Friday's Harbor: A Novel

by Diane Hammond

  “I can’t imagine why it would be.”

  Truman smiled apologetically. “There’s a rumor going around that he’s trying to commit suicide. I want to be sure we have a response if the rumor catches hold,” Truman said.

  “There isn’t an animal on earth besides us that even contemplates suicide, never mind attempts it,” the veterinarian said. “Animals are wired for survival, not premature death. Now, you can call me crazy if you want to, but whatever this guy is doing, you can bet it’s a sign of health, not psychosis. Can I prove it? No. But I’ve been working in this field for a long time, and all my instincts say it’s a PR problem, not a veterinary one.”

  “I’m hugely relieved, of course,” said Truman. “If we asked you to make a statement to that effect to the media, would you be willing to do it?”

  “The press isn’t too fond of me,” said Jergenson. “I tend to call a spade a spade, and they usually want something flashier. But sure, you can have them contact me if you want to.”

  “Thank you,” said Truman. “Hopefully we won’t need you to do that, but these two”—he indicated Neva and Gabriel—“have put the fear of God into me about how things can go sideways. I want to be prepared.”

  Jergenson grinned wickedly. “Oh, you can never be prepared. No matter what you think’s going to happen, you’ll be wrong—it’ll be much worse. That’s my experience, anyway.”

  Truman smiled unconvincingly. “Well, let’s hope this is one case where all of you are wrong.” He shook hands with the vet and said to the staff, “Short of catastrophic window failure, we’ll open the gallery tomorrow morning, so hopefully you can get a handle on the behavior by then—assuming it wasn’t the tooth that was causing the problem.”

  “We can always hope,” said Gabriel.

  Truman was hugely relieved at Jergensen’s assessment. The idea of having a sick whale on his hands at all, never mind under the scrutiny of the world media, was just too awful to contemplate. Now, striding toward Max Biedelman’s mansion, he could finally feel his heartbeat return to almost normal.

  But just outside the tapir exhibit, he saw a familiar figure wrapped in clanking cameras, lenses, and flash attachments. Martin Choi. Truman felt his jaws involuntarily clench. He took several deep breaths and mentally apologized to Harriet Saul for having criticized her shortcomings in the face of relentless media scrutiny; and then Martin was upon him, saying in his inimitable way, “Dude!”

  WHEN THE FIRST calls came in yesterday, Martin Choi had to admit he’d been skeptical. After all, what whale would want to off himself—especially one that might be released back to the wild, a possibility in which he still firmly believed despite the zoo’s ardent denials. But phone calls kept coming in from visitors, a total of seven within two hours. Each described how the killer whale deliberately swam smack into the windows time after time after time until people started leaving the gallery in tears.

  Then he got the zoo’s press statement. Scheduled maintenance. Yeah, right. His journalistic instincts, which he considered to be finely honed, screamed What the hell? Something was definitely up. For the sake of his career he certainly hoped so—something big, like some kind of a cover-up. That would be perfect. To get a jump on the suicide angle he tried to reach the animal psychic—she should know something—but he kept going to her voice mail, so he figured he’d just hoof it down to the zoo unannounced and hopefully catch something juicy in the act. And it looked to him like his timing was perfect, as usual—he had a special gift for that.

  Truman Levy looked like shit.

  “Martin,” he greeted the reporter levelly, turning Martin around so he was headed away from the pool. “You know we ask all our media visitors to check in at the front desk.”

  “That’s okay—I know my way around.”

  “Why don’t you come back to my office with me? I assume there’s something you wanted to talk about.”

  Martin let himself be diverted but waited to ask any questions until they got to Truman’s office and Martin could sit down and set up his recorder. If his career was about to take a huge leap forward—and he was sure it was—he didn’t want to miss anything. Truman shut his office door behind them. This was the first time Martin had been there since Harriet Saul left, and he couldn’t help noticing that it had been straightened up and cleaned to within an inch of its life—not an old nacho plate or half-eaten muffin in sight.

  “Martin?” Truman said.

