Night of the Animals (39 page)

The Met and the horrible king's special paramilitary units were working this weirdness, he explained to the crowd in the room. American security personnel—diplomatic police, a small, specialized marine detachment, the CIA agents and liaisons, and a few British security “contractors” whom everyone accepted as MI5—would spectate. No one seriously believed that an embassy attacker was going to fill an elephant with ammonium nitrate and attach an Opticall detonator.

“Gorillas are buckchuck cool,” said the boyish agent. Everyone looked at him. He zoomed in with one of the deep-infrared cameras, making a red-orange bloom fill the screen. “That's its brain. Lot of energy there.”

A soldier standing by the door laughed.

And that was about the time when Mason's own brain, still recovering from a deep sleep, truly awakened.

“Holy shit—the applicants, the fucking visa applicants!”

A collective gasp arose.
No
one had remembered. Even as early as 4:00
A.M.,
there was always a queue for the visa services section of the embassy. Men, women, often children—usually Indigents—huddled in blankets, walked in place to keep their feet warm, whispered reverently in a hundred languages. The problem was, they normally gathered so close to the front of the chancery, they were not visible, on-screen, until the embassy officially opened for business at 8:30
A.M.,
when they would filter into the building's indoor battery of metal detectors and snaking queues and undergo a terrific, multitiered, marginally legal scrutinizing.

Mason said, “Goddamnit, we need to get the
fuck
out there.” He could see the
Mirror
/WikiNous's headline already:
HEARTLESS YANKS LEAVE REFUGEES TO BEASTS.

He looked at the marines in the Roost. “Jesus. Wait a second.
You
can't go out there
.
” What to do, precisely, turned out to be not so simple. The applicants stood on British soil, for now.

U.S. soldiers could not go out onto the pavement with weapons to protect foreign nationals on English territory. Even assigning diplomatic police to the pavement could cause an international row. The “special relationship” between America and the United Kingdom had long gone. If nothing else, Henry IX was majestically, deviously fickle. You just never knew what was coming next. Last year, Henry had actually lobbied to reopen the Treaty of Ghent; there were some twenty million acres of mineral-rich Maine and Upper Michigan that he felt Canada, now a Crown colony (apart from Quebec) again, had a historical claim to, at least in part, and tensions between the two countries were rising. Weeks later, he was calling the struggling America of the twenty-first century “a continuing inspiration for all.”

“You could invite them in,” said the British contractor. “The people, obviously—not the elephants.”

“No, no elephants,” Mason nodded, smirking. “That's good.” He turned to one of the diplomatic police officers. “
Do
it.”

The officer started patting his neuralzinger belt.

“Goddamnit,” said Mason. “Do it fast or I'll cut your cock off with a dull deer antler.”

A few of the men laughed. The Cog was shaking his head in apparent disgust.

“Yes, sir! Sorry, sir!”

The officer ran out of the room.

“Open the main doors!” A voice was shouting up a stairwell. “Let the applicants in.”

Mason turned to Navas.

“What a mess. Get Five and the Circus up to speed. Tell them that we're getting our
logistics
in place, that we've got a few minor jurisdictional queries out to Legal—wait, no, wait, don't, don't do
that. God, we'll never hear the end of it. The ‘rights of Englishmen' this, EU treaties that. Wait till Harry gets a hold of that! Just request assistance.”

“Sure,” said Navas. “What about the woman—the inspector from the Royal Parks? The one the Watch is hot for?”

“I don't know. I'd like to talk with her. I think I need to get out there.”

“Are you fucking nuts?” asked Navas.

“Well,” said Mason. He punched in the code on a rectangle of numbers by the door of the lift. The lift, which had just two stops—ground level or six floors below to the Roost—opened with a sibilant
woosh
.

“I'm good with animals,” said Mason.

The applicants needed help. Mason remembered Ephesians—how it was important to “be ye kind to one another, tenderhearted.” He himself had come up hard from the impoverished hamlet of Mingo Grove, a foggy holler in the shadow of Spruce Knob Mountain. After high school, he joined the air force and excelled. He later worked his way through the state university, managing a BodyFriendly's ice cream restaurant at night to pay the bills. Despite the stereotypes of insular Appalachia, Mason's attraction to “furn service,” as his family called it, was admired around his pine-forested, precipitous home. Getting out was the right thing to do, as everyone said once you'd done it. The applicants had it much worse, he knew. There was no comparison.

