GABRIEL AND IVY made it back to Bladenham by late afternoon, which was a miracle, given the infrequent ferry runs at that time of year. They drove directly to the pool, where Neva and Libertine were waiting. Neva darted out before Gabriel had even stepped out of his truck. “Slow down,” he told her. “Take a deep breath.” Once they’d reached the office he said, “Okay. Now.”
“He does an underwater speed-swim for maybe two or three laps, until he’s really got some speed, and then he slams into the gallery windows.” Neva said. “It’s totally unnerving.”
“Headfirst?”
“God no—broadside.”
“And when she says ‘slams’ she really means slams,” Libertine said. “You can hear the reverberation from across the pool. And he’s doing it over and over and over.”
“Here—watch. He’s getting ready to do it again.” Neva pulled Gabriel over to the window. Just as she’d described, Friday wound himself up and bodychecked the nearest acrylic pane the way a hockey player slams into the boards. “It’s awful,” she said.
“Is he vocalizing?”
“I don’t know.” She and Libertine looked at each other for consensus. “No, not that we’ve heard.”
“And how many times has he done it?”
“Maybe forty times,” Neva said. “When we’ve been here.”
“Has the sun been out?”
“I wish.”
“What’s his body posture like?”
“I don’t know—normal,” Neva said. She looked to Libertine, who concurred. “Nothing different.”
“No convulsing, no arching, no cramping?”
Both women shook their heads.
“And no vocalizing?” he asked again.
“No.”
“Have you been in the water to listen?”
“I cleaned yesterday afternoon,” Neva said, “when he first started doing it. I didn’t hear anything.”
“No bleeding, no broken teeth?”
“No.”
“And he’s eating?”
“Yes.”
“No discharge when he blows—no flying snot?”
“No.”
Suspecting that whatever was going on was behavioral rather than medical, Gabriel calmly folded his arms across his chest and said, “Okay. Let me watch him.”
“We were worried he’d hurt himself,” said Libertine.
“If he wanted to do that, he’d be slamming into the rock work, not the windows. Have either of you told Truman what’s going on?”
“Yes,” Neva said. “I thought he should know.”
“Absolutely. Why don’t you call him and ask him to come over when he gets a chance?” Gabriel said to Neva; and then, to both the women, “Go to opposite ends of the windows in the gallery and see if you can see anything different from over there.”
With that, Gabriel leaned his elbows on the windowsill and spent fifteen minutes watching—until Friday slammed into one of the windows across the pool again, exactly as Neva had described it. Truman arrived at the office just in time to see it. “I gather we have a problem,” he said to Gabriel, looking shaken.
“I’m not sure. I wouldn’t say it’s a problem, necessarily, but it’s certainly a new behavior.”
“Frankly, I’m a little worried about the windows,” Truman said. “They weren’t engineered to take that kind of lateral force.”
They exchanged looks. “Well, that’s not good,” Gabriel said dryly.
“No. I’ve got a call in to see if we can find out what their tolerance is. I have to tell you I’m considering closing the gallery and asking you to put him in the medical pool.”
Both men paused as Friday made another pass around the pool and slammed into the windows again. Truman winced at the impact. “Can you tell me some things that might cause this?”
Gabriel frowned thoughtfully, saying, “It could be a lot of things. He could be having stomach pain or some other kind of discomfort, though I don’t think that’s it. He could be bored. He could like the sound the window makes when he hits it. He could be seeing his own reflection in the window and thinking it’s a second killer whale challenging him. His equilibrium or eyesight could be impaired by some kind of infection or virus. I want to take a blood sample and watch him for a while before I start narrowing it down.”
“All right,” said Truman. “Well, keep me posted.”
Once Truman was gone, Gabriel asked Libertine and Neva to bring a bucket of fish upstairs while he put on a wet suit. By the time he got there, Friday was at the slide-out area with his mouth wide open, as usual. Gabriel moved the bucket back and squatted down, scratching Friday’s head and tongue and talking to him congenially.
“Hey, bud. The girls tell me you’re being a dick. What’s up with that? You hungry?” While he was talking he inspected and wiggled all of Friday’s forty-eight teeth. Only one was damaged, an old vertical crack that would need attention at some point, though right now the whale didn’t flinch or show any other pain response when Gabriel moved it, convincing him that this wasn’t the source of the trouble. When he was done he stood up and said, “Come on. Let’s see you do your stuff.”
He put Friday through a standard set of breaches, bows, and spy hops, rewarding each one with fish and a blast on his whistle. Throughout, Friday was attentive, energetic, and in a seemingly excellent humor. When the half-hour session was over, Gabriel took a blood sample for Libertine to run to the hospital lab for a rush analysis, and then got into the water. Over the next hour, in an attempt to harness any excess nervous energy, Gabriel tried to wear him out by playing high-energy tag using the yellow scooter, by letting the whale pitch him off his back, by doing rocket rides, where Gabriel stood on Friday’s nose as Friday shot out of the water in a high spy hop, and by playing games incorporating the blue ball.
After all that, Friday bodychecked the gallery window before Gabriel had even reached the bottom of the stairs.
Neva, back from the viewing gallery, told him, “He’s hitting pretty hard—you can actually see the window flex, and it makes a kind of booming sound. And he’s definitely doing it deliberately. I mean, he’s not swimming into the walls of the pool or the rock work, which I’d think he would be if it were a vision or parasite problem. Frankly, it’s a little creepy. I hope the windows hold.”
The hospital lab called to report that nothing had shown up in the blood work.
