Raptor Read online

  “You know who I am.”

  “Indeed and it is my pleasure, Ms. Hamel.” He spoke beautiful English, the kind of English you don’t learn in the U.S. of A. “Perhaps we could go somewhere and talk.”

  “Lucy’s?” That’s something I would like to have seen, the prince in his white robes entering a cowboy bar at ten in the morning.

  “I don’t drink. I have another suggestion. We shall sit in the car. It’s quite comfortable and I will send Heinz for coffee.”

  Some suggestion; a plan would be more like it. “Who is Heinz?”

  “My driver, but more than that. He is also, you might say, my agent. But this is a conversation he needn’t participate in.”

  How many times must one be told not to get into cars with strange men, even (or especially) biblical figures in white robes? But with the driver gone, in the middle of Main Street in a devil-fearing community, how dangerous could it be? Heinz was dressed in polyester and had a clipped haircut. He was the prince’s foil, coarse where the prince was smooth, short where the prince was tall, obsequious where the prince was in command, polyester where the prince was cotton. He hadn’t learned his English in the same place either. He agreed to get the coffee and leave us alone, not necessarily willingly, but obediently. There appeared to be a lot to gain from dancing to Sahid’s tune. Before he left, Heinz opened the back door and let me into the Mercedes, where I sat gripping the door handle.

  It was soft as velvet in that automobile, snug as down, dark as tinted glass could make it and silent, too. The temperature could be heated or cooled with a flick of a wrist. It sped faster, probably, than you’d ever want to go. I was wrapped in money, or what money could bring, ease and comfort. Once you got accustomed to it, it was a lure that could turn you aside from whatever goals you once had. The cars would get shinier, the houses bigger, and you’d have to fly higher and higher to reach the point where you couldn’t see them anymore. I pulled myself up to the edge of the seat, pushed a button to roll down the window and let some dust in.

  “Forgive me,” the prince said, watching from across the plush with a certain rapacious intensity, “for asking you to drive so far, but privacy is of the utmost importance and I did not want anyone in Fire Pond to see me talking to you. It is a beautiful drive, though, is it not? The great sky reminds me of my own country.”

  “And what country is that?”

  He spread his long, elegant fingers as though he were balancing a transparent ball. He didn’t really want to tell me where he was from, but his exquisite manners demanded it. “Saudi Arabia.”

  “Do you dress like that at home?” I asked.

  “For important matters, ceremonial occasions. For me this is an important occasion.”

  “Perhaps if you had told me, I might have dressed, too.”

  He smiled, tossed the invisible ball. “Of course, you want to know why I am here. I have a proposition for your client, March Augusta, and I would like you to present it to him since it is impossible to contact him directly. You are his attorney, correct? I had a business arrangement with Sandy Pedersen. He promised me a bird that I want very much, a very rare and beautiful passager bird, young enough to train.” His eyes glowed as he talked about the gyr, envisioning the beautiful, spirited, white female who will fly far, but only as far as he wanted her to go. His manners were impeccable, his goals despicable.

  “The white female,” I said, noting that what came naturally to me he had to dress up to achieve.

  “Precisely,” he replied. “I am willing to pay very well for that bird, but, unfortunately, your client…” He struggled for a polite way to put this. What was the euphemism for murder, anyway? Terminated? Put to sleep? He balanced the ball in one hand, waved with the other. I knew what he meant.

  “But my client didn’t…” I had a hand of my own to wave.

  “Of course,” he said, but it was only another layer of politeness on an edifice whose foundation had been laid on sand countless centuries before. “That has yet to be proven or disproven. Nevertheless, putting aside all matters of your client’s guilt or innocence, I believe your client can help me and I am willing to pay him very well.”

  “Just how could my client help you?”

  “He and the deceased were experienced woodsmen. Pedersen told Heinz of the respect he had for your client. He even mentioned that if anyone could stop him from taking the bird, it would be Mr. Augusta.”

  I grimaced. How many people had Pedersen told that to? “I’m sure Pedersen wasn’t talking about murder when he made that statement.”