As for animals, he had grown up around aggressives, both sentient and otherwise, and he loved them. His older sister had bred and sold at half-market price Perro de Presa Canario puppies and kept, of all things, a pet bobcat, called Snaggle, caught as a kitten in the hills. Snaggle had grown up to be dangerous; it had once attacked Mason's mother and killed a visiting Presa stud as well as another pet in the Gage home—a big raccoon. Still, no one, especially
not Mason, thought for a moment that Snaggle didn't have a place in their household.

As the lift opened to an anteroom of the chancery and Mason loped out into the square to survey the applicants, he felt a keen sense of destiny—and confidence to a fault.

Tenderhearted
, he had to repeat to himself.
Tender. Hearted.

OUTSIDE THE CHANCERY, A QUEUE OF AROUND
two dozen people, mostly men from sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and central China, seemed to be standing with remarkable poise. Few of them came from places wealthy enough to implement the Seoul International Open-Comm Accords, which made WikiNous flesh-implantation a human right. Consequently, almost none of them understood what was going on in the rest of London. When the gorilla and elephant—and something else—entered the square, they froze.

But it wasn't composure. It was terror.

“
Dà xîngxîng
!” a Chinese woman finally began screaming, and a clamor of cries and shouts followed. “
Dà xiàng
!”

Suleiman Ghailani had been sitting upon his “Ghana Must Go” bag,
^*
as some of his queue mates kept calling the huge plaid nylon tote, which contained all his possessions on earth. These mostly comprised secondhand clothes from charities in Zanzibar whose supply of ugly, ancient polyester clothes from Kentucky and
Bavaria was apparently inexhaustible. (The world had plenty of T-shirts and garish jumpers for Africa, Suleiman had discovered, long ago. To Zanzibari eyes, the old prebiodegradable fibers seemed to last decades longer than the inscrutable fashions they chased. There were things more injurious than poverty. Who in the world needed tight purple leggings with twelve zippered pockets?) There were also a pair of very weathered Reverend Awdry's Railway Series books to help him learn English (the haughty blue engine, Gordon, made him laugh), and two packages of his cherished ballpoint pens, which he had purchased prematurely (and expensively) upon arrival at Heathrow. He planned to post the pens back to his father and young sisters in Tanzania as soon as he finally made it to America. (No one attached to the WikiNous/Opticall web used pens or pencils, but the poorest parts of the world treated them with reverence.) He would put a crisp, new $500 note in the letter, too, as he had seen done in the kung fu movies everyone in Tanzania watched on the old electric
dalla-dalla
buses. Once safe in the USA, he was going to make his family feel big.

When he saw the first animals, he leaped up to his feet and backed against one of the Portland stone columns that helped support the chancery's facade. He was shocked. There were no gorillas on Zanzibar—the only primates left were a few colobus monkeys tourists paid to see in special reserves he himself had never cared to visit. As a young child, he had seen some of the last of the wild elephants, and like most East Africans, he respected the
tembo
more than any other creature, even
simba
, the lion—also now extinct in the wild.

After a moment, Suleiman stepped forward, toward the
tembo
. If he could attract the animals' attention, it might save lives.

“
Fee amaan Allah,
” he whispered. “
Inshallah
.”

Suleiman was very bright, but in coming to London he had catastrophically depended on someone who turned out to be unreliable,
and now he was down to his last £400, staying in a B&B, and filled with anguish. He was supposed to have stayed with a very religious acquaintance from the neighboring island of Pemba, a man named Abbas who lived in Finsbury Park and attended the Aga Khanian mosque there. But Abbas, strangely, had disappeared, and when Suleiman had knocked on his flat door, a bearded young Pakistani man in a long linen prayer shirt answered and smugly told him that Abbas had disappeared into hell. He never explained what that meant.

“Brother,” Suleiman had said. “I am lost.”

The man smiled and nodded knowingly. “Come back tomorrow and I will give a new way of life. You need to hear our imam. He's friends with the Caliph Aga Khan, you know? He's like no one you've ever heard. He will help you,
rafiki
.”

A fanatic, Suleiman thought.

So Suleiman had changed course; all the Africans he had met in London—nearly all from West Africa—urged him to “visit” New York City and simply overstay the “leave to remain” passport stamp. You could hide in Queens or Newark forever. The rest of America could be safely ignored.

