Mammoth (33 page)

Fuzzy entered in a typical elephantine lumbering gait, not as fast as he could go but fast enough so that Susan had to trot at a pretty good pace to stay beside him. Matt remembered Susan telling him that elephants—and now mammoths—were the only mammals that could neither run nor jump. Susan’s limp was barely perceptible; if you weren’t looking for it you’d never notice.

Fuzzy got to the center of the arena and stopped, turning in a circle to acknowledge the thunderous applause. He seemed absolutely calm, totally unimpressed by all the lights and noise. And why shouldn’t he be? He was a veteran of show business; he had been performing since his first birthday in the previous incarnation of this big, permanent home: the Ringling Brothers traveling show, booked into the biggest stadiums and indoors arenas throughout the United States.

He towered over his retinue of youngsters. Susan had told Matt that Fuzzy had recently passed the two-ton mark, and was seven feet tall.

The producers of the show had rejected the glitter and glitz of the elephant corps for Fuzzy and the baby mammoths. There were no jeweled and feathered crowns, no spangled blankets, no howdahs or ankle bracelets or painted toenails for the mammoths. This was better, Matt decided. These creatures from the distant past would have been diminished by circus trappings. The mammoths were as nature had created them…albeit a lot cleaner than they would have been in the wild. These were undoubtedly some of the most pampered animals in the world. Their coats were shampooed daily and combed out and conditioned for hours. Their diets were monitored with the care usually reserved for a rocket launch, and they got thorough veterinary exams every week. Circuses in Japan and China and Russia had standing offers of twenty million dollars for any one of them. Howard had told Susan he would have sneered at fifty million. He intended to keep a total monopoly on live mammoths for the foreseeable future.

The Columbian babies were all as cute as could be, with their short yellow-gold fur. But Fuzzy wore a coat that would have made an Italian movie starlet proud. Glossy black with
copper highlights, with a gentle wave that Matt supposed was natural—he had a vision of Fuzzy being done up every night with hair curlers the size of oil drums, and had to laugh—it ranged from only four or five inches on his trunk and around his face to a full three feet long on his sides and belly. The whole glorious pelt waved as he walked, and it was hard to imagine a more appealing animal. Elephants, with their thick, wrinkled, dusky hides inspired awe but Matt had never been inspired to reach out and stroke the skin of any of Susan’s elephants. Fuzzy, even at this distance, just made you ache to get close to him and run your fingers through all that fur. He was like a two-ton puppy.

Fuzzy’s part of the show went on for only about twenty minutes but it seemed timeless. Later, thinking it over, Matt realized that not a lot really happened. The youngsters went round and round the arena, at some points reaching out and grasping the tails ahead of them with their trunks, which delighted the children. Susan led Fuzzy to within ten feet of the crowd, slowly, so that everyone got a fairly close look at him. But as for tricks, neither Fuzzy nor his troop did much. This was again at Susan’s insistence. Several times Fuzzy reared up on his hind legs, to wild applause, but there were no handstands, no balancing on platforms or rolling on big balls, no tightrope walking, none of the stunts you would think an elephant or mammoth couldn’t do, but actually could.

Nobody seemed to care. It was enough to see Fuzzy. Matt figured the crowd would go wild if he just stood there and ate hay. When one of the youngsters lifted his tail and unceremoniously dropped a steaming load of dung near the center of the ring, the audience, and especially the children, went wild with delight. They liked it even more when a troop of incompetent clowns scurried out and made a hilarious botch of cleaning up the mess. There must be something universal about toilet humor, Matt decided, because he was laughing, too.

When Fuzzy and his entourage finally left the arena the show was essentially over, but nobody moved. The final attraction was about to unfold, the nightly Super Lottery, and Matt realized, with a bit of a shock, that this was the part of the show he was really here for.

Compared to the Super Lottery, a private papal audience was no big deal.

There were certainly a few people sitting around Matt who would be indifferent to the chance to enter Fuzzy’s private quarters, get the chance to stroke his big furry flanks, maybe feed him a handful of his specially formulated mammoth treats. But even they wouldn’t miss the opportunity to brag to their friends about how they got to hobnob for thirty minutes with the world’s most famous animal celebrity.

