Czytaj książkę: «The Falconer’s Tale»

1

A steady, cold rain fell from low clouds on the naked rock of the hillsides and became white waterfalls plummeting to the coarse grass below, soaking the thin soil and filling the streams and rivers.

Piat had walked up the valley from the road at Horgsa without wetting his feet, but the stream between his legs now roared. Where he stood to cast on a tongue of gravel, the water rose around his ankles and then his shins, pushing heavily against him. The river came down the mountain behind his left shoulder and curved in front of him before running into a long, slow, deep pool forty meters long, and from there falling away into a canyon.

His hands were slick and nearly numb on the cork grip of his rod, and when he raised his arm to flick another cast over the river, more water ran down from his wrist to his armpit, soaking his old wool sweater.

After a long, slow retrieve, he cast again, then pulled the line with his rod just as the fly struck the water so that it moved an inch on the surface before sinking. A sea trout struck just after Piat thought he had missed again, the pull before the first leap sending a shock down the rod to Piat’s wet hands. Then the fish jumped again, three quick jumps, pulling line off the reel after each one, and then ran away upriver.

Piat, burning with adrenaline, steadied himself by replanting his feet. One of his wellies filled with water. The big trout took almost a hundred feet of line in a continuous stream from Piat’s reel, and then the weight on the line changed. Piat’s first thought was that the fish was gone—a fraction of a second’s pressure on the rod, and then he could tell that the fish had changed direction, running in at him and his submerged gravel beach. Piat began to reel up as quickly as he could. His reel was too small, too light for this kind of action, but he knew what he was doing, and he pulled line and reeled up and raised his rod as high as he could, risking his footing in the rising stream and filling his other boot with a considered advance into the deepening water.

The fish leaped again and then again, the leaps shorter, farther apart, and Piat caught up with the line on the reel and started to use the rod to work the fish. It felt his first real effort at control and reacted like an unbroken horse, fighting the rod with a new series of short jumps and fast pulls that served only to tire it faster. Piat had time now, and he ratcheted up the drag on his reel to make the fish’s task of taking line off all the more difficult. He took his first careful shuffles toward the safety of the bank. He was in too deep, and when his heel caught on a rock in the gravel, he almost went down—he turned his head, caught his balance, and the fish was moving again, this time toward two straggling weed beds to his right. He tried to turn it, using the strength of the rod and the line against the fish, but even now the fish was too strong.

Piat took a long, gliding step up the bank, his filled boots clumsy. With his feet planted, he risked a strong pull and turned the fish. The sea trout leaped once more, its silver length flashing across the low gray clouds.

He didn’t have a net, and it took him more time to get the fish up on the gravel above the water line. The trout was a little smaller than he had thought; the poetic clarity of its last leap had suggested a much larger fish, but he wrestled it under his arm and hit its head with his knife handle. It thrashed, and he hit it again until it was dead.

Only after he had its guts out and his hands and knife clean did he take off his socks and wring them out. He had nothing to dry the insides of his boots, so he dumped out the water and the gravel, used the socks to towel his feet and the insides of the wellies, and wrung them out again before pulling a dry pair from his pack. The change was immediate—even rammed back into wet rubber boots, his feet were warm.

The rain slowed. He poured himself a celebratory cup of coffee from the thermos in his pack and admired the fish, now lying on a patch of grass.

While he sipped his coffee, the rain stopped altogether and the low cloud blew off down the river valley toward the sea. In a minute, the vanishing curtain of rain and cloud revealed the vast landscape of the valley and the rise of mountains beyond. Before his coffee was gone, he could see for miles across the river, the mountains high and snow-capped to his left and the river valley descending in deep-cut canyons to his right until it vanished a mile away where it crossed the road to town. He was content. A rare feeling for him.