Gabriel called Truman to say he was convinced that whatever was going on with Friday was behavioral, not medical; but to be sure, he suggested that Truman contact the local utility and ask if they would bring their buried line detector to the pool.
“Why?” Truman asked.
“It’s possible there’s something in his gut that hasn’t come up or out. I called down to Bogotá and they said there’d always been a story about his swallowing a brass hose nozzle, though there isn’t anyone down there anymore who actually saw him do it. I’ve never taken it too seriously, but we might as well rule it out.”
“I’m on it,” said Truman.
THE NEXT MORNING dawned mercifully clear, the third straight day after a week of rain and wind. Libertine came to work even earlier than usual so she could finish fish house in time to watch as a technician from the power company carried a sophisticated metal detector onto the pool top. He wore earphones and didn’t smile: he was clearly aware of the seriousness of his mission. As she watched, along with Neva and Truman, Gabriel directed Friday to roll over on his back, stretch out along the side of the pool, and hold still. Gabriel tugged his flukes until they lay partially in the wet walk so he couldn’t drift, and then he beckoned to the technician. The man approached cautiously—“He’s not going to eat me, right?”—and swept his wand over Friday’s exposed thirty-two-foot-long undercarriage. Up and back, up and back, up and back. Then he gave Gabriel a thumbs-up signal and removed his earphones. There was no metal in Friday’s body.
At Gabriel’s request, Libertine scampered down the stairs and brought back the fanny pack Gabriel kept his supplies in, and Gabriel drew a fresh blood sample. “It’s hard to know what to hope for, isn’t it?” she said as she took the vial from him, labeled it with the day’s date and time, and handed it off to Neva so she could rush it to the hospital lab.
The body slams continued.
The lab reported that the day’s blood values were as normal as yesterday’s had been.
Once the zoo opened, Truman asked Gabriel, Libertine, and Neva to do everything possible to keep Friday from swimming into the windows during visitors’ hours. They did innovative sessions, high-energy sessions, play sessions, scooter sessions, and put every toy they had into the pool.
By half an hour before the zoo closed, they were exhausted and Friday was once again slamming into the viewing windows. Gabriel sent Neva back to the gallery to observe him and then asked Libertine to stay behind in the office for a quick chat. Her heart began beating faster as he turned to face her, and she clasped her hands together. “Look,” he said, standing beside her at the office window, “I can’t believe I’m even asking this, but is there anything you can tell me about Friday’s state of mind?”
She smiled. “I didn’t think you believed in that sort of thing.”
“I don’t. But at this point any input might help.”
Across the pool they could see Friday hit the windows once more, feel the concussion through the acrylic office window.
“Crap,” said Gabriel.
“I’m sorry,” Libertine said with sincere regret. “I haven’t sensed a thing. Still. There hasn’t been anything since he got here.”
He turned to face her. “You’re kidding.”
“No. I thought you knew that.”
“And you’ve stayed anyway?” he said incredulously. “Why?”
She could feel herself blush. “At first I just wanted to be here in case he needed me. He’d found me in the first place, so I assumed he’d wanted my help. And then you let me work here, and who’s going to turn that down?”
“Yeah—for free.”
“Not anymore,” she pointed out.
He just shook his head and turned back to the window. Friday was making a first and then a second fast underwater circuit around the pool, setting himself up, and then he slammed the window again. Libertine winced.
Gabriel pointed up. Raindrops pocked the water’s surface. “Crap.”
“What?”
“I really thought he was charging his reflection in the window. It all started the day the sun came out. But he isn’t seeing a reflection now.”
Libertine mustered her convictions and spoke. “For what it’s worth, I think he’s trying to see what he can get away with.”
“Okay,” he said, waiting for her to go on.
“Neva’s been having trouble getting him to cooperate during her sessions.”
“Yeah, because he’s a brat,” said Gabriel.
Libertine smiled. “Exactly!”
“So okay, riddle me this,” he said. “He’s healthy for the first time in forever, he doesn’t have any dolphins beating him up, he’s got great food, plenty of room, and clean, cold water. Why act up now? Why not in Bogotá? His life there was pure crap.”
“Was he ever encouraged to act independently down there?”
“Probably not.”
Libertine tapped the tip of her nose with her finger. “You’ve given him the ability to make choices, to use his mind, to decide for himself. Innovative sessions, toys to play with, visitors to watch—for most of the day, he does exactly as he pleases. You’ve given him power. Well, he’s using it. And here’s the corollary: by and large, people—and I assume, by extension, killer whales—only act out when they know they’re safe.”
Gabriel regarded her for a long beat. She flushed. “For a wing nut you actually make a lot of sense,” he said.
“Thank you.”
And with that, he left the office. Moments later, she heard the heavy steel door to the outside open and close and she was alone.
She was surprised that Gabriel hadn’t come up with her analysis himself; after all, it was basic adolescent psychology. He was shrewd, and obviously extremely seasoned and skillful, but she realized that that didn’t mean he was particularly insightful. She was struck, not for the first time, by how underdeveloped he was. She’d never heard him mention aging parents or siblings or any other close family members—or even friends, outside of his colleagues. Here was a man on whom no one had ever depended, whose best life relationships had probably always been with his animals.
He was a lot like her.
And thus, she thought sadly but with a measure of relief, infatuations die.
WHEN NEVA CAME back from the gallery, Truman was with her. He looked pale.
“It’s not pretty over there,” she told Gabriel. “He’s just ramming those windows. And it could be my imagination, but it seems like he’s picking the window that has the most people watching. Plus there’s something else.” She looked at Truman. “You want to tell him?”
