“We need to let Victor off now, Lenny.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Raffaello. I’ll slow us down under the bridge.”
“I don’t want to get out.”
“It has started, Victor. It doesn’t do either of us any good for you to be with me right now, you understand? When Lenny slows you will jump out of the car.”
“But no. No. I can’t.”
The Cadillac eased slower just a bit and edged to the side as it slipped under a cement bridge.
Raffaello leaned over to open my door. As he leaned I saw him wince. The left side of his suit was wet with blood.
“You’ve been hit. You’re bleeding.”
“Get ready to fall,” he said as he clicked down the lever.
“I can’t do this. They’re probably following us. They’ll run right over me.”
“Then be sure to roll,” he said as the door yawned and I saw a primitive mural of cars in traffic pass and beneath that the rush of black asphalt.
“Wait!”
“We’ll be in touch,” said Enrico Raffaello before he shoved me out of the car.
A sledgehammer bashed into my shoulder, a pile of rocks fell all at once along my side, claws scraped at my face as my head was pummeled. A line of pain edged into my back and then I was up, over the curb, lying splayed on a narrow cement walkway just beyond the cover of the cement bridge. I picked my head up as a set of tires sped inches from my left hand, which lay in the street, pale and still like a dead fish.
I pulled it back and scooted to my knees and tried to figure out where I was. It all looked vaguely familiar. The stone tunnel to my left, the traffic lights, the banners on the poles. A ludicrous bouquet of balloons. Wait a second, balloons and banners? Over there, by that parking lot, gingerbread kiosks and barred entranceways and a great green statue of a lion pride at rest. Suddenly I knew. Lenny had pulled off the expressway at the Girard Street exit and left me just outside the front entrance to the Philadelphia Zoo.
When I figured out where I was I also realized that the murderous white van must also have known the Cadillac’s escape route. It would give chase, along with any other vehicles that were tagging along to finish the job. No doubt they’d come right up this road, looking for whatever they could to kill off and what they’d find, if I stayed there, on my knees, like a scared penitent, would be me.
I stood and did a quick inspection. My jacket was ripped at the shoulder and blood was leaking through the white of my shirt. I wiped thin lines of blood from the scratches on the left side of my face. The right knee of my pants was slashed and through the opening I could see jagged gashes from which bright red oozed. Move, I told myself. Where? Anywhere, you fool, just move.
I cantered past the balloon guy and across a narrow road that encircled the zoo and then, with a stiff side step, I passed the lion statue and headed for the open gate between the kiosks.
“That will be eight-fifty,” said the young woman in the ticket window after she eyed my tattered jacket and the blood that had seeped through the shoulder of my shirt. She had a wide mole on her cheek that creased when she smiled. “But if you want to buy a membership now, you can apply today’s admission charge to the forty-dollar total.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s a tremendous deal. You get free parking anytime you come and free admission all year long. If you just want to fill out this form.”
“Really, no thank you,” I said, handing her a twenty. As she counted out my change I looked behind me. Nothing suspicious, nothing at all, until I spotted the nose of a long black Lincoln sniff its way slowly down the same road Lenny had taken the Cadillac. I rushed through the gate and into the zoological gardens before the woman could give me back my change.
I galloped across the wide stone plaza with the fountain in the grand iron gazebo, past the statue of the elephants, into the rare animal house, a long semicircular corridor flanked by cages. Fruit bats, to my right, scurried across their caged ceiling like a puppy motorcycle gang in black leather. Naked mole rats, pale pink and toothsome, huddled together in a warren of tunnels to my left. I glanced quickly behind me as I walked through the interior. Owl-faced guenons, marmosets, colobus monkeys with fancy black-and-white furs. It was mostly empty of viewers, the rare animal house at that time of the day, a few kids in strollers with their mothers. I stopped for a second to listen. The screech of a monkey, the rustle of the bats. The place smelled of dung and the musk of simian sweat. Two tobacco-colored tree kangaroos humped on a branch high in their cage. I was about to start moving again when I heard a door swing open and the tap of running feet.
I couldn’t see who was coming because of the curve of the wide corridor, but I knew enough not to want them to see me. There was an exit to the left marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and I darted to it, but the handle wouldn’t turn, as if the door knew exactly who I wasn’t. I looked back down the corridor, still saw nothing, and started running, past the mongoose lemurs from Madagascar, running to the far door, the sound of the footsteps gaining. Just as I hit the first of the double doors a herd of schoolchildren stampeded in, followed by their teachers. They pushed me back, drowning out the sound of the following steps with their excited baying. I found myself unable to wade through the waist-high gaggle and as the kids streamed by, I stopped and turned to face whatever fate it was that was chasing me.
The woman from the ticket window.
“Sir,” she said, her mole creasing with a smile, holding up two bills in her fist. “You forgot your change.”
I forced myself to take a deep breath. Even as I trembled, I stretched my lips into a smile. “Thank you,” I said softly, “that was very kind.”
“Here you go.”
In her outstretched hand was a ten, a one, and two quarters. I took the one and the quarters and said, “Thank you, you can keep the rest.”
“I can’t do that sir. Really, I can’t.”
“Think of it as a tip,” I said, “for restoring my faith in human nature.”
She blushed and her mole creased considerably and she tried to protest but I raised a hand.
“Thanks a lot,” she said. “Really, that’s great,” and finally she spun around to leave. Then I, with my faith in human nature restored, stepped slowly from the building, searching about me all the while for the men who were trying to kill me.
There was nothing suspicious on the wide brick walkways. Huge Galápagos turtles, safe in their shells, stared passively as I hurried by. Emus strutted and hippos wallowed and a black-and-white tapir lumbered about, looking suspiciously like a girl I used to date. At the rhino pen I leaned on the fence and watched a mother rhino and her calf. I was jealous of their great slabs of body armor. A girl in a purple dress stood on the tips of her Mary Janes and slipped her golden elephant key into the story box. A voice poured out.
Throughout Africa and Asia the rhinoceros is being hunted almost to extinction. For centuries certain cultures have believed the rhinoceros horn, blood, and urine possess magical and medicinal power.
While leaning on the bars and listening to the lecture, I slyly looked back along the path. As I did I spotted a figure at the top of a rise and my breath stopped. A beefy man in a maroon suit, looking around with a fierce concentration.
Scientists estimate there are only fourteen hundred greater one-horned Asian rhinos remaining in India and Nepal .
I didn’t know him, and I wouldn’t have recognized him except for the suit. Maroon suits are rare enough, but that shade was simply radiant in its repulsiveness, and not easily forgotten. I had seen it just that morning, at Jimmy Vig’s funeral. Its owner was one of the downtown boys for sure and not, I was sure, here to commune with nature. I froze and let my breath return in tiny spurts.