  “What? Yeah, hey, so yesterday we got a few calls that there’s something big-time wrong with the whale.”

  “Oh?” said Truman carefully.

  “Yeah. Actually, what they said was that he was trying to kill himself by swimming into the windows. And now the exhibit’s closed. What’s up with that?”

  “Martin, Martin, Martin,” said Truman. “Does that sound likely to you?”

  “Hey, that’s why I’m asking you, man. Where there’s smoke and all that.”

  “If you read the press statement we sent you, you know we had scheduled maintenance that would keep the whale off exhibit for most of the day. We’d originally planned on completing the work before we moved porpoises in, but then obviously Friday came along and we put off some of the punch list. Now we’re playing catch-up.”

  “You had three weeks, right?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Weren’t there three weeks or something between when you decided to take the whale and when he actually arrived? Seems like there was a lot of time to take care of stuff, or is it just me?”

  “Yes, it was about three weeks, and no, there wasn’t time,” said Truman. “The contractor was already committed to work someplace else.”

  “Oh, okay, yeah, sure, I get that. So what’s being worked on?”

  He saw Truman take a beat. “The watertight gates between the med pool and main pool. They need a final block and tackle mechanism installed.”

  “And that takes a whole day?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Huh,” said Martin. “Because I didn’t see any, like, contractor trucks or gear up there or anything.” He scribbled some more notes, fussed with his digital recorder. Sometimes if you give people enough silence they’d hang themselves. He just loved that. But this time nothing happened, so Martin said, “So why do you think people are saying he’s trying to kill himself?”

  Truman cleared his throat, croaked out a word or two, cleared his throat again—the sure sign of a nervous interviewee—and said, “Let’s look at this piece by piece. You’ve seen Friday lately, right? I see you here pretty often. Has he looked sick to you?”

  Martin pretended to take notes. “I don’t know. He looked okay to me, but he’d have to be lying on the bottom of the pool before I’d know something was up.”

  “I promise you he’s not sick or lying on the bottom of the pool.”

  “Yeah?” Martin scribbled some bogus notes. Time dragged on. Martin scribbled some more.

  And that’s when Truman made his fatal mistake. He said—and from the looks of him, he knew he was screwed the minute he said it—“In fact, we have a veterinarian here just to look in on him.”

  Hah! It was the classic novice’s error: yammering into a silence. Martin jumped on it. “Yeah? A local guy?”

  “No, Southern California.”

  “So that’s handy, huh.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Well, I mean, people are saying something’s wrong with the whale, and then you just happen to have a veterinarian coming up. And the whale’s off-limits for the day. Pretty awesome, dude—I mean, what are the chances? If, you know, nothing’s wrong with the whale.”

  “There is nothing wrong with the whale,” said Truman grimly. “We had Dr. Jergensen scheduled for a wellness check. We’ll be having visits from a number of experts from time to time.”

  Martin wrote, flipped back and forth in his notebook like he was looking for something, then wrote some more, stretching things out.

  “Would you like to tal
k to him?” Truman finally said. “I believe he’s still here. He had a couple of things to finish up.”

  “Seems like a pretty amazing coincidence to me, but hey, you guys know best.”

  ”Look at me.”

  Martin looked at him. “He’s not sick,” said Truman.

  “But then there’s still the suicide thing.”

  “Please listen to me very carefully. He is not suicidal. No wild animal is suicidal. Their primary instinct is survival.”

  “Yeah, but he’s a wild animal who got caught. And now you’re telling him he can’t go back there. No wonder the poor guy’s slamming into windows.”

  “Let’s get you out there,” said Truman. “So you can see just how unsuicidal he is.”

  “Cool bananas!” Martin grabbed up all his camera gear, notebook, and recorder.

  “Let me just call ahead so they know we’re coming,” Truman said, picking up the phone. “Why don’t you say hello to Brenda? I’ll only be a minute.”

  “Hey, man, no prob—I can get there by myself,” Martin said. “It’s not like I don’t know where it is.”

  “I’d prefer to go with you.”

