THE DAY AFTER Friday’s arrival, the zoo’s executive committee began exerting increasing pressure on Truman to open the killer whale viewing gallery to the public. Adding urgency was the fact that the previous quarter’s attendance figures had been even worse than they’d projected.
“Hell,” the board president, Dink Schuler, declared at the executive committee meeting. “There’s a ton of money to be made here. This fish is a star.”
“Mammal,” Truman said mildly.
“What?”
“He’s a mammal, not a fish.”
“I don’t care if he has wings and can fly. All I know is, when I went to Rotary yesterday, people were jumping all over me about when we plan to open up. Money, money, money—the hospitality industry guys are drooling all over themselves about the out-of-town business we’ll bring in, and chamber’s mentioned several times that they’re willing to give us the front cover of their brochure the next time they reprint it. Oh, and get this—a couple of guys were visiting from Tacoma and they said, over there, there’s a rumor that the whale actually died a few hours after he got here and we’re hiding it by handing out canned footage to the TV guys instead of even letting them in to shoot their own.”
“That’s crazy,” said Truman, appalled.
“Sure, it’s bullshit, but what I’m saying is, keeping the guy off-limits could turn into a PR problem.”
Truman was also taking flak from visitors who knew full well that the killer whale they were hearing about on the evening news was right there; from the zoo grounds they could see staff working with him on the pool top. So when the executive committee meeting ended, Truman called Gabriel and explained the situation. “Do you see any downside to opening the gallery tomorrow?”
“Not as long as he’s still doing well—actually, having people in the gallery will give him some stimulation. I’m assuming that we can shut the gallery down if he gets into trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Oh, nothing in particular. Death, say.”
“Is he still that frail?” Truman asked with some alarm.
“No, but you still have to have protocols in place for how to deal with it. I’m just saying.”
“Oh,” said Truman. “Whew.”
Over the phone he could hear Gabriel snort with amusement. “Man, you really need to lighten up.”
“I know, I know. Then let’s open the gallery tomorrow. That’ll give us the chance for the maximum number of visitors over the weekend.”
“Fine by me,” said Gabriel.
So Truman called Dink Schuler to confirm that the gallery would open tomorrow; and Dink called the mayor of Bladenham and the president of the chamber of commerce and the county commissioners and a long list of other VIPs; by which time Truman had called Martin Choi, the reporter at the Bladenham News-Tribune who had been so instrumental, if unwittingly, in manipulating Harriet Saul into releasing Hannah to the Pachyderm Sanctuary in California, who called his radio buddy, who put the information out, which was picked up by the regional wire service; which prompted Dink to call Truman to pull together a ribbon-cutting ceremony; at which point Truman called Ivy, who, thanks to the vast experience she and her money had had with this sort of event, helped Truman plan a speech and photo opportunity with the additional input of Lavinia and Matthew, who strongly recommended that Truman not only invite Martin Choi, but include him in the ceremony as “one of our most important community partners” because, as Matthew put it, “Son, he’s an idiot, which means we can’t overestimate his strategic value if we need him down the road.”
MEANWHILE, ANIMAL COMMUNICATOR Libertine sat in her camp chair by the side of the street next to the killer whale pool. For the second full day Friday maintained his silence, which perplexed her. She was certain he’d been the one to summon her, but it was clear he’d withdrawn from her now. Did he want her there at all, or had he solved whatever problem he’d intended to bring to her? In that case, her work here was done. She never forced herself on any animal, but made herself available as its agent, leaving it to the animal to make use of her if it chose to. Though she had no doubt that it had been Friday who’d summoned her from Orcas Island, now she was at a loss.
At three o’clock she had just decided to take a walk—she was probably at risk for deep-vein thrombosis, with all the sitting she was doing—when a pleasant-looking man wearing zoo apparel came through a gate to her side of the chain-link fence and said, “Is there anything we can help you with?”
Libertine pushed herself out of her chair and staggered as she found that one of her feet was asleep. “Will you be putting the killer whale on exhibit anytime soon?”
“Friday.”
“Yes, Friday. Do you know when you’ll let people see him?”
“No, I meant on Friday—tomorrow. You’ll able to see Friday on Friday. My god, it’s like a bad Abbot and Costello routine. Who’s on first?”
“What?”
“No, what’s on second. Who’s on first?”
They both started laughing. “I’m sorry,” said the man, rubbing his face. “It’s been a long couple of days.”
“I’m sure.”
“I noticed you were here yesterday, too.”
“I came down from Orcas Island when I heard you were going to be bringing him up.”