Obviously the whole throng couldn’t pet the animal, all those reaching hands would eventually wear him down like a pencil eraser. Howard had wanted Fuzzy installed in a glass environment so that the entire departing crowd could at least file by and see him on their way out, but Susan had vetoed that. To Matt’s considerable surprise, Susan had vetoed a lot of Howard’s more intrusive ideas, and he still wasn’t sure how she got away with that. But she had given in to the idea of letting a small group—families with children only, she had insisted—spend a short time with Fuzzy after the shows. She had suggested a lottery and the show’s producers had eagerly agreed, as just one more way to heighten the excitement.

So now the ringmaster announced the Super Lottery, and asked everyone to get out their tickets. Matt took his from his pocket with a hand that was suddenly moist and shaky. Everything depended on this.

The ticket wasn’t a little stub of cardboard, but a souvenir in itself. It was plastic, three by four inches. There was a screen that showed a picture of Fuzzy striding across a grassy plain, and some buttons beneath the screen. After the lottery it became a handheld game, but right now it was a magic talisman. Searchlights began crisscrossing the crowd at random as the music built once again.

“And the first winning family is”
—the ringmaster’s voice thundered, and the entire huge arena suddenly was quiet enough to hear a pin drop—
“Paul and Claudette Williamson of Naples, Florida, and their children, Sonny and Michael!”

Even before the names were announced Matt heard loud shouting far above him, and he turned around to see a man and woman and two boys standing and holding their tickets triumphantly above their heads. The tickets were flashing red.
The spotlights converged on them and the rest of the audience applauded. The Williamsons were met by uniformed ushers at the aisle, and led to an exit, still followed by spotlights.

Three more families were announced, one with just a single child, another with six children, the last a family from Japan with three kids who were so astonished Matt wondered if they might pass out. Matt began to worry. They must be reaching capacity now, there could only be one more family chosen.

Matt knew something nobody else in the audience knew, though some suspected, which was that the lottery could be fixed.

It was openly announced that only families with children were eligible, of course. Naturally most people suspected that the families of the rich and powerful had a big edge, but no one had been able to prove it, and Susan had told Matt that it wasn’t true.

No, the cheating was only applied in favor of guests of organizations like the Make-A-Wish Foundation, kids with terminal diseases or terrible injuries. This had been Andrea de la Terre’s idea, and it
had
been noticed, but who was going to complain? There had never been an outraged editorial or exposé, and there never would be.

But the fact that the lottery
could
be fixed meant that it could be fixed for anyone. It was all up to whoever controlled the lottery computer.

“And the last family of the night…”

It seemed the air pressure dropped a bit from all the people inhaling at once.

“…is Jerry and Melissa Myers, and their children, Brittney and Dwight!”

To Matt’s right the Myers family was bathed in light and Brittney was proving, incredibly, that she had hardly begun to demonstrate the power of her lungs earlier in the show. Matt was showered with Karamel Kettle Korn as she threw her half-eaten jumbo box into the air. He glanced at his ticket, which was flashing red, too, then he slipped it back into his pocket and joined in the thunderous applause.

Then in an instant he was engulfed in the biggest human traffic jam he had ever seen, as all the people who had not
dared to leave while they still had a chance were suddenly seized by visions of gridlock in the parking lots, long lines for trains, and the tantrums of cross and exhausted children. He sat and waited for a bit as his feet were stepped on by the shuffling mass, then when his aisle was clear he got up and followed the directions Susan had given him.

EVENTUALLY
he reached a point where the wide exit corridors branched beneath a sign that read:

The crowd went one way and he went another. At last he had some elbow room. Fifty feet down a hall lined with a plastic jungle filled with capering mechanical monkeys and the standard whoops, caws, roars, and yelps of a 1930s jungle epic he came to a velvet rope barrier manned by a young fellow in safari khakis and helmet, who took Matt’s flashing ticket, glanced at it, and handed it back, stifling a yawn. Theme park workers put in long hours for not much pay; this one looked more than ready to ride the train back to Portland.