He poured a second cup of coffee and watched a distant falcon soaring above the river. A flicker of color on the most distant hillside caught his eye and he glanced up to see one of Iceland’s many buses stopped on the high road above him, hardly more than a white dot amidst a tumble of rock. It was well over a mile away. A ray of cold yellow sun flashed off the windscreen; it must have been that that had diverted him from the falcon. Even without binoculars, he could see a passenger get off, and paranoia made him suspicious—there was nothing to get off the bus for out here except fishing. Perhaps serious rock climbing.

He went back to his study of the falcon, finished his coffee and changed his fly. His hands were warmer and more nimble after holding the coffee. He smiled when he saw the fish on the grass, considered bagging the rest of his fishing and going back down the valley to his room, but he had paid the last of his diminishing supply of cash for three days’ fishing on this river and he didn’t want to waste it, although this first fish satisfied his need. He had caught a good fish.

He wished he had waders. He looked at the river, now moving with considerable speed, still beautifully clear despite the press of water.

I need waders, he thought. But he didn’t have money for waders. And they couldn’t be bought anywhere short of Reykjavik.

He made several lackluster casts. The wind had changed and developed flaws; the combination made casting tricky. He moved to his left along the rocky shore and cast again. As his eye followed the fall of the fly, another dot of color caught his attention. The bus passenger had donned a yellow slicker and was coming down the hillside. Piat had climbed that hillside himself, and he wished the late-season hiker luck in negotiating the steep, sodden marsh that passed for a trail, with grass tussocks surrounded by ankle-twisting holes you could go into to the knee. He noted that the hiker did not have a rod.

Piat fished automatically until he focused again to discover that he had moved to a place with no weed and no wind—and no fish. The casting was easy, but to little purpose, and he reeled up and started back to the beach. The pale sun became stronger at his back. Out in the river, a fish rose noisily. Piat looked up to see the size of the ring, checked on the hiker’s progress with the same glance, and was startled by how fast the hiker was moving. He was almost down to the base of the hill, walking purposefully.

Piat went to his pack and took out binoculars. He took a careful look. Then he carefully dried the lenses with a cloth, replaced the binoculars in their case, and put them in his pack with his thermos and the fish wrapped in a plastic sack. He broke down his rod, stowed it, pocketed his reel, and started back down the valley. No one watching him would have thought him hurried or panicked.

The streams really were full, and Piat remembered having crossed four on his way up from Horgsa. He crossed the second one that he came to with trepidation; the third was running so heavily that he turned and followed it rather than crossing. He knew that the stream should bring him down the glen to Horgsa. A narrow track ran along the side, cut so deep into the turf by rivulets of water that he had to catch himself constantly to keep from falling. Patches of gravel were like rest stops. Even a few steps on solid ground felt like a holiday.

Piat pushed on, crossing a boulder field and passing over the last crest before all the land fell away to the sea three miles distant.

He did not look back.

The stream he had followed roared along to his right, sometimes close beside him and sometimes more distant as he followed the gentlest contours. He had a sense that he was too far to the east and might have a long walk on the road once he reached it, but he relished the thought of a walk on the shoulder of a paved road, no matter how narrow, and his unease was growing.

The hillside suddenly became steeper and the stream fell into falls, straight to the plain more than a hundred feet below. Piat stood at the top for several minutes, watching the falls and trying to gauge his chances of either crossing the stream above the fall or making his way down the cliff. He didn’t like either, but neither did he relish the notion of backtracking up the long hillside behind him. He felt that he was being watched.

He started down the cliff, following another deep-cut track. Luck revealed an old road that seemed to spring from nowhere and ran along a hedge of boulders for a hundred meters. Piat couldn’t imagine what conveyance could have climbed a road so steep, or how much effort it must have taken to hew the road. Just as suddenly, the road vanished into steep rock fall, but he was around the very worst of the cliff and he began to move cautiously straight down, grasping handfuls of grass at every step.

