Pride of Eden

by Taylor Brown

  “One day there will be a last one, I reckon. An Elvis tiger. Time’s coming. There was this anti-poaching unit in the Russian taiga, Operation Amba, meant to save the Siberian tiger.”

  “Mamba?”

  “Ahm-ba,” said Anse. “Means tiger in the native tongue. Old cultures out there worshipped her as lord of the ginseng, told stories of weretigers that could read men’s minds. Wouldn’t kill any amba but a man-eater, and then with apologies. But poachers went wild after the Iron Curtain fell. Chinese were paying big money for tiger parts—furs, bones, organs. In Siberia, poachers got to calling the tiger ‘Toyota’—that’s what a single one could buy you. By the mid-nineties, they were hunted near extinct. Then came Operation Amba. Bad mothers, ex–Soviet commandos with SKS carbines and six-wheeled trucks. Men who could read the white book of the winter taiga, tracking anything through the snow.”

  Anse cracked another seed between his teeth.

  “The tiger-unit commander was old-breed, a survivor of the Stalinist era. Cossack by birth, big iron-gray beard. Liked to wear shoulder boards and fur hats. People called him the General. Some journalists come out in the nineties, asked him what, if anything, could save the tiger from extinction.”

  “What did he say?”

  Anse spat a pair of seed hulls in the dirt.

  “AIDS.”

  * * *

  That night Malaya lay in bed, thinking of her early days in Iraq.

  She and the rest of the 3rd Infantry Division were staying at the Al Rashid Hotel, an eighteen-story behemoth that once lodged visiting despots and oil-hungry businessmen. Now the sand-colored walls were pocked and cratered with artillery fire. The five-star rooms, some of the finest in the Middle East, glistened with shattered glass. The plumbing was out and the toilets in each of the 449 rooms were brimming. Humvees and armored personnel carriers and turbine-powered M1 battle tanks were parked helter-skelter about the place, as if awaiting valets. At night, the residents could watch the city flicker and pulse with automatic weapons fire. Tracers soared across the ancient skyline, snuffing themselves against walls or cars or bodies. Parachute flares dangled above domed mosques and spearlike minarets—each a possible sniper perch.

  In the morning, she and the rest of the division would file out of the shattered lobby and fire up their hundreds of engines, a rolling thunder of American firepower, and go chewing through the broken streets, along the sludgy meander of the Tigris and past the dawn mania of the looters’ bazaars. They would pass palaces built with rape-rooms and torture chambers in their bowels, their upper reaches ravaged by laser-guided bombs and raided by the Special Forces, who’d descended goggled and armored from black helicopters like alien war-gods. The procession would pass the blasted gates of the Baghdad Zoo, like some new portal to hell.

  Here the Fedayeen Saddam—Saddam’s “Men of Sacrifice”—had taken up defensive positions against the American assault. The place had been bombed and shelled; the surrounding streets twinkled with bullet casings. A stray mortar had blasted a hole in the wall of the lion enclosure and the cats had escaped, a whole pride of them rumbling heavy-shouldered and hungry through the zoo. They stood sun-struck and strange at crosswalks, as if looking for street signs, while assault rifles clattered in the distance and American fighter-bombers carved vapor trails through the sky. Members of the 3rd ID had used their armored personnel carriers to round up as many of the loose cats as they could, but four had to be shot when they couldn’t be corralled. Three lionesses and a black-maned male.

  A week later, Malaya walked through the wrecked gates of the zoo for the first time, leading a string of goats bought from a back-alley seller. Word had it that only thirty of the original seven hundred animals had survived, and they were starving. Her patrol had rounded up what meat they could, paying for the goats out of their own pockets.

  A stench lay heavy on the place, an evil reek of shit and death that threatened to toss her stomach onto the pavement at her feet. Dead animals were everywhere, clad in living shrouds of flies. Here a camel, the ship of the desert, wrecked by mortar fire, its ribs exposed like the timbers of a shattered hull. There an ostrich blown headless, a pink scrawl of neck. Before her, a troop of baboons had been machine-gunned from the branches of a eucalyptus tree. They lay about the trunk like a necklace of death’s-heads, rotting, each the size of a child.

