Friday's Harbor (19 page)

“I hope so. I’ve actually just put in a call to an old friend of mine,” Gabriel said. “Monty Jergensen in San Diego. He’s an ex-SeaWorld veterinarian—we visited Friday in Bogotá together a few times, so he already knows him. He’s willing to fly up tomorrow and work on his tooth. I don’t think that’s what’s causing the behavior, but it’ll need to be fixed at some point anyway, so we might as well do it now, to be sure. He’ll give Friday a good look-over and go through the lab work while he’s here, in case we missed something.”

Truman nodded; Gabriel had already run this by him. He said, “In the meantime, let’s be proactive about this and prepare a statement for the media that will explain the closure. I’d like your input in drafting it.”

At the end of half an hour of vigorous and sometimes heated discussion over how forthcoming they wanted to be about Friday’s health in general (not at all, as far as Gabriel was concerned; very, thought Neva), Truman decided that more disclosure was safer than less. Thus:

On Saturday (tomorrow), the Max L. Biedelman Zoo will close its killer whale pool to the public so that Friday can undergo a routine dental procedure. We regret any inconvenience this may cause our visitors and will gladly provide rain checks for anyone who would like to return when Friday is once again on exhibit.

But once it was down in black-and-white Truman equivocated, thinking it was probably naïve to offer up medical information that might raise more questions than it answered. How had the tooth been broken in the first place? How long ago? Why wasn’t it treated before this? How much pain had he been in, and for how long? What were the signs that he
was
in pain? Etc. After another thirty minutes of discussion, they decided that a safer tack would be to focus the statement on nonhealth issues, and how the visitors’ experience would be affected.

On Saturday (tomorrow), the Max L. Biedelman Zoo will close its killer whale pool to visitors for twenty-four hours, in order to take care of routine pool maintenance. The exhibit will be open to the public as usual on Sunday morning. We regret any inconvenience this may cause our visitors and will gladly provide rain checks to anyone who’d like to return to the zoo when Friday is once again on exhibit.

Truman asked Brenda to prepare the press statement before she left for the day and distribute it via an e-mail blast to media outlets within a three-hour drive, so the visitors most likely to be affected were the ones informed.

In the coming months, as Truman thought back on it—and he often thought back on it—they couldn’t have fueled the fire any better if they’d poured gasoline all over it and lit a match.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
while Truman watched, Gabriel directed Friday into the medical pool and gave Neva the word to lower the watertight gates that separated it from the main pool. Truman could see Friday eyeing Gabriel nervously, but Gabriel stayed at his head in the water and reassured him as the water level began to drop. Neva and Monty Jergensen, an affable, plainspoken, rumpled man in his early seventies who’d pioneered many of the procedures and protocols still being used in marine mammal care and rehabilitation, waited to climb into the pool until the water was shallow enough to keep Friday floating just a foot off the bottom. Then Truman saw them raise Friday’s transport sling beneath him both to suspend him and hold him in place. The vet gave Friday a reassuring pat or two just behind the blowhole.

Gabriel signaled Friday to open his mouth, and the veterinarian examined the offending tooth. “See this?” he said to Gabriel. “It’s fractured all the way through—you can see the crack.” Directing himself up to Truman, who was squatting on the pool deck overhead, he said, “It’s too badly split to fix. Let’s go ahead and take it out.”

Truman looked down at Gabriel, who nodded:
let’s do it
. Truman gave the go-ahead.

Gabriel fed Friday several herring and then gave the signal for the whale to open his mouth again. The vet injected a numbing agent into the gum, and though Friday shuddered momentarily as the shot was administered, he continued to hold still and open wide. Gabriel scratched his head and pectoral flipper, murmuring encouraging things Friday couldn’t hear. Once the numbing agent had taken effect the veterinarian applied a dental chisel and hammer and in four deft taps broke the tooth cleanly, extracted the pieces, swabbed the socket, and packed it with an antibiotic dressing. For the next three weeks, he directed Gabriel, they’d need to irrigate the area and cleanse it with hydrogen peroxide.

From beginning to end, the procedure took less than ten minutes. Jergensen wanted Friday confined to the medical pool for the next two hours, to make sure that he’d metabolized the Novocain without any adverse reactions. Downstairs, Truman paced in the food prep area while the vet read through a sheaf of lab results, starting with the last year’s records from Bogotá and working forward to the sample they’d taken just the day before. Then he called for Truman to come into the office.

“I’m not seeing any red flags in the blood work—he was in crappy shape when he got here, obviously, and probably seriously immunodeficient, which is why his skin was so bad, but I’m seeing steady improvement. There are no signs of infection or injury. I guarantee you he’s in better shape today than he’s been in years.”

“And the body slams?” Truman asked.

“Strictly behavioral,” said the vet.

Truman nodded, relieved. “Any advice on how to get him to stop?”

The vet indicated Gabriel. “Not a clue, but you’ve got the best guy in the world right here—he’ll get it figured out. The whale isn’t hurting himself, so keep that in mind. It looks worse than it is. He’s probably having a field day.”

Truman asked carefully, “So you don’t think it’s a sign of deep-seated rage, say, or depression?”

“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!
”

W
HEN 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 talk 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
.”