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'Your just reward,' I said, with pomp. 'Your final justice.'
'Final?' said old O. Schrutt.
'Stand up,' I said, and he did. I snatched the truncheon out of his boot and lifted his chin up with it. 'Eyes closed, Schrutt,' I said. 'I'll guide you with this beating stick, and see you don't move odd or I'll bash you. In the old fashion,' I added, not knowing what that might be but hoping it might ring bells for him - or have him imagining an old fashion of his own.
'Zeiker!' he said. 'It is Zeiker, isn't it?' But I just poked him through the door and out in the maze. 'Is it Zeiker?' he screamed, and I bopped him lightly on his head.
'Quiet, please,' I said, tapping his ear with the truncheon.
'Zeiker, it's been too many years for this,' he said. I said nothing; I just led him through the aisles, looking for a cage.
Empty was the biggest glasshouse of all, the home of the giant anteaters - missing, off on a Schrutt-sent mission of terror. I found the chute behind the cage rows, opened it and prodded old O. Schrutt inside.
'What are you doing?' he said, feeling his hands along the chute. 'Some of these animals are vicious.'
But I just poked him along until the label on the chute door said: GIANT ANTEATER, PAIR OF. Then there was the problem of cramming Schrutt down into the pitlike cage, where he groveled in the sawdust, covering his eyes and throat. And when nothing attacked him straightaway, he sat up for me so I could lash him all together in a lump - in his thick, multi-buckled ammunition belt. I crossed his arms and feet on his rump, and trussed him up, facedown in the sawdust.
'Keep those eyes shut, Schrutt,' I said.
'I'm sorry, Zeiker,' he moaned. 'Really, that was a terrible time for us all, you know.' And when I didn't answer, he said, 'Please, Zeiker, is it you?'
He was still asking me when I crept back in the chute and locked the door behind me. He could yell all night in there, and as long as the glass frontispiece wasn't slid back, no one would hear him. His cries would be as muffled as his mistreated neighbors'.
Out in the aisle, then, I paused to watch him under infrared. He peered at the blank glass; he must have known I stood there, watching him. His scar pulsed double-time, and for that moment I might have pitied him, but across the aisle I noticed a new sadness. The expectant ocelot was wary of her forced company, the frightened wombat, Vombatus hirsutus - a small bearlike creature with a rodent's sort of nose, or a huge hamster, looking like a toothy bear's runt cub.
First things first, again, I thought. And ran into the doorway aisle of the Small Mammal House.
'Gallen!' I cried, and the zoo responded - thumps and outcries bolder than my own. 'All clear!' I shouted, and the monkeys mimicked. I could almost sense the Big Cats purring.
And when I said, 'The ocelot is a waiting mother,' Gallen was helpful and unwary about the delicate business of separating O. Schrutt's luckless charges. She even paused at O. Schrutt's cage and stared at him awhile - her eyes the closest they could come to hating, a sort of horror-struck glare through the one-way glass. While old O. flopped nervously about in the sawdust, anticipating company.
But Gallen got her caution back, once the mother ocelot was bedded by herself and somewhat relaxed in her crib of straw. 'Graff?' she said. 'Don't you think it's illogical of you to separate these animals now, because they scare or even hurt each other, and then to let them all loose in the same mess, when they're sure to really hurt each other?'
'I said I wasn't going to let them all go,' I told her, and felt a little let down by that reminder to myself.
Perhaps as an added gesture, then - after Gallen had left the Small Mammal House to scout down the paths for me, to see if our disturbance had brought anybody snooping around - I thought I shouldn't leave old O. to himself in the cage. And having no place to put the giant anteaters, any way - having removed them from the cages of ratel and civet, respectively - I allowed O. Schrutt to know, before the chute door was opened, just who was returning home.
The giant anteater measures seven feet from nose to tip of tail; it's sort of two-fifths tail, and two-fifths nose, and one-fifth hair. With no body to speak of.
And O. Schrutt surely knew them by their peculiar grunts - and how they sent their long noses inquiring into the cage, before they allowed me to budge them with a shove down into th
eir rightful home, which was now trespassed in by old O. Schrutt, whom the anteaters regarded distastefully from the other side of the cage. And seeing, I suppose, that Schrutt was without gaff or prod, and had himself trussed up in a lump, they were not afraid of him. In fact, they clawed up a little sawdust and grunted at him; they began to circle him - although the anteater is no meat hunter at all and wouldn't be interested in eating people, preferring bugs - while old O. said, 'No! I didn't mean to come in here. I'll leave you alone. Please don't you feel threatened by me, oh no, sir!' And then whispered, a different pitch, 'Here now, isn't this cosy, sort of? Wouldn't you say so? Oh, I would.' But they shuffled around and around him - now and then a long tongue flying out and testing his cheek, tasting how scared he was.
When I left, he might have been saying, 'Here now, did you have a nice visit with ratel and civet? All for fun, I hope you know - and exercise, which you need. And there's no harm done, now, is there?' But I assured myself that the anteaters wouldn't eat him, or even pound him very severely with their leaden tails; or claw through him, the way they can claw through trunks of trees, or at least thigh-thick roots.
I could have left him with the Chinese fishing cat, I thought. And if you're not a good O. Schrutt, I will.
Then I walked out of the Small Mammal House, going over again in my mind just what few animals I would select as safe. But I saw Gallen looking rather frightened outside the door, and when I entered the real night again, I heard the din the zoo was making. The Big Cats sputtering like barges on the Danube, the monkeys reeling, thumping loud against the bars, the birds all calling their praise of me; and over it all, in a low-voiced monotone, the Famous Asiatic Black Bear.
All of them greeted me as I stepped out in the zoo I now had total charge of. All of them. Every different, frotting one of them - awaiting Hannes Graff's decision.
My Reunion with the Real and Unreasonable World
'GRAFF,' GALLEN SAID, 'someone's sure to hear all this.' And I wondered if perhaps there were loud nights in the zoo, anyway; if the conditioned suburb folk of Hietzing wouldn't just roll over and mildly complain: the animals are having a restless night. But I couldn't convince myself that there ever was a clamor like this. They were stomping, shaking the bars and bellowing delirious. And my frotting fellow-primates were the worst.
I'd left the infrared on because I didn't want anyone sleeping now; they had to be ready; and I wanted O. Schrutt kept in the dark, you might say. So I stayed a moment in the pathway of purple light from the Small Mammal House and I tried to read the key labels off the keyring. Finding the Monkey Complex key, I skirted the outside terrace, where shriveled and savage faces poked through the bars, ushering me inside with wails. I didn't dare an overhead light, thinking some passer-by outside the zoo might notice something different and report. I went from cage to cage with O. Schrutt's flashlight, glimpsing the rows and rows of black, leathery hands clutching the bars. I was being careful; I read the names of animals.
Monkeys: howler, lion-tailed, proboscis, rhesus, spider, squirrel and woolly - all small ones, so I let them out.
