The big doctor was unconcerned. He squared the cigar in his mouth, shifted his haunches. “Oh, no, no, that’s just the thing, don’t you see — a little compression. It’s what they all need.”
Afterward, when apologies had been made all around and Mr. McCormick, very contrite, was put to bed for his afternoon nap, O‘Kane felt it politic to escort Dr. Brush out onto the fog-shrouded grounds in search of Dr. Hamilton. “Can’t see a damned thing,” Brush complained, moving cautiously forward as O’Kane, familiar with the terrain, led the way. “Afraid of barking a damned shin. Or worse. You sure he’s out here?” And then, in a stentorian voice: “Gilbert? Gilbert Hamilton! Are you there?”
The trees stood ghostly, ribbed in white like so many masts hung with tattered sails. The leaves were damp underfoot. Nothing moved, and there was no sound, not even of birds. O‘Kane felt his way, and he didn’t even have the stench of the hominoids to guide him. All but two of the baboons and monkeys had been sold off to private collectors or donated to zoos, and Hamilton was packing up his notes and equipment and shipping it back east to his mentor, a small monkey-obsessed scholar by the name of Yerkes who’d spent some time at Riven Rock a year ago. As for Julius, he’d been removed from the premises after the Potter Hotel incident and sold for a song to a traveling circus — on Katherine’s orders.
There was a smell of burning in the air, and of something else too, something rank, and before long they could hear the crackling of a fire, and then they saw the flames, a moiling interwoven ball of them, up ahead at the edge of the oak grove. Two figures, in silhouette, slipped back and forth in front of the fire, feeding the flames with scraps of timber. As they drew closer, the big doctor tramping heavily behind him and cursing steadily under his breath, O‘Kane recognized Hamilton’s gnomelike assistants, and he called out to the shorter of them, the Mexican. “Hey, Isidro, you seen Dr. Hamilton?” And then, showing off one of the handy phrases he’d picked up amongst the denizens of Spanishtown: “ El Doctor Hamilton, dondy estis?”
They were at the edge of the fire now and O‘Kane saw that the two men were burning up the dismantled cages, wire and all. Paint sizzled and peeled. Wood split. Fingers of flame poked up through the mesh, weaving an intricate pattern, leaping high to drive back the fog even as the smoke settled in to replace it. The heat was intense, a hundred stoves stoked to capacity, and they had to step back away from it; O’Kane looked at the two scurrying men and hoped they knew what they were doing — a blaze like this could get out of hand and bring the whole place down, orchards, cottages, Pierce Arrows and Mr. McCormick too. Isidro, the Mexican, paused with an armload of rubbish to consider the question of Hamilton’s whereabouts, then nodded his head toward the place beneath the trees where the cages had stood even this morning.
They found Dr. Hamilton fussing around a pile of odds and ends he meant to keep, the chute with the doors at the end of it, a couple of the smaller cages, a pegboard he’d used to gauge the monkeys’ intelligence. “Gil!” Dr. Brush boomed, bobbing through the fog to seize Hamilton’s hand. “I’m late, I know it, but it was for the main and simple reason of this damned fog, and I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’m here now and I’ve met everybody and I’m raring to go.”
“Nat,” Hamilton said, shaking with one hand and adjusting his spectacles with the other. “Yes, well, the weather’s been unusual. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
“Pah!” Brush returned, waving a big flipperlike hand. “No inconvenience to me, for the main and simple reason that I’m here to stay. California. God bless it. But what’s this — leftover monkeys?”
He was pointing to a small cage set atop the psychological chute. In it, O‘Kane saw, were the two remaining hominoids, a pair of rhesus monkeys the doctor called Jack and Jill. They were runts, even for monkeys, and though they’d been displaced and seen all their companions exiled and their home of the last several years demolished, they still had the spirit to fuck — which is what they were doing at the moment, black lips drawn back in erotic transport, the cage swaying rhythmically to the persistent in-and-out motion of the monkey on top, presumably Jack, but you never could tell. That much O’Kane had learned about hominoids.
Hamilton seemed a bit fuzzy. “Yes,” he said, gazing down on them, “the last two. Jack and Jill. I’d had half a mind to take them with me, but now I’m not so sure. The zoo down in Los Angeles is filled up with them — rhesus, that is — and I can’t seem to get rid of them in any case.”
The big doctor huffed a few times. His cigar had gone out, but he still clutched it with his teeth as if it were the last link of a breathing tube and he a sponge diver wending his way along the bottom of the sea. “Why not set ‘em free? Let ’em go. Liberate ‘em. For the main and simple reason that they’re sentient creatures, just like you and me, and it’s a cruelty to keep them caged up like that, and the climate here’ll support ’em, I don’t doubt that, for the main and simple—”
“Yes, I’ve thought of that,” Hamilton said. “Haven’t I, Edward?”
O‘Kane hadn’t the faintest idea what Hamilton had or hadn’t thought of, but he nodded his head anyway.
“Well?” Brush demanded. “And so?”
Hamilton took his time, the fog settling in, the fire of demolition snapping and roaring off in the distance. He looked down at the copulating monkeys. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned after all these years of study,” he sighed, “it’s that they’re nothing but dirty stinking little uncontrollable beasts. Set them free?” He looked up. “They don’t deserve it.”
It was about that time that Giovannella came to O‘Kane with the news that she was pregnant. She wasn’t Giovannella Dimucci anymore, but Giovannella Capolupo, married, at her father’s insistence, to a little hunched-over wop with a single black eyebrow drawn like a visor across the top third of his head. Guido, his name was, Guido Capolupo. He had a shoemaker’s shop in a back alley in Spanishtown, with a cramped little cell of an apartment above it, which was convenient for O’Kane, who was then living at a boardinghouse not five minutes away.
Giovannella, sleek and beautiful, with her eyes like chocolate candies and her feet primly crossed at the ankles, sat waiting for him in the parlor under the watchful eye of the landlady, Mrs. Fitzmaurice. It was a Saturday afternoon, 2:00 P.M., and he’d just come back from his half-day shift at Riven Rock and collapsed into his bed like a jellyfish, utterly drained after a long night of celebrating somebody’s birthday at Menhoff‘s, he couldn’t remember whose. He closed his eyes. And in the very next instant there was an impatient rapping at the door and who was it? Mrs. Fitzmaurice. And what did she want? There was a young lady downstairs for him.
“Giov,” he crooned, crossing the carpet and taking her hand, feeling better already, and he couldn’t kiss her there in public, though he wanted to, and he couldn’t read her chocolate-candy eyes either. “What do you say?”
“I’m pregnant.”
At first it didn’t register on him. The sun was fat in the windows and outside the streets were placid and inviting, all the long Saturday afternoon stretching languidly before him. Since he was up, he was thinking of maybe suggesting a stroll up to Menhoff‘s, for a little hair of the dog. He blinked. Tried on a smile.
Giovannella was beaming suddenly. “I thought you’d be mad, Eddie, but I’m so happy.” She gave his hand a squeeze, though Mrs. Fitzmaurice, studiously watering her geraniums at the far window, was watching like a moral executioner, ready to pounce at any hint of impropriety.