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Prologue

In Bogota Columbia, a twenty-one-foot-long, nineteen-year- old, North Atlantic–caught killer whale swam around and around. His small, warm, cloudy pool was the main attraction of a theme park long past its glory days. Because he always swam in a counterclockwise direction, the centrifugal force may have caused the fallen dorsal fin that curled tightly over his back. He was called Viernes—Friday—but he’d been given that name years and years ago and no one left knew why.

Viernes hadn’t lived with or even seen another killer whale in eighteen years, which was how long he’d been in captivity. He wasn’t alone, though: he shared his pool with a changing cast of bottlenose dolphins that hectored him mercilessly. His skin was delicately filigreed all over with rake-marks from their teeth: while they could move fast in this small pool, he barely fit, which made him slow and awkward. Whenever he dropped his tail flukes, they rested on the bottom of the pool while his head stayed above water.

It was all too obvious that the killer whale’s health was breaking down. Clusters of wartlike lesions encircled the base of both pectoral flippers and formed a black masslike bubbled tar above his tail flukes; he was two-thousand-pounds underweight. But he still performed in shows twice a day on weekdays, three times a day on weekends and in summer, producing on command a series of lumbering bows that splashed the delighted children in the front rows around his pool. Some- times there were birthday parties, too, which he enjoyed because the children were allowed to come closer, where he could watch them. They were allowed to pet his face and head, and he liked this most of all. When they went home, they took with them cups and kites and stuffed plush toys in his likeness.

In Colombia, he was a star.

From time to time, people from other marine parks in other countries had come to assess his well-being; among the international marine mammal community he’d been considered at death’s door for years. They never stayed for long, and nothing ever changed. But now, though he had no way of knowing it, a different kind of committee had arrived at the park’s invitation.

The committee members included an older woman in a flowing, floor-length caftan and Nikes who held in her arms a tiny dog that interested Viernes very much. He’d never seen an animal like this before, and he hoped she’d put it down so he could take a closer look, but although they stayed at his pool for an hour or more, she kept it in her arms.

The woman reappeared off and on during the rest of the day, always with the dog and sometimes, but not always, with other people. At the end of the day she returned for the last time, accompanied by a man Viernes recognized from past visits. He and the woman talked and talked and talked, with their arms folded over their chests, considering him. This, too, had happened before.

Viernes drifted to the far side of the pool and closed his eyes.

Chapter 1

What would come to be known by the Levy family and friends as the Whale Business began that day in Bogotá. The woman in the flowing Egyptian caftan and cross-trainers was Ivy Levy, a longtime board member of the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, Washington, who had traveled to Bogotá at the very last minute, filling in for another representative stricken with food poisoning.

At sixty-two, by her own admission, Ivy was a boozy old gal with more time and money than she knew what to do with; broad in the shoulders and wide through the beam, canny and keen-eyed, plainspoken and possessed of unshakable convictions—that most people were more stupid than they thought they were; that young people squandered their elders’ wisdom; that in all the world only animals were honest; that if God were truly almighty, things would be going a lot better.

Ivy had joined a blue-ribbon panel convened by the Bogotá theme park to solve Viernes’s increasingly desperate housing and health problems. In addition to the Whale Museum, the committee included representatives from SeaWorld, the Vancouver Aquarium, Shedd Aquarium, and Sea Life Park—some of the world’s preeminent marine parks. The committee’s un- qualified conclusion was that the whale had run out of time, but that saving him would require an immediate move out of Bogotá. Unfortunately, not a single zoo or marine park would take him. He was a high-profile, failing animal that might die of stress during or shortly after transport, on top of which no one had a pool that was at the same time big enough for a full- grown killer whale and unoccupied, which it had to be in case he arrived with something contagious. And then there was the problem of money—enough to underwrite the crippling costs not only of transporting a killer whale out of Central America, but also of sustaining him through a long and uncertain rehabilitation.

Ivy’s last-minute involvement was, as she would put it, a game-changer. She knew what no other committee member did, namely that the tiny Max L. Biedelman Zoo in Bladen- ham, Washington, had just finished constructing, but not yet populating, a large saltwater pool intended to exhibit por- poises, thereby beefing up the zoo’s dwindling revenue stream; that the zoo was run by Ivy’s nephew Truman, a newly minted lawyer and recently appointed executive director; and that Ivy herself was exceedingly, excessively, congenitally rich.

