Endangered Species (5 page)

I left the paper where it was. “Thanks, but I don't think so.”

“Why?” The smile on his face made it clear he wasn't used to refusals. “It's Eli, isn't it?” Chapman took a sip of his drink.

Zsa Zsa barked. I leaned over and scratched her rump. “Among other things, yes. Maybe this is just my hang-up, but having dinner with someone who kicks someone in the balls, cuts them, then threatens to cut off their fingers when a business deal goes bad is not very appealing.”

“I just wanted to show him I meant business.”

“I think he got the message.”

“Good.” Then Chapman chuckled. “God. You should have seen his face when I told him I was going to cut his fingers off. I thought his eyes were going to fall out of his head. I didn't think people actually looked like that outside of bad movies.” He lifted his glass up and put it back down. “I can't believe that he really thinks I'm going to do it.”

“And you think that's funny?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“I don't”

Chapman moved slightly closer to me. His thigh brushed against mine. “I'll apologize to him.”

I flushed. What the hell was the matter with me, I wondered as I moved my leg away. This guy was playing me. I knew that. But it didn't seem to matter. “So then nothing will happen if I don't find the suitcase?”

“You will,” Chapman said confidently.

“But if I can't. Hypothetically speaking.”

He smiled again and stood up. “Let's not talk about that now.”

“What's in it?”

“Didn't Eli tell you?”

“Yes, he did. I just want to hear your version.”

Chapman squinted. “Cuban cigars. A lucrative commodity thanks to the stock market. I don't smoke them myself, but lots of people these days do.”

“Fine. But still we're not talking vast amounts of money here. How about my client gives you half if the suitcase doesn't show up. It sounds to me as if you can afford to take a four-thousand-dollar loss without too much grief.”

For a split second the pupils of Chapman's eyes turned flat and reptilian. Then the second was gone, leaving me to wonder if I'd really seen what I thought I had.

“That's right,” he said, now looking merely irritated. “We're not. We're talking about something more important. We're talking about principle.”

“The principle being?”

“Honoring your word.” He slapped the bar with the palm of his hand for emphasis. “That's very important to me. When I give my word I abide by it, and I expect the people I deal with to do the same.”

“Really.” I felt as if I was listening to a wolf preach vegetarianism. I found myself absentmindedly chewing on my cuticle. I put my hand down. “And if, through no fault of their own, they can't?” I asked.

“I don't accept that kind of negative thinking. Negative thinking leads to weakness, it leads to moral rot. Listen,” he continued. “I made a deal with your friend. I was prepared to pay him a fair amount of money for his services. In return, I expect him to abide by our agreement. That's how I run my business. That's why I'm a successful entrepreneur. It's that simple.”

I stood. Looking up at him was making the crick in my neck worse. “Adam Smith would be proud of you.”

The corners of Chapman's mouth turned up. “I see you're well read. That's a nice quality in a woman. As a matter of fact, I like to think he would be. I'm not ashamed to be a capitalist. I'm just doing what everyone else is doing. Earning a living, and in the process I'm giving your friend, among others, the chance to earn enough money to go to college. There's nothing wrong with that.”

“You're a philanthropist, too.”

“Yes, I am,” he said with complete sincerity, choosing to not respond to the sarcasm in my voice. “Let me tell you what makes me a success,” he continued, answering a question I hadn't asked. “Just like the Japanese, I subscribe to the concept of the team. If the team is successful, then everyone shares in the rewards, but if one person screws up that means everyone screws up. If one person makes a mistake, everyone bears the consequences. And that includes Eli and anyone he subcontracts with.”

“Are you threatening me?” I demanded.

Chapman made a vague gesture in the air with his hands. “Actions have consequences. It's time your friend learned that. Believe me, in the long run he'll be better off. Unfortunately, sometimes learning discipline can be a painful process.” Chapman reached over, took the paper he'd written his number on, folded it up, and tucked it in the breast pocket of my shirt. The familiarity of the gesture annoyed and excited me at the same time. “Don't forget to call me now. I'll be waiting to hear from you.”

