“How ’bout you?” Sam asked.
Daisy kept watching the door and the carousel movement, and Sam noted that she saw it all in the exact same way. “How ’bout let’s have a drink?”
“Don’t you find that hypocritical?” he asked.
“I call it an agent’s job to not make themselves known. Hell, it’s in the manual.”
“Dry agents come with a manual?”
“On some things.”
“And the rest?”
“The rest is all intuition, Pinkerton. Don’t you ever find yourself in a situation that ain’t according to Hoyle and you have to just use the noodle?”
The Cocoanut Grove was a big bubble of jazz and smoke and cocktails and laughter. Stars twinkled in a plaster-domed sky. There were twenty-foot palm trees that looked so real, Sam had to reach out and touch them to check his eyes-a woman at the bar said they’d been brought straight from the set of The Sheik. Fat paper lanterns hung from the drooping fronds and brightly colored tents had been set up all over the nightclub, where people smoked and laughed, walking in and out of silky floating curtains like a hazy, smoky dream. Women lounged on large pillows and danced on tables, a paper moon going down over a painted lake far on the wall, a horizon that made you feel unsteady, almost as if you could drown yourself in it if you stared long enough. And there was Daisy at a bar with a bartender dressed as a sultan, and Sam watched the drape of her hair down the reach of her long neck and the elegant placement of her thin arms across the bar, and she turned to Sam and smiled with that red mouth.
And Sam smiled back.
A mass of people separated them, but Sam could see through them to Daisy, the way your eyes can make out shapes and patterns of trees and roads through the fog. There was laughter and dancing and jazz and the sound of a trumpet.
He walked toward her.
Daisy put her finger to her nose and sloughed it off, turning to a skinny fella in a black suit bopping his way though the party. Sam could not see the man’s face but noted the way his shoulder blades cut up into the material of his jacket and the long droop of the neck. He walked with speed-deliberate yet loose and disjointed.
Sam followed him out onto the hill and then lost him in the mass of a hundred machines, finding him again as he piled into a Studebaker Big Six, Sam knowing it was a Studebaker by the insignia as it shot past close enough to feel the engine’s heat on his face.
When he turned, there was the Hupmobile idling next to him.
“Do I need to spell it out for you?” Daisy asked.
16
The Studebaker drove east, back through downtown, with its flashing signs and jostling streetcars, and joined up with Valley Boulevard until there was nothing but pasture and produce trucks and lonesome gas stations and the odd farmhouse or seed store. Daisy hung back a quarter mile, watching the Big Six’s courtesy lamp on the driver’s side like a beacon. Sam commented on the lamp being a great thing and Daisy shot back that it didn’t really matter because there was nothing else out here besides farmers and cows and orange trees. The hills were silver and rolling in the moonlight, the wind coming through the Hupmobile’s cab warm on Sam’s face, the dashboard glowing under the instrument panel and showing off Daisy’s lean legs as she mashed the accelerator when the Studebaker would disappear around another lone turn.
VISIT GAY’S LION FARM read the billboard. At El Monte on Valley Boulevard.
“You don’t think?” Sam asked.
“I don’t like animals.”
The Studebaker rolled off a little access road and Daisy slowed to a near stop. There was a dusty lot and a broad stucco entrance bragging about the place being Internationally Famous, and from his vantage point Sam could see the figure of the lean man walk through the gates and disappear. Daisy followed, parked, and killed the engine. The only other machine in the lot besides the Hupmobile and the Big Six was a long flatbed truck with slatted sides.
Flies buzzed in the back of the truck, and in the moonlight Sam could see rancid meat and blood.
The entrance gate was open, and they followed the man down a winding path of crushed pebbles. Signs to the lion cages were fashioned from bamboo and oak trees canopied the path, past small red barns and little kiosks that sold postcards and stuffed lions and gum and cigarettes. They were well down the path when they heard the first scream.
“What’s that?”
“The King of the Beasts,” Sam said.
“They keep ’em locked up, don’t they?”
“One would hope.”
There were more screams and roars-definitely roars-and Daisy stepped back from the lead to take a stride beside Sam, too worried to lead but too proud to follow. The trees looked old, spared from the bulldozer and plow, and it all seemed natural and prehistoric in the moonlight.
They stopped and listened for steps but only heard the screams until the screams seemed to be coming from all around them. It was a great ring, a chain-link circle as wide around as a baseball field, at least thirty feet high, with bleachers and long nets strung from what looked like telephone poles.
“Where are they?” she whispered.
“I don’t see ’em.”
“You see him?”
“I don’t,” Sam said.
“This was a goddamn fool thing to do.”
They kept on the path, over a little bamboo bridge and toward a long red barn lit up with tiny white bulbs. Sam nearly ran into Daisy when she stopped and pulled him behind the large trunk of an oak. From the barn, an engine started, and soon another flatbed truck, identical to the one parked in front, came rambling down the path, breezing past their hiding place and slowing to an idle by the giant cage. The headlights lit up the center of the ring, and the long, lean man, Jack Lawrence, unlocked a gate and walked inside. Sam and Daisy stood watching at the narrow spot in the path well back from the idling truck.
They watched Lawrence squat on his haunches and walk backward with the edge of a tarp, the dust and gravel falling away and choking the night air. The beams of the headlights caught the dust as Lawrence emerged into the light and removed one large wooden beam and then another before disappearing for several moments down below and returning with a large crate. They could hear the bottles jostle and rattle against one another as he slid the crate into the truck and went back for more. On his third trip down into the hidden hole, Daisy walked down the path and into the headlight beams and locked the cage door.
Sam followed.
Soon Lawrence emerged with another flat of hooch and walked to the closed doors and looked puzzled, before he saw Daisy and asked, “What gives?”
Daisy twisted her knee inward and removed the pearl-handled.22 and aimed it through a diamond in the chain-link. “Got to hand it you.”
“Who are you?”
“Daisy Simpkins, federal dry agent.”
“This isn’t what you think.”
“What is it?”
“It’s mineral oil,” Lawrence said with a noticeable Australian accent.
“For the animals.”
“Sam, hold ’im.”
Sam walked up to the man, who was still hoisting the crate in his arm, and he pulled a gun and showed it. He winked at Lawrence.
“I didn’t do nothing.”
Sam smiled back.
“Hey,” Lawrence said. “What’s she doing? Hey!”
Sam heard the rusted bars and the metal gates swing open one after another. The cries of the lions had stopped, and as the animals filled the ring through their now-open chutes there was soft, contented purring. Lawrence dropped the hooch. The bottles cracked and broke, and Sam shook his head at the damn shame of it all.
“Keep the gun on him,” Daisy called out.
“Them animals will kill me,” Lawrence said.