“Jesus suffering Christ!” the man rasped, in a lower, raspier, gravedigger’s voice. “Worthless!”
For a moment, no one responded. Then the man spoke again: “It’s Dawkins—the night keeper. Up bloody here.” They looked up, and there in one of the smallest trees in the group, caught like a horrible fly in a spiderweb of branches, dangled a lanky young man. “No one fucking respects the night keepers!”
Astrid and Atwell trained their torches on the figure, and Astrid immediately recognized the face, and so did Atwell. He looked very different than Astrid recalled. He was much thinner. He wasn’t so much a bag of bones as a ripped-open turnip sack of them. He was wearing a saggy set of boxers, thick knit socks slipped around his ankles, and a pair of very old weatherbeaten Reebok hovershoes, which clearly were missing their hover-cell, or he would have floated back home. But it was Dawkins all right, the eccentric Indigent the powers that be allowed to watch the zoo at night from the inside, the latest in a two-hundred-year line of eerie, solitary, and terminally irascible nocturnals who kept the London Zoo at night.
“Dawkins? You’ve lost several stone, right?”
“Who wants to know?”
The fellow looked worse for it. The blotchy skin of his face stretched over a narrow skull and deep-sunk eyeholes. His lips were a pair of dead leeches—gray but very full (of what, one daren’t ask). His ginger-colored hair stood up in a stiff patch like corroded steel wool. Astrid had met him only once, when she first started working for the constabulary (she was introduced then to most of the zoo’s key personnel), but the guy gave one such a creepy feeling, he was impossible to forget.
Dawkins had quite the reputation, too. Astrid had heard that so protective and secretive was he about his tiny apartment in the old Reptile House (at night, he was the only soul—unless one believes animals have souls—in the zoo), he was mostly kept on due to kindly administrators who did not want to confront him. That he had abandoned his snake pit tonight was remarkable. Astrid recalled a more filled-out Dawkins, wearing riveted glass-goggles, a ridiculous red toy-soldier jacket with epaulets, and a brass-cast antique respirator. She remembered him asking her if she’d read the long-passé steampunk magazine Hiss (its heyday must have been around 2014, if she recalled).
“It’s all I read,” he had once boasted to Astrid. “It’s the only bit of truly high culture that’s not tat, at least in England. On real paper, you know.”
“Oh yeah. They do paper. That’s their little thing,” she’d replied.
Dawkins’s main duty, Astrid knew, was to turn the zoo’s security system on and off each night and, above all else, notify others if some emergency arose. This night he seemed to have failed magnificently in his only real charge. This bone-spur of a man had been jostled out of his hole, and all he wanted was to get back in it safely. To hell with the rest of humankind.
“You don’t remember me?” Astrid asked. “It’s Inspector Sullivan? We’ve met, Dawkins.”
“I might do,” he said glumly.
“Well, I remember you. Do you need help, getting down?”
“I don’t need any help.”
“Well come down then, please.”
“I remember your partner, the cow,” Dawkins said, repositioning his feet, as if preparing for a long stay in the tree. “She piggin’ abandoned me to the animals. I can’t bloody believe it.” He jabbed a skinny finger toward Atwell. He said, “You’re duff, you, you’re a wanky excuse for a copper.”
Atwell looked deservedly angry, puffing air out between her lips. She started tapping her toe. She said to Astrid, almost inaudibly, “Shall I get him down?”
Dawkins wouldn’t shut up for a moment, it seemed. “The Parks Police! Ha! The anti-litter Gestapo is more like it! And she’s a duffer, a —”
Suddenly, Astrid screamed, her anger as big as Dawkins’s tree, “Gerrout! Shut your cake-hole and come down, sir. You’re getting on my wick now, you are, damn it. You stupid son of a bitch—you two-bone dox!” The deadly ire of second withdrawal was out again, this time for all to see. And it felt like righteousness. It felt like bliss on fire.
“Tell him,” said Atwell. “Tell him.”
Astrid took hold of herself. She grabbed the little thread of fury spinning out from her heart and she reeled it back in.
“This is inexcusable, sir,” she said, coughing a little. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . I . . . but you’re an employee of the royal parks, right? There’s no need for all these insults. But Mr. Dawkins, that is. You come down now. You must be cold and tired, mustn’t you?”