  Why was the guy so determined to handle him? Martin wondered. Even ol’ Harriet Saul would have let him walk over alone, and she’d been a controlling harridan. “Hey,” he said to Brenda dutifully out in the reception area.

  “Hey,” she said without even looking away from her computer screen, cracking a tiny piece of gum. He used to think she was kind of cute in a ratted-hair-and-twenty-pounds-overweight kind of way, but now he could see he was above that kind of girl.

  “Okay,” said Truman, closing his office door behind him. “All set.”

  TRUMAN HAD NO sooner gotten to the whale pool than the security radio at his hip crackled. “Brenda for Truman. Truman, do you copy?”

  “Go for Truman,” he said.

  “A guy just called from KIRO in Seattle. They heard the whale died. Over.”

  “I’m on my way,” he said. He’d have to hand Martin off to Gabriel with only the brief heads-up Truman had given him over the phone, but Gabriel was a pro. Hell, he’d probably have handled this whole mess much better than Truman had.

  As soon as he got back, Brenda held her hand over the phone receiver and said, “This is KOIN in Portland. They heard the whale died, too. They’re sending a satellite truck up. So’s another of the Seattle stations I can’t remember the letters of right now. You want to talk to this guy?”

  He had Brenda put the call through to his office.

  “Hey there,” said a man who identified himself as one of the producers for the station’s evening news. “We got a bunch of folks saying the pool down there’s closed because the whale committed suicide by swimming into the walls. We’re sending a satellite truck up there for the six o’clock news.”

  “No, no, no,” Truman begged. “Don’t waste your time. Friday is not only very much alive, he’s in excellent health and his spirits couldn’t be better.”

  “So how come you closed the pool to visitors?”

  “We had some construction projects to finish that we weren’t able to get to before Friday arrived.”

  “We were told he wasn’t even in the pool anymore.”

  Truman marveled for a few seconds and then said, “Just out of curiosity, where else could he be?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t make up the news, bud, I just report it. So you’re saying he’s not dead?”

  “He’s definitely not dead. He’s alive and he’s here.”

  “So why’d you have a vet flown up?”

  Truman’s heart sank: clearly his effort to confine the story had backfired. “How did you hear about that, if I may ask?”

  “Come on, don’t you know we hear about everything? It’s just a matter of how quickly.”

  Truman thought that was a bit arch, but he was in no position to pick fights. He put on his most lawyerly persona, took a big breath, and began. “A marine mammal veterinary specialist was here today, yes. His name is Monty Jergensen, and he’s seen Friday in the past in Bogotá. We asked him to come review the whale’s blood work and look him over. This was strictly a wellness call.”

  “Yeah? And did he find anything?”

  “As a matter of fact, he confirmed that Friday is in excellent shape, much better shape than he’d expected so soon. He did, however, find a broken tooth, which he extracted.”

  “A busted tooth?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Jeez, I’d hate to see the drill,” said the producer, cracking himself up. Truman wondered if Martin Choi had family members in Seattle who were also in the news business. “Pretty handy, having the guy right there.”

  Truman sighed—and then he realized that he’d said nothing about the tooth to Martin. Monty or Gabriel probably would. If they did, it would make Truman look even shiftier. If they didn’t, Martin would see the spot on TV and assume they’d treated him differently than they treated the big-city TV stations. Either way, Truman was screwed, and another chip would be added to the already tall stack Martin Choi carried on his shoulder.

  The TV producer was talking in his ear. “I’m sorry?” said Truman.

  “Let me see if I got this right, because it sounds like you guys had a busy day. There was construction stuff going on, and because of that the whale was off-exhibit, which worked out okay because it just so happened that a whale vet was up there and he found a busted tooth you didn’t know about, but that he extracted. Am I right so far?”

  “Pretty much,” said Truman.

  “Okay, and so you’re saying the whale didn’t commit suicide or fail to commit suicide, even though a bunch of folks down there yesterday saw him slamming into windows off and on all day, which no one knows why he’d do something like that when it must have hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. It seems like that’s a whole lot of stuff to have happening all at the same time.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Truman.

