And would they ever appear at night? He had never seen a seagull at night—their whiteness seemed a sort of violation of it. But he determined to keep his eyes peeled. If the penguins seemed to honor them so, surely, from somewhere, they were watching, from above, right now.
Then Cuthbert took a few steps back up the pool stairway and slapped the side of his thigh: “Saft man!” The obvious solution to the problem of the gulls was right under his nose. The long-dead architect, this Tecton fellow, like a great heap of white concrete pushed off the cliffs of Dover, had shattered into a thousand, flying pieces—seagulls. Here were the Gulls of Imago—the “father” of the penguins. They had risen from the scraps of rubbish magazine spreads. They had risen from unbuilt dream cities, from the sad spirit of the man whose greatest architectural success had not been for workers, as he wanted, but for a few displaced, bravely appreciative penguins. If Tecton could not create a comfortable place for the birds, he had at least tried to please the public, truly and deeply and incompetently.
Cuthbert said, to the dark sky above the zoo, “I’ll find them—or him!”
So he left the pool, a guilty servant, a criminal, and a man enthralled to flightless telepathic birds imprisoned in the wrong hemisphere.
popcorn for the lions
AS CUTHBERT HANDLEY TRIED TO DECIDE HOW and where to find the storied Gulls of Imago, and at the same time accomplish his most consecrated task—the freeing of the otters—he got himself rather seriously diverted once again, this time by a religious development among the zoo’s felines.
Cats have a way of drawing people into their worlds. Penguin dreams and holy otters, gory jackals and creepy cults, King Henry’s Red Watch and the very white seagulls—all would have to wait. A set of needle-clawed gauntlets, with fur licked clean to a sheen, were about to be thrown down.
Cuthbert found himself in the big cats district of the zoo, passing a series of semicircular windows intended to give glimpses of large felines in their separate enclosures: tigers, a black leopard, a jaguar, and the Asiatic lions, but from that side of the complex, none of the cats were visible at the time. He wondered whether the cats were quartered in secret night quarters, and whether a tube connected them somehow to the penguins’ clandestine night-holes. Can’t imagine what the penguins and the tigers would have to say to each other, Cuthbert thought. But you never knew, did you?
He quietly sidled around to the front of the cat compound, to a gift kiosk called the Cat’s Curiosity Shop, across from the lion enclosure. There’s something happening here, he thought. There was a red sign fastened to the kiosk that read (in handpainted, gold, metal-flake script, which was incongruously ornate):
ALARM BELL
IN EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS
Below the sign was a small red box. It was designed for the lion enclosure specifically, but Cuthbert didn’t see that. Instinctively, he started to reach for the box, then hesitated. He took a deep breath and rubbed his wrist across his eyebrow. There was certainly an emergency of some kind in England, he felt.
He gawked into the darkened shop. It nauseated him, looking in. There was a shelf crammed with old-fashioned, twentieth-century-style stuffed leopards and pumas. On another shelf, several holographic jaguars and tigers waved their glowing heads back and forth, but the projections were jumbled up and growing grotesquely through one another like a spotted and striped cancer of catness. He tried a window, and, surprisingly, it opened. There were, right beside the window, bags of popcorn and algae crisps on sale, too, and Cuthbert grabbed a few and stuffed them into his shirt. Close to the locked door, the blue-light numerals on a till could be seen displaying a huge sum from earlier in the day: ￡80,044.50. Was it possible, he wondered, that a zoo visitor had purchased a lion?