Night of the Animals (28 page)

“Jumbie?” She giggled. “What's that then? Oliver Cromwell's got one, too?”

“Oh, sorry. I mean, ‘evil spirit'—or ghost. Guyanese, ma'am. You know—creole.”

“Mmm,” said Astrid. “Island lore?”

“Ha! Guyana's no island. That's Britain.” Atwell grinned. “And this zoo, this island of almost-extinct pets in cages. Either a very intelligent animal has broken loose, and let the jackals out, or a very foolish person has broken in. How long for Beauchamp, you suppose?”

“Who knows?” said Astrid. “Oh, how I loathe that man. Sorry to say that, but he really gets on my knob.”

In the firearm training sessions Astrid had helped lead for the zoo team, Beauchamp had rushed her along and acted as if the constabulary's onetime involvement with the zoo practically contaminated his staff. Beauchamp seemed to have neither particular respect for, nor desire to be addled with, schooling in safety or crisis management.

One of Astrid's few friends in the zoo reported that he occupied his important job unhappily, with the impatient but apparently plausible hope that he might obtain some administrative position on the ZSL board, which would have carried with it a title of nobility. He scorned the ZSL's own public relations team and craved WikiNous attention, so much so that the ZSL's spokespeople steered visiting reporters away from him. Once, during a grim morning training
session on the topic of what would happen if an animal needed to be shot, Astrid had tried to lighten things up. She pointed to an anteater in the Moonlight World exhibit, and made a wisecrack about the dangers an escaping “bull aardvark” could pose. Many of the zoo staff members laughed.

“That's a Bolivian anteater,” Beauchamp had said, seething from the back, wagging his finger. “It's an important distinction. And it's a female specimen. And her name is Dinah.” With that, Beauchamp peered into the glass and said with a straight face, “Right, Dinah?”

He was what Astrid considered an animal fanatic. She adored animals—but she wasn't a nut. Still, Atwell's point was procedurally correct, she knew. The man knew his specimens.

“I've heard he's difficult,” said Atwell.

“Yes,” said Astrid. “The zoo's
his
babs to take care of. But he's not going to be right chuffed about tonight.”

“I've heard he takes the animals very seriously and all.”

There were two torches in the boot of the pandaglider, along with muscle-slowing batons and extra sets of invisible handcuffs (they weren't actually invisible, but used magnetic force to impel hands or feet together).

Astrid rummaged through them while Atwell used the comm to make sure Beauchamp and his small team were en route. For a moment, Astrid set the cuffs to reverse polarity and “floated” one cuff piece a few inches above her hand, amusing herself. She kept the torches and batons, and put back the cuffs—what was she going to do, lock up the jackals?

When Atwell came around to the back, she said, “I actually spoke to him. He's coming. He sounded, erm, whipped up. He said we need to move quickly.”

“He's whipped up all right, I'm sure.”

“He wants to seal off the zoo. He was beside himself, actually,
guv. I told him about the man who claimed to be the watchman and he scarcely seemed to hear me. He wanted to know if we'd established a perimeter. He said it was ‘dead urgent.' He was rather definite about that. I quote, ‘It's the last line of defense against tragedy.'”

Astrid gritted her teeth. Had things really progressed into such a grand arena as that—
tragedy
? Wasn't this more a mishap?

A few new scattered animal noises began coming from the zoo. This time, they sounded like monkeys or apes shrieking hellishly. It unnerved Astrid badly.

“Jesus fuck,” she said. “OK, let's do our best to find out what's going on. We sure as hell can't establish a perimeter with two officers, can we? We'll do what we can.”

She handed a torch and a baton to Atwell, and Atwell reminded her about the terribly distressed man who claimed to be the night watchman, whose mother was somehow still in the zoo—they wouldn't forget about him, would they? She assured her they would look for them, but she thought it a waste of time. The real danger lay in Beauchamp's appearing. He was such a fool. Then Astrid realized something.

