dig; she's not upset about me being
there all the time anymore.”

“I thought it was you.” He turned and looked at Piat. “But
you wouldn't do that, would you, Jack.” It wasn't a
question, but a statement. Perhaps, just perhaps, a warning.

Piat thought about equivocations. He probably thought too
long. He shrugged. “No,” he said after too long a delay.

“It would sink the operation. And that's what you care
about.” He picked up the binoculars, but he didn't put them
to his eyes. “And—I don't think you'd do that to me.”

He looked back and their eyes met. Piat said, “This is why
you got me up here.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Hackbutt frowned at his thought. “I
can say what I mean up here.”

Then he began to watch the eagles, and after a few minutes
he began to talk about them and then to point out the islands
and tell Piat which was which. Piat, still weak from the climb,
let himself be silenced by the display of authority he'd seen.
But Hackbutt wouldn't stop, and Piat pulled himself together
because that was what Hackbutt expected.

I like him
, Piat thought. It was a revelation. But he couldn't
say so. He didn't even know how. Instead, he said, “Holy
mother of God, Digger, is that Ireland?”

“No, Jack. That's Ulva. There's Iona—see? I forget the
others—the big islands. Ulva has another nesting pair. Iona
has some unique terns.” Hackbutt passed his glasses over the
infinite spaces behind them and then lay down and pointed
his binoculars up the mountain at the nest.

“Both of them. Oh, Jack!” he whispered. “Look!”

Piat looked. The birds were big, well developed. Their nest
was a pile of offal and bird shit at the top of the cleft, supported
by two big rocks. There were bones and bloody bits scattered
over the top of the nest and coating the rocks all the way
to the base.

“Old nest?” Piat asked.

“I think so. I think they've been here for
ever
. The old
Ordnance Survey calls that feature Creag na h-Iolaire—that's
the eagle's crag, in Gaelic. Gaelic! How long have they been
here, Jack? Two thousand years? Five thousand years?”

“Fantastic,” Piat said. In fact, it was better than fantastic.
The two birds—Bella's parents—were huge through his binoculars.
They were quite clearly repairing the nest.

Hackbutt was beaming at him. “I'm so happy you came,”
he said. “I've tried to get Irene to come—but it's not her—”

“Cup of tea?” Piat murmured, the binocs still perched on
his nose. “It's a tough climb, Digger. I'm wasted. You're not
even breathing hard.”

Hackbutt laughed. “You're so good at everything, Jack.
You're so surprised to lose at anything. You remember that
night in Jakarta—in the bar? You sang ‘Roland the Headless
Thompson Gunner.' You turned off the karaoke machine.
You remember?”

Piat nodded. He remembered that there had been such an
evening. He must have been pretty drunk.

“And I thought—God, he can even sing.”

“You're embarrassing me.” Piat shook his head.

“No, Jack—you started it. You made me see that I needed
to do something—something worth doing. Here I am.”

Piat found himself looking at a man who could climb a
mountain and handle a wild eagle. He thought of the same
man's crying on the gravel drive. Without thinking it through,
he said, “Digger—why can't you always be like this?”

Hackbutt had started to root in his pack, and now he
stopped, and a slow smile spread over his face.

“Like what?” he asked. But the smile suggested that he
already knew.

It was dark by the time they made it down the mountain.
Piat was obscurely pleased that Hackbutt had forgotten to
bring a torch—he might have thought that every trace of
the nerd had been washed away down the mountain. They
didn't talk much, climbing down or in the car. But when
Piat pulled up at the farm, he gave Hackbutt's shoulder a
squeeze.

“That was a great day,” he said.

“Yup,” Hackbutt replied. “You said it, Jack.”

“Take the weekend off, Digger. I'll see you Monday.” Piat
had other plans in motion and some other work to do, and
he already dreaded what his leg muscles would do in the
morning.

“Don't you want to come in and see Irene?” Hackbutt
asked. Piat wondered what, exactly, Hackbutt was asking.

“No,” Piat said. And then, realizing that he'd made a gaffe—
“Just send her my regards, Digger. I'm beat.”

Hackbutt leaned back into the car with a wide smile. “You
need to get more exercise, Jack.”

Piat laughed as he drove away, because it was the phrase
with which he'd ended almost every meeting with Digger in
the old days.

The next day, Piat awoke with aching joints and the thin
memory of a dream. As he washed his face, flashes of the
dream came up at him, as if from the water in the sink.
Something about Irene and Partlow—Hackbutt had been in
it too.

He drove to the farm, equally afraid that he would see her
and that he wouldn't. He wasn't sure he had anything to
say to her. He still wanted to say something.

But she wasn't there. She was moving the first load of
boxes to the ferry, and Piat found Hackbutt on the hillside.
Hackbutt was standing in a circle of beaten grass with Bella
on his arm. He smiled at Piat when he came up, but otherwise
the big bird had his complete attention. He was talking
to her quietly, and she had her head turned a little away, as
if she only had one good ear and were listening carefully.

Piat moved until he was at Hackbutt's elbow.

“You want to hold her, Jack?” Hackbutt asked.

Piat reached out and took her. She hesitated only a moment
before stepping from Hackbutt's arm to his.

