I believed him but said: “Give me a place to start.”
“I don’t know of any place to start, now. Now that Miss Sokolow is dead.”
I stood there for a while, chewing on it. “What did she die of?”
“You didn’t know her at all?”
“Not from Adam.”
“Then that’s really none of your business,” he told me, without rancor, just stating a plain fact.
4
I considered hiring a private investigator. Then I rehearsed in my head the kind of conversation it would take to get started, and decided to skip it. But because I couldn’t just up and quit on it, I made a phone call to the local zoo and asked if they happened to have a lowland gorilla in stock. They didn’t. I said I happened to have one I needed to get rid of and did they want it, and they said no. I asked if they could suggest someone who might want it, and they said no, not really. I asked them what they’d do if they absolutely had to get rid of a gorilla. They said there might be a laboratory or two that would take it as a specimen, but I could tell they weren’t really concentrating.
One thing was obvious: Ishmael had some friends I didn’t know about—perhaps former pupils. The only way I could think of to reach them was the way he had probably reached them—through an ad in the personals:
FRIENDS OF ISHMAEL: Another friend has lost contact. Please call and tell me where he is.
The ad was a mistake, because it gave me an excuse to turn my brain off. I waited for it to appear, then I waited for it to run for a week, then I waited a few more days for a call that didn’t come, and in that way two weeks passed during which I didn’t lift a finger.
When I finally faced the fact that I wasn’t going to get any response to the ad, I had to look for a new heading, and it took me about three minutes to come up with it. I called city hall and was soon talking to the person who would issue a permit to a traveling show if one turned up and wanted to squat on a vacant lot for a week.
Was there one in town at the moment?
No.
Had there been any in the past month?
Yes, the Darryl Hicks Carnival, with nineteen rides, twenty-four games, and a sideshow, had been here and was gone now for a couple weeks or thereabouts.
Anything like a menagerie?
Don’t recollect anything like that being listed.
Maybe an animal or two in the sideshow?
Dunno. Possible.
Next stop on its route?
No idea at all.
It didn’t matter. A dozen calls tracked it to a town forty miles north, where it had stayed a week and moved on. Assuming it would keep on moving north, I located its next stop and present location with a single call. And yes, it now boasted of having “Gargantua, the world’s most famous gorilla”—a critter that I personally knew had been dead for something like forty years.
For you or anyone with reasonably modern equipment, the Darryl Hicks Carnival would have been ninety minutes away, but for me, in a Plymouth that came out the same year as Dallas, it was two hours. When I got there, it was a carnival. You know. Carnivals are like bus stations: Some are bigger than others, but they’re all alike. The Darryl Hicks was two acres of the usual sleaze masquerading as merriment, full of ugly people, noise, and the stink of beer, cotton candy, and popcorn. I waded through it in search of the sideshow.
I have the impression that sideshows as I remember them from boyhood (or maybe from movies in boyhood) are nearly extinct in the modern
carnival world; if so, the Darryl Hicks has elected to ignore the trend. When I arrived, a barker was putting a fire-eater through his paces, but I didn’t stay to watch. There was plenty to see inside—the usual collection of monsters, freaks, and geeks, a bottle-biter, a pincushion, a tattooed fat lady, all the rest, which I ignored.
Ishmael was in a dim corner as far from the entrance as it was possible to be, with two ten-year-olds in attendance.
“I’ll bet he could tear those bars right out if he wanted to,” one observed.
“Yeah,” said the other. “But he doesn’t know that.”
I stood there giving him a smoldering look, and he sat there placidly paying no attention to anything until the boys moved off.