“Oh Jesus, Atwell. We're in for it tonight. I tell you, mark my words. I'd forgot something—you know Beauchamp's going to have us at
his
disposal? That's the reg. Crown property and whatnot.”

“Maybe it won't be
so
bad, ma'am,” said Atwell. “Least it's not the Watch as gaffer.”

“True.”

Atwell flipped the torch on and it shone up into her face. It gave her a sinister look with a moonglow brow and icy-looking cheeks.

They decided to walk down toward the place where the jackals had been. Astrid felt charged. Here she was in the midst of interesting police work. It was rare for Parkies. But there was something
more and more frightening about the night, too, a sense of things flying out in broken pieces she could neither catch nor fix without getting hurt. The feeling back at the FA meeting, and Atwell's jumbie, and the terrifying sounds in the zoo—there was something baleful afoot.

“You know,” said Astrid. “I think we'd better freq Omotoso. But I can't imagine the old man's going to be happy.”

Astrid waited as Atwell glanced down to prepare a new orange-freq.

“It's done,” she said. “Omotoso knows a thing or two now.”

THEY WOULD FIRST CIRCUMNAVIGATE THE ZOO,
Astrid decided, and inspect the fence. Meanwhile, they would also keep on the lookout for the alleged watchman—and, perhaps, of all people, his poor mother.

The two officers—one an addict in extremis, the other an unwell rookie—stayed on the Broad Walk, which, in the constricting darkness, hardly lived up to its name. The beams from their torches waved back and forth over the edges of the pink pavement like the antennae of a giant, blind beetle, and the night seemed to have grown unusually murky; Astrid thought this was due to some trick of the torches on her digitalized retinas, or perhaps because of the security lamps jumping on and off and on inside the zoo, to their right, as they patrolled forward. They passed a small tea kiosk, little more than a whitewashed hut built around a big gas-operated kettle. Beside it was a folding chair, apparently forgotten after closing. The chair had been knocked onto its side.

Atwell seemed rapt by the strange, melted-looking granite of the contemporary statues in the large children's field to their left.
They were all elephants. “See that, Inspector?” she said. “They sort of come to life in the night. They're like hearts, folded up on themselves and all gone gray. I don't know if I see
elephants
, per se. But I see loads of feeling. It's nice, ma'am, yeah?”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “I suppose you're right.”

In truth, Astrid didn't see indrawn hearts—she saw insufficiency, the grayness of indecision, an ingrownness of old dreams. This art didn't move her. They walked on.

But there was that comet somewhere, Astrid thought, the one all over the WikiNous. Something brighter and more cutting than this world—now
that
would speak to her. The “most widely observed comet in human history” visible and she was stuck chasing wild dogs down. Urga-Rampos—
it
would
really
be something to see.

Ironically, the comet was actually more luminous in southern Britain at that time than almost anywhere else on Earth, but it was blocked, in north London, by a very southern English formation of stratus clouds. The cloud cover was beginning to push off.

Astrid thought about Atwell's apparently heartfelt conviction that she could do what almost no one else had—withstand second withdrawal. It was touching, but wasn't it misplaced? Oh, she hoped not. Could she beat Death? She was so close, after all, wasn't she? Or was she?
For if she could drink just one orb of Flōt—and no more—and walk sober thereafter—and never again after that. If, if, if. Just one orb. One and only one and never again on this debased Earth.

“Inspector!” Atwell was scurrying ahead of her. She had her torch trained on a red and black shape. “There's something wrong up there.” She pointed toward a shadowy misplacement.

“Wait, Jasmine. Wait!” But she kept bustling along, well in front now.

Now she shined her torch over the thing. It was a small, chawed-out head of some kind. Atwell reeled backward.

“Jesus!” she said, her hand over her mouth. “I'm going to be sick.”

Astrid caught up and shined her light down. “My god,” she said.