  Malaya turned her head away, only to see a bear curled in the corner of an enclosure, trembling, her head buried in her paws, and a long-eared fox shooting from cover to cover, as if pursued by phantoms. There were other animals she could not even identify, their shapes shattered into simple bone and meat. A cast of desert falcons, having fled their aviaries, wheeled high against the sun, as if lasing targets for the gunships, while exotic parrots screamed.

  Malaya could hardly breathe. She felt for a moment that she had been transported into the distant past or future, the end of an age. A mass extinction. Behind her, the string of goats moaned like the damned. She was standing there, open-mouthed before the massacre, when she felt the string tugged gently from her fingers. She turned to find a giant of a man standing beside her, holding the rope. Smiling. He was a white man, gray-bearded and wearing a khaki safari shirt. His eyes shone a kind blue beneath a ballcap that read THULA THULA GAME RESERVE.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You don’t know how much this means.”

  Malaya swallowed. “You must be the Loco Lion Man of Africa. You’re the talk of the Al Rashid.”

  Later he’d become known as the Elephant Whisperer for rescuing a herd of traumatized elephants rampaging across Zululand. He held out his paw-sized hand.

  “Lawrence Anthony,” he said.

  “They say you were the first civilian in, just eight days after the invasion. How did you manage that?”

  The big man smiled, his cheeks a jolly pink.

  “The head of a bull,” he said, knocking two knuckles against his forehead. “And a Kuwaiti rental car.”

  * * *

  Anthony led her through the place. There was the Bengal tiger, Malooh, pacing back and forth in his cage, back and forth. A paling specter, meatless, his bones like some intricate coatrack beneath his skin. His stripes were faded, as if his hide had been spread on the floor of a game lodge, tread threadbare beneath a long parade of boots. Still, he snarled yellow-toothed at their passage, his instincts undead.

  “He’d bonded with one of the lionesses,” said Anthony. “Part of a mating experiment. She was killed in front of his cage.” The big man shook his head. “The soldiers did their best to corral the animals. No one knew she was just trying to get back to her mate.”

  They passed a sounder of Iraqi wild boars, tusked furies that princes once hunted from horseback. A burst water tank had flooded their pen and only a small island of high ground remained. Here the swine had gathered themselves into a mountain of bristly gray misery, their hooves churning for traction in the muck, while dead piglets floated in the cesspool about them.

  “Water is still our primary problem,” said Anthony. “The pumps are broken. We’ve been carrying water from the canal in buckets.”

  They passed a Eurasian lynx who was rattling his ribs against the iron bars of his enclosure, again and again, as if trying to rub the spots from his coat. He had the double-pointed beard of his kind, wizard-like, and black tassels of hair streamed from the tips of his ears. He’d rubbed his skin raw against the bars, his spots bleeding, and Malaya could only imagine what black terror was bolting through the cat’s mind, the soul-shattering crash of bombs or mortars or machine guns. The screams of the seven hundred inhabitants of this once-oasis, dying by alien violence. They passed other rows of cages and enclosures with their doors twisted open, as if wrenched from their hinges by an ogre or troll.

  “Who did this?” asked Malaya.

  Anthony showed his teeth.

  “Ali Baba,” he said. The Arabic slang for looters. “Mobs of them. They come every night. They steal any animal they can for meat. Some ar
e sold for exotic pets.” He shook his head. “My opinion, the only good cage is an empty cage. But not like this. The Baghdad Zoo was a jewel of the Middle East.”

  Malaya stared at the wrecked hinges and twisted bars. She could hardly believe this was the work of human hands. A padlock lay on the ground at her feet, the shackle torqued noodlelike from its tumblers. The barred door hung drunkenly from its latches, iron-built like something to hold Billy the Kid. Malaya imagined the hundreds of hands that must have gripped these bars at once, thousands of pencil-thin hand bones straining beneath the skin. The same power that toppled the bullet-chipped statues of Saddam’s regime.

  “What lived here?”

  “Giraffe,” said Anthony. “Someone feasted on the long steaks of her neck.” Again, his teeth showed in the hoary gray of his beard. “The only survivors are the animals too deadly or elusive for Ali Baba to catch.” He used the name as if the looters were a single beast come in the night. “They come over the walls or the blast-rubble or straight through the front gate. They are hungry, yes, but still. They steal everything, even our fecking water buckets. We can do nothing.”