“No, you can go ahead.”
Neva drew a breath. “Somebody’s started a rumor that he’s trying to commit suicide because we won’t release him. They’re saying it’s why his dorsal fin is curled over—that it’s a sign of despair.”
For a beat there was silence, and then Gabriel said grimly, “Welcome to the dark side.”
AFTER THE ZOO closed, Truman called Sam and Ivy, who hadn’t been at the zoo that day, and asked them to come in for a meeting. Once everyone was together in the office, he asked Gabriel to bring them up to speed.
“None of the labs came back positive and there isn’t any metal in his body that might be hurting him,” Gabriel reviewed. “Which tells me it’s behavioral.” Then he summarized Libertine’s explanation for the whale’s behavior, giving her the credit. “I have to say, it makes perfect sense,” he concluded.
“He’s certainly been giving me a hard time the last few days,” Neva concurred.
“But if Libertine’s right—and it feels right—that’s actually good news,” said Ivy. “Isn’t it?”
“That depends on your point of view,” said Truman carefully. “It’s good news for him, but not necessarily for the zoo. It’s very upsetting to the visitors, and there’s still the structural problem of the windows. According to the specs, the contractors are pretty sure the windows are strong enough to withstand the impact, but obviously the sooner we get him to stop ramming them, the better.” To Gabriel he said, “If I close the exhibit and give you a full day to work with him, do you think you can get this turned around?”
“I hope so. I’ve actually just put in a call to an old friend of mine,” Gabriel said. “Monty Jergensen in San Diego. He’s an ex-SeaWorld veterinarian—we visited Friday in Bogotá together a few times, so he already knows him. He’s willing to fly up tomorrow and work on his tooth. I don’t think that’s what’s causing the behavior, but it’ll need to be fixed at some point anyway, so we might as well do it now, to be sure. He’ll give Friday a good look-over and go through the lab work while he’s here, in case we missed something.”
Truman nodded; Gabriel had already run this by him. He said, “In the meantime, let’s be proactive about this and prepare a statement for the media that will explain the closure. I’d like your input in drafting it.”
At the end of half an hour of vigorous and sometimes heated discussion over how forthcoming they wanted to be about Friday’s health in general (not at all, as far as Gabriel was concerned; very, thought Neva), Truman decided that more disclosure was safer than less. Thus:
On Saturday (tomorrow), the Max L. Biedelman Zoo will close its killer whale pool to the public so that Friday can undergo a routine dental procedure. We regret any inconvenience this may cause our visitors and will gladly provide rain checks for anyone who would like to return when Friday is once again on exhibit.
But once it was down in black-and-white Truman equivocated, thinking it was probably naïve to offer up medical information that might raise more questions than it answered. How had the tooth been broken in the first place? How long ago? Why wasn’t it treated before this? How much pain had he been in, and for how long? What were the signs that he was in pain? Etc. After another thirty minutes of discussion, they decided that a safer tack would be to focus the statement on nonhealth issues, and how the visitors’ experience would be affected.
On Saturday (tomorrow), the Max L. Biedelman Zoo will close its killer whale pool to visitors for twenty-four hours, in order to take care of routine pool maintenance. The exhibit will be open to the public as usual on Sunday morning. We regret any inconvenience this may cause our visitors and will gladly provide rain checks to anyone who’d like to return to the zoo when Friday is once again on exhibit.
Truman asked Brenda to prepare the press statement before she left for the day and distribute it via an e-mail blast to media outlets within a three-hour drive, so the visitors most likely to be affected were the ones informed.
In the coming months, as Truman thought back on it—and he often thought back on it—they couldn’t have fueled the fire any better if they’d poured gasoline all over it and lit a match.
THE NEXT MORNING, while Truman watched, Gabriel directed Friday into the medical pool and gave Neva the word to lower the watertight gates that separated it from the main pool. Truman could see Friday eyeing Gabriel nervously, but Gabriel stayed at his head in the water and reassured him as the water level began to drop. Neva and Monty Jergensen, an affable, plainspoken, rumpled man in his early seventies who’d pioneered many of the procedures and protocols still being used in marine mammal care and rehabilitation, waited to climb into the pool until the water was shallow enough to keep Friday floating just a foot off the bottom. Then Truman saw them raise Friday’s transport sling beneath him both to suspend him and hold him in place. The vet gave Friday a reassuring pat or two just behind the blowhole.
Gabriel signaled Friday to open his mouth, and the veterinarian examined the offending tooth. “See this?” he said to Gabriel. “It’s fractured all the way through—you can see the crack.” Directing himself up to Truman, who was squatting on the pool deck overhead, he said, “It’s too badly split to fix. Let’s go ahead and take it out.”
Truman looked down at Gabriel, who nodded: let’s do it. Truman gave the go-ahead.
Gabriel fed Friday several herring and then gave the signal for the whale to open his mouth again. The vet injected a numbing agent into the gum, and though Friday shuddered momentarily as the shot was administered, he continued to hold still and open wide. Gabriel scratched his head and pectoral flipper, murmuring encouraging things Friday couldn’t hear. Once the numbing agent had taken effect the veterinarian applied a dental chisel and hammer and in four deft taps broke the tooth cleanly, extracted the pieces, swabbed the socket, and packed it with an antibiotic dressing. For the next three weeks, he directed Gabriel, they’d need to irrigate the area and cleanse it with hydrogen peroxide.