  “So if he wasn’t trying to commit suicide, why was he slamming into the windows and freaking out a bunch of folks with their kids?”

  “The best answer we have is that he was seeing his reflection in the windows, assuming it was another killer whale, and exerting territoriality.”

  “Huh,” said the producer. “Don’t whales get those parasites that make them lose their sense of direction or spatial orientation or something and swim up onto beaches or whatever?”

  “I think I’m over my head,” Truman said. “I’m going to get off the phone and get one of our keepers to call you right back.”

  “That’s okay—I’ve got what I need.” The phone went dead in Truman’s hand.

  Truman stared at the handset for a moment. What could the producer possibly have to make a story from but wild conjectures, rumors, and conflicting facts?

  Before he could decide whether he should do something—call the TV station back, tell him god knows what—Brenda stuck an ominous stack of pink While You Were Out messages in front of him. “Some of them said they heard the whale was dead, and the rest say he’s on suicide watch.” She cracked her gum and walked out. “Good luck, boss.”

  Truman flipped quickly through the packet of messages and found three more TV stations, AP and Reuters, Sky News, and NPR. Behind those were the Seattle Times, the Oregonian, and a handful of California newspapers. The evening news was being written at that very moment, based on crazy conclusions invented by people lacking even an iota of factual information, and there was no time to set them all straight.

  Spin or be spun.

  LIBERTINE STOOD OUTSIDE Havenside for a good ten minutes before she could summon her resolve. When she got upstairs, she thought Truman looked like hell, pasty-faced and wilted. He gestured for her to come in and sit down. She took one of his visitors’ chairs and said, “I wonder if I can offer a suggestion? It might help.”

  “That would be nice,” he said—somewhat wistfully, she thought.

  She took a deep breath
and began. “Here’s the thing: no one except a handful of us knows Friday has chosen not to communicate with me anymore. And I’m seeing what everyone else should: a robust, active, chipper whale. I’d gladly call anyone on your media roster who’s running with the wrong story and give them the same update you have, only as though he’s told me, especially, how good life has become. I can say he’s slamming into the windows because even though we know it’s his own reflection, he’s seeing another killer whale in the window and asserting dominance. Gabriel still feels that’s the most likely explanation, and it is a sign of good health—he wouldn’t have had the energy to do it until recently. Anyway, let me talk at least to Martin Choi on my own. He might buy it. At least it might stop the rumor about Friday being suicidal.”

  Truman thought.

  “You, Gabriel, Ivy, or Neva are welcome to listen in, if you’re worried about my being a loose cannon,” Libertine said. “And I won’t even affiliate myself with the zoo—that’ll have better credibility anyway.”

  Truman smiled at her, a nice little smile, though with sad undertones.

  “You’ve all done so much for me—let me give something back.”

  Truman gave her the go-ahead to talk not only to Martin Choi, but also to any of the media speeding toward Bladenham. He sent a message back with her to Gabriel: let any media who descended upon them see the whale. And if at all possible, keep him busy enough not to slam into the windows.

  TRUMAN LEFT THE zoo after the early evening news was over. The coverage was horrible, horrible, horrible, and God alone knew what would run in the newspapers tomorrow morning. He went directly to his parents’ house.

  It had been a long time since he’d sought out Matthew for solace. But his father’s even temper, dry sense of humor, and incisive mind were exactly what he needed—that and something alcoholic. He accepted Lavinia’s proffered glass of crisp chardonnay and took it into the sunroom, where Matthew was sitting with the New York Times, a newspaper he’d been reading daily, cover to cover, for as long as Truman could remember.

  Now, seeing Truman, Matthew meticulously folded the paper, made a pass over the crease so it would lie perfectly flat, and placed it in front of him on the white wicker coffee table. The room was brilliant, saturated with light even on a winter evening, refracting off-white furniture, white window casements, white drapes, white lamps, white rug. Lavinia had chosen vivid floral upholstery and well-placed plants around the room to soften it. Ordinarily it was one of Truman’s favorite places, but tonight it just felt overilluminated and jarring.