Читать книгу The Falconer’s Tale - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 6

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Piat had never had a case officer before. Case officers are the men and women who recruit agents and then handle them—long hours of manipulation, a shoulder on which to cry, a voice when it is dark. Piat was used to being the shoulder and the voice.

“Dave’s” was not the shoulder or the voice that Piat would have chosen. Dave was clearly the man’s cover name—he didn’t always respond when the name was called. His voice was rough, assertive, yet with a surprising repertoire of high-pitched giggles and nervous laughter. He had had trouble parking his rental car. He had shown considerable resentment while walking Piat through some shopping in Oban. Piat had been tempted to start coaching him then and there.

Two hours later, Piat sat next to the man on the cafeteria deck of MV Isle of Mull and tried not to gnaw on the sore ends of how little he wanted to do this. He’d taken the money, and there wasn’t much he could do about any of it, but it smelled.

Partlow should have run him himself. They loathed each other, but Partlow was a competent case officer and would have made sure that things got done on time and under budget. Dave was so clearly a second stringer that Piat wanted to ask him what other agents he’d run—if any. It was as if, having recruited Piat, Partlow was now distancing himself from the operation. That wasn’t like Clyde. He didn’t usually let go of anything once he had it in his well-manicured hands.

Piat was sure that if he wanted to, he could ditch Dave at Craignure, the ferry terminal he’d already noted on the map of Mull. And then he’d walk. It was a tempting thought. Dave struck Piat as the type who’d order a lot of searches done by other people and spend a lot of time in cars. Piat thought it might be fun to walk away. In Piat’s experience, the way to lose Americans was to walk. It worked on Russians and Chinese, too.

He’d been paid half the money and he’d discovered that the Agency really didn’t have much on him—or had buried the evidence to protect themselves. He could probably manage a day’s fishing before he flew—

Pure fantasy. He had one passport—his own—and they’d come looking for him. Mull was an island cul-de-sac with only a couple of exits.

Ten thousand dollars for two days’ work, no matter how dirty, would get him back to Greece. If he was careful, the money would see him through the winter. By then it was possible that he would find something in the antiquities market to sell.

Because Dave had taken the window seat, Piat got up and pulled a sweater out of his bag. It was a very nice sweater—Burberry, more than a hundred pounds in Oban on the High Street. Piat had never been able to resist spending other people’s money. He had purchased a wardrobe that would last him five years—good stuff, if you liked English clothes. Piat liked anything that lasted. He pulled the sweater over his head and added the clothes to his list of positives. He could leave Partlow holding his baggage now—there was nothing in it worth as much as the clothes he had just encouraged Dave to buy for him. Scratch that thought—Piat wanted the rods back. He sat and admired his wool trousers and smiled again.

Dave didn’t even look up. He was reading The Economist with an air of self-importance that Piat longed to puncture. He shrugged internally. Why bother? Piat took out a guide to the early European Bronze Age and browsed it, trying to separate the useful facts from the clutter of drivel about prehistoric alphabets and runic stones. The early European Bronze Age was the hottest market in antiquities. Piat tried for fifteen minutes, but the book didn’t hold his attention.

Why does Partlow need me? Piat chewed the question. Hackbutt was a handling nightmare—did Partlow know that?

He looked at the cover of his book and wondered if any of the Roman authorities had commented on the world before Greece. All too damned speculative. He allowed his eyes to skim past the usual photos; a bronze breastplate, a helmet, a spectacular sword with an early flanged hilt, some badly decorated pottery. He knew all the objects. They decorated major museums. It needed a remarkable coincidence of durability, placement and luck for anything that old—the second millennium BC—to be found in northern Europe. Even to survive.

Partlow is doing something around the rules—above, below, whatever. He had to be. He’d involved Dukas—Piat went back with Dukas, not exactly as pals but with some respect. He’d involved Alan Craik. Piat didn’t love Craik but he had seen him in action. Dukas and Craik were buddies. Dukas and Partlow were not buddies at all.

And Hackbutt was into falconry—and Partlow had said right out that’s why they wanted him. Most of the Arab bigwigs were into falconry, too. No big leap of logic there.

Like speculating on what classical authority might have a bearing on the Bronze Age, speculating on Clyde Partlow’s motives from the deck of the ferry wasn’t getting Piat anywhere.

I can find a partner and a dig when I get back to Lesvos. Worst case, I’m a few thousand richer, and I have some new clothes.

Piat shrugged, this time physically. It made Dave glance up at him from his magazine. For a moment their eyes met. Piat smiled.

“I’m trying to read,” said Dave.

Piat nodded, still smiling. He started to prepare himself to meet Edgar Hackbutt, bird fancier, social outcast, and ex-agent.

Piat swung the rented Renault down into Tobermory’s main street, reminding himself to get over to the left, toward the water. The morning was brilliant, with thin, pale-blue mare’s tails high up against a darker blue sky. The tide was in, and big boats rode alongside the pier; as always when he saw them, he thought, I could live on one of those, but in fact he never would. Too much a creature of the land, or perhaps too suspicious of the predictability of a boat, too easy to find. On land, you could always get out and walk.

