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“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 better believe it. But worth it.” This bird was restless and maybe dangerous; it flapped its wings while on his arm, and its beak flashed too close to Hackbutt’s face, Piat thought. “Irene’s going to be a household name. She has her own website. But that costs money, yes it does. Just moving an installation around from gallery to gallery costs a lot. Just the insurance! Plus we’ve got ideas for a coffee-table book of Irene’s art, and she’s into video now, maybe a DVD of the making of The Body Electric. She shot a lot of video of me boiling up a dead sheep I found. There’re these great shots of the bones sort of emerging out of the flesh—sort of stop-action.”
“The galleries pay for that?”
“You kidding?” Hackbutt laughed. He was wrestling the bird back to its perch. “Don’t make me laugh.”
“So where’s the money come from? Irene’s mother?”
“That’s a sore subject.” Hackbutt trudged along with his pail. “Between you and me, they had a big fight. Her mother doesn’t understand about Irene’s art. She hates feminists. We have to do everything ourselves. Irene’s a free spirit.”
“The project I have in mind might be able to help with that.” Piat caught Hackbutt’s head move out of the corner of his eye, and he said quickly, “Maybe you could support Irene’s art and she wouldn’t have to go crawling to her mother.”
Hackbutt put the bucket down and folded his arms over his skinny chest. “You better tell me about that.”
“I don’t want to tempt you to do something you don’t want to do, Digger.”
“It’s legit?”
“Oh, shit yes, well, if that’s what’s bothering you— Yeah, this is top-drawer, Dig. Have I ever bullshitted you? You know I was into some shitty stuff in Southeast; so were you, smuggling those parrots—”
“Irene doesn’t know about that!”
“I’m just saying, this isn’t anything like that. This is US policy. The most important kind.” He lowered his voice as if he were going to pronounce the secret name of Yahweh. “Anti-terrorism.”
“I told you, I haven’t got the guts for that stuff.”
“Not that kind of ‘antiterrorism’. This is sort of social. It’s a matter of contact. And maybe recruitment. You remember how that goes. Shmoozing. If anything starts to go down, the whole thing’ll be moved to other people.”
“I’m not very social, Jack.”
Piat knew that, and he was looking at Hackbutt’s wild hair and his scraggy beard and his bloodstained clothes and thinking that anything social was going to take a total makeover. But that wasn’t his problem “You’d be fine.”
“Why me?”
It was the moment he had been aiming toward. It was either going to make everything else a piece of cake, or it was going to end it with the finality of the cleaver. He leaned closer and almost whispered, “The birds.”
Hackbutt didn’t get it. He looked as if he didn’t get it and he said so. Piat, his own arms folded now because he was cold, the early sun behind clouds that were piling over the whole sky, said, “You’re an authority on falconry. No, you are, Dig, don’t deny it. But you also love the birds. That love comes through in everything—when you handle them, when you talk about them. It’s great—it’s nice, it’s a good quality. It’s what makes you right for this project and it’s what would make the project easy for you. See—” He looked up where the sun should have been and saw only a bright smudge behind deepening gray. “The means to make contact with a certain guy is through falconry. He’s like you—he lives for the birds”. Piat hoped it was true. He could push invention only so far.
“He flies them.”
“Exactly.”
“Is he an Arab?”
That caught Piat off guard. It was an obvious leap—It was the guess on which he was building the tale—but not one he’d expected Hackbutt to make. “You’re getting ahead of me, man. What’s the rule—we find out when we need to know?”
“Sorry.”
“No, no—” He put his hand on Hackbutt’s arm and then let go. “It would be meeting this individual and talking birds with him, letting him get to know you a little. Then, if that goes well, then the powers that be maybe would make a bird available to you to give him or something. Then—”
“What kind of bird?”
“Well, I don’t know birds, Dig—”
“Do I get to pick the bird? There are some fantastic birds out there, Jack, I’d give my left nut just to handle one of them! Is that the way it would work?”
“That’s the way it could work, I guess. You’re the expert here, after all. Sure, I’d think you could maybe write your own ticket about that.” Would Partlow buy it? Did it matter?
Hackbutt was hot-eyed. “There are some incredible birds out there! But Jeez, man, they cost thousands—I mean, big five figures!”
Piat knew he was overstepping his bounds. Still, what the hell. “The US is the richest country in the world, Dig.”
Hackbutt looked away, his mouth working. Was he calculating figures? Almost without voice, he muttered, “Wow,” and picked up the bucket. He unlatched a gate and then turned back. “I don’t want to seem mercenary, Jack, but—Irene’s installation, and everything—what kind of money are we talking? For me?”
On firmer ground, Piat said, “Fifty thou?”
Hackbutt’s lips moved: fifty.
“If you score.”
“God, I’d love to do that for Renie. God, that’d be great.”