  Malaya felt a shadow fall over her. When she looked up, there stood a trio of private security contractors, conjured as from the dust itself. The cowboys of Baghdad, former commando mercenaries who sped through the city in unmarked SUVs, escorting VIPs and protecting civilian convoys. They wore heavy beards and angular sunglasses, baseball caps and rugby jerseys beneath their tactical gear. They carried their M4 carbines high across their chests, black and deadly, and the braids of radio earpieces hung from their ears. Pistols were strapped to their thighs, and rubber tourniquets and packets of QuikClot peeked from pouches in their chest rigs.

  The one in the center spoke.

  “Lawrence, you should let us smoke a couple of the Ali Babas for you, teach them a lesson.” A South African flag was stitched on his tactical vest. “Your problems will be over, man.”

  Malaya looked at the man. He had a blond dagger of beard, nearly white, and wore a pair of safari shorts that showed the hard little balls of muscle that capped his knees. His legs looked like those of a cyclist—hard-calved and hairless, with sharp shinbones. Malaya’s heart was thumping hard against the chest plate of her body armor—surprise or something else.

  “I hope you’re joking,” she said.

  A sly cut of grin ran across the man’s face and Malaya wished she could see his eyes. She wondered what color they were, what spark of glee or menace they might hold.

  Anthony rocked from foot to foot.

  “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “But, as always, I must decline.”

  The mercenary shrugged.

  “It’s your funeral, man.” The merc turned toward the trio’s black SUV, parked just short of the twisted wreck of the enclosure. Malaya could not believe she hadn’t heard them roll up, the crunch of glass beneath their run-flat tires.

  “Hey,” she said, stepping after him. “I hope you’re joking about shooting looters.”

  The man didn’t reply. His mates had posted themselves at each corner of the SUV, scanning the zoo grounds for threats, while he raised the rear door of the machine.

  “We found something for you in one of the Hussein palaces,” he told Anthony.

  “Hey,” said Malaya. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  She was about to grab his shoulder when she stopped short, staring at the creature in the cargo bed of the truck.

  “Leeu welpie,” said the mercenary. “He was the only one we could save.”

  The lion cub lay accordianlike, lank and emaciated on a wool army blanket. His ribs pressed against his skin, fine as harp strings, his paws sized like cartoon mitts. Slowly, he lifted his head to the hand of the mercenary, who scratched him between the ears. Now the man lifted the cub from the blanket, gently, and held him out to Malaya. “Would you like to hold him?”

  Malaya’s mouth went sudden-dry. She could only nod.

  The man handed her the cub, warm against her chest.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “My name is Jaager de Vaal.”

  * * *

  Anse stood in front of the empty lion enclosure. A cold wind was blowing through his chest, and the ground felt spongy beneath his boots, tremulous, as if the world were spinning too fast. Memories, long buried, were rising from their graves. A whole nation of them—so many he felt the urge to run.

  It was the questions Malaya asked, he knew, the memories that haunted her—so many that echoed his own. He felt old ghosts quickening inside him. More than once in the past weeks, he thought he’d caught a glint of light in the trees, like the scope of a Viet Cong sniper, or heard the patter of bare feet beneath the pines. He’d felt his neck-hairs stand on end, as if he were being watched. As if something haunted the edges of the sanctuary, circling closer, closer.

  That night he lay beside Tyler in bed. They were naked, coated in a saline glaze. Their lovemaking had regained its wildness of late, a desperation that left them panting and spent. They lay tangled now, their skin burning with new scratches and abrasions. Anse pulled a shred of Tyler’s hair from his mouth.

  “Do you ever think about the last one?”

  Tyler rolled up onto an elbow. She wore a moonstone, a lustrous pendant that hung in the sun-wrinkled valley between her breasts.

  “The last of what?”

  Anse was looking at the ceiling of the trailer. He swallowed.

  “I dream of a saber cat sometimes. Smilodon fatalis. He’s old and gray, with chipped sabers. His joints ache. Winter is always coming for him, and wolves.”

  “And he’s the last of his kind?”

