Apparently, there was still time. Apparently, the meet had been called for-what time was it now? Carella looked at his watch. It was three fifteen. Was three thirty a safe estimate? Was that why his young friend was dawdling all over the park?
The dawdling eventually took the blond boy to the men's room. He walked up the flag-covered path, and Carella watched him. As soon as the boy entered the building, Carella circled it, checking for a second exit door. There was none. Satisfied that the boy could not leave the building in any way but through the door by which he had entered, Carella sat on a bench and prepared to wait out the vagaries of nature.
He waited for five minutes. At the end of that time, the boy reappeared and began traveling at a fast trot in the direction of the reptile house. Whatever other faults there may have been in the boy's judgment, Carella could not venture to guess. But he had certainly been astute in choosing the snake pit as an appropriate spot to meet a pusher. Carella grinned and followed toward the snakes, a sudden gay mood overtaking him. He was looking forward to the pinch, the way a good coon dog looks forward to the moment of the kill, just before the wounded coon drops out of the tree.
As if to add to his sudden happy outlook, a crowd magically appeared. It was as if a movie director cued his musicians for a crescendo, and then signaled for throngs to swarm out of the hills, building to a climactic scene.
The people who suddenly appeared were not exactly what Carella would have called throngs. They were, instead, the students of a junior high school class, led by a slightly embarrassed-looking male teacher whose principal had undoubtedly decided his charges were not getting enough "real" experience. The principal had decided to introduce them to "life," so the science teacher had probably been asked to take his class to the zoo, where they could smell the animals. The teacher's face bore the expression of a man sitting next to two drunks in a subway; his mouth yearned to shout, "They're not with me!"
But, unfortunately, the kids were with him, and they were the noisiest damn kids Carella had ever seen or heard. He did not mind the noise because there was a noise within him now, an excitement that mounted as he followed his prey past the school kids and hurried down the path toward the reptile house.
Behind him, one of the kids was saying, "They got a snake in there can eat a pig whole, how about that?"
Another kid answered, "There ain't no snakes can eat pigs whole."
"No? That's how much you know. My father saw a Frank Buck pitcher where the snake eats a pig whole. And they got that snake here."
"The
"Not the one in the pitcher, stupid. But a snake like him."
"Then how do you know this one can eat pigs?"
Fascinated as Carella was, he concentrated on his quarry. His quarry was entering the house with the snakes, and Carella did not want to lose him. For a ridiculous moment, he had the sneaking suspicion his mustache was falling off. He stopped, touched the area beneath his nose, and then satisfied, entered the building. The boy seemed to know exactly where he was going. He didn't look at any of the snakes he passed, even though the zoo officials had gone to considerable expense in capturing, transporting and suitably enclosing the reptiles. He walked directly to a cage behind whose thick plate-glass window lay two cobras. He stood watching the cobras, fascinated-or at least seemingly fascinated. Once or twice, he rapped on the glass.
Carella took up a station alongside a small glass-front cage that contained a Rocky Mountain rattler. The snake was asleep, or dead, or some damn thing. It lay in a despondent coil, looking for all the world as if an earthquake would not have disturbed it. But Carella was not interested in the snake. Carella was interested in the color of the glass cage that held the snake. For the back wall of that cage was painted a deep green, and from where Carella was standing, the plate-glass front combined with the green back wall to provide an excellent mirror effect. He could, while ostensibly marveling over the rattle on the surely dead snake in the cage, study the boy across the room with considerable ease.
The boy was undoubtedly a snake lover. He was making sounds at the cobra cage, and he was rapping on the plate-glass front again, and he looked something like a new father in a hospital nursery, making an ass of himself through the nursery window.