From beginning to end, the procedure took less than ten minutes. Jergensen wanted Friday confined to the medical pool for the next two hours, to make sure that he’d metabolized the Novocain without any adverse reactions. Downstairs, Truman paced in the food prep area while the vet read through a sheaf of lab results, starting with the last year’s records from Bogotá and working forward to the sample they’d taken just the day before. Then he called for Truman to come into the office.
“I’m not seeing any red flags in the blood work—he was in crappy shape when he got here, obviously, and probably seriously immunodeficient, which is why his skin was so bad, but I’m seeing steady improvement. There are no signs of infection or injury. I guarantee you he’s in better shape today than he’s been in years.”
“And the body slams?” Truman asked.
“Strictly behavioral,” said the vet.
Truman nodded, relieved. “Any advice on how to get him to stop?”
The vet indicated Gabriel. “Not a clue, but you’ve got the best guy in the world right here—he’ll get it figured out. The whale isn’t hurting himself, so keep that in mind. It looks worse than it is. He’s probably having a field day.”
Truman asked carefully, “So you don’t think it’s a sign of deep-seated rage, say, or depression?”
“I can’t imagine why it would be.”
Truman smiled apologetically. “There’s a rumor going around that he’s trying to commit suicide. I want to be sure we have a response if the rumor catches hold,” Truman said.
“There isn’t an animal on earth besides us that even contemplates suicide, never mind attempts it,” the veterinarian said. “Animals are wired for survival, not premature death. Now, you can call me crazy if you want to, but whatever this guy is doing, you can bet it’s a sign of health, not psychosis. Can I prove it? No. But I’ve been working in this field for a long time, and all my instincts say it’s a PR problem, not a veterinary one.”
“I’m hugely relieved, of course,” said Truman. “If we asked you to make a statement to that effect to the media, would you be willing to do it?”
“The press isn’t too fond of me,” said Jergenson. “I tend to call a spade a spade, and they usually want something flashier. But sure, you can have them contact me if you want to.”
“Thank you,” said Truman. “Hopefully we won’t need you to do that, but these two”—he indicated Neva and Gabriel—“have put the fear of God into me about how things can go sideways. I want to be prepared.”
Jergenson grinned wickedly. “Oh, you can never be prepared. No matter what you think’s going to happen, you’ll be wrong—it’ll be much worse. That’s my experience, anyway.”
Truman smiled unconvincingly. “Well, let’s hope this is one case where all of you are wrong.” He shook hands with the vet and said to the staff, “Short of catastrophic window failure, we’ll open the gallery tomorrow morning, so hopefully you can get a handle on the behavior by then—assuming it wasn’t the tooth that was causing the problem.”
“We can always hope,” said Gabriel.
Truman was hugely relieved at Jergensen’s assessment. The idea of having a sick whale on his hands at all, never mind under the scrutiny of the world media, was just too awful to contemplate. Now, striding toward Max Biedelman’s mansion, he could finally feel his heartbeat return to almost normal.
But just outside the tapir exhibit, he saw a familiar figure wrapped in clanking cameras, lenses, and flash attachments. Martin Choi. Truman felt his jaws involuntarily clench. He took several deep breaths and mentally apologized to Harriet Saul for having criticized her shortcomings in the face of relentless media scrutiny; and then Martin was upon him, saying in his inimitable way, “Dude!”
WHEN THE FIRST calls came in yesterday, Martin Choi had to admit he’d been skeptical. After all, what whale would want to off himself—especially one that might be released back to the wild, a possibility in which he still firmly believed despite the zoo’s ardent denials. But phone calls kept coming in from visitors, a total of seven within two hours. Each described how the killer whale deliberately swam smack into the windows time after time after time until people started leaving the gallery in tears.
Then he got the zoo’s press statement. Scheduled maintenance. Yeah, right. His journalistic instincts, which he considered to be finely honed, screamed What the hell? Something was definitely up. For the sake of his career he certainly hoped so—something big, like some kind of a cover-up. That would be perfect. To get a jump on the suicide angle he tried to reach the animal psychic—she should know something—but he kept going to her voice mail, so he figured he’d just hoof it down to the zoo unannounced and hopefully catch something juicy in the act. And it looked to him like his timing was perfect, as usual—he had a special gift for that.
Truman Levy looked like shit.
“Martin,” he greeted the reporter levelly, turning Martin around so he was headed away from the pool. “You know we ask all our media visitors to check in at the front desk.”
“That’s okay—I know my way around.”
“Why don’t you come back to my office with me? I assume there’s something you wanted to talk about.”
Martin let himself be diverted but waited to ask any questions until they got to Truman’s office and Martin could sit down and set up his recorder. If his career was about to take a huge leap forward—and he was sure it was—he didn’t want to miss anything. Truman shut his office door behind them. This was the first time Martin had been there since Harriet Saul left, and he couldn’t help noticing that it had been straightened up and cleaned to within an inch of its life—not an old nacho plate or half-eaten muffin in sight.
“Martin?” Truman said.
“What? Yeah, hey, so yesterday we got a few calls that there’s something big-time wrong with the whale.”
“Oh?” said Truman carefully.
“Yeah. Actually, what they said was that he was trying to kill himself by swimming into the windows. And now the exhibit’s closed. What’s up with that?”
“Martin, Martin, Martin,” said Truman. “Does that sound likely to you?”
“Hey, that’s why I’m asking you, man. Where there’s smoke and all that.”
“If you read the press statement we sent you, you know we had scheduled maintenance that would keep the whale off exhibit for most of the day. We’d originally planned on completing the work before we moved porpoises in, but then obviously Friday came along and we put off some of the punch list. Now we’re playing catch-up.”