They went down the pens, feeding and handling birds, Piat lying back, letting Hackbutt think it over. They were heading for the farther pens where the older, trained birds were, and Hackbutt said as if out of nowhere, “Let’s trot it past Irene. I think it’s a fantastic opportunity. Incredible.” He beamed at Piat.
A woman after her bath was always attractive to Piat. There was something about the skin, which seemed whiter, cooler, enormously tactile. If you added to this the baking of fresh bread, the appeal was overwhelming. He wanted to put her on the rug and go to it. Unfortunately, her husband was standing next to him.
Irene smiled at him as if they had a secret. “Almost done,” she said. She was back in the day’s long-skirted dress, without jewelry, little makeup that he could see on her broad face. She was a fairly tall woman, not Rubenesque or heavy but strong. Vegetarianism hadn’t made her thin the way it had Hackbutt. “Surprised?’ she said.
“The bread? I guess I am. I didn’t figure you to cook.” Piat was surprised.
“I’m a damned good cook. I do great country ham and shit like that, or I used to.”
“Bread smells fantastic.” He was laying it on too thick, but the smell of the bread—he pushed his mind back into the role of case officer.
“Baking bread is an art.” She opened the oven, looked in, poked something. “Did you boys talk?”
“We did. Now you two need to talk.” That seemed to please her.
Hackbutt went into the small living room, leaving the two of them in the kitchen.
She took the bread out and put it on the already littered table. One loaf was a low-mounded oval with coarse salt and something else on the top; the other was more ordinary, but both were beautifully browned and high. “No tasting,” she said. “It has to cool.” She came past him, stopped where he was in the doorway. She kissed him lightly on the lips. “So do I.” She smiled. “All things in good time.” She went out.
When he left, Piat paused at the dog again. This time, it sniffed his extended hand, then looked at him. He tried to pet it, but it withdrew its head; something like a warning, no more than the sound of the most distant thunder, came from its throat.
“You’re a tough sell, doggie. Thank God you’re not the falconer.”
Explaining Irene and her importance (tactically, not sexually) didn’t go down so well with Dave.
“It was great until she got involved,” Piat said as if he hadn’t planned it that way. “Then I had hell’s own time with it.”
“What the fuck did you even let her near it for?” Before Piat could answer, Dave shouted, “It’s not the way you do it! You don’t recruit the fucking girlfriend!” His broad face was red. Dave had been to the Ranch and had taken the courses, and so he knew at least in theory how things were done. Piat again had the feeling that he hadn’t put the theory into practice much.
“This ‘girlfriend’ is different.”
“You deal with the guy alone and keep her out of it. That’s how it’s done!”
“There’d be no deal if I had.”
Dave made a contemptuous sound. Piat said, in a voice that meant See how hard I’m working to keep from calling you astupid asshole, “Dave, you don’t know this guy or this woman. They don’t do things without each other.”
“You’ve blown security and you’ve saddled me with a big fucking problem. I’ve got to run this guy!”
“Yeah, now thanks to me, you do.”
“Christ, if I’d known you were going to tell the girlfriend, I’d have aborted you right the hell out. Jesus, what a bush-league thing to do. You know what Partlow would do to you if he knew?”
“Yeah, Dave, I know what Partlow would do. He’d say, ‘Well, if that was your judgment call, okay.’”
“He wouldn’t! He’d tell you you blew it and to get lost. Now I’m stuck with it.” Dave was standing by the window of his room in the Western Isles Hotel, his fists clenched, his face blotched with rage. He was scared, Piat realized. Scared because he was going to have to do something that wasn’t in the book. Dave said, “You’re a fucking loser.”
Piat didn’t miss a beat: he didn’t raise his voice or get red or insist on the challenge of eye contact. He said, as if he were lecturing a beginning class, “You get to him through her, at least at the start. Hackbutt will take a lot of stroking. Pass some of it through her. It’ll please both of them and—”
“Don’t tell me how to do my fucking job!”
Piat waited for him to stop and then went right on. “Hackbutt’ll need a makeover. Clothes. A decent haircut. You’re going to have to teach him how to—”
Dave lumbered toward him. “Get the fuck out of here! Stop talking to me! Get lost!”
Piat waited for him to come close. He thought it would be nifty to put Dave on his back. Maybe Dave saw that that was a possibility, too, because he pulled up before he was quite close enough. He shouted “Get lost!” again. Piat looked him in the eye and, in the same tone of somebody doing a routine, file-it-and-forget-briefing, said, “You’re meeting Hackbutt at lunch tomorrow. I’ve made a reservation at a restaurant called the Mediterranea in Salen, partway down the island. Noon.” He waited for Dave to take it in. “The hardest part of all was getting Hackbutt to agree to anybody but me as his CO. It took me an hour. You’re going to have to turn on all the charm when you meet him, Dave.”
“I know how to do my job.”
“Hackbutt’s prepared to dislike you, because you aren’t me. Hackbutt thought it was going to be me. He’s a one-man man.”