“Do you know him somehow?”
“No,” said Libertine, not quite truthfully. “I’ve just heard a lot about him.”
“Really? Such as?”
“Mainly, that he deserves a lot of breaks.”
“No kidding,” said the man, holding out his hand. “I’m Truman Levy.”
“Libertine Adagio.” For now she decided to leave it at that.
ACROSS TOWN, BLADENHAM News-Tribune reporter Martin Choi was scratching around for a new story angle. The killer whale’s arrival was all well and good, but he’d gotten the same story as everyone else, and that wasn’t good enough. If you were to know just one thing about him, Martin Choi would tell you, it should be his unwavering ambition. Firmly believing that upper-level journalism classes were unnecessary—that in fact, they stifled a young reporter’s unique voice—he’d come to the Bladenham News-Tribune four years ago, fresh from an introductory journalism class at the community college. His current plan was to become an online feature writer for the Huffington Post. He used to dream of becoming an investigative reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, but he saw all too clearly now that paper-and-ink newspapers were doomed to become nothing but a headline or two, a couple of advertorials, and a bunch of grocery store ads and True Value Hardware supplements. He had more on the ball than that—a lot more. He was a hard-nosed reporter waiting for the story that would blast him out of this rat pit town and into cyberfame.
He’d been trying to reach Truman Levy all morning, unsuccessfully. Martin was pretty sure Truman was avoiding him. If Harriet Saul had still been around, he’d have been in like Flynn; she’d never said as much, but he knew she’d had a crush on him, and justifiably—he’d stood on the front steps of Havenside three years ago and declared her a hero, blowing the lid off her secret intention of relocating Hannah to a sanctuary in California. In fact, he’d parlayed that great moment into his current title, Lead Feature Writer, which now ran beside his byline. Sure, he still wrote marriage and birth announcements, but he’d drawn the line at obituaries. Everyone knew obituary writing was a dead-end job. (And he’d come up with that amazing pun on the fly while outlining his demands to his editor. That was the kind of nimble wit he had.)
Truman Levy, on the other hand, was a tougher nut, and now a brand-new lawyer to boot, which meant he wasn’t going to go for the easy, hand-in-glove relationship that local newspapers and nonprofit organizations so often shared. No, he’d need to find another angle on this Friday business that was his own.
Then he’d gotten the phone call from none other than Truman himself about the ribbon-cutting at the whale pool the next morning. Who said good things didn’t go to those who waited, or whatever the hell that saying was? His life was charmed; this was just another sign of it.
WHEN TRUMAN LOOKED out his office window the next morning he saw a line leading all the way to the main parking lot and disappearing around a corner of the gift shop—more visitors than the zoo hosted during an average peak-season weekend. And the zoo wouldn’t even be open for another half hour.
Acting fast, he had his IT guy add to the zoo’s Web site basic information about Friday, the hours during which the public could see him, and a link to accept donations. He asked Brenda to create a Facebook page and a Twitter account on Friday’s behalf. Then he instructed security to take down the ribbon for the noon ribbon-cutting ceremony so visitors could get into the gallery immediately, and asked the two front gate employees to open early and capture guests’ zip codes—which, in the first two hours, included people from as far away as San Diego and Calgary. The Web site crashed under the weight of nearly a quarter of a million hits per hour, and children showed up with jars of pennies and crumpled dollar bills from the tooth fairy. When the day’s mail arrived it included an avalanche of greeting cards, hand-scrawled good wishes, and checks—lots and lots of checks.
It occurred to him that he might have underestimated the effect this animal could have on the entire zoo.
He decided to walk through the zoo grounds, joining a tidal wave of visitors who were skipping all the other exhibits in favor of Friday’s pool. Halfway there he caught up with a young couple with two tow-headed boys wearing SHAMU sweatshirts and tugging at their hands to make them go faster. “They’re both just crazy about killer whales,” the woman told Truman ruefully. “We’ve already taken them to SeaWorld twice, and he’s only eight.” She indicated the older boy. “When I told them we were going to get to see a killer whale right here at home, I thought they’d pop they were so excited.”
“Are you from Bladenham?”
“Well, Tacoma, which is a heck of a lot closer than San Diego. We promised the boys we’d buy a zoo membership so they can come as often as they want. I home school them, and I’d already planned a unit on marine mammals, so this is just perfect. You’re not planning on getting any more, by any chance?”
“No,” said Truman. “I think we’ll have our hands full just with Friday.”