Around one last bend and there was the inner sanctum. Compared to the rest of the theme park it was rather prosaic. It was a big room, as befitted the big animal Fuzzy had become, divided roughly in half by a stout fence of steel I-beams that would have stymied Big Mama in an escape attempt, much less Fuzzy. Not that Fuzzy showed any signs of discontent. He was close to the fence, facing it, extending his trunk over and over to take the mammoth treats held out in the hands of the lucky lottery children. The kids were on the far side of a less substantial railing, designed to keep them two feet back from their idol; an easy reach for Fuzzy’s trunk but too far for a child to reach out and touch his legs or side.

Susan stood beside Fuzzy on the other side of the heavy fence. Between the two fences was the male assistant handler, an old friend of Susan’s, who guarded a gate through which he would let groups of two or three children to a caged enclosure where they could actually reach out and stroke Fuzzy’s
fur. Most of the children did this in absolute, awed silence, so delicately and tentatively that it was as if they feared their tiny hands could somehow hurt the giant beast. Matt noticed that one of the kids, a girl of about seven, was careful to keep her left side turned away from the people she was with. He glimpsed a hideous burn, and a nose that was in the process of being reconstructed. The look of sheer delight on the undamaged side of the girl’s face made the back of Matt’s throat burn, and he had to turn away.

What am I doing here? Is this a good idea?

But it was too late for that.

Susan caught his eye, and unobtrusively turned her head and gestured toward a door off to Matt’s left. He nodded, trying not to glance too obviously at the cameras set high in the walls of the enclosure. Once inside, he switched on the lights.

This was Susan’s office, and it was much like any office anywhere, dominated by various data systems. There were a few old-fashioned filing cabinets, a coffeemaker, and a microwave. He noticed there were fluorescent lights in the ceiling but they hadn’t come on. Instead, a series of attractive lamps at each work area gave the room a warmth unusual for a place like this.

One wall facing her desk was a grid of screens displaying various parts of the mammoth compound. On one Matt could see the children still gathering around Fuzzy. On another was a view of Big Mama’s quarters. Two attendants were shoveling hay and fruit into her gigantic manger, while another used a machine a little like a Zamboni to muck out the floor, spray and mop it, and spread fresh straw, all in one operation. All three workers seemed to be keeping a wary eye on the irascible old matriarch, though she was securely chained.

The other screens showed scenes of very little interest. There were ordinary hallways, and a few that were much larger and concrete-floored, presumably for moving the elephants and Big Mama from their quarters to the arena floor and back. One camera was focused on a big parking lot where lots of vehicles were jockeying for position to get through what looked like a security checkpoint. At first Matt thought it was the remains of the audience heading for their homes and hotels, then realized it was an employee lot. He knew enough
of the plan to realize why Susan would be interested in that lot.

He had been coasting along on the pleasurable high he got from watching the circus show, but now the whole improbable plan, which he had been trying not to think about too much, came crashing back into his consciousness.

Could it work?

Well…yes, the first part, anyway. He was dubious about their long-term chances, but there hadn’t been time to fill him in on every detail of that part. But the parts Susan had laid out for him seemed well thought out, as he would have expected of her.

Once more he asked himself why he was doing this.

One reason was obvious, and that was his love for Susan. If she wanted to do this, if she thought it was the right thing to do, then that was good enough for him. There was a second reason he thought they might succeed, but he hadn’t figured out how to tell her that one yet. In fact, he hadn’t had time to reconcile himself to the insanity of the idea.

The third reason was simple. Any robbery of this magnitude could only be carried out with help from the inside. Susan herself was the person with the most unquestioned access to Fuzzy, but even that would not have been enough, alone.

There was another insider.

WHILE
Matt waited and fretted in Susan’s office, a confederate he had never met was seated in a room, waiting and fretting, only a hundred yards away, beneath the circus grandstand seats. His name was Jack Elk, which had almost been a problem when he was hired, six months earlier. He had been born Jack Elkins but had changed his name legally ten years before, at the age of eighteen.