He drove along the waterfront, brightly painted buildings on his right, memorizing them—hardware store, chandler’s shop, bank, grocery—and then pulled up the long hill out of town and around a roundabout to the right, heading not down the island’s length but across its northern part. A sign said “Dervaig”; he followed it, passed a chain of small lakes (Mishnish Lochs, fishing, small trout—he’d pretty much memorized a tourist brochure) and, with a kind of fierce joy, drove the one-lane road that twisted and switch-backed up and down hills. He played the game of chicken that was the island’s way of dealing with two cars driving straight at each other: one would have to yield and pull into a supposedly available lay-by. Locals drove like maniacs and waved happily as they roared past; tourists either went into the lay-bys like frightened rabbits or clutched the wheel and hoped that what was happening to them was an illusion. Piat, flicking in and out of lay-bys, waving when he won, giving a thumbs-up when he didn’t, had the time of his life.

He climbed past a cemetery above Dervaig and, following a map in his head, turned left and south. Halfway down the wide glen would be a road on the right; from it, a track went still farther up and then briefly down. At its end, Dave had assured him, Hackbutt’s farm waited. Piat drove slower, head ducked so he could look out the windscreen. He’d have said that landscape didn’t interest him, but in fact, it fascinated him, only without the sentimentality that led other people to take photos and paint watercolors. He always saw possibilities—for escape, for hides, for pursuit. Here, the sheer scale of the place surprised him: this was an island, and Tobermory was almost a toy town, but out here was a breadth of horizon that reminded him of Africa. Even with the mountains. The glen was miles wide, he thought, the mountains starting as rolling slopes that careened abruptly upward and became almost vertical climbs to their summits. Strong climber could shake anybody up there. The landscape was brown and green and gray; grass, not heather; bare rock and bracken. You could walk and walk. Or run and run. If the footing is okay.

He found the road to the right and drove it more slowly; it was ancient tarmac, crumbling along the edges, potholed, hardly wider than the car. He came over a rise and almost ran into a goofy-looking runner, some old guy wearing what looked like a giant’s T-shirt that flapped around him in the crisp wind. Hardly noticing him, the runner plodded on. Piat thought, I could give you half a mile and still get there first. After another mile, the road forked and he went right. Almost there. When he had gone half a mile farther, he pulled up just short of a crest and got the car into a lay-by and stopped. “Please do not park in the lay-bys,” the tourist brochure had said. You bet.

Piat got out and spread an Ordnance Survey map on the hood, traced his route from Tobermory, found the fork, followed with his finger, and judged from the contour lines that if he walked over the crest, he’d be looking down on Hackbutt’s house. Or farm, or whatever the hell it was. His aviary, how would that be?

He had borrowed a pair of binoculars from good old Dave—Swarovskis, 10x50, nice if you didn’t have to carry them very far—and walked the hundred feet to the top of the hill. He made his way into the bracken and moved toward a rock outcrop, keeping himself out of sight of the house he’d glimpsed below, until he reached the outcrop and put his back against it and turned the binoculars on the house.

It could have been any house on the island—central doorway, two windows on each side, a chimney at one end, second storey with two dormers. The color of rich cream but probably stone under a coat of paint, possibly an old croft fixed up but more likely built in the last hundred years. At the far side of the house, clothes blew in the wind on a circular contraption with a central metal pole. Behind it, as if to tell him it was the right house, were pens and little shacks like doghouses that he took to be sheds for the birds; beside a half-collapsed metal gate, a dejected-looking black and white dog lay with its head on outstretched paws, beside it what was apparently supposed to be a doghouse made out of boxes and a tarp. The bird pens seemed to have been set out at random, the hutches put together by somebody who didn’t know which end of a hammer to hit his thumb with. That’d be Hackbutt, for sure.

Piat studied the place. He hoped to actually see Hackbutt so he’d go in with that advantage. They hadn’t seen each other in fifteen years; let the other guy feel the shock of change. Hackbutt would have an idea he was coming but wouldn’t know when: Piat had sent him a postcard with a picture of a bear on the front, a nonsense message on the back signed “Freddy.” From “ready for Freddy.” It meant “get ready;” the bear was the identifier, an old code between them. Would Hackbutt remember? Of course he would. In fact, Piat thought, he’d piss his pants.

After fifteen minutes, nobody had appeared near the house. Piat eased himself around the outcrop and walked back through the bracken to the car. He leaned on the roof and trained the binoculars around him, idling, not wanting to go down to the house yet. Apprehensive? Cold feet? He looked down the road. The goofy runner was coming back. He was making heavy going of it now, his feet coming down as if he were wearing boots, his hands too high on his chest. The too-big T-shirt blew around him. He had a beard and long, gray hair, also blowing, the effect that of some small-time wizard in a ragged white robe. Smiling, Piat put the binoculars to his eyes to enjoy this sorry sight, and when the focus snapped in, he realized with a shock that the runner was Hackbutt.

The last time he had seen Hackbutt, he’d weighed about two-thirty and had had a sidewall haircut, smooth cheeks, and eyes like two raisins in a slice of very white bread. Now, there was the beard and the long hair, and the face had been carved down to planes that made his eyes look huge; his skin was almost brown, and he had lost a lot of weight—so much that his legs looked fragile. The T-shirt, Piat realized, must be one of his own from the old days.