The boys, who’d never stopped tugging on her hands, said in unison, “Mom, come on!” As soon as they got near the doors to the viewing gallery they sprinted ahead, calling over their shoulders, “Hurry up! Come on, come on, we’re going to miss him,” as though the animal could come and go from the pool at will.
Truman slipped into the gallery behind them, staying on an elevated walkway at the back so he could see the visitors as well as the whale. A frisson of anticipation pulsed through the gallery like an electrical charge. When at last Friday made a single sluggish pass-by, a deafening cheer rang out.
WHEN MARTIN CHOI finally got inside the viewing gallery after waiting in line for twenty freaking minutes—he could have invoked journalistic privilege, but he decided to maintain his anonymity to preserve the integrity of his story—he arrived to find four empty windows. Water, water, water; no whale. He asked a woman standing next to him what the hell. “If you look up there,” she told him, pointing, “you can just barely see his tail flukes.”
She was right—he could see them hanging down in the water. Once he’d pressed his way through the crowd to stand directly in front of the window and look up, he could see not only the flukes but the whale’s whole undercarriage.
“Hey, is he dead?” someone called from the crowd. “Because I don’t see him breathing or nothing. I heard he might die.”
A murmur of concern rippled through the two hundred or so people in the gallery.
“Nah, he’s been like that for an hour,” someone else said. “If you watch for a while, you’ll see him take a breath. Then he just lays there. He could be dying, but they’re not going to tell you that. You’ll just read it in the paper one day.”
A child started wailing, “Don’t let him die, Mommy, don’t let him die!”
The cry was instantly taken up by other children throughout the gallery. Martin turned to face the crowd, both arms raised as though to invoke a benediction, and said, “Don’t worry—I’m a reporter. I’ll get to the bottom of this and run it in Monday’s News-Tribune.” Given that today was only Friday he knew how lame that sounded, but what else could he do?
“So is he dead?” a woman at the back of the gallery demanded. “Or what?”
“He’s not dead,” said a quiet voice at Martin Choi’s elbow. “He’s not even dying. He’s just tired. It was a long trip from Colombia to here.”
Martin looked down upon a pink-nosed, frowsy-haired little woman standing beside him. He was lucky he’d even heard her. Feeling his whale-death exposé slipping away, he said, “How do you know?”
“I just do.”
“How?”
The woman sighed. “He told me.”
“He told you? Who told you, the whale?”
“The whale, Friday. Yes.”
“No shit. You talk to whales?”
“Not all whales, no, just the ones who approach me. I don’t talk to them, exactly. I communicate with them.”
Martin could feel his heart rate increase and his palms get damp. Here, just like that, might be the story of a lifetime, his ticket out. “I thought his name was Viernes.”
“Viernes means Friday in Spanish,” said the woman.
“Oh, yeah? How come they named him that?”
“I assume he was captured on a Friday.”
“And you know that how?”
“I don’t. It’s a guess.”
Suddenly the flukes above them kicked, the whale heaved into motion, and the gallery erupted.
“Someone’s feeding him,” said the woman beside him.
“You can see that?” Martin said, peering up into the water. All he could see was the killer whale’s belly on the far side of the pool. “How can you see that?”
“I can’t.”
But sure enough a few minutes later a couple of fish drifted down. When Friday swam after them and picked them off, the gallery collectively lost its mind. Martin grabbed his camera and took shot after shot through the window.
“So listen—how about I interview you?” he said when Friday had once more disappeared from view. “Since you have, you know, an inside track.”
He watched the woman dig an old Starbucks napkin out of her purse and blow her nose, fold the napkin carefully, and return it to her purse.
“So, like, what else is going on with him?” Martin asked.
“I don’t know. He’s not actually communicating with me right now—I only know what I can sense.”
“Yeah?”
“Mostly, he’s tired.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
“There are actually some similarities between what’s been happening to him in the last few days and what would happen if he were still in the wild.”
“Why would he be in the wild?”
“He was born there.”
“Huh.”
“So either way, he’d probably have been headed north.”
“Why?”
“There are annual herring runs up north.”
“Yeah?”
The psychic waited a beat. “They eat herring.”
“Oh. Sure, yeah, I get that. So what does he think about being here?”
The woman sighed. “As I said, he isn’t communicating with me right now. But he’s obviously in a much better situation now than he was at that terrible place. Of course, he is still in captivity.”
“Yeah?”
“He used to live in the wild. Now he’s an attraction.” She gestured around the gallery at the cheering people, many of whom were knocking on the thick acrylic windows to try to entice him back.
“He told you this?”
