“How do you talk to a flamingo?” he said aloud, half-hoping that Muezza would offer some animal-world answer. The cat was watching the sleeping birds charily. The question seemed a critical matter to Muezza.
The cat answered: “I would not bother, really. These are ugly, self-important creatures. I have heard that lawn-worshippers in America, the kind of people who poison neighborhood cats, put effigies of them on their lawns. Blasphemous!” He paused, and looked down, speculatively. “When I was a kitten, I saw them in the reeds, near a great dying lake, but they stopped coming. But the nomads never liked them, nor did the camels or cattle or foxes. And then all the water dried up. My grandfather said thousands used to come, long ago—but no more.” Muezza snapped out of his contemplation and gave a little chirping laugh. He said: “It is said they are pink because they are so vain, and they are already beginning to burn in hell, at the command of Allah.”
Cuthbert did not like to think of them this way. This strain of moralism in Muezza was a challenge. He said, “I find them rather sprucy, myself. But I agree, there is something wrong with flamingos. They’ve got ’em in Birmingham, too, you know. Genomic clones, of course.”
“But these birds, they are real. Among the last on earth,” said Muezza. “Still, they are not a blessed color. As I said. Let’s move along now, and you will thank me eternally for taking you to the great angel of all animals. I believe he is going to end all your problems.”
Cuthbert did not like the sound of that.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I feel you’re not telling me something. And I still need to find the otters, and the Gulls of Imago.”
The cat said, “As for these birds you keep harping on about, dear saliq, you might just ask another bird. Try one of the local herons or mandarin ducks. And be faithful, Kitten-Man. You mustn’t fear the Shayk. Through the Shayk, and through you, all things are possible now.”
“Kitten what?”
“Oh, never mind,” hissed Muezza, aggravation splintering his voice. “Brother.”
THE TWO OF THEM walked a bit faster now along the Green Line trail. It curved back from the flamingo pond past a big, open plaza and then toward the other big cats. The plaza, with its potted junipers, precision-cut rows of yellow and pink peonies, and abstract bronze-cast of two baboons (with trapezoids meant to resemble ears) stood in contrast to the steel mesh, dirty cement, and scratchy glass of the big cat enclosures. The paws painted on either side of the Green Line, every few meters and as large as footballs, seemed distinctly feline now to Cuthbert. It was almost as if the London Zoo management’s contrivance to help guests “not miss a thing!” was in fact designed to appeal especially to an escaped sand cat with the soul of a ninth-century Islamic warrior. The thought disturbed Cuthbert. At one point, as they walked, Muezza encountered the paws and skipped from one to the other, as though playing hopscotch. The cat seemed not merely happy, but full of a hajji’s ecstasy.
The Green Line took Cuthbert and the sand cat past the angular enclosures of Joseph the jaguar, who had been born in the zoo, and who, for a time, garnered much publicity, and also the tragic Sumatran tigers.
The tigers were long-waisted, potent creatures who spent much of their time circling back and forth in a corner, over and over, demonstrating the captive animal reflex known as stereotypy.
These big felids lived their lives out in convoluted, shelf-life residences with low ceilings. There were no impressive moats or ha-has, no tiered daises, no lion-head bollards, no geometrical points of interest. Cuthbert tried to get a glimpse of a tiger or Joseph and saw only the empty, concrete-and-dirt slots they inhabited in the day.
“Where are they?” he asked Muezza, tapping his bolt cutters against his open palm.
“We zoo cats all ask that, too. The keepers used to put these wonder-beings away at night, but they stopped that, years ago. Nonetheless, the cats—hunters of the night—now sleep at night. It’s unholy.”
“Yow’d bloody think they’d get better digs, wouldn’t you?”
“Such cruelties remind people of their own power all the better.”
At last they arrived at the exhibit of the black leopard. Like all the big cat areas where the enclosure lay close to the footpath, a steel fence of a meter high stood between the trail and the caging. This existed for no other reason than to keep guests at arm’s length from the cages. It would have been too easy, otherwise, for an aristocratic hand to be bitten off. Almost no light shone in this section of the zoo at night, and Cuthbert could not easily read the brief description of the leopard on the sign, though he made out something about genetic mutations and pigmentation.
“We are here!” said Muezza, and immediately rolled onto his back and drew in his paws. “You must crawl!”
“I won’t,” said Cuthbert. “I don’t do that for anyone.”