In her eyes, the project was perfect.

On the same day that Ivy got back to her home on San Juan Island, off the northern Washington coast, Truman sat at his computer drafting a staff memo with a subject line reading No More Fear and Trembling at the Zoo! Though he had only been appointed zoo director six weeks earlier, he knew the Biedelman zoo very well, even intimately. He’d been its business manager until three years ago, when he’d cast aside his normally pragmatic judgment and colluded in a plot to smuggle the lone Asian elephant, Hannah, out of the zoo. After that, his career in shambles, he’d enrolled in law school. He had just gotten word that he’d passed the bar exam when the Bladenham City Council petitioned him to come back as the zoo’s director. The board had just fired his predecessor and former employer, Harriet Saul, and thought he’d be an excellent replacement. Unfortunately, the zoo had also just completed construction of a porpoise pool for which Harriet had advocated tirelessly.

“Nothing brings people in the door like dolphins. Have you ever seen one? Of course not. No one in the Northwest has, except maybe on vacation at SeaWorld,” she’d famously asserted during her campaign to persuade—some would say browbeat—the city’s mayor and councilmen into approving the expansion. They had eventually capitulated in the face of Harriet’s tireless hectoring, but from the moment ground was broken, a year and a half ago, the pool had proved to be a never-ending son-of-a-bitch. The fourteen-month timeline had been determined by Harriet’s trademark impatience rather than by its inherent doability, forcing the facility’s design and construction to occur more or less simultaneously. There had been issues with the ozone filtration system; with the company responsible for constructing realistic-looking underwater rock work that would make the pool look less like the cement box that it was and more like some undersea grotto; and, most recently and disastrously, with the intergovernmental permits required to move three harbor porpoises from their current rehabilitation facility in Vancouver, British Columbia, to the Biedelman Zoo. No one seemed able to say when the animals might be transported; the pool had already been filled, making its lack of inhabitants that much more damning. The fiasco had cost Harriet her job, though Bladenham News-Tribune re- porter Martin Choi allowed her a face-saving quote in which she stated she’d been successfully headhunted by an up-and- coming safari park in Texas.

It was Harriet’s dramatic fall from grace that had motivated the skittish Bladenham City Council to woo Truman to take her place, and not only because of the extensive working knowledge of the zoo he’d gained during his tenure as business manager, but also because he had not one contentious or narcissistic bone in his body, which would be a welcome relief after Harriet’s disastrous reign. Being the quiet only child of one appellate court judge and one high-profile attorney had made Truman an ideal consensus-builder, though it sometimes gave him a falsely milquetoast demeanor. Milquetoast he was not.

Truman had no illusions about his lack of passion for the law, but he’d worked hard to get where he was, and was looking forward to the relative financial security it offered him and his fourteen-year-old son, Winslow. Working at the zoo, even at the top, would mean a life of basics. Still, he’d invested a lot of himself in the place before he left, and he felt the facility could thrive under a measured hand, so before he could think better of it he’d said yes.

Harriet Saul had been a bully and a micromanager who had so relentlessly ridden her employees that the zoo personnel were paralyzed. When the head of maintenance came all the way across the zoo grounds to request Truman’s permission to order toilet paper—toilet paper! —Truman had had enough.

I welcome any and all ideas, he now typed with two fingers, and hope that you will all feel welcome to bring them to my attention, either in person or in writing. I believe we can bring this zoo to greatness, but it will take the brain- power of every one of us. By the same token, do not feel you need my permission to carry out your job’s day-to-day functions. I trust you and your dedication to this zoo implicitly. You were hired for your expertise. Use it.

His phone rang as he was deliberating over whether to change I welcome in the first sentence to I’d love to hear. On the other end of the line he heard his Aunt Ivy’s strident voice say, “I have a proposition for you.”

He moved the receiver six inches from his ear. “There’s a killer whale I need you to take in.” “What?”

“That got your attention, didn’t it? ” It did.

“Here’s the thing,” Ivy continued. “There’s this poor killer whale named Viernes in an awful place in Colombia—”

“Missouri? ”

“Central America.”

“Ah.”

“—who’s been living in a terrible little pool for years and now he’s dying.”

“Okay,” said Truman. “I’m listening.”

“You need to take him. The zoo needs to.” “You’re kidding,” Truman said flatly.

“You know me better than that.”

Truman sighed. He did. “But there must be facilities much better equipped to deal with an animal like this.”