“No. He hasn’t asked me to say anything on his behalf.”
“He asks you to speak? Jeez, what a story!” He scribbled frantically in his reporter’s spiral notebook, more to keep his excitement under control than for the notes themselves. You didn’t need them anymore; everything was on his digital recorder, there for the replaying. Sometimes he interviewed people and didn’t write down a single thing. “So what other stuff do you think he’ll want you to say?”
The psychic shook her head wearily. “There’s no way of knowing that until he communicates with me again. But I imagine he wants to go home. It’s what they all want.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“The captive killer whales who were born in the wild.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
He’d finished writing and was staring into the empty water of the pool when she said, “I’m going to leave now. Is there anything else you want to ask me?”
His first thought was, if she was really a psychic, shouldn’t she know that without having to ask? But it was just as well if she couldn’t read his mind, because he was thinking he’d better get her photo before she started to look any worse. He’d hate to see what was at the bottom of that gene pool. Instead, he said, “I’m just processing what you’re telling me. It’s, you know, sad.”
The psychic nodded silently.
“So what’s your name?”
“Libertine. Libertine Adagio.”
“Your parents must have been patriots, huh? Liberty and all that. Okay, so hey, thanks for this. No kidding. You planning on talking to anyone else?”
She shook her head. “No—at least not for now.”
Far out—he’d gotten the scoop! “Don’t talk to anyone else if they contact you, okay? We’ll treat this as an exclusive. I’ll have the story filed in time to run in Monday’s paper.” Silently he railed again at the fact that the pissant News-Tribune only came out twice a week, and the publisher was considering dropping that to once a week if ad revenues continued to decline. Since the HuffPost was strictly online, it was always coming out—something newsworthy came along, you filed the story, and bam!, the thing went live online immediately, with your byline out there for the whole world to see. God, but he couldn’t wait for that day. He would definitely put this story on the Associated Press’s news feed, too, because he was absolutely sure it would be picked up.
The minute the psychic was out the door Martin hotfooted it to the back of the newsroom and told his editor, O’Reilly, that he had a story as big as the one he broke when the zoo was fighting over its elephant—maybe bigger. O’Reilly was a tool, but he also must have smelled journalistic gold because he gave Martin the go-ahead to work from home, where there would be no distractions. He beat feet to his car, an old Honda Civic he’d be able to replace once he was earning a living wage at the HuffPost.
At home, he cracked open a beer—he thought more clearly with a beer or two under his belt, which he loved about himself—and tore into the story.
DESPITE TRUMAN’S JITTERS, the ribbon-cutting ceremony went off without a hitch at midday, and in record time—Dink delivered a three-minute set of comments that Truman scripted for him, the mayor gave two minutes of observations about the zoo’s importance to the community, and a round of applause rang out. Despite his father’s urging, he hadn’t included Martin Choi in the program. Dink snipped the ribbon in two with a pair of hastily found garden shears loaned by the buildings and grounds crew, and the zoo visitors surged back into the briefly closed gallery.
At the windows Friday showed for the first time his alleged fascination with babies, a fact they’d all been told about but doubted. Now, however, Truman saw him select a little girl in her mother’s arms at the front of the crowd, hover in the water right in front of her, and watch her for a long time without going up for a breath of air. The child looked back at him, smiled, offered her bottle. The whale nodded and stayed on and on in the window, watching the bottle, watching the baby, going with them as her parents finally walked away with a regretful last look to a place where the killer whale couldn’t follow.
The atmosphere in the gallery was what Truman imagined it would be at Lourdes. Though they were packed in shoulder to shoulder, people talked in hushed tones; many cheeks were wet with tears. Cameras were ubiquitous. And Friday delivered. Still dingy with the last of the zinc oxide ointment, and trailing peeling skin like mourning ribbons, he gave his visitors his fullest attention. Once the baby was gone, people set their toddlers on the deep windowsills in front of them and watched excitedly as the killer whale homed in on one after another, bringing his eye to the window inches away to look them over. For Truman there was something slightly unnerving about the intensity of both the whale’s interest and the crowd’s. It was as though they were beholding a superhero or saint.
He left the gallery for the back area and office. Gabriel was at the computer when Truman came in. From the office’s underwater window he could still see Friday across the pool, at the gallery windows.
“It’s amazing,” Truman told Gabriel. “Are all killer whales treated with this kind of, I don’t know, reverence?”
“Yep. Blows your mind, doesn’t it?”
Truman admitted it did. “But why?” he asked. “What’s the draw?”
