Night of the Animals(132)
Suleiman was very bright, but in coming to London he had catastrophically depended on someone who turned out to be unreliable, and now he was down to his last ￡400, staying in a B&B, and filled with anguish. He was supposed to have stayed with a very religious acquaintance from the neighboring island of Pemba, a man named Abbas who lived in Finsbury Park and attended the Aga Khanian mosque there. But Abbas, strangely, had disappeared, and when Suleiman had knocked on his flat door, a bearded young Pakistani man in a long linen prayer shirt answered and smugly told him that Abbas had disappeared into hell. He never explained what that meant.
“Brother,” Suleiman had said. “I am lost.”
The man smiled and nodded knowingly. “Come back tomorrow and I will give a new way of life. You need to hear our imam. He’s friends with the Caliph Aga Khan, you know? He’s like no one you’ve ever heard. He will help you, rafiki.”
A fanatic, Suleiman thought.
So Suleiman had changed course; all the Africans he had met in London—nearly all from West Africa—urged him to “visit” New York City and simply overstay the “leave to remain” passport stamp. You could hide in Queens or Newark forever. The rest of America could be safely ignored.
“Go to the Big Apple, my nigga,” a fat path-manager from Lagos had said, laughing his head off. “I’m going back next week just to buy some new shoes. This London—it’s five thousand percent rip-f*cking-rippa-dip-dip-rip-off!”
The elephant very pointedly stopped and faced the visa applicants. Suleiman turned and saw several of them try to squeeze behind the column. But it was hopeless. Too many people, too little protection.
“Toka, mama tembo,” Suleiman said to the elephant. “Toka, mama lady.”
Meanwhile, the gorilla regarded the entire scene, shaking his head mournfully. He looked up at the facade’s massive grill-like Eero Saarinen design of reinforced concrete cells. (Its precise, offset rectangles, along with the thirty-five-foot-wide gold eagle above the building, inspired and intimidated visitors—it made America seem like a country of the distant future, a splendid but remote posthuman society, oddly complementing the tidy math of the Georgian buildings around it.) But something about the rectangles riled the gorilla; there was a cold blandness and lack of fire about them, a total ensnaring of aggression, from grid point to grid point, the opposite of animalism.
Hoping for a closer look, Kibali jumped onto one of the dozens of new, larger stone bollards, ancient tank traps installed decades before in front of the embassy complex. They were ugly, disordered trapeziums, like the reactive-armor bricks on Russian T-120 tanks, and they completely perverted Saarinen’s light touch. Amid this angular clutter sat the ape, perched on one of these stone fists of national fright, hunched in anxiety as the doors of the embassy flew open. Nearby, he saw the giant plane trees, so thickly and horizontally limbed that Kibali felt he had perhaps found a safe, comfortable, murky home in this strange world.
A spectral being then drifted up and out of the green shadows that Kibali was contemplating. It resembled Astrid, but it was larger, untamed, like a wild, long-limbed yew tree spotted with tiny red berries. Astrid’s long black hair seemed to have turned a golden green, and floated in the air between the embassy and the animals, sparking little fires from which baby kestrels and whipping adders and speeding tiny stoats burst forth.
“Gagoga,” said the creature. “Gagoga maga medu.”
And those close to the vernal being, who heard the words, bowed their heads.
But not Mason Gage. He came out of the chancery building with his arms behind him, his head lowered for other reasons. Such was his focus on the notion of saving the vulnerable visa applicants from the elephant and gorilla, he did not, for quite a while, even notice the being. He’d merely struck a sort of improvised submissive pose, something he remembered in dealing with his sister’s feisty Perro de Presa Canarios; it could not have contrasted more with the imperial golden eagle statute six floors above him, and the gesture looked particularly odd on Mason.
The angry elephant turned its head toward the being, calming for a moment, but it trotted straight through the green fog, and bucked a bit, then squared off against Mason, so close the young man could smell the high, sweet reek of its shit.
A phalanx of nearly identical-looking men in coveralls the color of yoghurt stood behind Mason, too, emerging from the interior of the chancery, and looking pressed for time. By contrast, Mason had thrown on a simple navy blazer and old black DreamUp jeans, which supposedly could be slightly adjusted through telekinesis (but this never worked, buyers soon learned). He kept a neuralzinger pistol with nonlethal rounds holstered under the blazer.
Several of the men had their hair cut in the same cropped, androgynous style. Their appearance threw him off a bit, but they’d come from the chancery’s offices, and he implicitly—and imprudently—trusted them as legitimate. There were, after all, a very few tertiary aspects of embassy operations in any major world capital—everything from toilet repairs to heating duct maintenance—that even the chief of security didn’t fully grasp. Mason’s mistake was that he saw these people as one of them.
“Who are you? What unit?”
None answered.
Mason decided that they must be some kind of foreign outside building contractors. He would address the issue of the white-suited caretakers or whatever the f*ck they were at the next security team meeting, and they looked funny, didn’t they, and shouldn’t they know some basic English?