Night of the Animals(131)
A few of the men laughed. The Cog was shaking his head in apparent disgust.
“Yes, sir! Sorry, sir!”
The officer ran out of the room.
“Open the main doors!” A voice was shouting up a stairwell. “Let the applicants in.”
Mason turned to Navas.
“What a mess. Get Five and the Circus up to speed. Tell them that we’re getting our logistics in place, that we’ve got a few minor jurisdictional queries out to Legal—wait, no, wait, don’t, don’t do that. God, we’ll never hear the end of it. The ‘rights of Englishmen’ this, EU treaties that. Wait till Harry gets a hold of that! Just request assistance.”
“Sure,” said Navas. “What about the woman—the inspector from the Royal Parks? The one the Watch is hot for?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to talk with her. I think I need to get out there.”
“Are you f*cking nuts?” asked Navas.
“Well,” said Mason. He punched in the code on a rectangle of numbers by the door of the lift. The lift, which had just two stops—ground level or six floors below to the Roost—opened with a sibilant woosh.
“I’m good with animals,” said Mason.
The applicants needed help. Mason remembered Ephesians—how it was important to “be ye kind to one another, tenderhearted.” He himself had come up hard from the impoverished hamlet of Mingo Grove, a foggy holler in the shadow of Spruce Knob Mountain. After high school, he joined the air force and excelled. He later worked his way through the state university, managing a BodyFriendly’s ice cream restaurant at night to pay the bills. Despite the stereotypes of insular Appalachia, Mason’s attraction to “furn service,” as his family called it, was admired around his pine-forested, precipitous home. Getting out was the right thing to do, as everyone said once you’d done it. The applicants had it much worse, he knew. There was no comparison.
As for animals, he had grown up around aggressives, both sentient and otherwise, and he loved them. His older sister had bred and sold at half-market price Perro de Presa Canario puppies and kept, of all things, a pet bobcat, called Snaggle, caught as a kitten in the hills. Snaggle had grown up to be dangerous; it had once attacked Mason’s mother and killed a visiting Presa stud as well as another pet in the Gage home—a big raccoon. Still, no one, especially not Mason, thought for a moment that Snaggle didn’t have a place in their household.
As the lift opened to an anteroom of the chancery and Mason loped out into the square to survey the applicants, he felt a keen sense of destiny—and confidence to a fault.
Tenderhearted, he had to repeat to himself. Tender. Hearted.
the brave man from zanzibar
OUTSIDE THE CHANCERY, A QUEUE OF AROUND two dozen people, mostly men from sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and central China, seemed to be standing with remarkable poise. Few of them came from places wealthy enough to implement the Seoul International Open-Comm Accords, which made WikiNous flesh-implantation a human right. Consequently, almost none of them understood what was going on in the rest of London. When the gorilla and elephant—and something else—entered the square, they froze.
But it wasn’t composure. It was terror.
“Dà x?ngx?ng!” a Chinese woman finally began screaming, and a clamor of cries and shouts followed. “Dà xiàng!”
Suleiman Ghailani had been sitting upon his “Ghana Must Go” bag,* as some of his queue mates kept calling the huge plaid nylon tote, which contained all his possessions on earth. These mostly comprised secondhand clothes from charities in Zanzibar whose supply of ugly, ancient polyester clothes from Kentucky and Bavaria was apparently inexhaustible. (The world had plenty of T-shirts and garish jumpers for Africa, Suleiman had discovered, long ago. To Zanzibari eyes, the old prebiodegradable fibers seemed to last decades longer than the inscrutable fashions they chased. There were things more injurious than poverty. Who in the world needed tight purple leggings with twelve zippered pockets?) There were also a pair of very weathered Reverend Awdry’s Railway Series books to help him learn English (the haughty blue engine, Gordon, made him laugh), and two packages of his cherished ballpoint pens, which he had purchased prematurely (and expensively) upon arrival at Heathrow. He planned to post the pens back to his father and young sisters in Tanzania as soon as he finally made it to America. (No one attached to the WikiNous/Opticall web used pens or pencils, but the poorest parts of the world treated them with reverence.) He would put a crisp, new $500 note in the letter, too, as he had seen done in the kung fu movies everyone in Tanzania watched on the old electric dalla-dalla buses. Once safe in the USA, he was going to make his family feel big.
When he saw the first animals, he leaped up to his feet and backed against one of the Portland stone columns that helped support the chancery’s facade. He was shocked. There were no gorillas on Zanzibar—the only primates left were a few colobus monkeys tourists paid to see in special reserves he himself had never cared to visit. As a young child, he had seen some of the last of the wild elephants, and like most East Africans, he respected the tembo more than any other creature, even simba, the lion—also now extinct in the wild.
After a moment, Suleiman stepped forward, toward the tembo. If he could attract the animals’ attention, it might save lives.
“Fee amaan Allah,” he whispered. “Inshallah.”