by Dixie Lyle
“Go see for yourself,” I said. “He’s quite impressive.”
Oscar nodded. “I believe I will. I’ve always identified with the lion as a personal totem; proud, majestic, fearless…”
“Spends most of his time sleeping?” I added.
“I prefer to think of it as conserving my strength. Good day, ladies.” He turned and headed off in the direction of the zoo.
“He’s in a cheerful mood,” ZZ said. “Keep an eye on him, will you?”
“Duly noted,” I answered.
Next to arrive was Abazu Chukwukadibia, a short, beaming man from Nigeria with curly gray hair, steel-rimmed glasses, and skin as dark as licorice. He wore a tattered, dark-blue suit and a white shirt with frayed cuffs, and carried a single overstuffed duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He walked from the front gate, and I got the impression he’d taken public transit from the airport.
“Hello, hello!” he said as he bustled up. “I am Abazu Chukwukadibia. A beautiful day, is it not?”
“It is,” said ZZ. She introduced herself, stressed that he should call her ZZ, and didn’t embarrass herself by attempting to pronounce his last name. He shook his head when ZZ tried to show him to his room, placing his duffel bag gently on the ground.
“Thank you, but I am fine,” he said. “Has Augustus arrived yet?”
“Yes. He’s just settling in,” I said.
“May I see him, please? I promise to be unobtrusive.”
I glanced at ZZ. She nodded. “That would be fine. Foxtrot, will you show him?”
“I’d be happy to,” I said.
Whiskey, meanwhile, had begun sniffing at Abazu’s dusty shoes. “Whiskey!” I said. “Leave the man alone, will you?”
In my head, though, I said, Smell anything interesting?
[Mmm. Yes. A species of herb indigenous to southern Africa. An industrial cleaner used by many airlines. And quite a wide array of spices, oils, and chemicals common in starchy, deep-fried snacks such as potato or corn chips, which I surmise is from crumbs caught in the cuffs of his pants.]
I wondered sometimes about the olfactory library Whiskey could access. How was it organized? What did it look like? Was it ranked from most stinky to least, or by some other factor? I always wound up picturing a huge room with floor-to-ceiling shelves and rolling ladders that went right up to the top, filled with slender volumes that emitted wavy smell lines when you opened them. And down below, dogs sat in overstuffed chairs with their legs crossed, books propped open in front of them, tiny smell-spectacles—smellacles?—positioned over their nostrils—
[Foxtrot. Focus, please.]
What? Oh, right. Sorry. “Follow me, please, Mr. Chukwukadibia.”
“I shall.”
“I’ll have your things put in your room,” said ZZ. Abazu nodded and smiled, but he was already moving.
Whiskey kept pace with me, as he usually did. “Did you have a pleasant flight?”
“Oh, my, yes. To see the sunlight on the tops of clouds is both humbling and amazing. I could watch it for hours.”
“I know what you mean.”
[I don’t. Birds are fundamentally insane.]
“How is Augustus?” Abazu asked. “Did the journey upset him? Is he eating well?”
“He seemed very calm when I saw him. Our vet, Caroline, was about to feed him when I left—we can see how it’s going for ourselves.”
It wasn’t a long walk from the house to the liger enclosure, but Abazu peppered me with half a dozen questions before we got there: How long had Augustus been on the road? What was he fed while traveling? Had he had a bowel movement since he arrived? I did my best to answer the ones I could and told him Caroline could probably give him information on the rest.
Then we arrived, and Abazu stopped talking.
Augustus’s appetite hadn’t suffered from the journey; he was tearing into a haunch of beef in one corner of the enclosure, trapping it between his paws and ripping great chunks of it out with his mouth. He glanced over at us casually, then went back to his meal.
Abazu had come to a dead stop, about ten feet away from the enclosure. The look on his face was one of wonder. “Oh, my,” he whispered. “He is … magnificent.”
“He is that,” I agreed.
[Hmmph.]
Oscar was nowhere in sight, but Caroline was still there. She walked up to us and said, “He’s settling in well. Went for a swim, checked out the pool.”