Her first flare of thought was that she was looking down at the lean, masticated head of Satan. Smudged with dark, bloody fingerprints, to Astrid the ribbed horns appeared to have been curled not by eons of genetic adaptation, but by murderous demons. There was a sense, too, that the appalling object had come to meet her. It was out of the zoo, ready to swallow her with its skinny skull and one wet ear. For a moment, she even thought she heard a faint voice calling her, but she put that down to withdrawal.

“It's a goat,” Astrid heard herself whisper hoarsely. “I'm fairly certain of that.”

“I don't want to look,” said Atwell.

“Don't,” Astrid said. She used her baton to roll the head over. There were no maggots or flies, no fetid smell. “This is part of the whole lights business,” she said. “Whatever did this did it tonight. Nothing to be worried about. It's not a person that's done it. People don't chew goat snouts off.” People did much worse, she thought.

She turned to face Atwell, who seemed to be recovering, standing taller. Atwell finally glanced at it again.

“It's just my stomach, ma'am—it's been bothering me. Crikey! It's horrible.” She turned her face away again. “I can't look or I'm going to chunder. Don't—look—at me—yeah, if I lose it, Inspector? It's humiliating, guv, in front of you, yeah?”

Atwell bent over and vomited. Astrid gently placed her hand on her colleague's back. It was hot and damp and muscular. “OK, I'm OK,” Atwell said. “OK, it's passing. Good.” She breathed in thickly, then spat. “Fuck!”

“Easy,” said Astrid.

“This head, guv, it does fright me just a bit. I mean, I don't want to go like this goat. Who did this?”

“Easy,” she said. She rubbed Atwell's back. “Easy.” She said, “It's
what
did it. This bit, it's animals on animals. That's precisely what we're looking at.” Squinty faced and tilting her head, she held her hand up for quiet.

Then she was sure she heard a voice—a peculiar, persecuted one, quietly whinging from thin air.

Umm, kay-kay, femaleans! You're flarking me out, kay-kay!
It was high-pitched but distinctly male, and it came from above. There was no one in sight.

“Fuck all,” said Atwell.

“Now
that
is right crooked by half-fives,” said Astrid.

Atwell nodded and said, “Couldn't
be
more. Do you think we . . . well, should keep walking, around the ‘perimeter'?”

“Oh—Beauchamp's bloody perimeter. For fuck's sake. No.” Astrid bit her lower lip. There was that anger. A rage before the Death. If she just held on. It was passing, wasn't it? “Actually, yes. Sorry. Beauchamp's right. We can walk, of course, we'll get around, but I want to investigate that person who's having a lark at our expense. It's back toward the pandaglider. It may be the joker who tried to give you a scare, earlier.” She looked up at the sky. A cool night-breeze was blowing. She said, “It came from up. Up is a funny place for a person.” She pointed at the field beyond the grove of plane trees that lined the Broad Walk. She said, “Maybe in that direction?”

So they left the goat head and walked back toward the glider.

Had they made it around the southern tip of the zoo, just a few yards beyond the goat head, they would have encountered Cuthbert's notable handiwork with the fence. They would have been able to raise the section of heavy ironwork fencing Cuthbert had pushed down into the turf, and plug up the only hole in the zoo in its two centuries.

THE JACKALS WERE ALREADY LONG GONE. THE
five of them had scurried out of Regent's Park and managed safely to cross the Marylebone Road. A young group of True Conservative politicos, drinking themselves silly at a local public house over Election Eve polls (LabouraTory was crushing them), had seen the jackals outside the window and mistook them for large bizarre cats (cats that lived, mysteriously, in packs).

“It's a good sign—animals,” one of them slurred. “A jolly good one. As long as we've got our cats, England will
dure
.”

“
Dure
? Steady, Michael.”

“
Yath
!” Michael answered, quite definitively.

When Astrid and Atwell got back to the pandaglider, the sound of the high-pitched man whinging started up again, but it sounded even closer.

Femaleans, help me—kay-kay?

“Who's there?” shouted Astrid.

“Up here.
Here
!”

