Night of the Animals(93)

“Can I . . . ask you something . . . Inspector?” Atwell nodded once and squinted slightly, as if uttering a credo. She wore a serious expression. “God, I feel odd. I . . . I don’t want to show you any sort of eye-pass.* But you—I heard that you’re in what they call recovery—from Flōt? Is it true?”

The question was very rarely asked in Astrid’s experience; it shocked her. “It is, for now.”

“And I’ve heard that . . . you know, Flōtism?” Astrid could hear miles and miles of Guyana in Atwell’s accent. “It’s wicked impossible to kill off, yeah? What with two withdrawals and all. And you end up trapped in the devil’s own torture chambers, and you’re pure anta banta if you go chronic. There’s no way out then. And almost everyone dies. That’s what I hear. You become a prisoner, for life, and everyone looks at you and troubles you and gives you the minute of your doom on a paper dog-horn, and then you’re dead.” Atwell cleared her throat and gazed directly at Astrid. She even leaned in a bit. “You tell me: Is that the truth?”

“Yes,” she said. “I think.”

“OK. But ma’am, here’s my perspective, right? See, I think you can make it. And that’s what I wanted to say. I think you’re different. I just do, and I know it’s kind of weird . . . but I felt I needed to tell you that. I don’t know much about recovery, like I said. But still.”

“Thanks, Atwell. Thank you, Jasmine. There’s some paracetamol back at the nick, by the way. For your fever.”

“Good. All right,” she said. She opened the door of the pandaglider and jumped out. “I’m glad you’re here, guv.” She slammed the door shut with surprising strength. “To work!” she said.

Astrid felt a wobbly sense of normalcy returning. She said, turning toward the zoo, “So, what do you think’s happening in there?”

Just as she spoke, an elephant trumpeted distantly. It was so loud Astrid could feel it in her chest.

“Unbelievable,” said Astrid. “I wonder whether things are worse in there than they seem.”

“I’ve been thinking that for the last hour, ma’am. We don’t really have situational awareness here. I wish we could talk to those frightcopters.”

“Don’t even think it! You know the Watch. They don’t share info. They try to dismantle you. God, but listen. Why does the zoo sound so much worse than it looks?”

Although a few of the security light arrays in the interior of the zoo still raged, after several minutes they had begun to shut down. It was an almost comically worthless energy-saving aspect of the system of motion detectors. Why, after all, would a detector at the zoo ever be triggered in the middle of the night unless a dire occasion had arisen, in which case there could not possibly be a valid reason for such a light, once triggered, to turn off again. Perhaps the zoo’s own security team, run by David Beauchamp, was primarily concerned with theft and vandalism deterrence. (A few of the animals, such as okapi, were reportedly worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, though precisely what a burglar would do in England with a two-hundred-pound extinct-in-the-wild forest ungulate from Central Africa seemed hard to fathom.)

Atwell bit her lower lip; she seemed to consider Astrid’s question grave. She said, “I just don’t know. Whatever’s in there—this jumbie or whatever it is—it’s still there.”

“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?”