The last of the climb down took twenty minutes. When he at last reached the base of the cliff, he jumped across a feeder of the waterfall stream into the backyard of a local farmer. He crossed the yard into a farm road and walked down the hill past an old byre full of Icelandic sheep. In half a mile he was on the main road, and in fifteen minutes he was waiting at the bus stop.

Only then did he look down his back trail. Even with binoculars he couldn’t find the yellow slicker, or the man who had been wearing it—a man he had seen several times through various lenses, and never met. Nor did he wish to. He cursed the loss of his fishing.

The bus arrived on time. Piat climbed wearily aboard, paid his fare, and settled into one of the high-backed seats after placing his backpack in the rack.

He was just opening his book when a voice said, “Hello, Jerry.” It was a voice he knew, and it belonged to a man he didn’t want to see just then. Mike Dukas.

“Hello, Mike,” he said.

“Good to see you, Jerry.”

It was a day to see people he didn’t want to see. Piat had been walked, gently but firmly, from the bus to a private car, and from the car to the lobby of the Kirkjubaejarklaustur Hotel, and from thence to the bar. In the bar, a bright, modern, Nordic bar with good Norwegian wood counters and clean glasses hung from wooden racks, sat Clyde Partlow. Piat knew a great deal about Partlow, and he didn’t like him much.

“I wish I could say the same, Clyde.” Piat shook hands, not quite ready to cross the social line and refuse.

“Sun is over the yardarm, Jerry. Want a drink?” Partlow indicated the bar and the bottles with a proprietary hand that indicated that Piat could help himself—and that Partlow had complete control of the hotel.

Piat walked over to the bar, feeling his wet socks inside his wellies and the weight of the fish in the bag on his shoulder. He’d cleaned it—it’d keep for a few hours. Odd thing to worry about. He knew he was rattled—rattled by the men who had picked him up, rattled by Partlow, who looked prosperous and well groomed, rattled that they had taken him so easily. It was unlikely he was even going to eat the fish. He poured himself a stiff shot—more like two shots—of twenty-five-year-old Laphroaig. It looked to be the most expensive scotch on the bar.

Partlow raised his glass. “Old friends,” he said.

“They’re all dead,” said Piat. He drank anyway, a little more than he had intended. “Okay, cut the soft crap, Clyde. What do you want?”

“As you will, Jerry.” Partlow reached into an expensive leather bag and retrieved a file. “A project has resurfaced one of your old agents, Jerry. We’d like you to bring him in.”

Piat struggled with the scotch and the adrenaline to hide his relief. It could still be a trap—they could still arrest him or turn him over to Icelandic immigration or any number of other things. But the file looked real, and it all seemed a little elaborate for an arrest. In fact, now that his hour-long panic was beginning to subside, it had all been too elaborate for an arrest. He hit his panic with a little more scotch.

He circled to the chair that had been placed opposite Partlow, slipped his fishing bag over his shoulder to land on the floor, removed his rain jacket, and sat. “Who?”

“Not so fast, Jerry. You are aware, I think, of your status with us—nil. In fact, you are a wanted man, aren’t you? So try to keep your usual greed in check, Jerry. First, I want your agreement that you’ll go and fetch this fellow for us. Then there will be some documents to sign. Then we’ll talk about who it is.”

Piat looked at Partlow for a few seconds, and his hand holding his scotch began to shake. Piat took the plunge anyway. “If I’m a wanted man, Clyde, then you’d better arrest me, hadn’t you? Because otherwise you’ll be in defiance of an executive order about dealing with known felons, won’t you, Clyde?”

The two men glared at each other for seconds. Partlow shook his head. “Really, Jerry, you are wasting my time.”

“I’m not the one who just got kidnapped, old boy. So thanks for the scotch. I’ll be going now. I paid a mint for the fishing that Mike Dukas interrupted.” Piat rose to his feet and started to don his jacket, thinking—now we’ll see what cards he really has. Fuck, my hands are shaking.

