“A week! Good Lord, that’s completely out of the question! I mean, if you could get me there and back in time to go to school Monday morning, that would at least be in the realm of the possible.”
Art shook his head. “Even the president of the United States, with all his resources, would have a hard time meeting that schedule.”
“Well, a week is just impossible. Why don’t you get Alan Lomax to do it, for God’s sake? He’s a grown-up. He can do anything he pleases.”
There was a moment of dead silence. Art shifted uncomfortably in his chair, crossed one leg over the other, and waited, along with me.
“Alan is not a candidate for this mission, Julie,” Ishmael said at last. “He couldn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
Ishmael frowned—scowled, really. He obviously didn’t care to have his word questioned on this point, but he pretty well had to put up with it, didn’t he? “Let me put it this way, Julie. Whatever you think, whatever opinion you may have in the matter, I will not ask Alan. But I am asking you.”
“Well, I’m flattered, I really am, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s impossible.”
“Why is it impossible, Julie?”
“Because my mother wouldn’t let me go.”
“Would she let you go if you could be back by Monday morning?”
“No … but I could do a little fiddling with that. I could tell her I was spending the weekend with a friend.”
“I would never permit you to do that, Julie,” Art said solemnly. “Not because I’m so moral
but because it would be too risky.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” I said, “since I certainly can’t tell her I’m spending a week with a friend.”
“Suppose we tell her something nearer the truth, Julie. Suppose we tell her you’re visiting an African head of state on an important mission.”
“Then she’ll just send for the police.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re obviously a lunatic. No one sends twelve-year-old girls on missions to heads of state.”
Art turned slowly to Ishmael and said, “You led me to expect someone brighter than this, Ishmael.”
I sprang up out of my chair and zapped him with a thunderbolt from my eyes that reduced him to a small mound of smoldering ashes.
Ishmael chuckled and waved me down. “Julie’s bright enough. She’s just not an experienced intriguer and confidence trickster.” Turning to me, he went on: “Since reality is not quite going to measure up to our needs in this situation, Julie, we’re going to have to help it along. In fact, you might say that we have to create a reality of our own, in which there are certain missions that can only be entrusted to twelve-year-old girls.”
“And who’s supposed to sell this reality to my mother?” I asked.
“If you agree, then the minister of the interior of the Republic of Mabili will sell it to her, Julie—Makiadi Owona, known to you as Art Owens. His passport still lists him as holding this rank. It’s an impressive one, don’t you think?”
Getting Me Ready
I’m not going to go into it.
What we finally ended up telling my mother was not very far from the truth, but the way it was told was a complete lie. As I say, I’m not going to go into it. Between them, Art Owens and Ishmael constructed a piece of reality so seamlessly cogent that all she could do was nod and say, “Well, good God Almighty, if Julie’s the only person on the planet who can do this thing, then I guess she’s got to do it.” Her only proviso was that I never be put in a position where I was on my own to get from one place to the next or from one plane to the next. I was to be met coming off every flight and constantly chaperoned till boarding the next flight.
Naturally she knew the mission had to do with returning a gorilla to its original habitat. This was all Luk was going to know as well. It was all that either one of them needed to know. Anything more than that they would have rejected anyway. Why it was so all-fired important to return a gorilla to Africa was just not going to be discussed nohow. It was an act of cosmic symbolic importance, so forget it.
Ishmael made his getaway from the Fairfield Building at three o’clock Sunday morning. I wasn’t involved in that.
Art and Ishmael were obviously uneasy about disclosing his immediate destination to me, but in the end there was just no way around it. Naturally they had to preface the information with some history. The years Art spent playing at being a naturalist in the bush provided him with a way of supporting himself during his years at school in Brussels and America. He worked as an animal handler at menageries, zoos, and circuses, and gained a reputation as the man to call in on problem cases—animals that couldn’t settle down to life behind bars, animals that wouldn’t eat, animals that were unusually hostile or that developed strange, self-destructive habits like opening up wounds in their skin and perversely keeping them open. When he returned to America at the end of 1989, he had his pick of jobs, and he took one with the Darryl Hicks Carnival, then wintering in Florida. As it turned out, Hicks was experiencing some health problems and had been planning to lighten his load by liquidating the menagerie attached to the carnival. Instead, he sold it to Art, who was not by any means destitute. He’d made some shrewd investments while in America and had left them in the hands of a friend he knew he could trust—Rachel Sokolow. Within a year Hicks was ready to get out of the business entirely and offered Art a deal on the whole carnival. Art had enough capital to take it off his hands, though he couldn’t buy it outright. It was during the second half of 1990 that he got to know Rachel really well—along with Ishmael, at long last. In January 1991 Rachel tested HIV-positive. Evidently she’d been infected during an operation to correct a heart problem of some kind. Rachel, Art, and Ishmael soon began to formulate the plans that were now involving me.