“Go to the Big Apple, my nigga,” a fat path-manager from Lagos had said, laughing his head off. “I'm going back next week just to buy some new shoes. This London—it's five thousand percent rip-fucking-rippa-dip-dip-
rip
-off!”

The elephant very pointedly stopped and faced the visa applicants. Suleiman turned and saw several of them try to squeeze behind the column. But it was hopeless. Too many people, too little protection.

“
Toka, mama tembo,
” Suleiman said to the elephant. “
Toka,
mama lady.”

Meanwhile, the gorilla regarded the entire scene, shaking his head mournfully. He looked up at the facade's massive grill-like
Eero Saarinen design of reinforced concrete cells. (Its precise, offset rectangles, along with the thirty-five-foot-wide gold eagle above the building, inspired and intimidated visitors—it made America seem like a country of the distant future, a splendid but remote posthuman society, oddly complementing the tidy math of the Georgian buildings around it.) But something about the rectangles riled the gorilla; there was a cold blandness and lack of fire about them, a total ensnaring of aggression, from grid point to grid point, the opposite of animalism.

Hoping for a closer look, Kibali jumped onto one of the dozens of new, larger stone bollards, ancient tank traps installed decades before in front of the embassy complex. They were ugly, disordered trapeziums, like the reactive-armor bricks on Russian T-120 tanks, and they completely perverted Saarinen's light touch. Amid this angular clutter sat the ape, perched on one of these stone fists of national fright, hunched in anxiety as the doors of the embassy flew open. Nearby, he saw the giant plane trees, so thickly and horizontally limbed that Kibali felt he had perhaps found a safe, comfortable, murky home in this strange world.

A spectral being then drifted up and out of the green shadows that Kibali was contemplating. It resembled Astrid, but it was larger, untamed, like a wild, long-limbed yew tree spotted with tiny red berries. Astrid's long black hair seemed to have turned a golden green, and floated in the air between the embassy and the animals, sparking little fires from which baby kestrels and whipping adders and speeding tiny stoats burst forth.

“
Gagoga,
” said the creature. “
Gagoga maga medu
.”

And those close to the vernal being, who heard the words, bowed their heads.

But not Mason Gage. He came out of the chancery building with his arms behind him, his head lowered for other reasons. Such was his focus on the notion of saving the vulnerable visa applicants from
the elephant and gorilla, he did not, for quite a while, even notice the being. He'd merely struck a sort of improvised submissive pose, something he remembered in dealing with his sister's feisty Perro de Presa Canarios; it could not have contrasted more with the imperial golden eagle statute six floors above him, and the gesture looked particularly odd on Mason.

The angry elephant turned its head toward the being, calming for a moment, but it trotted straight through the green fog, and bucked a bit, then squared off against Mason, so close the young man could smell the high, sweet reek of its shit.

A phalanx of nearly identical-looking men in coveralls the color of yoghurt stood behind Mason, too, emerging from the interior of the chancery, and looking pressed for time. By contrast, Mason had thrown on a simple navy blazer and old black DreamUp jeans, which supposedly could be slightly adjusted through telekinesis (but this never worked, buyers soon learned). He kept a neuralzinger pistol with nonlethal rounds holstered under the blazer.

Several of the men had their hair cut in the same cropped, androgynous style. Their appearance threw him off a bit, but they'd come from the chancery's offices, and he implicitly—and imprudently—trusted them as legitimate. There were, after all, a very few tertiary aspects of embassy operations in any major world capital—everything from toilet repairs to heating duct maintenance—that even the chief of security didn't fully grasp. Mason's mistake was that he saw these people as one of them.

“Who are you? What unit?”

None answered.

Mason decided that they must be some kind of foreign outside building contractors. He would address the issue of the white-suited caretakers or whatever the fuck they were at the next security team meeting, and they looked funny, didn't they, and shouldn't they know some basic English?

Moving out into the square, toward the elephant, Mason walked right past the black man who had stepped forward.

“Go inside,” Mason told the man, pushing his eyeglasses higher on the bridge of his nose. He held his hand out toward the anxious, angry pachyderm, behind which the green fog was gathering again. Mason glanced back for a moment at the rest of the visa applicants, and a feeling of protectiveness arose in him—but the elephant's stolid, fearful gaze preoccupied him more. If pushed to choose between human and animal, Mason was a person who could not be depended on to stand up for his own species.