He still can’t run for shit, at least.

Hackbutt toiled up toward him. Piat moved around to the rear of the car and leaned back against the trunk. The runner came on, his breathing hoarse and hard, his eyes on the crest. He was going to pass Piat without looking at him, Piat knew—eye contact had always been hard for the man, confronting new people a torment. Now, as he came almost even, Piat said, “Hey, Digger.”

Hackbutt was the kind of nerd who actually did double takes. He might look like a wizard now, but inside was the same insecure fumbler. Still running, he looked aside toward Piat, looked away, then really looked back and, finally believing the evidence of his eyes, came to a stop with his mouth open and his T-shirt flapping. “Jack?” he said, breathing hard. He’d always known Piat as Jack Michaels.

“Hey, man, you look good. Putting in the miles, that’s great.” Piat was still leaning on the car. He held out his hand. “Sight for sore eyes, Digger.”

“Jeez, Jack, this is—” Hackbutt took a death grip on Piat’s hand. The guy was really strong. “I got your card, but I didn’t know when you were coming!” He grinned. “Wow, this is unbelievable!” Then they both said it was great, and unbelievable, and a long time.

“You look good, Dig. Lost some weight, haven’t you?”

“Some weight! Sixty pounds, Jack.” His breathing was getting better and he was able to stick his chest out. “Surprised?”

“Amazing.”

“Jeez, Jack, you haven’t changed. You look just the same. You look great.”

“Little older, little grayer.” He grinned at Hackbutt. Piat was surprised to find he was pleased to see him. Good old, easy old Eddie Hackbutt. “Let me run you down to the house.” That was a slip; he shouldn’t have admitted he’d already seen the house. Hackbutt, however, didn’t notice; he was too busy shaking his head and frowning.

“No, no, Irene wouldn’t like it. I can’t give in like that. Anyway, I’m just coming up on the big finish—over the hill and then I sprint to the front door.”

Piat thought that would be worth seeing. Most of his concentration, however, was on Hackbutt’s “Irene.” Partlow’s file had said nothing about a wife, had mentioned only a “companion,” name unspecified. “Keeps your nose to the grindstone, does she?”

Hackbutt’s face darkened. “No, it isn’t like that!” This was new—he’d grown a spine in fifteen years. “You’ll have to meet her.” And Hackbutt turned about and started his painful plod up the last hundred feet of the hill before his final sprint.

Piat sat behind the wheel without starting the car; he wanted to let Hackbutt get home and tell “Irene” about meeting good old Jack. The house was no more than a third of a mile away—give the man four minutes. Five, so he could get out of that T-shirt. And Piat wanted to think: he’d made a mistake. He’d thought he’d told himself that Hackbutt would be changed, but he’d thought only that he’d be more like Hackbutt—fatter, nerdier—and not that he’d have reinvented himself as a skinny, bearded exercise freak. Or been reinvented by a woman named Irene, who now took on an importance that Piat hadn’t even guessed at.

Losing my touch. Or getting rusty.

He started the engine.

Irene Girouard wore a long dress, as if she had something to hide, but otherwise she was very much in evidence. Piat thought that her first initial, I, probably summed her up, so he didn’t need the confirmation of the wallful of photographs that greeted him as soon as he was taken into the house.

“Irene’s a photographer,” Hackbutt said. His tone said, I’m crazy about Irene.

The photographs were all of Irene, taken by Irene. Irene’s left eye, Irene’s chin, Irene’s right knee, Irene’s vagina (oh, yes), Irene’s left breast in profile, full front, and close-up, emphasis on big nipple. Piat decided that the long dress wasn’t meant to hide her but to refer curiosity to the photos.

“I’m doing an installation in Paris any time now.” Her voice had a hint of something foreign. “I just need to get my shit together and then it’s go any time I say so. Hackbutt’s gathering found objects for me.”

Hackbutt smiled. “Irene’s going to be a household name.”

“These are all, mm, you?” Piat said.

“I don’t fuck around with false modesty. Yes, that’s my cunt, if that’s what you want to ask. The photos’ll be assembled on stuff we’ve found, mostly animal bones, to make a humanoid construction. I’m fastening the photos to the bones with barbed wire from an old fence he found.”

“It’s called I Sing the Body Electric,” Hackbutt said.

“Whitman,” she said.

Piat thought of saying Whitman Who? but didn’t, aware that he didn’t like the woman at all, that she was going to be a problem, and at the same time finding a woman who took pictures of her own vagina perversely interesting. She also had a big, hearty, apparently healthy laugh, as if despite all the photos she was as sane as a stone and he ought to get to know her. For the sake of saying something, for the sake of having to put up with her, he said, “Are you going to cut the parts out of the photos when you, mm, barbed-wire them to the stuff?”

“God, no, that would be so calculated!”

That was just the central hall of the house, as far as they’d got at that point. There had been introductions, a pro forma question about something to drink—they didn’t drink tea or coffee, but they had water “from the hill” and juice, source not given—and then the photos, Hackbutt saying, as if they were the reason for the visit, “These are Irene’s photographs.”