“They’re black and white,” Gabriel said, consulting a handwritten slip of paper and continuing to type.
“What do you mean?”
Gabriel swiveled around to face Truman. “People just go nuts over black-and-white animals. Pandas, penguins, zebras, white tigers, snow leopards, killer whales. No one knows why.”
“Really?” To Truman the statement was at once outrageous and plausible.
“Absolutely. Don’t take my word for it—ask any zookeeper and they’ll tell you the same thing.”
In bed that night, Truman floated Gabriel’s theory past Neva. “Well, sure!” she said. “I thought everyone knew that.”
FIRST THING MONDAY morning, Truman picked up a copy of the News-Tribune and spread it on his desktop. The headline was: KILLER WHALE WANTS TO GO HOME. The sole source quoted was one Libertine Adagio, animal psychic—the woman he’d met two days ago sitting by the side of the road. There couldn’t possibly be two women with that name.
After reading it, which took a surprising amount of fortitude, he paced in his office, trying to decide what to do. He’d always known trouble would find them—god knows Neva had hammered that home—but he hadn’t imagined it would be so soon, or come from so close by. But in Truman’s mind it was counterbalanced against Friday’s rapt attention to the visitors who now packed his gallery. Truman was already overhearing visitors describing his antics: Friday, drifting by the gallery windows upside down and with his eyes closed; Friday, opening his mouth wide and waggling his tongue at the crowd; Friday, nodding his head as though accepting obeisance. It didn’t take an animal behaviorist to see that this animal didn’t just enjoy human interaction, he thrived on it.
And now some animal psychic was declaring that this very same animal was yearning to be released back to the wild.
Truman was undecided about an appropriate response to the article when he heard a smart knock on his door frame and then saw Ivy swirling into his office in her customary Egyptian abaya and Nikes, with Julio Iglesias in tow on a purple leash studded with dog-bone-shaped rivets. She threw herself into one of Truman’s visitors’ chairs, plunked Julio Iglesias into the other, and crowed, “So I gather our boy’s a huge hit! There’s a line past the parking lot. How are the numbers?”
“Excellent,” Truman said glumly.
“And this is a problem why?”
“It’s not a problem. Our favorite reporter, Martin Choi, is the problem.”
“The idiot at the local paper?”
“The very same,” said Truman. “He’s dug up some animal psychic who’s claiming that Friday wants to go home.”
“To Bogotá?”
“To the North Atlantic.”
“Why on earth would he want to go there?”
“I’m really not sure—the story wasn’t very clear.”
“Honey, he’s an idiot,” said Ivy.
“I know he’s an idiot,” Truman agreed.
“You said he was quoting an animal psychic?” Ivy asked thoughtfully.
“Evidently.”
“I met one the day after Friday got here,” said Ivy. “Well, a communicator. She doesn’t like to be called a psychic.”
“Here? In Bladenham?”
Ivy nodded. “Her name’s Libertine Adagio, and I had dinner with her at the Oat Maiden. She was eating alone, I was eating alone, so I invited myself to her table.”
“And was she raving?”
“Not at all. She was actually quite articulate. And genuine.”
“About channeling for animals?”
“I know,” Ivy said. “It sounded far-fetched to me, too, but she was very earnest.”
“Does she think she’s channeling for Friday?”
“She must,” Ivy said.
“Well, she’s given Martin Choi the worst kind of story we could have out there. ‘Zoo as prison,’ that kind of thing.”
“Need I remind you who wrote the article? It’s entirely possible that there’s not a single accurate word in that entire story. Honestly, she seemed like a very gentle soul. Maybe I’ll see if she can come in and talk to you.”
Truman looked at her with alarm. “Are you planning to see her again?”
“Absolutely,” Ivy said. “As soon as I can track her down. I liked her. I want to introduce her to Johnson Johnson.”
Truman was appalled. “Why on earth would you do that?”
“To see if she can rent his apartment, of course. She’s very poor, anyone can see that, and she apparently feels obligated to stick around for a while, so she’ll need a place to stay.”
“Encouraging her isn’t in the zoo’s best interests,” Truman protested. “You know that.”
“Oh, hush. I didn’t say I agreed with her, just that I see no point in shunning her. And it wouldn’t do you any harm to meet her. In the belly of the beast and all that. If you’re your father’s son, you won’t banish her, you’ll find a way to put her to good use.”