“Caroline, this is Abazu Chukwukadibia. He’s one of our guests.”
Abazu tore his gaze away from Augustus. “A pleasure, madam. You are in charge of his well-being?”
“That’s right,” Caroline said.
“He is healthy? Free of parasites, not injured?”
“I haven’t had a chance to give him a full physical, but he appears to be perfectly healthy.”
“Very good. Very good. A tremendous responsibility. You know this, yes?”
Caroline nodded. “I do, Mr. Chukwukadibia. I take it very, very seriously.”
He studied her for a second, then broke into a wide grin. “Yes, I can see that you do. That is most fine. I shall return later, yes?”
“You’re most welcome to do so.”
“But first, I have a few things I would like to ask.”
As Abazu questioned her, I caught Whiskey’s eye. He seems a little starstruck, don’t you think?
[That’s one way to put it.]
You sound less than impressed.
[Cats in general don’t impress me. The more cat there is, the more there is to be unimpressed by. I am currently confronted by a great deal of cat.]
That’s one way to put it.
When Abazu was finished his interrogation, he thanked Caroline profusely and indicated he’d like to return to the house to freshen up. He was quiet on the way back, apparently lost in his own thoughts, and didn’t even glance around his room when we got there. He told me he’d see me at dinner and closed the door.
The last guest to arrive was Luis Navarro.
He pulled up in a very new, very black Mercedes. ZZ had gone back inside by then, and I was the only one around. I walked forward, Whiskey at my side, to greet him.
He took two hard-shell suitcases out of the trunk as I approached. He was tall, broad in the shoulders, with an immaculately tailored dark suit that managed to look casual and dressy at the same time. His hair was shiny and black and cut short. He had that boyish look to him some Latin men have, his lashes just a little too long and his cheeks just a little too round, but he balanced that with a strong jaw and piercing eyes. He gave me an easy smile when he spotted me. “You must be Foxtrot,” he said. His voice was warm and deep. “Hello.”
“Hello. You must be Mr. Navarro.”
“Luis, please.”
“All right, Luis. Everyone else is already here; if you’ll follow me, I’ll show you to your room.”
“Thank you.”
And that was all he said as he followed me into the house and up the stairs. I kept talking, of course, but he kept his replies to nods and polite murmurs and offered no comments of his own. I got the hint and didn’t push; some people are uncomfortable with small talk, and trying to engage them is the wrong approach.
“Dinner is at six, drinks at five thirty,” I said, opening the door to his room.
“Thank you very much, Foxtrot,” he answered. He looked around his room with a careful, considering eye as he placed his bags on the floor; it seemed to meet with his approval, because he nodded before turning back to face me.
“You have wireless Internet, of course?” he asked.
“Yes. The password is on a card on the nightstand. You have my number; call me if you need anything else.”
He frowned, ever so slightly. “Really? I would have thought you’d have staff to take care of such mundane tasks.”
“We do. But I’m something of a control freak; everything gets routed through me. You want more towels, I have to okay the color and weave before the maid bring
s them up.”
His frown turned into a smile. It was a nice smile, one that reached all the way up to his eyes. “That’s very diligent of you. I’ll try not to take up too much of your time.”
“Not a problem. Just doing my job.” I smiled back, gave him the professional I’m-leaving-now nod, and took a step backward.
He took the same step forward, as gracefully as if we were dancing. Stopped at the precise second I did. His smile stayed the same, but his eyes locked with mine. “And what if I required something a little more … esoteric?” he asked gently.
I blinked. Neither his voice nor the expression on his face had changed, but his body language was subtly different in a way that was hard to explain: poised, somehow, while appearing relaxed. Like some internal gear had shifted but he hadn’t stomped on the gas yet.
“That depends on what you have in mind,” I said carefully.
He gazed at me for a second before answering. “Tequila,” he said at last. “I have a fondness for it, but only particular varieties. Purely as a sipping drink, you understand; I value a well-made tequila the way some value a good scotch.”
“Give me a name and I’ll do my best.”
