“Fordham?”
“Yes—um—we were, uh, exploring the chapel there as a possible site for the service. You know it has those gorgeous windows that were made in France, intended for the original Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.”
“Oh.”
“You’re trying too hard,” Mike whispered to me. “Relax.”
“So we’re only ten minutes away,” I said.
“It’s two now,” Deirdre said, “and I have a meeting in fifteen minutes. Why don’t you come over at three, and I’ll get you started. Would that work?”
“Sure. Sure it will.”
“Very good. Come in at the Fordham Road entrance—the Rainey gates—and head up, well, do you know where Astor Court is?” she asked.
“Astor Court?” I repeated the name aloud, shrugging my shoulders.
Mike nodded and gave me a thumbs-up.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“Head for that and then just ask one of the guards for the Heads and Horns building. I’m on the second floor,” Deirdre said. “Room 206.”
“Thank you. We’ll see you soon.”
I handed the phone back to Mercer. “So now we’re the memorial committee?” Mercer asked.
“I’ve been told not to mope around feeling sorry for myself,” I said. “What a good thing to involve myself in, to honor the late district attorney. Didn’t I make it clear that I’m not doing anything official?”
“James Prescott will have your head,” Mercer said.
“Heads and Horns it is,” I said. “You know where that building is, Mike?”
“Follow me,” he said. “You know how this place—I mean the zoo—was founded, don’t you?”
“Not a clue.”
“European royalty had its Saint Hubertus Society, as we found out, but America had a Boone and Crockett Club.”
“Daniel Boone?” I asked. “King of the Wild Frontier?”
“Those are the guys,” Mike said.
We were walking along a broad path, beautifully landscaped, and circling a tall stone fountain that was adorned with mythical creatures of all sorts. We continued on up the steps, stopping in front of the original buildings that had housed the first animals ever brought to the zoo.
“What do Boone and Crockett have to do with this?” Mercer asked.
“So far as I can remember,” I said, thinking back to my brothers’ fascination with their coonskin caps and all things related to Crockett, “those two managed to shoot and kill and skin and trap just about every critter that crossed their paths. Not very conservation-minded.”
“Nobody was,” Mike said, “when this country was growing westward. Nobody saw any need to be.”
“Crockett would be one of your heroes because he was in the Tennessee militia,” Mercer said, “and he died fighting Santa Anna and the Mexicans at the Alamo.”
“That would be right. So Teddy Roosevelt and his friends created something called the Boone and Crockett Club in the 1880s. No green robes. No white hoods,” Mike said. “They were early crusaders for saving wildlife.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “TR was a big-game hunter. He was slaughtering animals everywhere he went. I’ve seen photographs of him on these testosterone-filled trips with the guys standing next to dead elephants and zebras in Africa, elk and buffalo in the Dakotas. Don’t tell me this club was about conservation.”
“Teddy knew better than anyone that these animals were doomed to extinction unless there were ways to save them.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t shoot them. That’s one way.”
“I’m telling you, Coop, TR introduced legislation to stop deer hunting in New York, and this club dedicated itself to creating the zoological park. This park.”
“Why here?” Mercer asked. “Was this part of the Bronx really that wild?”
“Totally unkempt,” Mike said. “They’ve got loads of pictures of it over at the university. It was like a jungle of trees and weeds, a few huge bogs, a deadly sewer stream that flowed through it, and not a drop of drinking water anywhere on these two hundred sixty acres. What they created here is nothing short of miraculous.”
The pavement was redbrick, and the staircase led up to an enormous building with a great dome on top of it.
“Recognize that architecture? This is the Elephant House—and it was modeled on one of the great creations of the Columbian Exposition,” Mike said. “Chicago, 1893.”
“I don’t know much about the exposition except for the devil in the White City,” I said, thinking of the extraordinary story of the serial killer who murdered dozens of women during its run, “but the building is pretty spectacular.”
We walked through the arch under the dome—which was lined with Guastavino tiles, just like the magnificent ghost station in the subway below city hall and over the whispering corner in Grand Central Terminal.
“Can you imagine elephants penned up in buildings like this?” Mercer asked. “African elephants on one side and Asians on the other, with a small caged area outside where they could walk for a few hours a day.”
“What’s the difference between African and Asian elephants?” I asked.
“Pretty much two things,” Mercer said. “The Africans tend to be larger than their counterparts. They also have larger ears, which are sort of shaped like the continent itself.”
“This whole place was obviously built before the idea of designing spaces that resemble the natural habitats of the animals came to be,” Mike said. “You could go a little stir-crazy inside an old brick building if you were used to the freedom of the jungle.”
“That’s what happened to the zoo’s very first elephant,” Mercer said, obviously recalling his youthful obsession with the large gray beasts. “He was caught in the wild, in Assam. The zookeepers here were hoping to tame the big guy, but docile wasn’t in the stars for Gunda. He injured so many of the staff that he wound up in shackles.”
“Leg shackles?” I asked.
“Yes, chained down by all fours,” Mercer said. “But he still raged and charged at everyone who came near him, till they finally put him down.”
“With an elephant gun, no doubt,” Mike said.
“I thought zoos were such happy places,” I said.
“Better when we were kids than way back then,” Mercer said, patting me on the head.
“Straight forward to Heads and Horns,” Mike said. “At the far end of Astor Court, to your right.”
“What was that named for?” I asked. “Heads and Horns.”
“The first director of this facility,” Mike said, “was a man named William Hornaday.”
“He was a zoologist?”
“Not exactly, Coop. He was a taxidermist.”
“What? The guy stuffed dead animals?”
“That’s what he did,” Mike said.
“Why did they let him run a zoo, full of live ones?” I asked. “That makes no sense.”
“Listen to me, kid. Before 1900, it was pretty damn rare to find a man who made a distinction between killing for sport—like the great white hunters—and killing for scientific study, for education,” Mike said. “Hornaday made it his goal to preserve the animals of North America. He was really the forefather of this conservation movement.”