“Evidently not. If you could have seen the poor thing, honey, it would have broken your heart.”

“I understand that, but we’re a zoo. An inland zoo.”

“Don’t patronize me, Truman,” Ivy snapped. “You have a brand-new pool with no one living in it.” And Ivy was in a position to know: she’d contributed nearly seventy-five thousand dollars to its construction.

“A pool, yes,” Truman acknowledged. “Expertise and staff, no. Right at the moment, we can’t even get permits to bring in porpoises, never mind a dying adult killer whale.”

“If that pig of yours was dying you’d be more responsive,” Ivy said bitterly.

“Now you’re just trying to cheer me up,” Truman said. Miles, his three-year-old potbellied pig, was always a tender topic.

“What do you mean? ”

Truman sighed. “We’re fighting over who gets the bed.” “Your bed? ”

“Yes. Or, as Miles would tell you, his.”

“You let him on the furniture?” Ivy sounded appalled. “Honey, he’s a pig.”

“I know he’s a pig. I know it and you know it, but he thinks he’s a dog, and dogs get to be on furniture. Ipso facto, he wants the bed.”

“Your father told me he goes to some cockamamie doggie preschool,” Ivy said.

“First of all, it’s doggie day care,” Truman said defensively. “Neva’s doggie day care.” Three years ago his girlfriend, Neva Wilson, a career zookeeper, had been fired for her role in the plot to relocate Hannah. In order to be close to Truman, she had stayed in Bladenham and taken a job managing Woof! Now Truman told Ivy, “Second of all, it keeps him socially engaged. Otherwise he roots.”

“Roots? ”

“It’s what pigs do,” Truman said absently, mulling. “Look, I’m sorry but I don’t think the zoo’s in a position to help.”

“Oh, that’s just a bunch of hooey,” Ivy said. “And you know it.”

Truman sat silently for a long beat. There were certain resources he could probably tap into, charitable trusts with soft spots for marine mammal welfare projects. “If I approach the board about this—and I’m saying if—I have to be able to guarantee them that all the funding will come from donations,” he said. “One hundred percent, and up front. There’s no surplus in the budget—zero.” And that, at least, was the absolute truth.

“I have a checkbook, don’t I?” Ivy said irritably. “And frankly, I’m surprised you’re not looking at this as a chance for the zoo to get some favorable press for a change. Biedelman Zoo takes in ailing orca. Look—I want you to talk to a fellow named Gabriel Jump. He’s an expert in this kind of thing. He was down there with me, and he can answer all your questions.”

Truman became aware of the vertiginous feeling he always got before he jumped off the cliff of moderation. In words he was sure he’d live to regret he said, “Have him call me.”

“Hah!” Ivy crowed. “Now you’re talking, baby. Come up this Saturday and I’ll have Gabriel here.”

It was at that exact moment, Truman would later recall, when he first should have known he was screwed, screwed, screwed.

Two days later Ivy waited in her car for the early afternoon ferry to bring both men to San Juan Island. She watched the ferry pull into the dock, its workers bright in yellow rain gear and safety vests as they secured the boat and signaled the first car to clatter ashore. She’d been watching this unchanging ritual all her life and she was still thrilled to hear the sound of car and truck tires chunk-chunking one by one off the steel ramp and onto the asphalt streets of Friday Harbor, the island’s only town. She spotted Truman walking off from the upper passenger deck, and she thought what she always thought when she first saw him: that at thirty-nine years old, his pleasant appearance couldn’t be more unmemorable, belying the keen and agile mind spinning within. Of all her nieces and nephews, Ivy loved him most—not that she’d ever let that on to him or anyone.

She threw open the car’s passenger door and waved him over—as though he could miss her old robin’s-egg-blue, four- door Mercedes. With the sort of reverse snobbery practiced by the old-moneyed and the very rich, it was cheerfully and un- apologetically down-at-heel: the antenna was bent, the driver’s side door was dented, the bumpers showed spots of incipient rust.

Truman put his overnight bag in the car’s backseat and hopped in, moving his feet at the last minute to avoid a neat little dog turd on the floorboards.

“Oh, for god’s sake,” said Ivy, looking down. “Really, Julio!” She pulled a wadded-up tissue from her pocket and with practiced efficiency picked up the turd and tossed it out her window. The culprit was a Chihuahua named Julio Iglesias, with whom she’d been locked in a passive-aggressive war- fare for years; he glowered at her from a booster seat clipped into one of the backseat belts. “He must have done that this morning while I was in the drugstore,” Ivy said. “And then he wonders why I make him sit back there.”

