The Falconer's Tale (9 page)

Partlow nodded. “Athens it is. I have business there.”

They shook hands. Partlow's jawline moved, but whatever
he had to say, the moment passed, and he was out the door.

Piat lay on the bed and started his shopping list.

Piat woke next morning in Oban with a hangover and a mix
of foreboding and guilt. The operation was all very well when
discussed from the safety of an expensive hotel room, but in
the chilly gray air of a Scottish morning all he could think
about was Hackbutt—and Irene. Partlow had been cagey
about what
exactly
had cued him to fire Dave.

Hackbutt had changed from the old days in Southeast, but
Piat still felt he knew where his mind would go.
Betrayal
.
Personal betrayal of trust by his old friend Jack. From
Hackbutt's perspective, good ol' Jack had walked off and
abandoned him to the tender mercies of Dave.

Piat considered it from a number of angles while he drank
grapefruit juice in the hotel's restaurant. He added to the list
in his head—props. Envelopes. Tickets.

On the ferry to Mull he read more about crannogs to keep
his mind off his worries.

This wasn't going to be pretty
.

The dog greeted him with silent appraisal, its eyes following
him from the car to the door while Piat's stomach did back-
flips in anticipation of Hackbutt's welcome. He temporized
by extending a hand again, letting the dog sniff; and he was
about to try petting it again when he heard footsteps and
the door opened.

“Look who the dog dragged in,” Irene said as she opened
the door. Her face had all the expression of a runway
model's. The sexual performance was not on offer. Piat
guessed she was angry. Over his sudden disappearance, or
for her husband's sake? Or was it Dave and whatever he'd
botched? Piat had too few cues to do anything but guess
wildly, but since he had to guess, he suspected that Hackbutt
had told her everything and she had hated it. Not a good
start.

He narrowly avoided the trap of asking for Hackbutt. That
way lay Dave's disastrous attempt—excluding Irene.

Piat met her eyes. “I want to try again,” he said.

Irene's face didn't move. “Can I offer you anything, Jack?
Tea?”

Piat nodded—not too eagerly, he hoped. “Tea would be
great.”

Irene was wearing another shapeless bag. The slight sheen
of the material and the coarse beadwork suggested that it
was an expensive shapeless bag. She was barefoot, and as
she walked off to the kitchen, he saw that she had small feet
arched like a ballerina's. Her back remained straight, her
shoulders square. Nothing sexual was being shown, and he
was grateful.

She put water on. The door to the room she called her
“studio” was closed; the photographs were still up in the
same places; there was no sign that she was “working” or
doing whatever people who thought they were artists did.

“Hackbutt's up on the hillside. He's flying his young birds.”
She paused, reached into a jar and pulled out a handful of
loose tea. “Herbal, or do you run on caffeine?”

Nice to have the right answer made obvious. “I drink coffee
when I want caffeine. Herbal, please.”

Irene's back remained to him. “Good black tea has more
caffeine than coffee and is better for you. I'm sorry Eddie
isn't 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 believed in living his cover. He spent the rest of the
evening on the estuary of the Aros River, fishing.

In the morning, he didn't go straight to the farm. Instead,
he put on his boots and first drove, then climbed to his loch.
He took a rod, but he didn't set it up. Instead he took a
cheap digital camera. Then, from the pub in Craignure, he
accessed his “Furman” account online. Furman was the identity
he used in Athens to sell antiquities. He uploaded three
digital images of the crannog from the cheap camera and
sent them to three different addresses; one in Sri Lanka, one
in Florida, and one in Ireland. He wasn't sure just what he
was meaning to do yet. So he was testing the water.

* * *

As he drove back down the gravel road to the farm, he caught
a flash of Hackbutt among the cages behind the house. His
stomach rolled over. He pulled around the house, parked,
and took a deep breath.

As he got out of the car, Hackbutt came around the house
and waved. Hackbutt's wave said it all, he hoped. Piat gave up
the idea of trying to make contact with the dog and faced him.

“You really pissed me off,” Hackbutt said from thirty feet
away. His tone was high, almost falsetto. As he walked toward
Piat, he said, “It's not that I can't be your friend. Not that
I'm angry—really angry. But it wasn't decent, leaving me
like that.” He looked like shit. He looked like a beggar in the
wilderness—beard uncombed, hair wild.

“No, Digger. No. I abandoned you. It's not the way I meant
it to be, but I did it. I'm sorry.”

Hackbutt's hands were trembling. He rubbed them together.
“Why? Irene says I should forget it. That it's not our business.
But I can't—I think you have to tell me.”

Piat had forgotten how Hackbutt really was—the pile of
insecurities and grandiosities. Piat put an arm on the other
man's shoulders. Lies that he might have told other agents
wouldn't work on Hackbutt—lies that he had been busy, that
he had had to use Dave, that he'd been somewhere else
saving the world. Waste of breath. To Hackbutt, there was
only Hackbutt—and maybe Irene. Instead, he said, “I needed
to get you guys the money. That's all I can say, okay?”

Hackbutt's face was blotchy. “Dave said you weren't coming
back. That you didn't give a shit about me or Irene. That
you only worked for money and that he was my real friend.”
He was almost crying. He was very much the Hackbutt that
Piat had run in Malaysia.

Piat nodded, hugged Hackbutt a little harder. He could
imagine the vitriol that Dave must have spewed. He could
see how a fool like Dave would think that he could achieve
control that way.

“But I came back, Digger.” Piat didn't care that he could
see Irene at the window, that he was practically hugging her
man on the driveway. “I came back. I should never have
left.”

“And you won't leave again?”

“Not until the end.” Piat believed in being prepared for
the end, right from the beginning. “And then we'll just go
back to being friends.”

Hackbutt was crying now. But he was returning the hug.
Piat was patient, almost tender.

“Irene will think we're making out,” Hackbutt said after
a full minute. He giggled.

That
laugh's
got to go
, Piat thought.

Irene had made tea. The door to her studio was still closed,
but a third of the photographs had been taken down, and
some lay in untidy piles on the furniture. Irene was taciturn,
seemingly nervous. Regretting it?