Peregrine by William Bayer

Author:William Bayer [Bayer, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: detective thriller
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2015-02-12T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Hollander had no regrets. His bird had fought heroically, vanquished her enemy by force of will and guile. Even after she’d been injured, she’d proven her superiority. Now she lay wounded, a wounded gladiator returned bleeding from the ring.

The night air clung to the triangular window of the aerie. Peregrine was brilliantly illuminated by an architect’s lamp clamped to the table’s edge. She lay on her side, dosed with a tranquilizer, breathing heavily in sleep.

Hollander sat in semidarkness. He’d wiped away her blood, cleaned her wounds, dusted them with antibiotics. Now, as he inspected her broken feathers, he thought back upon the duel.

He had hated Nakamura from the moment he’d first heard of him, a satan who’d nurtured ugliness to destroy beauty in the sky. And so he’d lured him to New York, and now beauty had prevailed; art had vanquished artifice, and Nakamura was disemboweled, a fitting end to an ugly life.

Hollander pulled his chair forward, opened the drawer of the table, pulled out a leather case, opened it, lay it down beside the bird. It was a portfolio of feathers, each wrapped in clear plastic, arranged by shape and size. He had primaries, secondaries, tail feathers, and coverts collected over a period of years from birds that had molted them off. He’d kept them, as experienced falconers do, as replacements for feathers broken off in flight. But now he had a problem: five of Peregrine’s left primaries had been broken by the hawk-eagle, and the peregrine feathers Hollander had saved were too small to take their place. He would have to use others collected from bigger birds, gyrfalcons, prairie falcons, and eagles.

By trimming and shaping, he would be able to restore the broken primaries, though he knew it would not be possible to obtain a perfect match. The method of replacement was known as imping. In theory it was simple, though in practice it was not.

The feather to be repaired was cut off at an angle just below the break. A replacement feather of the same size and shape was then cut to match the severed feather on the bird. A small wooden stick was inserted into the shaft of both feathers in order to provide a link, and, finally, when the feathers were fitted, they were joined together and glued.

It was after midnight when he began, concentrating on his task, and though he despaired that the feathers he was using were of different colors and would thus mar the beauty of his bird, it was her ability to fly that concerned him now: To fly brilliantly and powerfully, she needed a perfect balance between her wings. She was an aerodynamically perfect living creature whose every part served a purpose in her flight. She could compensate for losses and deviations, as she had when she had made her final circle that afternoon, but to Hollander, something intangible had been lost, a fraction of acceleration, a millimeter of reach, her special quality, her edge, which he now wanted to restore.

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