Astrid and Atwell started jogging across a small pitch that
fanned into the northeastern quadrant of the park, against Camden Town. They soon made it to another stand of young plane trees.

“Jesus suffering Christ!” the man rasped, in a lower, raspier, gravedigger's voice. “Worthless!”

For a moment, no one responded. Then the man spoke again: “It's Dawkins—the night keeper. Up bloody here.” They looked up, and there in one of the smallest trees in the group, caught like a horrible fly in a spiderweb of branches, dangled a lanky young man. “No one fucking respects the night keepers!”

Astrid and Atwell trained their torches on the figure, and Astrid immediately recognized the face, and so did Atwell. He looked very different than Astrid recalled. He was much thinner. He wasn't so much a bag of bones as a ripped-open turnip sack of them. He was wearing a saggy set of boxers, thick knit socks slipped around his ankles, and a pair of very old weatherbeaten Reebok hovershoes, which clearly were missing their hover-cell, or he would have floated back home. But it was Dawkins all right, the eccentric Indigent the powers that be allowed to watch the zoo at night from the inside, the latest in a two-hundred-year line of eerie, solitary, and terminally irascible nocturnals who kept the London Zoo at night.

“Dawkins? You've lost several stone, right?”

“Who wants to know?”

The fellow looked worse for it. The blotchy skin of his face stretched over a narrow skull and deep-sunk eyeholes. His lips were a pair of dead leeches—gray but very full (of what, one daren't ask). His ginger-colored hair stood up in a stiff patch like corroded steel wool. Astrid had met him only once, when she first started working for the constabulary (she was introduced then to most of the zoo's key personnel), but the guy gave one such a creepy feeling, he was impossible to forget.

Dawkins had quite the reputation, too. Astrid had heard that
so protective and secretive was he about his tiny apartment in the old Reptile House (at night, he was the only soul—unless one believes animals have souls—in the zoo), he was mostly kept on due to kindly administrators who did not want to confront him. That he had abandoned his snake pit tonight was remarkable. Astrid recalled a more filled-out Dawkins, wearing riveted glass-goggles, a ridiculous red toy-soldier jacket with epaulets, and a brass-cast antique respirator. She remembered him asking her if she'd read the long-passé steampunk magazine
Hiss
(its heyday must have been around 2014, if she recalled).

“It's all I read,” he had once boasted to Astrid. “It's the only bit of truly
high
culture that's not tat, at least in England. On real paper, you know.”

“Oh yeah. They do paper. That's their little thing,” she'd replied.

Dawkins's main duty, Astrid knew, was to turn the zoo's security system on and off each night and, above all else, notify others if some emergency arose. This night he seemed to have failed magnificently in his only real charge. This bone-spur of a man had been jostled out of his hole, and all he wanted was to get back in it safely. To hell with the rest of humankind.

“You don't remember me?” Astrid asked. “It's Inspector Sullivan? We've met, Dawkins.”

“I might do,” he said glumly.

“Well, I remember you. Do you need help, getting down?”

“I don't need any help.”

“Well come down then, please.”

“I remember your partner, the cow,” Dawkins said, repositioning his feet, as if preparing for a long stay in the tree. “She piggin' abandoned me to the animals. I can't bloody believe it.” He jabbed a skinny finger toward Atwell. He said, “You're duff, you, you're a wanky excuse for a copper.”

Atwell looked deservedly angry, puffing air out between her lips. She started tapping her toe. She said to Astrid, almost inaudibly, “Shall I get him down?”

Dawkins wouldn't shut up for a moment, it seemed. “The Parks Police! Ha! The anti-litter Gestapo is more like it! And she's a duffer, a —”

Suddenly, Astrid screamed, her anger as big as Dawkins's tree, “Gerrout! Shut your cake-hole and come down, sir. You're getting on my wick now,
you are,
damn it. You stupid
son
of a bitch—you
two
-bone dox!” The deadly ire of second withdrawal was out again, this time for all to see. And it felt like righteousness. It felt like bliss on fire.

“Tell him,” said Atwell. “Tell him.”

