To help preserve this endangered species the Philadelphia Zoo cooperates with other zoos in a program called a species survival plan.
I waited, watching the man in maroon from the corner of my eye, and when he turned around to wave at something behind him I ran for the nearest building and rushed inside the doors.
I was in a wide, modern corridor, with huge plate glass windows fronting scenes of natural glory. Massive tortoises stared; a gray anaconda slept. A monitor, half submerged in a jungle pool, observed me with carnivorous eyes. At the end of the wide hallway were two huge windows with the superstars of the Reptile House, the alligator, squat and fierce, and the crocodile, pale and patient and hungry. Where the corridor made a sharp turn to the left I stepped away from the great predators so that while I was hidden, a view of the doors I had come in was reflected for me in the alligator’s window. Just be calm, I tried to tell myself, wait patiently and let him pass the building by as he searches the rest of the zoo. Better waiting and hiding then darting around the zoo’s maze of walkways like a zebra on the loose. Slow and patient, like my friend the crocodile, I told myself, while the bruiser lumbered past and disappeared. I evened out my breathing and the lump in my throat had almost dissolved when off the windowed front of the alligator’s cage I saw the door open and a flash of maroon.
I backed away until I hit a large wooden cube in the middle of the corridor. I slipped around it into the desert alcove. The windows here were smaller, like terrariums studded into the wall. Rattlesnakes, coachwhips, skinks, lots of skinks. I passed the Gila monster and then, using the wooden cube as a shield, I made my way into the older section of the building, toward a second set of doors. The atmosphere turned slippery and green. I backed my way to the far exit, past ropy snakes and tiny poisonous dart frogs and a North American bullfrog, staring at me with passive eyes that seemed to discount my fear. Your legs look mighty tasty, you bastard, I thought as the bullfrog sat comfortably on a synthetic log and watched me sweat. With the wooden cube still acting as a screen, I turned and made fast for the far doors, trotting then running then sprinting, sprinting too fast to stop when the doors opened and a figure, blackened by the light streaming in from behind, stepped through.
I ran right into it, bounced off as if hitting a wall, sprawled backwards onto the floor. The figure took one step toward me. When I recognized Peter Cressi looking down at me I quailed.
“Yo, Vic,” he said. “How’s it hanging?”
Behind me I heard steps.
“Geez, what happened wit’ you?” said Cressi as he eyed my tattered condition. “You crawl into one of the cages? Did some gorilla take a shine to you?”
I staggered up and immediately felt a hand fall onto my shoulder. I spun around. The beefy boy in maroon was grinning at me. He was missing a tooth. “Dante said we’d find someone here and he was right.”
I spun around again and stared at Cressi.
“Quite a thing what happened with that van,” said Cressi. “Quite a thing. To think such a thing like that could happen in this day and age.”
I tilted my head in thought while still staring at Cressi. “How’d you find out about the attack, Peter?”
“Dante, he told us and sent us on over.”
“And how’d he find out about it?” I asked.
“How do you think?”
“You tell me, Peter, dammit.”
My anger and fear all balled together and went directly to the muscles in my arms and in a tremendous shot of energy I slammed my hands into his chest, pushing him back against the doors.
“How’d he know, Peter?” I said. “Tell me that, you bastard.”
Again I pushed him back, this time so hard he hit his head on the glass.
“How’d he know unless he set it up? And you set it up with him. You bastard. Why the hell are you trying to kill me?”
I meant to slam him again but before I could two arms slithered fast as cobras around my shoulders and behind my neck and suddenly I was lifted off the ground.
“You bastard!” I shouted.
“Whoa, Vic,” said Cressi, giving me a strange look. “You’re going ballistic on us. Quiet yourself down or Andy Bandy here is going to have to quiet you for me. We don’t want no scenes in such a public place.”
Still struggling while held aloft, I said, “How’d you find out?”
Cressi gave me a look and then reached into his jacket and I stopped kicking as I waited for what I knew was coming. But what he pulled out of his jacket was a cellular phone.
“Lenny called Dante from the cell phone in the car once they dumped you. Dante sent me over to check out you was okay. We was only trying to take care of you is all.”
With that, Andy Bandy loosed the iron snakes around my shoulders and neck. Once again I dropped in a sprawl onto the ground.
“Pull yourself together, Vic,” said Cressi. “I’m not used to seeing you squirm like a slug such as you’re doing here. It’s enough to get me thinking, you know. It’s not a good thing to get me thinking, pal. It ruins my whole day.”
He reached into his pants pocket and jiggled what was in there for a moment before pulling out a small peppermint swirl wrapped in cellophane. He lifted his hand and with a quick squeeze he squirted the candy into his mouth before tossing the wrapper to the side.
“I can understand you being all shook up and all, but I hate to see you down there afraid of me.” The peppermint candy clicked in his teeth as he spoke. “What do you think I am, an idiot? You’re my lawyer. What kind of idiot would hurt his own lawyer?”
He leaned over me, but I found myself unable to look him in the face. Instead I was staring at something else, something I couldn’t yet understand the significance of, cringing and sniveling on the floor as I was, numb with fear of the two men standing over me. I couldn’t yet understand the significance but still I couldn’t stop staring, as if somewhere within me I knew the truth, that what I was staring at from the floor of the Philadelphia Zoo’s reptile house was the first loose thread in the eventual unraveling of the darkest secrets of the Reddman demise.
22
CRESSI AND ANDY BANDY drove me home and waited for me to enter the vestibule before they drove away, waited as if I were a schoolboy dropped off in the middle of the dark. “You want I should stay around some and keep an eye out for you, Vic?” had asked Peter from the front seat of the Lincoln. “No,” I had answered. The problem with Peter guarding my back was that I would have had to turn it to him and I didn’t trust him far enough for that. So I went into my apartment alone and stripped off my ragged suit and took a shower and put on a new white shirt and a relatively fresh suit and tightened my tie and looked at myself in the mirror. Then I loosened the tie and took off the suit and took off the shirt and the shoes and the socks and went to bed. It was now early afternoon and there was much work to be done at the office but still I went to bed.
I get this way, I guess, after I stare death in the face and she laughs at me. The fierce whine that had slid by my head in that car was death’s chortle, there was no doubt about that, and I had all but accepted her embrace when Andy Bandy held me aloft and Cressi reached into his jacket for what I was certain was a gun. But then death had slipped away for the moment, satiated, so it would seem, by the acrid scent of fear secreted by my endocrine system, satisfied with having reminded me once again of exactly what I truly was. I know people who look at the stars and say the night sky makes them feel insignificant, but I don’t believe them when they say it. When I look at the stars I don’t shrink but grow, filled with the perverse certainty that the whole of the universe has been put here solely for my amusement and enlightenment. But face to face with the grinning mask of death I know the truth. I am a randomly formed strand of DNA no more significant than random strands of DNA that define the leaf of grass upon which I tread or the cow whose charred muscle I gnaw. I eat Chinese food and crap corn and sweat through my socks and stink and the same DNA that gave me this nose and this chin and my ten fingers and ten toes has also sentenced me to oblivion. It directs my arteries to clog themselves with calcified fat, it directs my liver to wither, my kidneys to weaken, my lungs to spew bits of itself with every cough. And in the face of this utter randomness and planned obsolescence I can’t even imagine mustering enough energy to get out of bed and to walk the streets, to dry clean my suits, to return my library books, to vote for judges whose names I can’t pronounce, to act my part as if any of it really matters.