  The prince smiled graciously. “Well, we don’t know, and Mr. Pedersen is dead, isn’t he? But that does not change the fact that I must have that bird and that Mr. Augusta knows where it is and that he is the only one who can get it for me.”

  Heinz had come out of the Ampersand Cafe and was standing across the street holding styrofoam cups of coffee, waiting for a nod from the prince, but Prince Sahid’s attention, all of it, was focused on me.

  “Just for the sake of argument, how could my client help you when he is in prison and guarded twenty-four hours a day?”

  A mere formality to a prince. “I’m sure Heinz could arrange it. How many guards are there at a time? One? Two? March Augusta could leave at dawn, be back at noon, if he chose to return. Go anywhere he wanted to, if he didn’t. It is by no means impossible.”

  “I suppose you’ve got the means to fly him anywhere he wants to go?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you were following me in it yesterday.”

  “We took the Sparhawk out for a ride not to follow you but to see if anyone else was.”

  “Why on earth would my client want to help you trap a rare bird and take it from the wild when doing that is the thing he most despises?”

  Why indeed? The prince smiled a smile that had a billion dollars behind it, a million oil wells behind that. “I can pay him very well.”

  “If you know so much about my client, you would know that he can’t be bought. In the first place he finds what you are doing not only illegal, but despicable. That’s the difference between March and your Sandy Pedersen. Pedersen used his knowledge to exploit the wilderness, March preserves it. In the second place my client doesn’t care about money. There’s nothing he would even want to spend it on.”

  “But there is.” It was the beginning of a delicate little maneuver. The ball balanced on the tip of a finger and began to spin. “Money would set up a new life.”

  “He wouldn’t leave Montana. He’d rather be a prisoner here than a free man anyplace else.”

  “His choice, of course, but if he stays in Montana, he has a murder charge facing him. I could help him buy the very best legal representation.” Thousands of years of politeness couldn’t disguise the insult of that. “Please don’t take offense, I’m sure you have your areas of legal expertise.”

  Judy Bates’s divorces, the Kid’s speeding ticket.

  “But have you ever handled a murder trial?”

  “What difference does that make? My client is innocent.”

  He was not deterred. “I have spoken to Attorney Dwight Stillman.”

  Dwight Stillman, known all over the West for his six feet six and six inches of Stetson on top of that, also for having won the Mary Hanover case and…

  “He is very interested, but he is expensive. I think it would be in your client’s best interests to consider my offer.”

  “I’m a lawyer and asking me to advise a client to break the law is a little like asking a trained falcon to refuse the lure and fly away. It’s done—I’m not saying it isn’t—and maybe it’s even natural, but it’s not what I’m trained for. I will, however, tell him about this conversation.”

  The prince opened his window and called to Heinz. “Please, the coffee has gotten cold. Would you get another? Do you care for one?” he asked me.

  “No.”

  “I am staying at the Freezeout East Hotel. Please call as soon as you have
spoken to Mr. Augusta. Time is of the essence.”

  “And if I don’t, I suppose you will call me?”

  “Precisely,” the prince said.

  7

  THE NEXT DAY in the Fire Pond County Jail I told March about the prince and he was, just as I had said he would be, appalled.

  “Jesus, that’s who is after the gyr?”

  “He may look like Jesus, but they don’t have much else in common.”

  “Maybe that’s the guy I heard about who’s willing to pay a hundred thousand for the right passager bird.”

  “No figure was discussed.”

  “What’s the difference to a Saudi prince anyway? Saudi money probably has the same relationship to the dollar that the dollar has to the peso. We’re the Third World to the Saudis; a hundred thousand would be chicken feed to them. What chance does any rare or endangered species have against that kind of exchange? What he could afford to pay would be a fortune to a poor trapper, even to Sandy Pedersen. Poachers took a bull elk from Bison Reservation last week and someone probably paid them a bundle for it. They took the whole head, left the rest of the animal there. I guess that means a rich guy is looking for a trophy and the horns won’t be turned into powder for an Asian aphrodisiac. Trophy hunters are the worst of all in my opinion. I suppose there’s some justification for taking an animal if you’re starving, or if you think it’s going to increase your potency, or because you believe it’s killing your livestock.”