“You had three weeks, right?”
“Pardon me?”
“Weren’t there three weeks or something between when you decided to take the whale and when he actually arrived? Seems like there was a lot of time to take care of stuff, or is it just me?”
“Yes, it was about three weeks, and no, there wasn’t time,” said Truman. “The contractor was already committed to work someplace else.”
“Oh, okay, yeah, sure, I get that. So what’s being worked on?”
He saw Truman take a beat. “The watertight gates between the med pool and main pool. They need a final block and tackle mechanism installed.”
“And that takes a whole day?”
“Obviously.”
“Huh,” said Martin. “Because I didn’t see any, like, contractor trucks or gear up there or anything.” He scribbled some more notes, fussed with his digital recorder. Sometimes if you give people enough silence they’d hang themselves. He just loved that. But this time nothing happened, so Martin said, “So why do you think people are saying he’s trying to kill himself?”
Truman cleared his throat, croaked out a word or two, cleared his throat again—the sure sign of a nervous interviewee—and said, “Let’s look at this piece by piece. You’ve seen Friday lately, right? I see you here pretty often. Has he looked sick to you?”
Martin pretended to take notes. “I don’t know. He looked okay to me, but he’d have to be lying on the bottom of the pool before I’d know something was up.”
“I promise you he’s not sick or lying on the bottom of the pool.”
“Yeah?” Martin scribbled some bogus notes. Time dragged on. Martin scribbled some more.
And that’s when Truman made his fatal mistake. He said—and from the looks of him, he knew he was screwed the minute he said it—“In fact, we have a veterinarian here just to look in on him.”
Hah! It was the classic novice’s error: yammering into a silence. Martin jumped on it. “Yeah? A local guy?”
“No, Southern California.”
“So that’s handy, huh.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Well, I mean, people are saying something’s wrong with the whale, and then you just happen to have a veterinarian coming up. And the whale’s off-limits for the day. Pretty awesome, dude—I mean, what are the chances? If, you know, nothing’s wrong with the whale.”
“There is nothing wrong with the whale,” said Truman grimly. “We had Dr. Jergensen scheduled for a wellness check. We’ll be having visits from a number of experts from time to time.”
Martin wrote, flipped back and forth in his notebook like he was looking for something, then wrote some more, stretching things out.
“Would you like to talk to him?” Truman finally said. “I believe he’s still here. He had a couple of things to finish up.”
“Seems like a pretty amazing coincidence to me, but hey, you guys know best.”
”Look at me.”
Martin looked at him. “He’s not sick,” said Truman.
“But then there’s still the suicide thing.”
“Please listen to me very carefully. He is not suicidal. No wild animal is suicidal. Their primary instinct is survival.”
“Yeah, but he’s a wild animal who got caught. And now you’re telling him he can’t go back there. No wonder the poor guy’s slamming into windows.”
“Let’s get you out there,” said Truman. “So you can see just how unsuicidal he is.”
“Cool bananas!” Martin grabbed up all his camera gear, notebook, and recorder.
“Let me just call ahead so they know we’re coming,” Truman said, picking up the phone. “Why don’t you say hello to Brenda? I’ll only be a minute.”
“Hey, man, no prob—I can get there by myself,” Martin said. “It’s not like I don’t know where it is.”
“I’d prefer to go with you.”
Why was the guy so determined to handle him? Martin wondered. Even ol’ Harriet Saul would have let him walk over alone, and she’d been a controlling harridan. “Hey,” he said to Brenda dutifully out in the reception area.
“Hey,” she said without even looking away from her computer screen, cracking a tiny piece of gum. He used to think she was kind of cute in a ratted-hair-and-twenty-pounds-overweight kind of way, but now he could see he was above that kind of girl.
“Okay,” said Truman, closing his office door behind him. “All set.”
TRUMAN HAD NO sooner gotten to the whale pool than the security radio at his hip crackled. “Brenda for Truman. Truman, do you copy?”
“Go for Truman,” he said.
“A guy just called from KIRO in Seattle. They heard the whale died. Over.”
“I’m on my way,” he said. He’d have to hand Martin off to Gabriel with only the brief heads-up Truman had given him over the phone, but Gabriel was a pro. Hell, he’d probably have handled this whole mess much better than Truman had.
As soon as he got back, Brenda held her hand over the phone receiver and said, “This is KOIN in Portland. They heard the whale died, too. They’re sending a satellite truck up. So’s another of the Seattle stations I can’t remember the letters of right now. You want to talk to this guy?”
He had Brenda put the call through to his office.
“Hey there,” said a man who identified himself as one of the producers for the station’s evening news. “We got a bunch of folks saying the pool down there’s closed because the whale committed suicide by swimming into the walls. We’re sending a satellite truck up there for the six o’clock news.”
“No, no, no,” Truman begged. “Don’t waste your time. Friday is not only very much alive, he’s in excellent health and his spirits couldn’t be better.”
“So how come you closed the pool to visitors?”
“We had some construction projects to finish that we weren’t able to get to before Friday arrived.”
“We were told he wasn’t even in the pool anymore.”
Truman marveled for a few seconds and then said, “Just out of curiosity, where else could he be?”
“I don’t know. I don’t make up the news, bud, I just report it. So you’re saying he’s not dead?”
“He’s definitely not dead. He’s alive and he’s here.”
“So why’d you have a vet flown up?”