“Don't worry.” He was turning to go when something occurred to me. “Tell me one thing, Mr. Businessman.”

He cocked his head and waited. “Yes?”

“Is Chapman your real name?”

He grinned. “What do you think?”

“I think no.” .

Chapman imitated the shape of a gun with his thumb and his forefinger and pointed it at me. “Bingo. I knew it when I saw you. You and me we're going to get to be good friends.”

“I doubt it.”

He laughed. “I don't.”

I looked up his name in the phone book after he left. There was a Robert Chapman all right. Unfortunately when I called, his daughter told me, along with a few other choice words, that her father was seventy-five years old and confined to the house with emphysema.

G
eorge was dozing on the sofa when I let myself in. “Wha?” he groaned as Zsa Zsa jumped up and licked his nose. He pushed her off and sat up. “What time is it?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

“Twelve-thirty.”

He yawned. “You want something?” he asked as he let ered himself up and padded into the kitchen.

I told him I didn't. The beef was still rolling around in my stomach. “So, what did you want to talk to me about?”

He laughed. “This.” George handed me a page from last Sunday's
New York Times
travel section and pointed to a story about Belize in the left-hand column.

I scanned the article and handed it back. “Sounds great.”

“One of my cousins just bought some land there. How'd you like to go down for a couple of weeks?”

“Are you kidding?” His expression said he wasn't. I hugged him. “I'd love to.”

George grinned. He fixed himself a bowl of cereal and milk and sat down at the kitchen table. “Good. I'll call him tomorrow. So tell me about the meeting you just had.” He ate as I talked. “I don't like it,” he said when I was done. “Eight thousand is chump change. This guy is putting way too much effort into recovering it.”

“I know.”

“It sounds to me as if something else is going on.” He spooned up the last of the milk and pushed his bowl away. “You have any idea what?”

“Not yet.”

“But you're sticking with this?”

“For the moment.”

“Can I ask why?”

I picked Zsa Zsa up and sat her in my lap. I'd been thinking about that question on the way over. “A couple of reasons.” I plucked a twig off Zsa Zsa's ear.

“Which are?” George prompted.

“I feel bad for Eli and I really don't like Chapman.” I scratched Zsa Zsa's chest. “I figure I can always opt out if things go sour.”

“Fair enough.” George clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “See if you can set up another meeting with this guy.”

“Any reason?”

“So you can get his license plate number. I'll have one of my friends run it through the computer and see what comes up. At least then you'll know who you're dealing with.”

And on that note we went to bed.

I spent the night dreaming about beaches and butterflies and blue-green waters, so it was doubly painful to wake up and contemplate the gray sky out the window. I burrowed my head into my pillow and looked at George sleeping. God, I wished I didn't have to get up, but I did. I had to be at Lawrence Junior High at ten o'clock.

About a month ago, one of my customers, a nice lady who teaches in one of the city junior highs, and I had gotten talking about how tough it is to teach these days in the city schools. What with all the budget cuts, there's no money for books and paper anymore, let alone field trips. While the suburban kids still have Mommy and Daddy to take them to the zoo and the park, her kids don't. So she asked me if I'd ever be willing to come into the school with some of my reptiles and give a talk. I'd said sure, no problem. She'd called back the next day. And now I had to face a class full of thirty twelve-year-olds. I was not looking forward to this.

I stopped at a 7-Eleven and got two jelly doughnuts for Zsa Zsa and a couple of glazed doughnuts and a large coffee for myself before heading to the store. Tim was already there when I arrived.

“What are you planning on taking?” he asked.

After a fair amount of thinking, I'd come up with four specimens that wouldn't hurt the kids or be hurt by them. “One of the pythons.” The Burmese I was thinking about was fairly docile and at seven feet was large enough so he could be handled without being stressed out. “Iggy the Iguana.” He loved people and would curl up on your shoulders whenever he could. The people who had him had moved overseas and hadn't been able to take him along and I'd been trying to find a good home for him. “One of the monitors.” The one we had in the store was four feet long, with impressive claws and a tail that could inflict serious damage. People liked them because they looked like dinosaurs. In fact, in the fifties, filmmakers had used them as stand-ins.