  “What are they going to do with the head? Put it on their wall?”

  “Probably. It was a magnificent set of antlers. Taxidermists are required to turn in game taken illegally, but you could find someone to do it if you paid enough. People will do anything for money, which is why conservationists are fighting a losing battle. The return of the peregrine falcon is the rare success story in nature so far. Supposedly there is someone out there who is making a collection of rare and endangered birds—kind of a disturbed modern-day Audubon—and they say he’ll pay whatever it takes to get one. He wants to have them stuffed in his living room when all the live ones are gone. It’s an investment, I guess, and he’s banking on the destruction of the environment and the extirpation of species. Each time he takes one he hastens the day. Then we’ve got the Saudis leaking their oil all over the world, destroying habitats and paying huge sums of money to smuggle the birds that are left in the wild out of it. Why does this prince want the gyr so badly anyway?”

  “It’s white, it’s female. Those are primo in Saudi Arabia where they keep their own women hidden in black veils. There’s something else I must tell you. Not that I am suggesting you break the law or do something you despise, but the prince suggested that he would buy your way out of here if you would get him the bird. He offered to set you up in a new life someplace else, or, if you chose to stay in Montana, to get you, as he put it, ‘the very best legal representation,’ someone with experience in trying murder cases. He suggested Dwight Stillman.”

  “Dwight Stillman? He’s a hired gun.”

  “He got Mary Hanover off for killing her cowboy husband and that wasn’t easy.”

  “Mary Hanover was probably guilty. I’m not. Besides, why would I want Dwight Stillman when I’ve got something rare and primo—a white female.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. Neil, I think there is someone else you ought to see,” March said. “His name is Leo Wolfe and he lives around forty miles west of here. He’s a falconer with a kestrel that he’s devoted to; he also knew Sandy Pedersen. If you should run into Katharine, by the way, don’t mention you’re going. She hates Leo.”

  “With the exception of you and Marie, I don’t mention anything I do on this case to anyone and neither should you.” I hoped I was making myself clear. The last thing I wanted was him discussing what I was doing with Katharine.

  “Of course not, I won’t.”

  “Just for the record, why does Katharine hate Leo Wolfe?” A rhetorical question, perhaps, since Katharine seemed to hate everybody.

  “Partially, it’s a personality conflict, but also because he’s a falconer. Katharine is an animal rights advocate. She thinks it’s cruel to keep wild animals.”

  “What do you think?”

  “In principle I’m not crazy about it, but I know Leo takes good care of his bird.”

  ******

  Leo Wolfe lived on the L&W Ranch, a small place by Montana standards, probably only five thousand acres. It was accessed through an arch with a wrought-iron lion forged on the left side of it, a wolf on the right: the L, the W. It had been a long time since the dirt road to the ranch house had seen rain. Montana had had a big dry summer, the kind of summer where the top layer of the state ends up in Pennsylvania and the national parks end up in smoke. I rolled up the windows, held my breath and plowed through the dust thinking that I wouldn’t want to do it more than once a year. The house itself was freshly painted and well cared for, a place where a woman’s touch had civilized the prairie. There were some cottonwoods and, in season, probably flowers and grass. But the outbuildings, a series of ramshackle, unpainted barns and sheds, looked like whoever took care of them had his eyes on the sky. A beat-up brown truck with a license plate that said TALL was parked at the end of the road. I pulled up next to it.

  Leo met me at the door to the house. He was a large, expansive man around fifty, but a young fifty, one of those people who make it seem like the beginning of a decade rather than the end of a life. He wore jeans, boots, a Levi’s jacket. His hair was black with only a little gray around the edges. I introduced myself and told him that March had sent me.

  “Ma’am, I am pleased to meet you,” he said shaking my hand in his large paw. “Anyone who works for March Augusta is a friend of mine.”

  “I don’t exactly work for March, I represent him. I’m his lawyer.”