Astrid took hold of herself. She grabbed the little thread of fury spinning out from her heart and she reeled it back in.

“This is inexcusable, sir,” she said, coughing a little. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean . . . I . . . but you're an employee of the royal parks, right? There's no need for all these insults. But Mr. Dawkins, that is. You come down now. You must be cold and tired, mustn't you?”

“No, mammy, I will not,” he said. “There's bloody dangerous animals loose. No can do, officer.” He gave them a scandalous, bony-cheeked grin. “Why should I come down now with tigers still birdy-fly-fly free?” He pointed again at Atwell, wagging his finger. “I wasn't enough of a victim before, was I? I was all ballsed up and you did nothing, and that's wot's really got me up a tree.”

Atwell shook her head. She looked at Astrid with a momentary confusion, her big eyes like almonds suddenly cracked open. She said to Astrid, “I didn't know who he was, ma'am. He was screaming—I was alone. You know that, yeah? You know I needed assistance. That's the reg.”

Atwell turned back to Dawkins and said with an affected confidence (which Astrid found a little off-putting), “You can't have ev
erything you want, just the way you want it, on your schedule, Mr. Dawkins. That is life, my friend.” She whispered to Astrid, “Look at him, up a tree like Zacchaeus. He's
strange
. Remember: he said his mother was in the zoo.”

Astrid whispered back, “I say we just make as though we're going to leave him. He's an . . . obscure gent, isn't he?”

Then Astrid said to Dawkins, “Mr. Dawkins, what's this about your mother, in the zoo?”

Dawkins startled, raised his arms as though defending himself against something, then looked into his lap. He said, “She's not exactly me mother. She's my sister. She's visiting. Except . . .”

“Wha?” said Atwell.

Astrid said: “I need the facts here, Dawkins. I'm warning you. I won't be bothered with nonsense at this point. You don't want to be arrested for obstructing the course of justice, do you? Let's get this straight: your
sis
ter is at your flat, in the Reptile House?”

Dawkins glared at her, nodding his narrow head in anguished fury.

“She's my best friend. Her name's Una. She's really not supposed to be there, in the apartment. I hain't allowed to have visitors. She's Indigent, of course, but she don't have the special status wot I've got. But I thought, if I just tell people she's my mother, right, they won't press. It's not what you think. It's not
abnormal,
” he said, pronouncing each syllable. “See, she's a bit thick, all right? I take care of her, sort of like. We have our own pet snake, too. She's all white—perfectly. Una doesn't go anywhere without our snake. People don't understand it, you see? She has brain damage. When she was nineteen, she was run over. A glider-lorry full of Bronze Age artifacts, from one of the unis—a student driving it. In Dagenham.”

Atwell and Astrid looked at each other, and Atwell said, “Dagenham—just past Barking, of course.”

“Ha-ha,” said Dawkins. “If the Watch comes, they'll put her in a Calm House, and I'll never see her again. You can't tell them.”

Astrid said, “Mr. Dawkins, I'm very sorry, sir. I think we'll just need to make sure Una is safe is all. I'm not worried about anything else. I won't tell the Watch. But will you please come down?”

Dawkins said, “Can you get me a soft drink?”

“Uh, well,” said Astrid. “I suppose we—could? Can't you just climb down? You're going to hurt yourself.”

“I'll need a Diet Vanilla Coca-Cola?” he said, a bit shyly. “Then I'll come down.”

Atwell turned to Astrid, her lips parted, with a perplexed expression. “Where do we get that, sir? That's from fifty years ago.” Astrid shook her head, and quietly said, “We don't.”

She said to Dawkins, “Listen, we'll see if we can get someone to get you a . . . Coke . . . back at the nick, but you really need to come down.”

“
Diet. Vanilla.
Coke. There's a special edition.”

“Yes, well,” said Astrid. “You're going to feel the fool if you stay there, aren't you? What would Una think? Aren't you worried about her? And Mr. Beauchamp is on the way. Do you know Mr. Beauchamp? David Beauchamp? Is he your . . . gaffer, or something?”