Truman’s heart sank: clearly his effort to confine the story had backfired. “How did you hear about that, if I may ask?”
“Come on, don’t you know we hear about everything? It’s just a matter of how quickly.”
Truman thought that was a bit arch, but he was in no position to pick fights. He put on his most lawyerly persona, took a big breath, and began. “A marine mammal veterinary specialist was here today, yes. His name is Monty Jergensen, and he’s seen Friday in the past in Bogotá. We asked him to come review the whale’s blood work and look him over. This was strictly a wellness call.”
“Yeah? And did he find anything?”
“As a matter of fact, he confirmed that Friday is in excellent shape, much better shape than he’d expected so soon. He did, however, find a broken tooth, which he extracted.”
“A busted tooth?”
“That’s right.”
“Jeez, I’d hate to see the drill,” said the producer, cracking himself up. Truman wondered if Martin Choi had family members in Seattle who were also in the news business. “Pretty handy, having the guy right there.”
Truman sighed—and then he realized that he’d said nothing about the tooth to Martin. Monty or Gabriel probably would. If they did, it would make Truman look even shiftier. If they didn’t, Martin would see the spot on TV and assume they’d treated him differently than they treated the big-city TV stations. Either way, Truman was screwed, and another chip would be added to the already tall stack Martin Choi carried on his shoulder.
The TV producer was talking in his ear. “I’m sorry?” said Truman.
“Let me see if I got this right, because it sounds like you guys had a busy day. There was construction stuff going on, and because of that the whale was off-exhibit, which worked out okay because it just so happened that a whale vet was up there and he found a busted tooth you didn’t know about, but that he extracted. Am I right so far?”
“Pretty much,” said Truman.
“Okay, and so you’re saying the whale didn’t commit suicide or fail to commit suicide, even though a bunch of folks down there yesterday saw him slamming into windows off and on all day, which no one knows why he’d do something like that when it must have hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. It seems like that’s a whole lot of stuff to have happening all at the same time.”
“Tell me about it,” said Truman.
“So if he wasn’t trying to commit suicide, why was he slamming into the windows and freaking out a bunch of folks with their kids?”
“The best answer we have is that he was seeing his reflection in the windows, assuming it was another killer whale, and exerting territoriality.”
“Huh,” said the producer. “Don’t whales get those parasites that make them lose their sense of direction or spatial orientation or something and swim up onto beaches or whatever?”
“I think I’m over my head,” Truman said. “I’m going to get off the phone and get one of our keepers to call you right back.”
“That’s okay—I’ve got what I need.” The phone went dead in Truman’s hand.
Truman stared at the handset for a moment. What could the producer possibly have to make a story from but wild conjectures, rumors, and conflicting facts?
Before he could decide whether he should do something—call the TV station back, tell him god knows what—Brenda stuck an ominous stack of pink While You Were Out messages in front of him. “Some of them said they heard the whale was dead, and the rest say he’s on suicide watch.” She cracked her gum and walked out. “Good luck, boss.”
Truman flipped quickly through the packet of messages and found three more TV stations, AP and Reuters, Sky News, and NPR. Behind those were the Seattle Times, the Oregonian, and a handful of California newspapers. The evening news was being written at that very moment, based on crazy conclusions invented by people lacking even an iota of factual information, and there was no time to set them all straight.
Spin or be spun.
LIBERTINE STOOD OUTSIDE Havenside for a good ten minutes before she could summon her resolve. When she got upstairs, she thought Truman looked like hell, pasty-faced and wilted. He gestured for her to come in and sit down. She took one of his visitors’ chairs and said, “I wonder if I can offer a suggestion? It might help.”
“That would be nice,” he said—somewhat wistfully, she thought.
She took a deep breath and began. “Here’s the thing: no one except a handful of us knows Friday has chosen not to communicate with me anymore. And I’m seeing what everyone else should: a robust, active, chipper whale. I’d gladly call anyone on your media roster who’s running with the wrong story and give them the same update you have, only as though he’s told me, especially, how good life has become. I can say he’s slamming into the windows because even though we know it’s his own reflection, he’s seeing another killer whale in the window and asserting dominance. Gabriel still feels that’s the most likely explanation, and it is a sign of good health—he wouldn’t have had the energy to do it until recently. Anyway, let me talk at least to Martin Choi on my own. He might buy it. At least it might stop the rumor about Friday being suicidal.”
Truman thought.
“You, Gabriel, Ivy, or Neva are welcome to listen in, if you’re worried about my being a loose cannon,” Libertine said. “And I won’t even affiliate myself with the zoo—that’ll have better credibility anyway.”
Truman smiled at her, a nice little smile, though with sad undertones.
“You’ve all done so much for me—let me give something back.”
Truman gave her the go-ahead to talk not only to Martin Choi, but also to any of the media speeding toward Bladenham. He sent a message back with her to Gabriel: let any media who descended upon them see the whale. And if at all possible, keep him busy enough not to slam into the windows.
TRUMAN LEFT THE zoo after the early evening news was over. The coverage was horrible, horrible, horrible, and God alone knew what would run in the newspapers tomorrow morning. He went directly to his parents’ house.
It had been a long time since he’d sought out Matthew for solace. But his father’s even temper, dry sense of humor, and incisive mind were exactly what he needed—that and something alcoholic. He accepted Lavinia’s proffered glass of crisp chardonnay and took it into the sunroom, where Matthew was sitting with the New York Times, a newspaper he’d been reading daily, cover to cover, for as long as Truman could remember.