Partlow took a deep breath, sucked in his cheeks, and blew it out in a little explosion of petulance. Rain came against the big plate glass windows in rhythmic surges. “You know, Jerry, whole years pass when I don’t see you and I almost forget how much we dislike each other.”

Piat zipped up his coat. Partlow looked sleek and well dressed, and Piat felt every pull in his sweater and every tear in his rain jacket. “I never forget, Clyde.”

Partlow shook his head. “Fine, Jerry. Fine. Point to you—I overplayed my hand. I’ll pay you handsomely to bring in this agent, and I’ll drop the line about ‘wanted felon.’ Now be a good fellow for once and sit down.”

Having scored his victory, Piat had a hard time believing it was true. The shaking in his hands didn’t improve. Much the opposite. He had to struggle to get his jacket back off—a pitiful performance that made him feel even less secure in the face of Partlow’s careful grooming and assurance.

“How much?” Piat said, reverting to his time-honored role as greedy man of action.

“Five thousand dollars. In and out. You can be done in two days.”

“Ten thousand,” Piat demanded.

Partlow shrugged as if the subject pained him. “If you must.”

“Okay. Who is it?”

Partlow took out a sheet of paper. “I think you are familiar with the terms.”

Piat read it—a standard agency document for the recruitment of agents. Piat had always been on the other side of the document before—the case officer making the recruitment. Case officers were carefully trained professional spies. Agents were their amateur helpers. Mostly riffraff and rejects. That’s me these days, Piat thought to himself.

Partlow slid over an envelope. “I was sure you’d insist on getting money in advance.”

Piat cursed under his breath, but he took the envelope and scrawled his name on the agreement.

“Excellent. Welcome back, Jerry, if only as a lowly agent. You understand confidentiality, etcetera?”

“You’ll be running me yourself, Clyde?” Piat already disliked being an agent.

“Of course not, Jerry. I run a department. A case officer will come to deal with you and your needs. He’s waiting outside until you and I are finished.”

“I smell a rat already, Clyde.”

“As you will, Jerry. Your man—Hackbutt.” Clyde made a show of checking Piat’s signature before he handed over the dossier.

“The nerd? Christ, Clyde, what do you want him for?”

“Nerd?”

“Nerd. A hopelessly antisocial geek, Clyde. Who specializes to the point of obsession.”

“I don’t think you ever used that phrase in a contact report, Jerry.”

“No, I don’t think the agency pays its officers to write reports explaining what a bunch of fucking basket cases their agents are, Clyde. Nonetheless, he’s a handling nightmare and a freak. I take it there is sudden movement in Malaysian oil futures?” Hackbutt had been a small-time informer in Malaysia. Good enough at what he did—report on the oil industry—but useless otherwise.

Partlow looked at him from under his heavy gray brows. He steepled his fingers in front of him. He was clearly trying to decide what to tell Piat. “He’s now into falconry—the birds, you know.” Partlow started in a patronizing tone. “Falconry is the use of birds for hunting—”

“Thanks, Clyde, I know what falconry is. Eddie was always into birds—I smuggled him a couple as part payment for one of his best reports. But no way am I getting from here to Jakarta and back in two days.”

“Mull.” Partlow said the word as if delivering a sentence of doom.

“Mull? Where’s Mull?” Jerry thought the name could even be local. When Icelandic names weren’t an endless chain of harsh consonants, they were often quite simple.

“Scotland, Jerry. The Isle of Mull is off the west coast of Scotland.”

“Scotland? That’s as cold as this place. He used to be cold all the time in Jakarta.” Jerry finished his scotch, rose and poured himself another. Ten thousand dollars and relief from arrest—he had a lot to celebrate. “Whatever—I’ll need a passport.”

“Absolutely not. Your case officer will walk you through immigration.”

“Christ—really? You can do that? The world has changed.”

“The gloves are off, Jerry. People in Washington have realized that we are the most powerful country in the world.”