“It's OK, sugar,” he was saying to the elephant. “It's OK, darling.” Some of the men in the white coveralls leered at the scene, as if they thought Mason must be joking.

“Thar, thar, sugar,” he said to the elephant, smiling genially. “What're you all put out for?”

The men in coveralls began waving the visa applicants inside. Some of them were reading off SkinWerks notes glowing on their hands, in reflexive voices: “Inside! Inside! Welcome!
Huanying guanglin! Bienvenue!
Welcome!
Huanying guanglin! Bienvenue!
Inside!” A 3D holographic sign with the same words, in puffy lettering, was, in a flash, projecting from above the doors.

Suleiman, who had dawdled, and who didn't like the looks of the men in white coveralls, knew immediately that the navy-jacketed man from the embassy was making a profound mistake by getting so close to the
tembo
. When Suleiman was a child, his elder cousin, Amani, had been lucky enough to live and work seasonally at one of the game preserves south of the capital. When Suleiman had visited, he saw Amani carefully drive wild elephants away from the touring Land Rovers by smacking their feet—but it was perilous work, and one risked death. But this American man, he acted as if he had never seen a
tembo
in his life.

When the elephant began to charge, Suleiman watched stunned
as the man ran
toward
it. He did not know why, but he too began running toward the animal. There was perhaps a vague sense that he must start acting larger than himself—is
this
American, this running
toward
a monster? But mostly, Suleiman simply heeded an innate decency and courage he himself did not know he possessed.

“No!” he shouted. “
Toka
!”

Layang let out a sneezy, squeaky cry—the splurty sounds of a knotted cornet—then knocked Mason off his feet with the base of her trunk. His eyeglasses went flying. Everything happened so fast, Mason was still smiling, still believing, when the animal's front feet slammed down only inches from his knees. He had made no sound. He felt nothing. He still held his hand out toward the animal and was almost laughing, with a strange sense that his cropped hair had suddenly grown miles long and caught fire.

“Oh,” he finally said. “Hey.”

Then there was Suleiman over him, trying to wrestle with one of the elephant's feet.
“Toka! Mama tembo, toka!”

Suleiman had never been so close to a
tembo,
never touched one. The softness and warmth of the animal's huge ankles surprised him—he had expected a kind of hard rubberiness. He realized he didn't know what he was doing, but Layang seemed to respond to him, and backed away, but only for a moment. Suleiman turned toward the man and tried to lift him up. Layang had risen to her hind legs, preparing to pounce down on Mason with a 1,500-pound coup de grâce.

Suleiman spun around and staggered back, positioning himself between the angry elephant and Mason. The beast moved its head side to side in a brutal fashion, as if trying to shake its own brains out, and glared down at the humans. Suleiman was able to pull the man up to his feet, looping his arm around his chest, and yank him back. For reasons he could not grasp, the man was resisting him, pulling at his forearms fiercely.

“I'm OK,” Mason seethed. “Let me go!” But Suleiman had no intention of letting him die. He kept trying to heave him away from the elephant.

Mason, trying to regain his balance, thumping the heels of his own trainers down on a short set of three cement stairs, could see the blaming, sweeping rage in the elephant, its ears engorged with blood, its reddish-brown eyes furious. The unfamiliar tenderness of the man, the unplanned human-to-human connection, was humiliating to him. He didn't want to be rescued. It was a goddamn elephant, not a suicide bomber.

Still, as they stood back now, watching, Layang all at once thrust her feet down so hard on the pavement the nearby trees rustled. Then the elephant seemed to back off.

“Thanks,” said Mason stiffly, gaining a footing, gazing at the small, lean man, who was grinning. The dark blue insulated coat he had been wearing was missing an arm, and all he wore under the coat was an old faded-red T-shirt that read
OPERATION GET DOWN—DETROIT, MI
.

“Go inside now,” Mason said. “It's OK. Just go in.” He wiped some of the dust off his saggy khakis. He knelt down, retrieved his broken spectacles, and reset them on his nose. One of the lenses was shattered; he popped it out and let it fall on the ground.

The gorilla had moved off the bollard and into the little central garden in Grosvenor Square. He was watching all the people in front of the embassy with a look of unyielding confusion and distress. He kept placing his long hand over his solar plexus—in pain, it seemed. The elephant remained in the street, just beyond the tank traps. She was taking deep breaths, making her curved flanks flare out visibly in the half-darkness under the canopying boughs of enormous mottled plane trees.