There was more of Irene throughout the house, Piat learned. Nobody picked up after him/herself, apparently, so parts of both of them were left where they fell: the living room, just to the left after you came in the front door, was thick with art magazines, falconry paraphernalia (Piat had bought a book in Glasgow, so he recognized the jesses, at least); batteries, probably used; a battery charger, plugged in but empty; a sizable number of animal bones; a plate that had held something oily. Four spindly plants in the windows, yearning for a sunnier climate. The kitchen, next behind the living room, was furnished mostly in dirty dishes, a camera, burned-down candles. Piat, himself scrupulously neat, wondered if he’d dare to eat anything that came out of it. On the right of the central hall were, first, a small bedroom (“You’re going to stay, aren’t you, Jack?”), then a closed door that led, he supposed, to their own bedroom, which he hoped they wouldn’t show him. He imagined dirty laundry in shoulder-high heaps. At the end of a corridor, another closed door hid what Hackbutt called “Irene’s studio.”

Then it was out to see the birds, which were to Hackbutt as the photos were to Irene. They were hawks and falcons, different types that Piat couldn’t distinguish; hooded, silent, they sat on perches and occasionally turned their heads. Hackbutt insisted on feeding two of them for him to watch, and he demonstrated their training with one of them and an old sock that was supposed to represent a rabbit. Hackbutt almost had a glow around his head; his eyes were those of a fanatic. Partlow, he thought, had chosen well—if Hackbutt could be recruited.

“I wish I’d known you were coming,” Irene said when she’d decided they had spent enough time on the birds. “We could have had lunch.”

“I 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 himself for poor preparation and overall laziness; then, the personnel work done, he had decided what he must do. It all came down to two things: learn to like Irene Girouard, because she ran Edgar Hackbutt; and accept the new Hackbutt, consigning the old one to history.

Now, as he got out of the car, he grinned as Irene appeared in the doorway. She was in another long dress, blue denim, fairly waistless. Piat was wearing a black polo shirt and a sweater and a pair of khakis. He waved. She waved. He took a plastic sack from the car and loped up to the door. “I’m going to try this again,” he said, holding out the bag.

“For little ol’ me?”

“For both of little ol’ you.” She hesitated, holding the storm door open for him. He had to go past her, face to face. Going by, he bent his head and kissed her, quickly, lightly. “Good to see you again.”

“Edgar’s with his birds.”

“Good chance for me to talk to him?” Make it a question, he told himself; get on her good side. When she didn’t answer, he said, “What’s your dog’s name?” People like you ought to like their dogs, right?

“No idea,” she said. “He kept hanging around when we moved in.” She was taking things out of the sack. “Greek honey—well!” He’d found the gourmet shelves at the Island Bakery in Tobermory. “Oh—!” She had something clutched between her breasts. “Porcini cream!”

“Organic.”

She gave him an odd smile. “You’re a quick learner.” She pulled out other things—balsamic vinegar, olive oil crushed with blood oranges, a set of hemp place mats. She was pleased, maybe only with the effort and not the things themselves, but she was pleased. “Sure, why don’t you go talk to Edgar. I’ll get naked.”

And if that wasn’t a peace offering, what is? She made sex so overt, however, he was suspicious. He thought that maybe she was performing her sexuality, not being it. Maybe for her it was like a language she’d learned on paper but couldn’t get fluent in. If so, if they actually got to it, there would be a lot of drama—costumes like crotchless panties, oils and perfumes, sound effects like yum-yums to go with the obligatory blow job and glad cries for orgasm, real or simulated, probably the latter. And afterward, the reviews: You were so good. Was it good for you? Was I good? But maybe it wouldn’t be like that at all. But either way, he already wanted to know.

He was only going to be with them for a few days, and then he’d be on his way, so it wouldn’t be endangering his own operation if he took what she seemed to be offering.

He went out the rear door and stumbled because of the unexpected step down. Nobody cut the lawn at Hackbutt’s, but a path was worn between coarse grass and a bed of nettles, which Piat knew from Greece and managed to avoid. He tried to remember how to get to the bird pens; giving up, he shouted, “Digger! Digger!”

Hackbutt appeared, much closer than expected. “Jack! You did come back!” His hands were covered with red goo. “How nice. I won’t shake hands.” Part of the nettle bed was between them. “I’m cutting up some pigeons.”

Piat steered around the nettles and joined Hackbutt in the remains of an outbuilding. There was bad smell and a lot of feathers. “Where do you get the pigeons?”

“A kid shoots them for me with an air gun.”

“That doesn’t sound so vegan.”

Hackbutt shrugged. “Raptors aren’t vegans.” He had a bucket on the ground half full of pieces of pigeon, partly plucked, bloody. On a rough table that had started life as something else, he was chopping a dead bird with a cleaver.

“Can’t they do that for themselves?”

“Sure. They love to do it themselves. But you got to train them not to do it, so they’ll bring you game birds if you fly them at them.” He whacked off a wing. “Falconry’s a sport. Like shooting. There’s a quarry—in the old days, the object was to bring in game to eat. See, it’s hard to get a carnivore to bring meat to you instead of eating it itself. Like using a tiger for a retriever.” He whacked off the other wing. “You see Irene?”

“She was off to take her bath. I brought you some sort of veggie stuff. She seemed pleased.”