Piat shook his head. “Most people in Washington couldn’t find their asses with both hands, Clyde. Okay. I go, I meet this guy, I set him up with—who? Same guy who’s running me? That right?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. And no doubt wait around to make sure they get cozy?”

“Absolutely not, Jerry. You set him up and go home.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.” Partlow had returned to sounding smug. Piat didn’t like it, or him, but the money was good.

“So no chance for a little salmon fishing here before I go?”

“Jerry, sometimes I think you are not quite sane.”

“The feeling’s mutual, Clyde. Okay, I guess that’s a no. When do you want this done?”

“There’s a military plane leaving from Keflavik in three hours. I want you on it.”

“What about my fishing equipment? My luggage?”

“I’ll see to it that it’s returned to you when your assignment is complete.”

“Be careful of my rods.” Piat looked out the window at the vividly green grass. The hotel had the largest lawn he had seen outside of Reykjavik, as if a lawn was itself something to watch on one’s holiday. He felt the weight of the fish in his bag again.

He said, “Dukas? He staying here?”

Partlow thought a long time before saying, “Yes.”

“And you’re sending me to Scotland with this case officer, right?”

Again, Partlow took his time answering. “Yes, Jerry,” he said with mock patience.

“Okay.” Piat got to his feet. “I’d like to fetch some clothes.”

“No. You can buy them en route.”

“Not outa my cash, you won’t.”

“Fine, Jerry. As you will. I’ll have your case officer take you shopping. Otherwise, we’re done?”

“Yeah.”

Partlow got to his feet, looked Piat over carefully, and then walked to the bar’s main door to the lobby. Piat followed him to the concierge desk.

“I’d like to leave something for one of the guests,” he said. He ignored the heavyset man who appeared by his elbow and crowded his personal space.

The concierge nodded. “A package, sir?”

Piat thumped his bag down on the counter. “Dukas—Mike Dukas. Not a package. A fish. See to it he gets it for dinner.”

Regrettably, the concierge said, Mister Dukas had already checked out.

Mike Dukas was sitting at a table in an airport bar that was so atmospheric it felt like a film set for the kind of movie he wouldn’t go to see. Still, he knew that the rest of the world might find it warm and comforting and sweet, or at least a relief from Scandinavian modern. The motif was Olde Englande and the beer cost six-fifty a bottle. Dukas, begrudging the money but thirsty, figured the high price was really the admission charge to the Charles Dickens Theme Park, Iceland.

Dukas had kept his khaki raincoat on but placed his waterproof hat on the table. A small puddle had formed around it. Now, he sat with his right elbow next to the hat and his lower lip pushed against the knuckles of his right hand, watching Alan Craik saunter toward him. Craik was smiling. He looked relaxed and pleased, and also, Dukas conceded, handsome in a sort of rugged, fortyish, Hollywood way. What the hell, who cared about looks, anyway? (The ravishing blonde two tables away, that’s who.)

“I think we did that pretty well,” Craik said as he slipped into a chair. He was wearing some sort of weathered corduroy sport jacket and a nubbly shirt, and he had tossed a waxed cotton coat (veddy, veddy English) over the back of his chair.

“Piat didn’t think so.”

“Not pleased to be jerked away from fishing?”

“It costs five hundred bucks a day to fish here, he told me. For salmon, anyway.”

“If you all got to the point of talking about fishing, I’d say he wasn’t too upset.”

Dukas shrugged. Craik ordered a beer. He said, “Partlow telling him what this is about, you suppose?”

“One assumes. Now if they’d just tell me what it’s about. How about you tell me what it’s about, Al?”

“I told you over the phone—if I knew, I’d tell you. All I know is Partlow was looking for Jerry Piat for an operation, and you keep up with Jerry Piat. Our part was to bring him in, period.”

“You’re trusting Clyde Partlow?”

“Not with anything important like my wallet, but yeah, as little as you and I are involved, yeah.”