“That’s fucking laughable—that we’d trust a job like this to you.” Dave jabbed with his finger, but not very far, because there was always the possibility that Piat was fast enough to catch a flying finger and break it. “You’re an agent! You’re nothing but a goddam pissant agent! And don’t you forget it!”
Piat put his hands up a little above his waist, palms out. Dave’s hands jerked as if he expected a blow. Piat said, “There’s an old Patsy Cline song—‘Why Can’t He Be You?’ You might want to give it a listen to understand Hackbutt’s position. Or you can just go on being an asshole and lose him and then you can tell Partlow why your agent won’t work with you. I won’t be around to blame, unfortunately for you. Lucky me. See you at noon tomorrow, Dave.”
Piat went out and closed the door very softly.
It rained most of the night and was still raining when they started for the meeting with Hackbutt, a depressing dribble from the low overcast, as if the universe above was saturated and had to let the water leak out somewhere. Dave was driving. Piat, in the left-hand seat, wasn’t sure how he was supposed to get back to Tobermory after lunch if Dave took off with Hackbutt, but there was a bus, at least; asking Dave what he had in mind would prove too explosive, he thought, and anyway he didn’t want Dave to get the idea that he could plan Piat’s day.
Dave was still angry; maybe he’d been chewing on the scene in his room all night. He had bitched about the island roads all the way down, and he had come close to hitting another car more or less head on because he hadn’t gone into the lay-by that opened next to them, and instead he had thought the oncoming car would be terrorized into getting out of his way. It hadn’t been.
“Nice move,” Piat couldn’t resist saying when they were as far off the road as a stone wall would let them. The other car was vanishing behind them. The passenger-side fender was crumpled against the wall, and Piat couldn’t have opened his door more than inch even if he’d wanted to.
It hadn’t helped that another car had passed and the driver had laughed.
When they got out in the drizzle at Salen, Dave was in the silent phase of anger. He didn’t bother with his raincoat but hunched his shoulders and walked toward the restaurant—if you can’t punish somebody else for being stupid, punish yourself. Piat regretted having said what he’d said, because he knew he had made things worse, and it would all rub off on the meeting with Hackbutt. He didn’t know why he cared that the meeting go well, but he did. Maybe for Hackbutt’s sake. Maybe some vestigial pride of craft.
“Reservation,” Dave growled to the smiling man behind the combination bar and reservation desk.
“Name?”
Dave ground his teeth. He didn’t know Piat’s cover name.
“Michaels,” Piat said. “Jack Michaels.”
“Oh, yes, right—we chatted on the phone about running.” They had, in fact; now they chatted a bit more while Dave secreted bile. Piat had run a route the day before that this young man had suggested. “Fantastic,” Piat said now. “Great scenery. Great run.” The young man talked about hamstrings.
Hackbutt wasn’t there yet. They sat at a table for four, from which the young man whisked a table setting. Dave folded his arms and looked around as if he expected somebody to call him a bad name. Piat ordered a glass of Brunello and bruschetta, which wasn’t on the menu but didn’t raise any eyebrows. He tried to mollify Dave by offering him some of the toasted bread when it came, but Dave simply looked at it. He wasn’t going to allow himself to enjoy anything.
Hard on poor old Hackbutt.
“We could order,” Piat said when Hackbutt was twenty minutes late.
“We’ll wait.”
Piat shrugged and asked the young man if by any chance they had some roasted pepper in olive oil. He was enjoying that when at last Hackbutt stumbled in, looking as if he’d just come from Lear’s blasted heath—hair soaked and tangled, beard dripping, ancient drover’s coat glued to his legs by the wet.
“I walked.”
All three of them were standing by then. Hackbutt looked only at Piat. Piat saw Dave stick out his hand, and he said quickly, “This is the guy I’ve told you so much about, Digger. You two will really get along.” He ducked out of the way of Dave’s paw and went behind Hackbutt to help him off with the enormous and very wet coat. Hackbutt tried to turn to keep eye contact as if it were his only contact with reality. Piat gently turned him back and eased the coat off his shoulders, preventing Hackbutt from putting out his own hand. By the time he was able to do so, Dave had withdrawn the offer and was pulling back his chair.
“Siddown,” Dave said.
Hackbutt looked at Piat for permission. Piat nodded. Hackbutt sat.
So did Piat. He picked up his fork and stabbed it into a piece of glossy roasted pepper and prepared to say something light and conversational about the weather, and Dave said to him, “You’re done here. Bug out.”
Piat looked at him. Dave, he thought, was incredible. He put the pepper in his mouth and picked up his last piece of bruschetta and mopped up some of the olive oil. When he looked at his old friend, Hackbutt’s face showed frozen panic.
“You hear me?” Dave said.
“I did.”
“You’re done. Head out.” He jerked one thumb toward the door. “Look for a Land Rover.”