“I'm saying goodbye, Jack,” Hackbutt said. He had the
tracks of tears on his face, but his voice was strong and soft.
Controlled. “I thought about what you said. About everything
you said. I guess I'm willing to give up Bella—to save
people. That's what it is, isn't it? Because that guy—the
prince—he's a bad man. I can tell.”

Everyone's the hero in his own movie, Digger. Piat almost
said it, because it was the truth, and terms like good and bad
had no meaning to Piat. Except that, while causes didn't
move him, people did, and right now, with the big eagle on
his fist under the slate-gray sky, Piat didn't feel like lying to
Hackbutt at all.

So he stood with the man and the bird and the sky, and
together they said goodbye by saying nothing at all. And
then they walked back down the hill.

The next day, the cartons that had filled the house's corridor
were gone, and so was Irene. She hadn't told him when she
was going. It was better that way, he thought: with Hackbutt
standing by, they could hardly have talked about where they
would meet when he was back from Bahrain. If they were
going to meet at all. Piat already had the uneasy feeling that
the prospect of wealth would change him. And that the Piat
who owned his own future might not have much to offer
Irene. Or was it the other way around?

Then there were two days of marking time, when he
took long walks with the dog and walked for the twentieth
time through Tobermory's shops and sat in the Mishnish
bar and nursed some single malt he hadn't tried before.
Without Irene, Edgar was both edgy and elated: he missed
her, but no relationship is perfect, and without admitting
it he liked the freedom of being alone. He asked Piat to
make macaroni and cheese for supper, a dish he liked but
Irene wouldn't make (“Redneck food, Eddie”). Yet the imminence
of parting with Bella had him staring out of windows
at the rain and moving through his own house like a restless
ghost.

The next day, a man appeared in an aging green van to
get Bella. Piat had helped Hackbutt find the perfect travel
cage for her: they had sat together going through the back
pages of his falconry magazines, looking for advertisements.
When they found one Hackbutt thought he might approve,
Piat would make a note and later look it up on the web.
Hackbutt had had almost impossible requirements, but Piat
had told him that he had to choose because they were in
now and they had to go through with it. In the end, he had
ordered a huge, dome-topped cage of ABS plastic with
screened windows and cast-in food and water dishes that
could be filled from the outside.

The pickup man was sandy-haired, middle-aged, cheerful.
Piat thought he had a look of the long-time sergeant, probably
one now double-dipping for MI6. It made sense that
Partlow had informed the Brits, particularly to get the paperwork
on the strictly illegal shipping of an endangered bird
to a foreign country.

“Sign, if you please,” the man said. “Six places—there's a
little red arrow stuck to each one. Hard to miss.” He looked
around, stretched. “Beautiful day.” They were outside; it was
sunny with a few big clouds like puffs of cigar smoke. The
dog was running among the three of them.

“Thank
you,” he said. He produced another sheaf of papers.
“Your copies of the shipping packet—customs forms, letter
from the ministry, letter from Foreign Affairs—” Piat glanced
at it and read “…for transfer of a rare avian female to another
government for breeding purposes—” Well, close enough.

The man was going on. “—letter from the Royal
Ornithological Society—waiver of CITES treaty requirements—”
Piat handed each one to Hackbutt. He didn't want
to hear about breaking laws or violating a trust after the bird
was gone.

Partlow had done his part well. Barring a personal note
from the prime minister, a nation could hardly have put
more clearly on paper its willingness that its laws and international
treaties be violated.

“Well, then.” The man checked over the signed documents
and removed the little red stickers, which he rolled between
his fingers and thrust into a pocket. “Let's have this bird
then, shall we?”

Hackbutt turned away. Piat went with the man, who
dragged a red dolly behind him, to the bird pens, where Bella
was already in the new, commodious cage. Hackbutt had
been trying to accustom her to it. The man looked at it,
looked at Bella without getting too close, whistled in appreciation.
“Do you a right wound with that beak, wouldn't
she!”

He began to work the dolly under the cage.

“You're driving her to Glasgow?”

“Holy Loch.” He gave Piat a look that meant he'd say no
more about that, but if Piat had any sense he'd see that Bella
was going to be flown out by military air.

Better and better. Holy Loch to Bahrain, one way, no
customs.

When they were back in the front yard, Hackbutt had his
own bundle of paper to hand over. He'd written out in
painstaking block printing instructions on feeding, watering,
petting, flying Bella. He'd in fact written a monograph on
the care of traveling eagles.

The man took it all. “Right. Going to ask you about this
sort of thing.” He'd already found the cast-in pocket on the
side of the cage for documents. He put the feeding and
watering instructions in it and taped them down with a roll
of black tape from a pocket. “Don't you worry, sir,” he said.
He seemed to have grasped at once who the real owner of
the bird was and how he felt. “She'll be cared for like she's
a baby.” He put the rest of Hackbutt's writings with the legal
papers. He brandished the packet. “This'll ride with her every
step of the way.” He winked at Piat. “Wouldn't want to get
in trouble with the powers that be, would I?”

He and Piat lifted the cage into the van; the doors closed,
and Hackbutt winced. The dog, sitting nearby, cocked his
head.

“I'm to be contacted when she arrives,” Piat said.

“Not my area of responsibility, sir, but I'm sure that if that's
the arrangement, then that's the way it will happen.” Then
he waved at them and got into his vehicle and drove away.