Dukas drank the last of his beer and stared gloomily at the bottle. “I don’t get you helping a shit like Partlow.”

“It’s called ‘I’ll scratch your back now and you’ll owe me one.’”

“I wouldn’t want Clyde Partlow to owe me one.” Craik shrugged. Dukas gave up trying to save money and ordered another beer and then said, “This is a fine mess you’ve got us into, Stanley.” He waited for a response, got none. “Well?”

Grinning, Craik said, “You know what a working group is?”

“Mrs Luce, I am a Catholic.”

“Okay, I was at a meeting of a working group—sixty people in a big room sharing secrets. Or not sharing secrets, as the case may be. Although, with all the bullshit that’s been said since Nine-Eleven about agencies not sharing intelligence, in fact the amount of sharing that actually goes on is astonishing. Anyway, Partlow is a long-time regular at this particular working group; I’m a regular now because of my new job. When we took a break, Partlow made a beeline for me and asked me if you weren’t a friend of mine.”

“‘Oh-ho,’ you said to yourself, ‘this is suspicious.’”

“No, I said to myself, ‘Clyde Partlow is a good guy to do a favor for.’” Craik was silent for several seconds. “Now Partlow owes me one. And he owes you one—what’s wrong with that?”

“I was building up debts from assholes like Partlow when you were in Pampers.” Dukas waited while a fresh bottle of beer was put in front of him. “You’ve changed.”

“Older and wiser.”

“Where’s the Al Craik who used to say, ‘Damn the torpedoes, we’re going in without a country clearance’?”

“You know what the shelf life of a collections officer is? Short. I figure doing a favor for somebody like Partlow might give my sell-by date a little leeway.”

“I feel like I don’t know you so good anymore.”

“Yeah, you do. Same old lovable Craik, only I’ve wised up about Washington politics. Anyway, Partlow came over to me and asked about you, and I said why and so on, and he finally dropped Piat’s name like he was passing me the secret combination to Bush’s wall safe.” He slipped into a Partlow imitation, cheeks puffed, head back. “‘Might your friend Dukas know how Piat could be reached?’ So I said I’d check. And I did. And here we are.”

“Why?”

“Ah, da big question! I love da big questions! I dunno, Mike—Partlow has an operation that he wants Piat for, that’s all I could get. It’s on the up-and-up—it’s got a task number; and it’s passed the working group. It’s kosher.” He lowered his head, smiled. “But why would he want an untouchable like Piat?”

“You mean it smells.”

“N-o-o-o—”

“If it’s passed the working group, you heard it discussed.”

“Unh-unh. Discussion is general—tasks and goals. Peons like me not to know.”

“That’s sure what I call sharing information.” Dukas wiped a hand over his face. “Man, I’m tired. You at least got a night’s sleep. You know what you have to do to fly to Reykjavik from fucking Naples? Now I gotta do it in reverse. You of course feel great and look great, you bastard.”

“A healthy mind in a healthy body.”

Dukas sat looking at him, lips pushed out, eyebrows drawn together “You’re the guy who used to lecture me about honor, duty. Idealism. Now you’re running errands for one of the most political shits in the business.” He shook his head and held Craik’s eyes. “What happened to that fine rage you used to work up when other people did things for slimy reasons?”

Craik’s smile was tentative, apologetic. “My last fine rage got me a call from my detailer saying that if I didn’t can it, I wasn’t going to make captain.”

“And now you’re a captain.”

Craik nodded. The same small smile was still on his face “‘Honor, duty, idealism.’ Right.” He looked up. “But I believe you gotta pick your battles and your battlefield. And lost causes get you nowhere. Isn’t it okay to scratch the itch of my curiosity about Partlow’s wanting Piat, and maybe have Partlow owe me a favor at the same time?”

Dukas stared at his friend, then finished his second beer. Setting the bottle down carefully on its own old ring, he said, “It sure is comforting to know you’re still an idealist.”