  “A lawyer? Is that right? Come on inside for a minute, have some coffee, meet the little woman.” He hung his cowboy hat on a peg beside the door, sucked in his gut and squeezed himself into the house.

  Fay, his wife, was little all right, a tiny gray bird of a woman. If she was at the beginning of anything it was probably old age, retirement, Social Security, senior citizen’s discounts. He was a person who expanded as he got older, she contracted, which had probably exaggerated all those little differences that make up a relationship, but it looked like they had settled them by a division of territory. Her domain was obviously the inside of the house; his ended at the peg where he had hung his hat.

  “Where are you from?” she asked me.

  “Albuquerque, New Mexico.”

  “Mexico!” she said, fluttering around bringing coffee and cookies that I didn’t want. “Goodness, that’s another country.” One of our fifty was missing again.

  Leo settled into the one spot in the room that seemed to belong to him, a faded brown leather armchair with an ottoman. His large hands moved restlessly in his lap. The rest of the room was filled with knickknacks and fragile furniture. I wouldn’t want to sneeze suddenly in this room.

  “Leo and I took a trip around the country once in the Winnebago, didn’t we, dear?” Fay asked, as if the trip would be voided from her memory if he said no. He nodded. “We went across the border into Mexico, and we stopped and I bought salt and pepper shakers.” She took the trouble to show them to me, little ceramic imitations of adobe houses; the chimneys were where the salt and pepper came through.

  “Actually I’m from New Mexico,” I said. “It’s a state, and we have salt and pepper shakers there, too.”

  “Oh. We’ll have to go there the next time.”

  Leo listened to this from the depths of his chair maybe to prove that he knew how. “Now, Fay, this lady didn’t come all the way out here to talk about salt and pepper shakers. She wants to talk to me about birds. Ain’t that right?”

  “That and Sandy Pedersen.”

  “Oh, my goodness, don’t get him started on that,” Fay twitted. It was a delicate balance,
a lion and a wolf in a china shop and already getting restive.

  “I’ll tell you what, Fay, since Ms. Hamel here is interested in falcons, why don’t we just go on outside and take a look at Mimi?”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” said Fay.

  I followed Leo across the dusty yard to one of the sheds. It was time for Mimi’s lunch—dead mice. Leo opened up a small refrigerator and pulled out a tray on which the mice were laid out like cookie dough, lumps of white fur with pink feet where the chocolate chips belonged. Leo selected one and picked it up by its tail. While he affixed it to Mimi’s lure, I took a look around and noted a trap hanging from the wall, a vicious-looking metal instrument caked with dried blood.

  “You a trapper?” I asked.

  “I do a little predator harvesting now and then. Just my way of cutting back the excess, protecting the habitat. I never caught a human being, but I did get a wily coyote the other day. You want to see him?” He pointed to a pelt hanging on a stretcher in the corner. It was a beautiful coat, thick, luxurious, desert sand, black tipped. I wanted to sink my hand deep into it. It was a treat to see so close, but a large pain for the coyote for such a small pleasure for me.

  “Where’s Mimi?” I asked.

  “Out back.”

  We went behind the shed to Mimi’s chicken-wire enclosure. I was expecting a fierce, angry, elegant bird, a Black Shade, a Shadow of Death or an Avenger, but Mimi was smaller and browner than I had expected. She was about ten inches tall with reddish-brown wings and a white breast that was streaked with cinnamon. She had enormous dark eyes and black sideburns on her white face. She sat on a post with jesses dangling from her legs and cakked once when she saw us.

  “She has incredible eyes,” I said.

  “Hawks see a hell of a lot clearer and farther than any other animal and they see in color. A peregrine falcon’s eyes are larger and heavier than a man’s. Hawks have big mouths, too, just like some people I know. You always feed ’em from the lure.” He threw the lure with the dead mouse attached to it toward Mimi.

  She flapped her wings and fluttered down from her perch. I expected her to rip rapaciously into the meat around the heart of the mouse, but she sheared off the head first, tore out some guts, then ate delicately with careful, precise bites. As she ate she wrapped her wings around her like a cape.