BY LATE AFTERNOON Friday was napping with his head in a corner of the pool, and Gabriel and Neva, wearing bathing suits, were sprawled on the teak benches in the shower downstairs, beneath dual, steaming showerheads. Gabriel had finished two-and-a-half hours of cleaning on the bottom of the pool; Neva had been in and out of the water three times in an ongoing courtship. During her final attempt, Friday had let her swim up to him and take hold of his dorsal fin, which she’d assumed would feel pliable but instead found to be fixed and rigid, the curl as tight as a fist.
“I don’t think heat has ever felt so good,” she said now. “And I mean ever.”
“One of God’s little mercies. I’ve seen grown men weep under here, it’s felt so good.”
“Has anyone died of hypothermia in one of these pools? Because I’d totally believe it.”
“Not that I know of, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t come close.”
“We?” Neva said.
“We Who Swim with Whales.”
“It seems like the smart people would work with warm-water cetaceans,” Neva said, cracking open one eye to look at him. “Bottle-nosed dolphins.”
Gabriel waved this off. “Bottle-nosed dolphins are assholes. Honestly, when you’re moving, it doesn’t seem as bad. We spent a lot of time today just hanging around. That’s when you feel it the most.”
Neva closed her eyes again. “You know, you’re an enigma. How come you never talk about the work you’ve done?”
“I don’t have any reason to. I’ve been working with marine mammals my whole professional life, which means since you were a girl. I’ve had my hands on just about every killer whale in captivity. That doesn’t mean I’m an enigma, it just means I’m old.”
“How many do you think you’ve collected?” she asked, still self-conscious about using the more zoo-friendly parlance for captured, though she’d said it a thousand times.
Gabriel considered this. “I’ve never counted. Forty, maybe forty-five.”
“How many were rehab animals?”
“Not many. A few.”
“What about the rest?”
“Calves.”
Neva opened her eyes to watch him as he went on.
“When I first got into this business, hardly anyone anywhere had even heard of killer whales, never mind seen one, and half the ones who had thought they were some kind of fish. That was twenty-five, thirty years ago. Now there are killer whale toys, books, posters, stuffed animals, you name it. Hell, Southwest Airlines has Shamu airplanes. Every American kid has seen Free Willy at least five times. And why do kids love killer whales? Because they’ve seen one up close—not in the wild, but at SeaWorld or Busch Gardens or one of the other theme parks.”
“I know, I know, it’s the whole conservation thing, making kids better stewards for tomorrow’s world. I get that—we say the same thing about elephants when people say it’s inhumane to keep them in captivity. People won’t take care of something they don’t know anything about, blah blah blah. And I have no problem at all with captive-bred animals. I’m just not sure I’d be able to grab a young animal from the wild. That’s just me.”
“Well, hardly any are taken from the wild anymore anyway. Hell, SeaWorld wrote the book on successful captive breeding, and their whales are on their fourth generation. Turn any of them loose in the wild and they’d be dead inside two months.”
“Do you really think our guy would have died, if he’d been left there—in Bogotá?”
“I know it.”
“I wonder if he was scared,” she mused.
With closed eyes Gabriel said quietly, “Nature restores a state of grace at the end. By the time you die, you don’t feel a thing.”
“And you know this how?”
“I’ve been there.”
Neva looked at him.
Gabriel opened one eye. “What?”
Neva whacked him with a loofah. “Tell me the story.”
Gabriel shrugged. “There’s not much to tell. It was my own fault. We were collecting killer whales in the North Atlantic off Iceland and I got caught in the net. I was trying to untangle one of the calves. It was a stupid mistake.”
“So what saved you?”
“Not what, who. Christian. A Frenchman—we were collecting animals for an aquarium in Nice. I should have died. I was dying. And there really is a white light, because I was headed there when he dragged me up. I wasn’t scared, and it didn’t hurt. It was beautiful. So now I know it’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Neva shook her head. “I’ve always been afraid of drowning.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Well, if this job doesn’t get you over that, nothing will,” said Gabriel.
“You think?”
“Sure. And if it does happen, remember, you’ll be dying among friends.”
“There’s a comforting thought,” Neva said.
“Yup,” said Gabriel, closing his eyes again. “I thought it would be.”
LATE THAT AFTERNOON Ivy stopped by the pool to reassure herself that all was well. The office was empty and she was peering through the office window to see some sign of Friday when Gabriel came out of the locker room with a towel around his neck, wearing a fresh, dry wet suit folded down to his waist. Ivy turned to look at him, and took in the greenish-yellow remnants of the deep, ugly bruise on his chest. Even from across the room she could also make out the scars up and down around his arms and several longer, deeper scars on his sides and back. “Good god!”