“Oh, that’s good.” He swept the edge of the cleaver across the blood on the table, then held the bucket under the edge so he could push the blood into it. “Irene’s a wonderful gal, Jack. I want you two to like each other.” He wiped his hands on a rag. “She changed my life. They talk about people reinventing themselves—she reinvented me. Really. I’m still not much, I know that, but I’m a hell of a lot more than I was.”

“You were always a good guy. And a good agent.”

Hackbutt looked pleased and said, “Well—” but didn’t really rise to it. In the old days, he would have been like a cat, doing everything but arching his back. He picked up the bucket and pushed past Piat. “The birds are a full-time job. It’s fun, and I love my birds, but, Jeez, man, it’s your life!”

He went along the pens, talking to birds he told Piat were immature, making noises to them, tossing pieces of pigeon to them. He strapped a guard over his left arm and enticed a young falcon to perch on it by holding up a pigeon neck with the head still attached, and then he gave it to the bird.

One of the cages was twice the size of the others. So was the occupant. Alone of the birds, the giant received a whole pigeon. Piat watched as the big bird held the head down with both feet and tore out pieces of meat from the neck, plucking as it went, feathers drifting down and now and then getting stuck to its beak.

“I thought you had to teach them not to rip the prey to shreds?” Piat asked.

“She’s different. Jeez, Jack, can’t you see how big she is? Bella’s a sea eagle, Jack. I’m in a program for them. We get the chicks—long story there—and raise ’em by hand, then release ’em in the wild. Helps rebuild the population. They’re nearly extinct. Isn’t Bella great?” Hackbutt smiled like a parent with a bright toddler. “I love my birds!”

“You told Irene I’d want something,” Piat said.

Hackbutt was picking up another piece of meat with a gloved hand. “Well—yeah, I apologize, Jack. I just meant—”

“You were being honest. And you were right. I want something.”

Hackbutt looked at him and then turned so that Piat could see the bird better. He should have said something like What?, and in the old days he would have, but now he kept his mouth shut.

“How much did you tell Irene about what you used to do?”

“Nothing! Honest to God, Jack, nothing. I signed that paper, didn’t I? I swore I’d never say anything and I didn’t.”

“What did you tell her I do?” He put it in the present tense because he wasn’t going to tell Hackbutt that he was long out of the CIA and in fact a kind of renegade.

“Nothing.”

“She must have asked.”

“Oh, she said something like, ‘Does he work for the government?’”

Irene was a lot smarter than that, Piat thought, although maybe she was one of those people who paid no attention to the worlds of war and politics and tricky shit. Still, she’d have heard of the CIA. “What did you say?”

“Oh, I just said, ‘Sort of.’” The sea eagle had finished the pigeon and now snatched the next one from the glove and put it under one foot, then tried to disentangle the other foot from the remains of the head. It looked like a swimmer trying to shake water out of its ear. The mangled head fell to the ground and the bird started on the new prey.

“Tell you what, Digger.” Digger had been an early code name, from the Digger O’Dell of an old comedy program; it had become a nickname when Hackbutt had become more than an incidental source. “I know that anything I ask you to undertake, Irene’s got to know about—right? I see that. I acknowledge that’s the nature of your relationship. It isn’t usual, but we go back and—you two are bonded, right?” He was talking bullshit, but this was his spiel.

“Bonds of steel,” Hackbutt said. “I heard that someplace. It says it all. It’s love. It amazes me, but she loves me. Me. Thanks for understanding, Jack.”

“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 a stupid 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.”

Hackbutt at last managed to open his mouth and wheeze, “Yeah, but—Jack, Jeez—”

Piat was on his feet. He patted Hackbutt’s shoulder. “Everything’ll be fine. It’ll be great.” He glanced at Dave and saw an expression of malice and triumph. Dave, he knew, was right—the case officer’s the boss—but my god! he was a shit. Piat walked the few steps to the entryway, picked his raincoat off a hook, and opened the door. It was raining harder. He didn’t look back because he didn’t want to see Hackbutt’s face.

He went out to the road and started looking for a Land Rover, found one around the corner of the restaurant. Partlow was just visible through the rain at the wheel. Piat climbed in the passenger door.

“There we are, Jerry,” said Partlow. “Probably the easiest ten thousand dollars you ever earned.” He put the car in gear and started out of town. The big chassis barely fit the single-lane road past the old inn that dominated the north end of Salen.

“That’s it?” asked Piat. “And you’re sure Dave can handle this from here?”

Partlow changed gears. “I’m sure Dave can handle him as well as anyone, Jerry.” There were headlights visible on the long hill down from Aros Mains, and Partlow pulled into a lay-by to let the other car pass.

Piat considered a number of bitter replies and realized that, whatever mistakes Dave made, he himself was out of it. For two days, he had returned to the world of being a case officer. He had allowed Hackbutt’s needs to become the horizon and limit of his world, just as he always had. The shoulder to cry on. The voice in the dark.

All done. Never again, and all that. He took a deep breath and let it out.

“So, now what?” Piat asked. He was gripping the hand-hold over the passenger window a little too hard. Partlow was driving fast in the rain, taking curves too aggressively, and with what Piat saw as a reckless disregard for the possibility of further oncoming vehicles on a single-lane road.