  “I think so. Sometimes I see him stalking through the forest, alone. Hungry. Everything bolts from him. He’s the prototype of the lion and tiger, too crude to survive. The megafauna are dying out, the mastodons and giant sloths. He can’t feed himself.” Anse squinted, looking back into his own dreams. “Other times I see him standing atop a fallen mammoth. A real tusker, big as a little planet, her body all mired in tar. And there’s wolves coming and men with spears and he can feel his own bones under his skin.”

  Anse swallowed. Lately he felt a longing to tell Tyler the secret of Little Eden, the one that only Malaya knew—how so many of the animals had passed into his care. How, in the years since opening the rescue, he’d begun taking the mission of the place quite literally, rescuing animals from conditions of abuse and neglect. The urge to confess haunted him with the mad little joy of a death wish, like he would rip open the cage of his ribs for her sight. He inhaled.

  “Smilodon knows it’s his last battle, I think. And he isn’t afraid.”

  Tyler’s green eyes roamed his face. She was a woman of hard principle, he knew. Her principles shaped her, sure as the bones of a soul.

  “Why isn’t he afraid?” she asked.

  Anse felt tears swim into his eyes. His heart was punching at his sternum, trying to break out. He chewed his lip.

  “Sometimes I think he’s just tired. Been fighting his whole life, and he just wants a good death.”

  Anse thumbed the base of his throat, hard, as if digging for words.

  “Other times, I think it’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “Sometimes I think he’s so lonely, he has no fear of death.” He looked at Tyler. “I think he welcomes it.”

  Tyler’s eyes glowed that edenic green, as if she were seeing a world beyond his own. Sometimes he worried it was a paradise he would never know. A peace.

  She bent to his ear.

  “Roll over.”

  Her hands found the pale scars that striped his back. She began working in the buttery salve that eased and softened his old wounds. Anse pressed his forehead into the pillow, letting her hands shuttle him, stroke by stroke, into the strange lands of sleep.

  * * *

  Jaager de Vaal, aka the White Wolf of Baghdad. Malaya had heard this name whispered with reverence, even awe, among the 3rd Infantry
Division. He was a veteran of the Recces—the South African Special Forces. In his room at the Al Rashid, there was a thumbtacked photograph of him in some jungle hell, wearing the brigade’s maroon beret and shoulder badge—a black commando knife wreathed in laurels. He’d come to Baghdad as a diplomatic bodyguard, but the Special Forces soon found other uses for him.

  The elite operators of the United States military could be found standing in the man’s hotel room at midnight, caparisoned in full war-fighting regalia, complete with green-eyed night-vision goggles and ballistic body armor. They would be tapping their boots and checking their watches while the South African donned his rugby jersey and safari shorts and black Chuck Taylor tennis shoes without socks. Outside, the staccato crack of gunfire, the thud of artillery. These men would wait for the White Wolf because he could find places no one else could. Some said it was his tracking skills, honed in the wilds of Africa. Others said his senses were more highly attuned—that they were superhuman, wolflike.

  He found torture rooms hidden beneath the grand palaces of the royal family and secret passages that spread beneath the city like the tunnelwork of ants. He found caches of small arms and supplies intended to sustain the Republican Guard in case of foreign siege. He even found the hidden stables that once housed Saddam Hussein’s herd of priceless Arabians—steeds whose bloodlines could be traced back to the warhorses of Saladin himself, the great war king of Islam, who banished the Crusaders with a Damascus steel scimitar sharp enough to slice bolts of falling silk. In the wake of the U.S. invasion, black-marketeers had stolen the herd. Priceless Mesopotamian blood horses, whose ancestors had borne sultans, were rumored to be running weekday heats at the track in Abu Ghraib.

  The White Wolf did not find the weapons of mass destruction the coalition forces wanted so badly to find. No vast underground warehouses where bombshells full of anthrax or sarin gas lay cradled like the eggs of some genocidal dragon. He did find, again and again, the private menageries of the ruling class. He found Iraqi brown bears squashed into six-by-six iron crates, living in the evil stench of their own feces, and tigers thin as rails, starving at the end of backyard chains. He found the lions of Saddam’s eldest son, Uday Hussein, kept in an iron pen fifty yards long, said to be fed on the bodies of the man’s romantic rivals. The White Wolf found the starving lion cub—the one he brought to the zoo—in the basement of another palace, locked in a dog crate. His siblings were dead of thirst, piled about him like discarded toys.