“How about a corn snake?” Tim suggested.

I nodded. “That was my last choice.” A native Southwest snake, they were not only fairly sturdy, but with their yellow and red coloring, attractive as well.

“Have fun,” Tim said as I packed the four reptiles up in newspaper-lined cloth bags, newspaper being great insulating material, because the one thing that you can't do with reptiles is let them get cold.

“Who knows? Maybe this could be the start of a new career,” I said as I left.

Things began well. The kids gasped when I took the python out of its bag. I told them how they eat and how you can keep them in your house and how their skin really feels dry and what marvels of evolutionary efficiency they are. Then I invited anyone who wanted to, to come up and touch him. After some hesitation about ten kids did. Next I talked about Iggy and about how iguanas were good lizards to start out with if you were interested in owning one, because they weren't as fussy about their eating habits as some other lizards were. They eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and seemed to be able to withstand more variations in temperature. The corn snake went well, too. Even the girls liked him, because he was pretty.

When I took out the monitor, one of the kids in the front row said, “Wow, he looks like a Komodo dragon.”

“I guess you watch the Discovery Channel.”

The kid smiled.

“He does look very similar. He comes from the same family, except he's not on the CITES list.” And I went into the little speech I'd prepared. “Every year, thousands and thousands of animals die thanks to the wildlife black market. Many species are in danger of being wiped out. Some, like the Komodo dragon attract attention because they're so dramatic, but others, like beetles and butterflies, don't.” By now the lizard was moving his head around trying to bite me. I moved my right hand further down his back away from his mouth and made sure I had a good grip on his underbelly with my left hand. Then I turned him around so they could get a good look at his tail, which was whipping back and forth. “Now if he was bigger,” I told him, “his tail could really hurt you.” I lifted him up a little and indicated his claws with a nod of my chin. “And these could send you to the hospital with stitches.”

The kid who'd spoken before leaned forward. “How can I get a Komodo dragon?”

“You can't and you wouldn't want one. CITES species are protected under international law.” I was about to say more when the monitor lizard did something I'd only read about. When monitors get nervous they sometimes do something similar to projectile vomiting, except it comes out the other end.

Well, this one must have been really nervous, because suddenly he started spraying the room. Before I knew it, kids in the first five rows had lizard feces over their hands and faces and clothes. Everyone was screaming. Kids were dropping down on the floor and crawling for cover. The hall monitor and the school cop ran in and they got a dose of it, too. By the time I managed to get the lizard back in the bag, my hand was bleeding from the clawing I'd received and my shirt and hair were caked with lizard shit, which, let me tell you, smells really, really bad.

I looked at the teacher who'd asked me to come in. She was standing there with her mouth hanging open, her white shirt smeared with dark greenish-brown excrement. I looked at the school policeman and the principal. They were yelling at each other. I looked at the kids. Some were screaming and some were crying. No one was paying any attention to me. It seemed like a good time to leave. I packed up my reptiles and ran out into the hall. It was crowded with kids and teachers, most of whom were positive someone had been shot—which in a sense was true.

Tim's mouth fell open when I walked in the store. When I told him what had happened, he started to laugh. He was laughing so hard the tears were rolling down his cheeks.

“So much for your educational career,” he said when he got his breath back. Then he thought about it some more and went off into another gale of laughter.

After a minute, I joined him. Who would have thought one lizard could wreak so much havoc? We both ended up sitting on the floor cackling like maniacs, while I fended off Zsa Zsa, who was trying to lick me clean. When I got my breath back, I got up, went home, and practically sterilized myself. The first thing I did was get a garbage bag and strip off my clothes and threw them in it. Next, I went upstairs and took a long, scalding hot shower, making sure to scrub every inch of myself. My skin was bright pink by the time I was done. Then I washed my hair twice, put on new clothes, and went back downstairs. As I brewed a pot of coffee, I wondered if George had talked to his cousin yet. Belize was sounding better and better all the time.