“I take you back to the hotel. You check out and take the ferry back to the mainland. And goodbye.”

Piat trod hard on his anger. Partlow’s dismissal was a little too much like Dave’s. Stick to what matters. “When do I get my money? And my rods?”

“Why, immediately, if you like. Really, Jerry, your constant paranoia depresses me. You are done. You were hired to perform a service and you did a fine job. No hard feelings, I hope?”

Piat eyed an upcoming double hairpin turn with some misgivings, but he said, “No, Clyde. For once, I have no hard feelings.” He shrugged, mostly at himself. But Partlow was clearly pleased with the progress of the operation, and he probably had money just lying around—“Although I did lose a thousand dollars’ worth of fishing in Iceland, a trip I had planned and anticipated for some time.”

“Jerry, just come out with it. I take it we’re leading up to a demand for more cash?” Partlow sounded like a loving but aggrieved parent.

“Well.” Piat’s grasp on the handle loosened as Partlow reached the two-lane road that led into Tobermory. “Well, to be frank, Clyde, I’d think you could get me an airplane ticket and refund me the value of my trip to Iceland.”

Partlow sighed. “I had intended to add fifteen hundred dollars as a success bonus, Jerry. Is that sufficient? You can purchase your own ticket.”

Piat watched the town of Tobermory spreading out below them as they drove around the traffic circle. “Throw in the car for the rest of the day,” he said. “Let me have the car. I’ll go fishing.”

Partlow sighed again. “Jerry, sometimes I think you aren’t quite sane. It’s raining. It’s cold.”

“So you won’t leave the hotel. It’s a spate, Clyde. Give me the money and my rods and I’ll get an afternoon’s fishing here. And no hard feelings.” Curious how easily manipulated Partlow was on this. It had never occurred to Piat before that Partlow wanted his approval. But he did. Interesting.

Partlow turned and looked at him, as if assessing him. Almost certainly was assessing him. Then he smiled. “What the hell. Just don’t run off with the car, Jerry, okay? It’s a rental, and I signed for it.”

Piat smiled. “Clyde, why would I run off with the car?”

Piat spent thirty minutes with Partlow signing forms. It amused him that Clyde was so punctilious on his forms—another sign that the man hadn’t spent enough time running real agents. Perhaps that was the root of his insecurity. Piat complied cheerfully, however, especially when he discovered that he could sign all the forms in a cover name. He acquired sixty-five hundred dollars in large bills and retrieved his fishing gear and his battered backpack.

In his own room at the Mishnish he called Irene. Hackbutt would still be at the restaurant; Piat’s responsibility to the operation was over; what better time to get her to join him? Except that nobody answered at the farm. He called airlines at Glasgow and discovered that, as he had suspected, he couldn’t get back to Greece for twenty-four hours. Irene was vanishing over his horizon—Hackbutt would get back to the farm soon; complications would set in. He shrugged. In an hour, he was in the car, which he loathed as too big and too flashy—and too damned short to carry his rod already set up.

He had ideas about where to go to fish—he’d virtually memorized the green tourist brochure in his room. He sat in the car, watching the rain over the sea, and tried to remember how fishing worked in Scotland. You had to buy tickets—there was virtually no public fishing. At least, that’s what he’d read in the brochure. A glance at his watch told him that it was two p.m. He shut off the car and went back into the hotel.

The windows of the bookstore were full of children’s books and travel guides to catch the tourist’s eyes, but as soon as he was through the door and out of the rain he saw the case of flies and the corner dedicated to fishing. The floor was old wood, the ceiling low—it was an eighteenth-century shop front, or perhaps two joined together.

A pretty young woman stood behind the counter, perhaps sixteen years old—a little young for Piat, but a pleasure to see. “I wonder if you could tell me about the fishing,” Piat asked. “I have the afternoon.”

“Would you be wanting the trout, then?” she asked.

“Salmon?” Piat asked, a little wistfully. “Or is there sea trout fishing here?”

“Some, aye. My da would know better.” She spoke quite seriously—fishing was a serious subject here. “He’s in the back. Shall I get him, then?”

She made Piat feel quite old. “Yes, please,” he said, like a boy on his best behavior.

She vanished into an office in the back. Piat began to browse. The front of the store was full of books for tourists, with maps and walking guides and a whole series of books on the genealogy and history of the island. All locally printed. He flipped through one, a walking guide with historical notes. The antiquarian in him automatically counted the hill forts, the duns, the standing stones—the island boasted a strong archaeological record.

“Are you looking for sea trout?”

Piat turned from the book rack and saw a tall man, gaunt, with a huge smile and a shock of black hair. He did not have the expected accent.

“Yes. Sea trout,” said Piat.

“Not what they used to be, I’m afraid. Had some Americans catching them in the Aros last year—they come every year. Aros estuary. I can give you that for this evening, but there’s no point in going there now. The tide’s down.”

Piat nodded. “How much?”

“Five pounds for the estuary. It’s best fished two hours either side of high tide. I wouldn’t even start on it until six. I’m Donald, by the way.”

“Jack,” said Piat, shaking hands. He’d been Jack for two days. The lie came automatically, and Piat thought Why’d I do that? “I’d like to fish this afternoon, too.”