“Casa Dragones is my favorite, though a bottle of Milagro Unico will do. One hundred percent blue agave, both of them. The Milagro is flavorful and smooth, yet somewhat playful.”
“It sounds … intriguing.”
“Mmm. The Dragones is delicately sweet, with an underlying fire. And most satisfying—even more so if you have someone to share it with.”
Somehow, I didn’t think he was talking about tequila anymore. “I’ll see what I can do … but you may have to wait. These things can take a while.”
Oddly, he didn’t seem disappointed. “Yes, I understand. Hopefully, you will be successful before I leave.” He nodded once again, more formally, and closed his door.
“Huh,” I said to Whiskey as I walked away. “Well, I’ve been hit on aggressively before, but that was a weird combination. Full steam one second, then back down to zero without taking offense. Almost like he was just going through the motions.”
[It could be he had other things on his mind.]
“You mean like Augustus?”
[I mean like the firearms he was carrying.]
CHAPTER THREE
“What do you mean, firearms?” I demanded.
Whiskey had stopped, too, and now he sat down and looked up at me. [I don’t know for certain. What I do know is that I smelled gun oil and gunpowder. Maybe he’s just carrying ammunition and a cleaning kit.]
“Right, because packing two things you’re not going to need is what everyone does when they’re taking a long trip.”
[It could also be that he came into contact with those two things before he left. As I said, I can’t be sure.]
I rolled my eyes. “Terrific. I’ve got to let Shondra know. Once I come up with a way to explain how I know.”
[Except we don’t know. At this point, it’s only conjecture.]
He was right. Navarro was already on Shondra’s radar; about all I could do was stay alert and hope there wasn’t any trouble.
There was still no sign of Tango, but I wasn’t worried; she was a cat, and they keep their own hours. There was no real urgency in talking to Augustus, anyway—even if someone was going to try to kill him, it was unlikely he had any idea why. It wasn’t as if he’d been sleeping with another liger’s wife or embezzling from the local zoo.
So I spent the rest of the afternoon doing my usual, which is to say everything. I did research on things ZZ was interested in, talked on the phone to several charities, placed online orders for items ranging from cleaning supplies to gourmet foods, then spent half an hour tracking down a local supplier of specialty tequila and arranging immediate delivery. Then I dressed for dinner.
I have a standing invitation to ZZ’s salons. It’s usually up to me whether or not I want to attend, but tonight was a special case; ZZ had asked me to stay because she valued my opinion and she had a difficult decision to make: where Augustus was going to spend the rest of his life.
How ZZ wound up in this position was an interesting story, but not nearly as interesting as the story of Augustus’s early life. Ligers are a strictly artificial phenomenon, because lions and tigers live in different parts of the world and haven’t had any territory that overlapped in a very long time. The earliest historical reports of a liger come from a color plate made in 1798. Two liger cubs born in 1837 were exhibited to Queen Victoria. Royalty has always had a fascination with the exotic.
But in the twenty-first century, royalty can be a strange, hybrid beast itself. Anyone with enough money and power can become a de facto ruler, especially if they have an army to back them up. That was the case with Augustus’s owner, a ruthless drug kingpin named Branco Gamboa. Gamboa controlled a meth-and-heroin empire that stretched over much of the southern United States, and died in a spectacular DEA raid on his sprawling ranch in Georgia. Searching the house and grounds afterward, federal agents found enough weapons to storm Normandy, over fifty high-end sports cars, a mountain of cash … and a private zoo.
Augustus appeared to have been well cared for. But the DEA was a little out of its depth when it came to housing and feeding a thousand-pound carnivore, and the local zoo admitted it didn’t have the facilities, either. A liger was nothing if not photogenic, though, so the press played the story up big-time. “White Liger” became an Internet meme about ten seconds later, and a Twitter hashtag ten seconds after that. Everybody weighed in on the debate, from the ASPCA to Siegfried and Roy, and ZZ was in the thick of it. When all the dust settled, the DEA had agreed to let her choose Augustus’s new home—as long as she took him off their hands immediately.