I was struck once again by what a nice guy he was and how scary he looked. The scowl he habitually plastered across his face would have made someone who didn't know him move to another part of the known universe. Maybe it was like the big dogs. Most of the really big breeds are sweethearts, because they don't have to be mean. Everyone defers to them automatically.

“It's not my fault if I'm big and I'm black and I scare the shit out of everyone,” George had once bragged to me five beers into the evening. He'd been grinning at the time he said it.

But that had been when he'd been on the police force. I wonder if he felt the same way now that he was in grad school. History grad students don't look like he did. Maybe that's why he was trying to lose weight and had taken to wearing blue denim work shirts and corduroy pants. Which made me think about the paper he was working on. He'd given it to me to read a couple of days ago. I'd been putting it off, “The function of popular political songs in France in the 1800s” not being what I considered an easy read, but now seemed as good a time as ever.

“I call these songs eighteenth-century rap,” he'd said, tapping a page with his finger. “These were songs made up by the common man to protest social conditions, in the same way that rap protests today's social ills, by today's disenfranchised.”

I took my coffee into the living room, along with the paper, and settled down to read it. Actually, it turned out to be more interesting than I thought. I was on the second page when Tim called to tell me that one of our suppliers had just called to say that our shipment of crickets and mealworms would be delayed by a couple of days. Which wasn't good because we were short as it was.

“Who do you want me to call?” he asked.

“Call Mike,” I suggested. “See if he'll sell us some to tide us over.”

“Are you coming in?” Tim asked.

“Do you need me?”

“Nah. It looks like it's going to be a slow day.” And he hung up.

He was right. It did. Around twelve o'clock the weather had turned bad. The sky had gone from gray to black. The streedights had come on. It started sleeting. Last night the weather announcer had predicted we'd get a mix of sleet, freezing rain, and snow today, which would continue into the evening. Unfortunately, it looked as if he'd been right. Weather like this was not good for business. If we took in twenty dollars today we'd be lucky. People don't come out when it gets like this, which made it a good day to see what I could do about finding Eli's lost property.

I finished off George's article, penciled some questions in the margin, corrected a few typos, then went to get the envelope I'd found in Nestor's room. The numbers turned out to be the phone numbers of a flower shop, a Kinko's, a dry-cleaning store, two no-longer-in-services, and a Chinese restaurant down in New York City. Nobody there, naturally, had heard of a Nestor Chang or a Robert Chapman. I tried the travel agency next and got a recording telling me to leave a message and they'd get back to me as soon as possible. I looked at my watch. Two-thirty. I called the number Chapman had given me and left a message for him, after which I decided to take a ride over to Adelina's house and see if she had come back home yet.

According to the address Eli had given me, Adelina lived over by Thorden Park. The area had once been middle class. Not anymore. The houses looked wearier than I remembered them being, as if they'd given up the fight against the elements. Driveways buckled. Cars were parked on front lawns. Tipped, empty trash cans lolled around on their sides in front of houses. Sodden newspapers and beer cans lay on the grassy divides.

Adelina's house, a two-family, blue Colonial, still had Christmas decorations in the windows. I parked across the street in front of two, large, dead pine trees, stubbed out my cigarette, put the collar of my jacket up and ran for the house. The wind had picked up since I'd left work. The sleet stung my cheeks and numbed my hands. I blew on them after I rang the bell. A moment later, a woman who I assumed was Adelina's mother opened the front door halfway and peered out at me.

“Yes?” she said. The woman was short and stocky. Her black hair was pulled back, but at some point in the day wisps had escaped and now floated across her lined forehead and her cheeks. Her dark-brown eyes were underscored by deep circles. Her skin was pale and blotchy. Large brown freckles were splattered over her chin and nose. She looked tired and harassed. One of her hands was clutching the collar of the old quilted coat she was wearing. Evidently I'd caught her on her way out, or she'd just come in.

I introduced myself. “My name is Robin Light.” I had to raise my voice so I could be heard over the sounds of the TV and fighting children coming from inside the house. I handed her one of my pet store cards. “I run a pet store called Noah's Ark and I'm talking to people in the neighborhood about my store. We have some specials this week you might be interested in.”