The Falconer’s Tale. Gordon Kent

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.

      When Piat wheeled the rented Renault into the grass in front of Hackbutt’s house next day, he was better prepared. During an evening much clarified by the Johnnie Walker he’d bought for Hackbutt, he’d scolded