“You have a car?” Donald asked. Donald spoke the way Clyde Partlow wanted to speak, with no trace of an island accent—like someone who had gone to all the best schools. Eton. Oxford. Maybe Cambridge. “I don’t guarantee you’ll get any fish, but Loch Làidir is available.” He seemed wistful. “It’s quite a climb from the road.”

The man was already filling out a bright orange card. “Leave this on the dashboard of your car.”

Piat watched him for a few seconds. “Where am I going?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. Right.” Donald flashed his gigantic smile again. “Do you know the island at all?”

“I can get from here to Salen,” Piat replied with a shrug. “I’ve driven over near Dervaig.”

“Right. You’ll want a map.” He pointed to the rack of Ordnance Surveys. He rattled off driving directions. “It should take you less than half an hour to get there. Then the climb—you see this stream?—strenuous but worth it.” His forefinger covered the mark on the map. “Just follow it up to the loch. Nothing in it but wee trout. The sea trout come up the other side, from the sea, of course. Once you reach the loch, it’s still difficult going—rock all the way round. But there’s a gravel beach on this shore. I’d fish there, by the crannog.”

Piat saw a tiny island on the Ordnance map, with the word “crannog” in minute italics. “What’s a crannog?” he asked.

Donald laughed. “A local oddity. An artificial island. Built long ago. You have waders?”

Piat shook his head.

Donald considered him. Piat knew that Donald had just written him off as a novice.

“I forgot them,” he muttered.

“You really will need them.” Then, cheerfully, “I suppose that you could just skip about on the shore. The loch is very deep in places.”

With a sigh for the money, Piat chose a pair of heavy rubber thigh waders from the fishing equipment. He wondered if the bulky things would go in his pack. He noted that the shop had light waders—very pricey. But they’d fit in his pack, and in effect, Partlow was paying. What the hell.

Piat paid.

The climb to the loch was spectacular. The terrain was very like Iceland, with shocks of coarse grass over gravel and volcanic rock. There was a path at first, but it soon divided into hundreds of sheep tracks, all going in the same general direction up the stream. It took him almost an hour to climb over the last crest and look down into what had to be the caldera of an extinct volcano. The shingle of gravel was clearly visible across the loch, and so was the crannog, seen at this distance as a humped island with a single tree growing from it, the tree visible for a mile in any direction because it was the only one. Again, Piat was reminded of the immense vistas of Africa.

Beyond the far lip of the caldera was only sky. High above, an eagle circled. Piat drank a cup of tea from his thermos and started down. The sense of openness—freedom, even—Piat couldn’t think of the origin of the tag, but the words above him, only sky ran around and around his head. The Bible? The Beatles?

It was three-thirty before he arrived on the gravel and set up his rod. He fished the shallow water between the gravel and the crannog for fifteen minutes, hooking and releasing a half-dozen minute brown trout. Then he put on the light, stocking-foot waders, a wet task in the rain, and pulled his boots on over them. No choice there. His boots were in for a pounding.

He worked the seaward end of the gravel, moving slowly into the deeper water. The loch itself was quite deep and very clear, so that when the watery sun made momentary appearances, he could see the complex rock formations in the depths. Right at his feet was a hollow cone of rock thirty feet across and so deep in the middle that light couldn’t penetrate it, some sort of ancient volcanic vent. He cast to the edge of the vent and immediately caught a strong brown trout, perhaps a pound, which he watched rise from the depths to seize the sea-trout fly. As far as he could see, the loch was short on food for fish and long on fish, but watching the predatory glide of the brown to his fly was pure joy.

A younger and braver fisherman could walk out along the vent’s top ridge to fish the deeper water. Piat actually considered it for a moment while he landed the brown trout before deciding that the creeping cowardice of age was going to win this one. He released the brown. He’d eat in a restaurant for his last meal on the island, and they wouldn’t want to cook his fish.

The crannog rose like a temptation, only fifteen or twenty meters off shore, the perfect platform from which to fish the vent, and whatever further wonders might lurk in the loch beyond. Piat climbed out of the water on the shingle and eyed the crannog. The water was too deep to walk out directly—he’d be over the top of his belt at the midpoint, soaked to the skin and cold. But there were stones under the surface of the water, two sets of stepping stones. The stones themselves were well down, but he thought he could move from one stone to the next without going over his waders.

Piat knew he was going to attempt it. He laughed at himself while he drank some tea, because his failure to accept the lure of the vent ridge meant that he was going to try and prove himself on something just as ridiculous. Partlow had thought he was crazy for fishing in the rain. Piat raised his cup of tea to Partlow. Then he stowed it, put his pack under a particularly large clump of grass as the best shelter from the rain available, and studied the stones one more time.

The left-hand stones looked more accessible. They started in deeper water but stuck up higher and seemed to have larger and flatter tops. Piat waded out to the first stone and stepped up. The surface of the stone was covered in a dark olive slime and his hiking boots slipped badly. He moved cautiously to the next stone. The water came to the middle of his knee. He used his rod as a staff, heedless of the wetting of his reel, and took a long gliding step to the third stone. It was less slippery, and he paused to rest, sweat already pouring down his chest under his sweater.