“Beauchamp? Oh, f-allin' bugger us all,” said Dawkins, looking crestfallen. “He'll give me the sack if he hears about Una.” He shook his head. “Poor girl! She's not well—physically. She's got the stomach flu's goin' round. And I'm . . . not well. We need each other very badly, Inspector. I told her to stay in the Reptile House when I saw the lights start to go on around the zoo. She's a bit done up tonight. I blagged a kind of fancy explorer's outfit, right, with lots of pockets and all, yeah? But when I saw the jackals, I panicked, and I nipped off, and I don't know where Una is now. Oh blood and sand! I'm an 'orrible thing!”

Astrid sighed. She said, “You're making this out to be more than
it is. Really, Mr. Dawkins. Come down. Beauchamp doesn't need to know anything.”

“You all can take the mick out of me if you like, and so can Mr. Beauchamp, but I'll report it to the King's Employment Tribunal, I will. I'm not going to be forced to endanger myself. And there's a crazy man in the zoo, too—I saw him. Mad as a box of frogs. Talking to himself.”

“You saw someone
else
?” This new fact blindsided Astrid. She looked toward the zoo for a moment. “A man? Another man?”

“From a distance. I think. I think. Yes, I thought I did. I was too terrified to get close. He looked rather desperate. He—this is
odd
—he—”

“Take your time, sweet pea,” said Atwell.

Dawkins smiled at her, blinking. “I
am
a sweet pea, to be honest. But a fucking cold one!” He starting hugging himself with his arms, but could not, in his exhaustion, muster much vigor. “Well,” he continued. “Here's something funny.” He rubbed his hand on his thigh and looked at Astrid. “I could have sworn the man, well, he weren't at all the spit of you, no, Inspector, and he'd be a minging, plug-ugly version of you. But he
sort
of 'ad your cheekbones, like,
vaguely
mind you, and a
sort
of similar something about his face, though he did look badly battered—and drunk. Typical Flōt sot, I should think. Do you know him?”

“Of course not,” she said.

“You ain't some . . . type of . . . cousin?”

Dawkins's claim disturbed Astrid, and her heart began racing. She said, “Ha! Now you're off your chump.” But her anxiety hadn't gone. The idea of her drunken doppelgänger, in the zoo, created an instant sense of unreality that signaled, for her, the last gasp of her own sanity. The travails of second withdrawal were far worse than she'd imagined, it seemed.

Nonetheless, she decided to try an old FA trick—to “act as if,”
that is, to pretend she wasn't really crazy. She said, “Now, will you come down from the tree? Or will we need to send something up to get you?”

“Yes, a Flōt sot!” Dawkins repeated. He seemed pleased to be able to condescend to anyone.

He didn't say anything for a while, and then, with an agility that took Astrid and Atwell by surprise, he started to lower himself to the ground, unfurling one arm, taking hold of a branch, and so on, again and again, with balletic grace.

“I've been getting more fit,” he said. “It's more attractive. I'm going to be sex on a stick someday.”

“Yes you are, love,” said Atwell. She put her hand on Dawkins's back and gave him a few puppy-pats. At first, he jumped forward, then he leaned back into her hand. “Let's get you warm now,” she was saying.

Just as Atwell said that, several huge sets of headlamps exploded onto the Broad Walk and on all the area around them. It was not illumination; it was the national autonewsmedia, or a leading edge of it—a white squarish satellite truck from ITN/WikiNous, a tired, slightly shit-faced reporter from the
Sun
/WikiNous, and some kind of European woman freelancer in a Lancia glider with a smashed-in front end. This little trio alone had the power to do lasting damage, or bring great approbation, to almost any public figure or institution in Britain, provided the target wasn't one of the king's favorites. How they got wind of the zoo occurrences seemed beside the point, but Astrid felt she knew whose long-fingered hand had given the media's naughty bits a throttle in the night.