Now, seeing Truman, Matthew meticulously folded the paper, made a pass over the crease so it would lie perfectly flat, and placed it in front of him on the white wicker coffee table. The room was brilliant, saturated with light even on a winter evening, refracting off-white furniture, white window casements, white drapes, white lamps, white rug. Lavinia had chosen vivid floral upholstery and well-placed plants around the room to soften it. Ordinarily it was one of Truman’s favorite places, but tonight it just felt overilluminated and jarring.
“You look wrung out. Tough day?” Matthew asked mildly. “Have you had dinner?”
“Not yet. Neva’s working this evening, so I told Winslow I’d pick up something on my way home. I can’t stay long.”
“My dear,” Matthew called into the kitchen, “do we have enough dinner to feed a growing boy?”
“I’m sure we do,” Lavinia called back. “Elena cooked a roast this morning.” Elena was the housekeeper who’d been with the Levy family for nearly thirty-five years. “And Ivy’s gone home for a few days.”
“Tell Winslow to ride his bike over,” Matthew suggested. Truman lived just four blocks away. Truman got Winslow on the phone and told him to be very, very careful on the ride over, despite the fact that he’d be on residential streets with very little traffic, and to use his headlamp.
“So,” Matthew said with the faintest twinkle in his eye once Truman was off the phone. “Anything you want to talk about?”
Truman rubbed his eyes, then his face, then his scalp, harder and harder until his hair stood in lively little spikes all over his head. In his most lawyerly voice he attempted a cogent summary of the day for Matthew, sticking to the facts. When he was finished, what it all amounted to was this: Martin Choi, dim though he was, had brought Truman to his knees.
“My boy, there’s lying and then there’s what I like to call creative truth-telling,” Matthew said after listening very carefully. “From what you’ve told me, you weren’t so much lying as you were disorganized and tentative. The cardinal rule when working with the press is to keep the story so simple that even the very stupid can’t get it wrong. Identify a simple message, make sure you have facts to support it—and mind you, you can get creative in your presentation—and once you’ve decided you have a story that can be summarized in one simple sentence, blow every hole in it you can think of and see if it sinks or floats. If it sinks, keep working on it, even if the phone is ringing off the hook. If it floats, stick to it no matter what. And don’t lie. Never lie. In work as in life, it rarely helps. And it’ll destroy your credibility forever.”
Winslow came into the room with Lavinia, who kissed Truman on the top of the head, a rare demonstrative act. She handed around flatware and napkins, to be laid on TV trays rather than the dining room table.
Then she turned on the last of the evening news.
IVY FIRST HEARD that Friday had died, an apparent suicide, as she drove home from the market in Friday Harbor. She nearly drove into a tree, and Julio Iglesias was pitched right out of his booster seat onto the floor, where he fixed her with a long and baleful look before turning his back on her and curling into a sullen ball on the floorboards.
“What the hell!” she said when she connected with Truman. “When were you planning on letting me know? Suicide? I leave for two days and this happens?”
“Wait,” said Truman. “Wait, wait, wait. Friday is alive. He’s well. It’s all been a huge mistake.”
“Well?” said Ivy. “Who botched it?”
“I did,” he said, and proceeded to give her a quick recap.
“Whew,” said Ivy. “I’m pouring myself a good stiff drink. I’m even giving Julio Iglesias a small one.”
“Then bottoms up,” said Truman. “And by the way, if you TiVoed the news, I’d recommend you not watch.”
“Oh?”
“Yep,” Truman said. “Just don’t.”
THE NEXT MORNING Truman waited until he’d gotten to his office to open the News-Tribune. The lead headline read KILLER WHALE WANTS OUT. Despite what Truman knew were Libertine’s best efforts, the story was a remarkable work of fiction, claiming that Friday was trying to break the glass in the zoo’s visitors’ gallery as a tactic to demand his return to the wild. Apparently bowing to the fact that a suicide attempt wasn’t likely, Martin had instead seized on the fact that Friday once swam free in the North Atlantic, “at one with his podmates and limitless environment.” Based on the fact of Friday’s wild birth—and Truman granted that at least Martin got that part right—he went on to quote Libertine: “He’s a remarkably adaptive animal. His new surroundings and life are a huge, huge improvement. Imagine if you’d been living in a cardboard box for eighteen years, and suddenly you’re given the presidential suite at the Hilton. That’s what this feels like to him. And he’s the opposite of suicidal; he’s on a round-the-clock high. His new life here at the zoo is phenomenal.”
The article then quoted a person named Katrina Beemer, vice president of a group called Friends of Animals of the Sea, which Truman had never heard of, who said in rebuttal, “Sure, his accommodations there are a step up, but replacing one prison cell with another, better prison cell doesn’t make up for the fact that it’s still a prison. He’s captive and a long way from home. It’s no coincidence that he’s sick. Sickness is the outward manifestation of a dying spirit. Animals from the sea should be returned to the sea. I implore the Max Biederman [sic] Zoo with all my heart to do the right thing here and let him go home.”
The article then revealed that Friends of Animals of the Sea was accepting donations to launch a campaign to return Friday to the North Atlantic.
“C’MON,” SAID DINK Schuler at that afternoon’s emergency executive committee meeting, which Truman had convened. In front of him on the table was a copy of Martin Choi’s article. “The guy’s an idiot—everybody knows that.”
“I disagree,” said Bruce Horvitz, vice president of the zoo’s board of directors. “That is, yes, the guy’s an idiot, but he’s still capable of stirring up a storm.”
