LITMIR.BIZ

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for Dempsey.’

      Cutting a ‘deck’ (I know, very tricky) of bluffing or packing cards was something Mr Gentry had been helping me master. But cards are terribly difficult for a young chimpanzee to manipulate, and my attempts at cutting had never elicited the full banana of approval from Mr Gentry. There was room for improvement, to be honest—I either dropped or ate them. As the oldest chimp on Forest Lawn, Stroheim could be expected to make a better fist of things requiring more developed motor-control—that must have been Julius’s thinking—but it never came to that.

      Stroheim was staring at me with his muddy brown eyes and his hair erect, making a series of threatening pant-grunts. He ripped his hand out of Julius’s and thumped up on to the table with a heavy, hollow ber-bang, hooting at me in an aggressive foursquare posture—arms out, knuckles down, ready to spring. I abandoned to him the banana I was peeling and scampered round the back of Mr Gentry, who stood up, making a rucksack of me. Bonzo and Frederick had scattered, squealing but ignored by Stroheim, who was still bristling and pant-grunting at me even though he was now in possession both of my banana and the cigarette I’d left burning on the table. We were straight back in the jungle.

      ‘Are we playing cards or having a tea-party?’ Captain Mannicher asked, reasonably enough. ‘Get it out of here, Julius. And the rest of them. Put ‘em back in their cages and we can get on with our game.’ Stroheim had retracted himself into a sullen bundle and was puffing gloomily on my cigarette as if savouring the shift in mood. ‘And Cheats as well, Tony. Enough. We’re gonna have some serious poker tonight.’

      So we were all trooped back into Hold Number Four. I didn’t mind it as much as you might think—I’d been wondering about the safety of my shelter ever since I’d seen Stroheim gibbering around the wheelhouse roof that afternoon. Without shelters there was no rehabilitation programme. The programme’s key principle—not to be constantly threatened by death (a good principle: mark me down as a ‘pro’)—was dependent on them. After the light and the wind of the Atlantic, the hold seemed black with dreams and comforting thick smells: faeces, urine, rotting fruit.

      ‘Hardly the goddamned Ritz down here, is it?’ said Julius, admiringly.

      ‘Smells like the, uh, the Tijuana Hilton,’ said Baxter, ‘but with better room-service,’ which confirmed my suspicions that we were indeed recipients of some special treatment on Forest Lawn.

      Baxter peeled off with Bonzo and Frederick, and Julius hit a little cluster of moonfruit-like globes on a stand (whose sudden light stirred up a fluster of cheeps and squeaks from those expecting dinner). He and Earl were leading the banana-clutching Stroheim and me back towards our shelters—and I thought, We’ll be back in our shelters in a second anyway, and what can he do while there are two humans here? That’s my goddamned banana! and I jinked sideways and plucked it—ha!—from Stroheim’s grasp.

      Unfortunately, my momentum carried me into Julius’s legs and, in catching his balance, his hand separated from Stroheim’s, freeing him. Stroheim swivelled, ducked Julius’s grab and—he had this way of instantaneously converting his sullenness to ferocity—charged shrieking into me, catching me and clutching hard so that we spun over painfully into the side of a shelter. For a moment I was winded, and then, dropping the banana in the hope that that’d be enough for him, I skittered out of reach and doubled back towards the humans. I figured they were my best option. But Earl and Julius were backing away from me with expressions I had not yet seen on human faces, and I had time to think, Surely between the pair of you, you can handle him—and don’t forget, guys, it was my banana in the first place, before they started to shout.

      Down from its busted shelter flowed the charcoal-grey snake. It decanted itself, horrible in its ease of motion, raised its head from the ground, flashing its paler underside, and bared its mouth.

      The inside of its mouth was black. It wasn’t the black of a chimp, or a crow, or a panther—it was infinitely more intense. It was what you’d arrive at when you got to the end of black. You just looked at it and thought: Death. That’s Death.

      ‘It’s the fucking mamba, Earl,’ Julius said, ‘the fucking mamba!’

      The snake moved with a quite hideous rapidity towards Stroheim, who was hoisting himself up the outside of a stack of shelters. It strained after him, five, six feet vertically upwards, then fell sideways and magicked itself into the darkness behind a stand of lights.

      When I think about it I sometimes wonder whether Louis Mayer was in fact right and that Thalberg was losing it. There was simply no chance that that snake could have handled an MGM family-oriented or comedy role. Warner’s could have used it, perhaps. TV, sure, but not opposite Deanna Durbin. What had Thalberg been thinking in offering it a slot on Forest Lawn? The snake was like poor old Anna Sten. Remember her? Everybody in Hollywood, apart from Sam Goldwyn himself, knew it just wasn’t going to happen for her. Or it might have been that Tony Gentry had simply picked the snake up hoping for a straight-to-zoo sale. Whatever the reason for its presence on Forest Lawn, with the mamba’s escape the whole noble premise of the rehabilitation centre collapsed. You try to make it out of the jungle and the jungle comes with you. Death was still here, shelters or not.

      In a sort of chain-reaction, the serenity of Forest Lawn exploded. Captain Mannicher was furious and used his hand against Julius. It was the first blow I had ever seen between humans. ‘We’re six hours out of New York!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t give me this shit! Who the fuck do you think is liable? The longshoremen? They’re not even going to think about unloading the cargo! My men aren’t going to touch it. Don’t fucking tell me it was damaged in transit! This is your fucking liability. Your fucking problem!’

      Mr Gentry was behind Captain Mannicher, trying to groom him down from his display. ‘Pete, come on, this isn’t helping us…’

      ‘Don’t tell me what’s helping, Gentry. I’ve got a million and a half dollars’ worth of cargo that the Port Authority’s not gonna let me unload until you find this fucking thing and I am gonna—listen to me—I’m gonna fucking close you down if it harms anybody on board this vessel.’

      I would like, by the way, to make the point again that it was actually my banana in the first place, not Stroheim’s, and in that sense it was all his fault. It was not easy to communicate this at the time.

      ‘I’m not suggesting that anyone involved with the freight company or the ship look for the mamba. Quite the contrary,’ Mr Gentry said, with calming gestures of submission. ‘This is a highly aggressive, deadly animal. No antivenom has been developed for it. It’ll be disoriented by its surroundings, which may mean it’s less aggressive, it may not. But I and my men will do the searching. In the meantime, I suggest that you keep on all the lights we have and gather the crew here on the top deck.’

      ‘Rats, Tony,’ said Earl.

      ‘Yeah, I know. It’ll feed on rats, Captain, given its ‘druthers. Tell the men to stay clear of places where rodents might tend—the giraffes’ straw, the bulkheads, the binnacles, you know better than me. OK, Earl, come on, not your fault. Let’s go.’

      ‘Don’t let the fucking lions out,’ Mannicher said in farewell. ‘Never afuckingain, Gentry. And take fucking Bonzo with you!’

      ‘This animal is safer where you are, Captain. The mamba won’t have any difficulty entering the cages in the hold and getting after the stock. In fact, that’s where we’re starting. So let’s just all keep our heads and we’ll solve this.’ Mr Gentry was very white where Mannicher was red. ‘And it’s not Bonzo, Captain,’ he said, ‘it’s Cheater.’

      A very special human being, Mr Tony Gentry.

      All that evening I stayed in the wheelhouse with Captain Mannicher and various other extremely anxious humans. As the night wore on they relaxed somewhat, having little else to do except display cards and drink whisky. DiMarco was volunteered to travel with a number of others to the galley and return with something to eat, and by the time they came back, unscathed, the humans were again laughing

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