The fourth stone was clearly visible now, a darker and larger stone that marked the halfway point. Piat knew the moment his boot touched the surface under water that this stone was slippery, and then he was in the water, his waders full and then his mouth. The water was cold—so cold that it hit him like an electric shock—and the bottom was ooze, not rock, so that his feet were sinking and he had no purchase.

Piat had long experience of his own panic reflex and he beat it down, kept hold of his rod and kept the other hand in contact with the stepping stone until he had control of his brain, and then he used the strength of his arms to pull himself up on the rock, heedless of the temperature of the water. The wind on his head was like a new shock of ice. He’d lost his hat, which was scudding across the loch on the surface of the water. Mud and ooze billowed around his thrashing feet. He pulled himself up by the strength of his arms, heaving the weight of his full waders to the rock.

He fell again, just one stone out from the shore, but he was prepared this time, and his fall merely caused him to sit down hard on the stone and take a new batch of cold water over his waders.

Close up, the crannog was composed of small, round rocks the size of his fist, raised in a low mound. Underneath the water, the mound of rubble continued, although he could clearly see a beam or heavy rafter of wood deep in the clear water of the leeward side.

He stripped. He wrung out each sodden garment and put the wool socks and the jeans and sweater back on under the now empty waders, made a bundle of the rest of the clothes and tied it around his waist. He was warmer already—his jacket and the waders were windproof, and the wool was warm even when wet. Just to make a point to himself, he made some desultory casts into the deep water beyond the crannog. Something made a sizeable silver flash on his fourth cast—

Gone. A sea trout, without question. A good fish. He cast again, and again, trying to relive the moment of the earlier cast and remember just what he had done, eventually wondering if he had imagined the whole thing. His head was cold, and that wasn’t good.

Time to go.

The crannog interested him, even while he stood shivering on it. Between casts and retrieves, he tried to imagine how it had come here, how much effort it would have taken people (how many people—a family? Two families?) to build—and why. For the fishing? And when?

He left his boots off for the return trip. With his socks worn over the waders, he had reasonably sure footing and made his way without incident. He was losing too much heat from his head. He drank the rest of his thermos of tea and ate a sandwich made of the leftovers from his attempt to find presents for Hackbutt and pulled the plastic bags over his head, and then his cotton shirt, now wrung out, and then another bag. Better than nothing.

The walk back out was easier than he had expected. Perhaps because it was downhill, or the psychological effect of having his car in sight from the moment he climbed out of the caldera, but the climb down served only to keep the worst of the chill away. The Land Rover’s heater was a magnificent, efficient machine and he was warm before he negotiated the mountain pass on the road back to Salen. The heater almost made up for the width of the monster, but as he negotiated lay-bys and oncoming headlights, he cursed the car again. Darkness was falling. He drove carefully, passed the Aros estuary with regret, and went straight to the hotel.

In the morning, he stopped at the bookstore on his way to his car. Donald was already at work and greeted him enthusiastically. “Did you get anything?” he called, as soon as Piat was through the door.

Piat recounted his adventures. He had recorded his catch on the tickets and produced them.

Donald laughed. “You climbed on the crannog, then?”

“Who built it?” asked Piat.

Donald shrugged. “We have some books—people always want to know. There are four of them on the island, more on the mainland of course.” He pulled out a battered Ordnance Survey map and flipped it fully open. “One here, on the Glen Lochs—that’s quite a walk. Some fishing if you like wee browns. One here, on Loch Frisa. The one you climbed, of course, down south. And one just above the town, here. Quite a story to go with the local one.”

Piat had watched Donald’s thick fingers moving over the map, thinking automatically no cover, no cover, visible from the road. “Hmmm?” he said. “A story?” Piat was a good listener.

“A local man, a farmer, had the notion that he could build a dam on the loch above the town and regulate the flow of water—perhaps he intended to build a mill. What he did in fact was to drain the loch. The crannog was revealed as the water ran out—and they found a boat, completely intact, all sorts of other objects.”

Piat made interested noises throughout. “Where are they?”

“Oh, as for that, you’d have to ask Jean or my daughter. Perhaps in the museum?”

Piat left with two books on crannogs, one an archaeological report from a dig on the mainland and one more general. He stopped at the museum, but it was closed.

He made the ferry line with seconds to spare, checked in at Lufthansa two hours early in Glasgow, and landed in Athens via London and Munich in time to eat a late dinner on the Plaka and fall into a hotel bed. He had nine thousand, four hundred and twelve dollars and some change, a new wardrobe, a new historical interest, and a return ticket to Glasgow. It’d been cheaper that way. What the hell, he thought as he lay in bed. Maybe someday I’ll go back.

The next day, he splurged and caught the high-speed ferry to Lesvos, saving twelve hours. He called Mrs Kinnessos from Piraeus and told her that yes, he would be taking the house for another six months, even at the summer price, and he was absurdly pleased when she offered him a discount for his constancy. By the time the ferry reached Mytilene, he had made himself the middleman on a deal for some Roman statuary from the Ukraine headed to the United States. His cut would be seven hundred euros.

Molyvos seemed ridiculously crowded after Mull. He sat in the chocolate shop half way up the town with his laptop open, drinking Helenika and thinking about sea trout and crannogs.