“It looks worse than it is,” he said of the bruise.
“Did you get hit by a bus?”
“Sea lion. Same thing.”
“Yowza.”
Gabriel shrugged with a certain degree of pride. “Goes with the territory. In this industry all us old guys look like we’ve been mauled by tigers. I’ve broken both ankles—one of them twice—both wrists, all my fingers, most of my toes, and blown out both knees and an eardrum.”
“Talk about a leaky ship.”
Gabriel pulled on the upper part of his wet suit and reached over his shoulder, feeling for the zipper pull.
“Here,” she said, stepping over and efficiently zipping him up. “You must be taking the evening watch.”
“Yep. I want to keep an eye on him for at least one more night.”
“If you call the Oat Maiden, Johnson Johnson would probably send over a pizza.”
“I’m fine.”
“Well, you can’t object to a little company, at least.”
Together they climbed the metal stairs, Ivy with one of her oversized tote bags, Gabriel with a bucket of fish, a security radio, and a flashlight. Dark was moving in and one by one the automatic lights sputtered on. Friday was fast asleep in his corner.
Ivy fetched Julio Iglesias from her car, where he’d been methodically chewing through the passenger’s seat belt, brought him upstairs, set him down on the pool deck, and watched him trot away on skinny tweezer-legs to pee on a coiled hose. “He’s such a little martinet,” she said. “You know, in one of his lives he was either a pharoah, a king, or a fascist. I’m serious.”
Gabriel dragged two Adirondack chairs to Ivy, who had bought the second one to the pool yesterday, complaining that the lawn chairs were going to do them all in. Now she pulled a cushion from her bottomless tote and put it on the chair. “Sciatica,” she said, sitting down with a soft grunt. “Handiwork of the devil.”
“Think sitting out in the cold and dampness could have anything to do with it?”
“Nah. My doctor—who, by the way, sits at Satan’s right hand—would tell you it’s my own damned fault. Lose a little weight, exercise more, turn the clock back fifteen years, and I’d be perfect.” Ivy fished out her flask and took a good swig, then offered it to Gabriel. “Scotch. Excellent scotch. Go on—it’s not going to kill you to break the rules once.”
As they passed the flask back and forth, Ivy extracted a sky-blue afghan-in-progress from her bag, peered at it, consulted a dog-eared pattern, and ripped out some of the stitches. “You know, the last time I spent this much time with a man, I was engaged to him.” She gave him a puckish look before setting to work, the metal knitting needles briskly clicking.
“And?”
She waved her hand dismissively. “I came to my senses.”
“Any regrets?”
“None,” said Ivy. “He died at forty-nine. I’d have been a grieving widow.”
“Better to have loved and lost than never to have—”
“There’s a crock,” said Ivy. “How about you? Ever been married?”
“Once. Back before the flood. If you believe her, and you probably should, I’m not cut out for domestic life.”
“What on earth is that supposed to mean?”
Gabriel shrugged. “I travel. I put my work first.”
Ivy nodded, holding a cable needle loosely between her lips like a forgotten cigarette.
“The real deal-breaker, though, was kids,” Gabriel said. “She started to want them, and I didn’t—if you’re going to have kids, you should stay home and have some sort of relationship with them, which I obviously would not be doing. It was all very amicable, though. She’s married again and has two sets of twins. I see her on Vashon sometimes when I’m home. She looks happy.”
Barely visible in the darkness, Friday exhaled and inhaled, clapping his blowhole closed, his warm breath steaming. Ivy put the empty flask away and Gabriel sipped coffee from a mug that said I ♥ MY WALRUS. He watched her, after a while saying, “My grandmother used to knit. Socks, mostly. She said it was an act of contrition.”
“For what?” “She’d never tell me, and I can’t imagine. The woman was a saint. Married at fourteen, five kids by twenty-one. She grew up on a cattle ranch in Alberta and single-handedly fed twenty ranch hands three hot meals a day.” He gazed across the pool. “She used to say she had kids so if she ever had to go back there at least she’d have help.”
“Did she? Ever go back?”
“Nope. She moved to Vancouver, B.C., all by herself, taught herself typing and shorthand, and met my grandfather taking a night-school class on modern English literature. She married him a month later, when she was twenty-two, and they moved to Vashon Island. She loved it there. I remember someone once told her she was a good woman, and she said she was motivated because she’d already been to hell and she wasn’t about to go back. You’d have to work her over with a crowbar to get her to talk about her growing up. She was ashamed of her family.”
“Because they were poor?”