I kept a few outfits on hand in case I wanted to show up for dinner, and for tonight I selected a simple, mid-length black dress with low heels and a black jacket; classy, not too sexy, mostly business-like. Mostly.
Whiskey pointedly looked in the other direction when I dressed, an affectation I found endearing. I’d told him more than once that I didn’t care whether or not he saw me naked, but he insisted he was merely being polite and that there was nothing wrong with a little courtesy. I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t.
“What do you think?” I asked him when I was done.
[I think I have very little experience in wearing clothes, and even less in judging them.]
“Fair enough. How about if I can’t decide which bush to pee on?”
[Then my extensive experience and knowledge are at your disposal.]
“Good to know.”
We went downstairs, where the mystery of Tango’s whereabouts was solved immediately: She was curled up on a chair in the sitting room, a large, comfortable space with a fireplace at one end. She appeared to be asleep, so I didn’t call out to her.
Abazu and Karst were both seated on a sofa, Karst in the middle of some story involving waving his arms around, Abazu nodding and smiling. Karst had changed into a dinner jacket, while Abazu was dressed in the same suit he arrived in. Rajiv sat near them on a chair, his posture erect, wearing an honest-to-God tuxedo and looking like he was about to perform best-man duties to someone he barely knew. Zhen Yao stood over by the fireplace in a dress even more business-like than mine, clutching a glass of wine and looking uncomfortable. Luis Navarro wasn’t there.
I couldn’t see any of them as a killer—in fact, they all had good reasons for wanting to keep Augustus alive. I thought back to my conversation with Eli and tried to remember if he’d actually used the word murder. Maybe the threat to Augustus was disease, or an accident.
“Hello, everyone,” I said. I walked up to the bar and poured myself a drink. “I hope you’re all settled in and everything is to your satisfaction?”
There was a chorus of affirmations, nods, and smiles.
“Good. ZZ will be down in a minute. In the meantime, enjoy yourself and relax. That’s an order.” It was my standard joke, and it got t
he standard response of chuckles and grins. Except from Zhen, who looked confused.
I walked over to her. “How about you?” I said. “Everything okay?”
“Yes. It is fine. I am most satisfactory. Satisfied.” She took a largish gulp of wine, and spilled a little on herself.
“I’ll get some club soda,” I said, and bustled over to the bar with her in tow. She looked embarrassed and a little angry, but not with me. I managed to get the wine out before it stained, but there wasn’t much I could do to salvage Zhen’s mood.
Oscar showed up a minute later, wearing a stylish cream-colored dinner jacket over a pin-striped linen shirt. He went straight to the bar, as usual, and poured himself a healthy glass of twenty-year-old scotch. He drifted over to the conversation between Karst and Abazu and stood there with a slight smile on his face, listening attentively. Oscar was a bit of a social chameleon; he’d mastered the art of insinuating himself into the middle of conversations so smoothly and unobtrusively that it seemed as if he’d been there from the very start.
His mother, on the other hand, was the exact opposite. She liked to make an entrance—and did so now, sweeping into the room in a vivid purple gown with a wide smile on her face. She greeted everyone by name, asked Oscar to fix her a drink, commiserated with Zhen over her dress, told me to put some music on, and somehow enticed everyone onto his or her feet without expressly saying so. ZZ could throw a party just by showing up, and on her own turf she was pretty much unstoppable.
I did my part, chatting with each of them, talking about nothing in particular, doing my best to put them at ease. My first impressions didn’t change much: Rajiv remained formal, Karst was hearty, Zhen was uncomfortable, and Abazu was … well, intent but serene, somehow. More focused than the others.
At exactly six o’clock ZZ ushered us into the dining room, where an enormous table of dark, gleaming wood was set with white linen napkins and polished silver. Three large flatscreens hung on the walls of the room, currently showing an ever-changing montage of art.
Luis Navarro joined us as we sat down, taking a seat at the far end of the table. His suit was black, with silver pinstripes so thin they were almost subliminal, his tie a scarlet even more vivid than Rajiv’s turban. ZZ introduced him to everyone, and he smiled and nodded and murmured pleasantries in return. He seemed vaguely amused.