“Nah,” said Dink. “No one reads that paper anyway, and the people who do don’t make the decisions in this town. Besides, who the hell would turn loose an animal that hasn’t smelled ocean air since he was a kid-whale? That woman is bat-crap crazy.” He stabbed his finger at a photo of Trina Beemer. “And while we’re at it, why do the nut jobs always turn out to be such dogs? Seriously.”
“Libertine?” said Truman, who couldn’t see the paper. “Actually, she’s turned out to be quite an asset—”
“Nah, nah, that Tina Bender or whoever, from the Animals of the Sea Society or whatever the hell it is. ASS,” Dink ranted. “What kind of an organization calls itself something that spells ASS?”
“It’s actually Friends of Animals of the Sea. FAS,” said Truman.
“I don’t care what it is; they better keep their mitts off this whale. We’re making a goddamn fortune! I mean, all those years of scratching around and now we’re swimming in money.”
Truman smiled weakly and said he’d keep them updated as new stories appeared in the media, but the five men and one woman on his executive committee didn’t care: After some very hard times, the zoo was running in the black and its name was suddenly known to half the residents of the Pacific Northwest and a hell of a lot of others across the county, even over in the UK and Germany. It was fun to be on top, politics be damned. Let them raise their money. Legally the whale belonged to the zoo.
JUST BEFORE LUNCH Gabriel called Truman and asked if he had an hour or so to come over and help with something. Gabriel refused to say what that something was, but Neva met Truman at the door to the killer whale office with his wet suit and a broad smile.
“Thank you for the concern,” Truman said, “but this is not the time—”
“We think this is exactly the time,” Neva said. “C’mon, a little whale therapy would do you good. And him, too. Someone advised us to keep him busy and away from the windows. Here’s your chance to do your bit.”
No amount of objecting dissuaded her, and anyway the thought of his office and the inevitable stack of media calls, was suddenly too much. Truman gave in.
It took him forever to put the thing on—he’d never worn a wet suit before, or even tried it on, and he was amazed at how heavy and clumsy it was. Once he was dressed, Neva hustled him to the top of the pool before he had a chance to focus on how ridiculous he felt.
He slipped into the water beside her. Cold water immediately trickled down his neck into his suit and inside his sleeves. The sensation was unpleasant but fleeting; his body heat quickly warmed the thin layer of water. He was weirdly buoyant inside the neoprene.
Almost immediately he felt a presence below; an approaching enormity. Friday surfaced just one foot away from him, utterly silent. When he exhaled it scared Truman half to death, despite the fact that it was a sound he’d heard a million times before. He could feel the whale regarding him.
Neva greeted Friday with a pat on the surface of the water—a signal that she’d give him a scratch if he came over. The whale accepted, rolling on his side and lifting one pectoral flipper high, offering her the killer whale equivalent of an armpit. Truman horned in on the moment and gave scratches, too, thinking that Friday’s skin didn’t feel like skin—at least not in the human sense—and it was hard to believe that this huge animal could feel something as delicate as a light touch. Still, there was no doubt that he could. He lolled and rolled with pleasure.
“Isn’t he amazing?” Neva asked, clearly delighted to share this experience with him. “He’s the most fabulous animal!” She’d taken to his world quickly and capably, diving and swimming and giving him exercise sessions and silly sessions and work to do. And Truman knew that almost anyone would kill to be here in his place, in this icy water beside this enormous animal, but he couldn’t shake his uneasiness. He rode Friday’s back and scratched him until his fingernails were black with sloughed skin cells, but then he told Neva he was ready to get out, hitching himself up to sit on the dry concrete.
“Really?” She looked crushed. “You’ve only been in here for a few minutes. Don’t you like him?”
“It’s not that—I don’t even know him. I just don’t feel comfortable.”
“Are you scared? Because he’s really just a big pussycat—”
“It’s not that—I’m not scared. Well, maybe a little, but that’s not it. Don’t you feel like we’re, I don’t know, trivializing him somehow? He isn’t just a big pussycat. He’s a wild animal, and he’s smart, crazy-smart—you can just feel it.”
Neva looked him right in the eye. “Yes, he is. And we’ve been able to give him a decent life here, for the first time in forever. How often can you say that?”
“I know that, of course I know that, but I can’t help feeling, I don’t know—guilty.”
“Why on earth would you feel guilty?”
“He’s here because of us, isn’t he?”
“We got him away from that terrible place.”
“I don’t mean here here,” he said, indicating the pool. “I mean, you know, here.” He held out his arms to take in the universe. “Doesn’t it bother you that we’ve played God?”
“You didn’t. I didn’t.”
“You know what I mean. He doesn’t belong here, he didn’t do anything to deserve this. What was it that woman said in the paper this morning? ‘Replacing one prison cell with another, better prison cell doesn’t make up for the fact that he’s still in prison.’ Something like that.”
Neva hitched herself up to sit beside him, her feet beside his in the wet walk. Friday had taken his blue ball across the pool and left it on the surface while he sank to look into the viewing gallery. She sucked reflectively on her wet suit sleeve. “Gabriel said that only the stupid ones get caught. The smart ones get away.”
“So, what, now he’s somehow to blame for his own captivity?”
“No, more like it’s natural selection at work. I didn’t know you felt that way about captivity. It’s probably not the most helpful mind-set for a zoo director.”
He looked at her earnest little face beside him. Feeling a rush of affection, he leaned over and kissed her. “Don’t mind me—it’s just been a bitch of a day.” Then he went downstairs to change back into his real clothes.
The next day, as abruptly as the body slams had begun, they stopped.