Setting Free the Bears - Page 97

'I understand,' he said, 'that whoever it was ended up like a lamb chop.'

See? Sly frotter. He knew it all along.

So I asked him, 'What sort of fellow would ever try such a thing?'

'A madman,' he said. 'A real psych case.'

'You mean,' I suggested, 'someone with inherited flaws? Or someone who had a background heaped with insecurities and frustrations - a type from a broken home?'

'Why sure,' he said - still humoring me, the frotter. 'That's what I meant, all right.'

'A case of transference,' I added.

'An error of judgment,' he pronounced.

'A lack of logic,' I said.

'A total loss of logic,' said the waiter; he beamed at me. His armload of polished glass ashtrays threw little sharp triangles of sun up to his face.

But I have my own idea of who the mad zoo buster might have been. After all, it's perfectly fair to have your own theory on this matter; it's an open question. And I can think of the perfect man for the job; at least, from all I've heard about him, he would have been ripe for it - both for the divine idea and the flaw in his youthful foresight that caused him to be eaten. He was somehow related to me too; he was rumored to have driven a hunted newspaper editor to Hungary, and rumored not to have gotten back. But everyone knows that the editor was saved, and so it's possible to assume that the driver might have gone to Hungary and gotten back - at a time when those he most wanted to see were unavailable. Well, it's possible. This person did love animals. I happen to know he once expressed grave concern over a park squirrel who'd been tattooed - so deeply that its mind could only dance in circles.

It could have been him, as easily as it could have been another - say, some guilt-ridden relative of Hinley Gouch.

Then that sly Balkan waiter said, 'Sir, are you all right?' Trying to make me think I wasn't, you see; suggesting that I'd been doing funny things with my hands or mouth, maybe.

You have to watch out for these Balkans. I once knew of one who failed to recognize his best friend over a urinal.

But I wasn't about to let a frotting Balkan trick me. I said, 'Of course I'm all right. Are you?' Seeing, already, what would happen to his armload of ashtrays, one morning soon, when he'd raise his sly eyes and lose his smug composure - in the face of a charging Rare Spectacled Bear from across Maxing Strasse.

'I only thought, sir,' the waiter said, 'that maybe you wanted some water. You seemed to be dizzy, or at loose ends - as they say.'

But I wasn't going to let him get the best of me. I said:

Bolje rob nego grob!

Better a slave than a grave!

Then I said, 'Right? That's right, isn't it?'

Incredibly sly, like a stone, he said, 'Would you like anything to eat?'

'Just coffee,' I told him.

'Then you'll have to wait,' he said, thinking he'd fix me good. 'We don't serve till seven.'

'Then tell me where's the nearest barbershop,' I said.

'But it's almost seven now,' he said.

'I want a barber,' I told him, nastily.

'They won't cut your hair till seven, either,' he said.

'How do you know I want my hair cut?' I asked him, and that shut him up. He pointed round the Platz off Maxing Strasse; I pretended I didn't see the barber's striped pole.

Then, just to confuse him, I sat at the table past seven o'clock - doodling in my notebook. I pretended I was sketching his portrait, keeping my eyes on him and making him nervous while he served a few other early people.

At seven o'clock they open the zoo. There's no one who goes that early, though. There's just a fat man with a gambler's green eyeshade, smug as a sultan in the ticket booth. Over the booth, from time to time, the giraffe's head looms.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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