“Because they were uneducated. She brought up my dad on Vashon, but sent him off to the University of Washington in Seattle with a promise that he’d never come back except to visit. He got a PhD in English Literature, met my mother, and waited until my grandmother died to come home and be a scholar-janitor. Cleaned the church every Sunday, shops and the bank every evening. Good honest work, he called it. He always had a book in his back pocket so he could read while he waxed the floors. Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Joyce, Vonnegut, Clancy.”
Ivy smiled. “Eclectic tastes.”
Gabriel nodded. “He died when he was fifty-four, had a heart attack in the nave of St. John the Divine. Father David found him with a book in his hand and a smile on his face.”
“And your mother?”
“She still lives on Vashon, still does some light cleaning for my dad’s old clients.”
“Do you see her often?”
“Not as often as I should, but I go when I can.”
They fell silent while Ivy considered her work, employed her cable needle, then tucked it back between her lips. She hadn’t thought of Gabriel as coming from an educated family; to her he’d seemed more elemental, like the son of a milkman or a plumber. “Shouldn’t he be breathing more?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It just seems like an animal that big should need more oxygen.”
“First, they’re much more efficient at using oxygen than we are, and second, he’s dozing.”
“How do you know he’s not cowering in fear?”
“If he were afraid, his respirations would be faster,” Gabriel said.
“Do you really think he’ll be okay here?”
“Absolutely. We’re going to be throwing a bunch of new stuff at him that’ll keep him busy and challenged.”
“I hope so—I really do. I have to admit that some of what that animal psychic said shook me up a little,” Ivy said.
“Such as?”
“Thinking that he might still miss the wild, even after all these years. Who are we to play God?”
“For one thing, animal psychics are frauds—there’s no such thing. For another thing, Friday would be dead inside a week if he were released back to the wild. He’s used to being hand-fed dead fish, not having to figure out where the schools of fish are today and tomorrow. He’s immune-suppressed, so he’d pick up the first infection he came across. And the North Atlantic is a big, big place—the odds of him finding his pod, or of them finding him, are remote. Reality bites.”
Ivy nodded, only slightly heartened.
LIBERTINE SAT AT the celestial table at the Oat Maiden and talked softly into her cell phone. On the other end of the call was Katrina—Trina—Beemer, a grim-faced, sour woman in her early fifties at whose hammer toes Libertine had been unable to keep herself from staring in fascination during a Sea Shepherd gathering in Seattle two summers ago; and to whom she hadn’t spoken since. Trina headed an organization called Friends of Animals of the Sea and often tagged along when the big animal activist organizations like PETA and Sea Shepherd staged protests.
“I won’t ask you how you infiltrated that place, but you’re a hero,” Trina was saying. “Everyone’s saying so.”
“What place?”
“What place?—you silly woman!” Trina said coyly. “The Breederman Zoo or whatever. You’re all over the Internet.”
Libertine’s heart sank. She believed in the animal welfare groups’ efforts to improve the lives of captive whales and dolphins, even to shut their programs down when the conditions warranted it, as they clearly had in Bogotá, but that wasn’t her work. She merely represented those individuals who couldn’t represent themselves. She’d had no intention of taking a political stand when she talked to Martin Choi. She was just telling him what she knew to be true. It wasn’t the first time she’d talked before she’d thought things through, and while it probably wasn’t the last time, either, she longed for a do-over.
Trina was still talking. “—reconnaisance,” she was saying.
“I’m sorry?”
She heard Trina sigh and start over, using the vaguely singsong tone women used when talking to small children and the mentally challenged. “We’re hoping you’ll do some reconnaissance for us, since you’re there. If you could make a map of the whale building, filtration plant, entrances, exits, and which ones are locked and when, that would be really great.”
“I don’t think I’d be comfortable doing that,” Libertine said.
“Well, you’re not doing anything else, are you? I assume you don’t have direct access to him.”
“Him?”
“Viernes or Friday or whatever his latest name is,” Trina said impatiently. “The whale.”
“Oh. No, not physical access.” She hadn’t had psychic access to him, either, since the day after his arrival. Not that she would tell that to Trina. “I guess I ought to get online and see what people are saying.”
“Listen to the radio, too. Joe Minton did a whole piece on the whale’s background and prospects on NPR. You can probably find it on their Web site.”
“Oh.”
“Look, we really, really need that information. Will you at least think it over?” The phone line went silent until Libertine finally said, “I’ll think about it.”
“Oh, that’s great!” said Trina. “That’s my little guerrilla warrior.”