The dog shot Ivy a look of pure contempt.

“Gabriel was on the ferry, too,” she told Truman. “He’s one of the pioneers of marine mammal husbandry and rehabilitation. People talk about him with a certain degree of reverence.” She spotted a weathered pickup matching the description Gabriel had given her, and waved. He waved back, and once she was sure he was following her, she pulled out of the ferry parking lot. By her reckoning, she had six minutes alone with Truman to cogently review the killer whale’s plight. Once they got to the house the show would belong to Gabriel.

“Let me tell you what I know,” she said, making sure Tru- man’s passenger-side window was fully raised so it didn’t dribble. “Fire away,” said Truman, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Hello, by the way.”

She waved this away impatiently. “Now, listen. His name is Viernes, which means Friday, and he’s in this tiny pool he shares with Satan’s dolphins—”

“Is that a species?” Truman said. “Of course not.”

“Oh.”

“—and they make him do these shows even though he’s thin as a rail and weak. Cheesy shows with beautiful girls standing on his head giving parade waves to the crowd while he swims around the pool, and they have him jump out of the water and splash people in the front rows of the bleachers, that kind of thing. Tacky.”

“I didn’t know animals could die of poor taste,” Truman said. “Don’t you mock me,” Ivy said, giving him a dangerous look.

Truman subsided. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

“His food is crap—whatever they can get cheap at the local fish market, which means it’s spoiled a lot of the time, plus there’s never enough of it. They’re inland like your zoo, so they make seawater with this stuff called Instant Ocean—”

“As will we,” Truman pointed out.

“With polluted water?” Ivy said archly. “I think not.” “No,” Truman said. “Of course not.”

“Well then. The water system’s also antiquated, so they can’t chill the pool adequately, which means the water’s hot all the time. And he’s from the North Atlantic, so you can only imagine. He’s also got this nasty skin condition, like big patches of warts, which means his immune system’s probably shot.”

“My god,” Truman groaned, “the only thing you haven’t mentioned is that he has some inoperable tumor somewhere.”

“No, no tumor.” Ivy frowned thoughtfully. “At least not that I know of.”

She pulled into her driveway, looking in the rearview mirror to be sure Gabriel had made the turn, which he had. She turned off the car but made no move to get out. She sensed that Truman was unconvinced.

“Come on—think about what it could do for the zoo,” she said. “You’d be heroes for taking him in. And people would come out of the woodwork to see him. Think of the revenue stream. Anyway, you don’t have to take my word for any- thing,” she said. “That’s why I want you and Gabriel to talk. This could be the perfect marriage of need and opportunity.”

With that she got out of the car, released Julio Iglesias from the detested booster seat, and came around to Gabriel’s truck, rapping it smartly on the flank. “Watch out for the dog,” she called. “He bites.”

But Julio Iglesias had already disappeared under a scraggly rhododendron from which emanated a delicate but unmistakable odor of rot.

The levy ancestral home was one of the biggest and oldest on the island, shingled and squat above a notch in the shore- line too tiny to have a name. Three generations of Levys had grown up there, including Ivy and Truman’s father, Matthew; Ivy had never left. Inside, it was as fusty and worn as a soft paper bag. Braided rugs covered the original fir floors; pine cabinets lined the kitchen walls, and the old upholstered furniture was as enveloping as an embrace. Ivy shooed Truman and Gabriel into the living room. “Get the pleasantries over with,” she called over her shoulder, “while I scare us up some coffee.” Truman, being naturally bookish and inclined toward indoor activities, had always loved coming here with his parents. From his favorite sprung old club chair in the living room he’d done a hundred jigsaw puzzles, watched killer whales stitch through Haro Strait, followed seals and sea lions, cormorants and pelicans as they worked the gray water. Nearly everything he valued came from here in one way or another: his love of books and art and living things; his deep sense of family and its commitment to upholding the highest moral standard.

Now, in the light, Truman regarded Gabriel Jump, who had picked up a pair of high-powered binoculars from the coffee table and was peering at something on the water. Though he guessed Gabriel was eight or ten years older than he was, Gabriel was big and powerfully built—the sort of man Truman would instinctively steer clear of on a dimly lighted street; the sort of man to whom Truman, to his deep and lasting shame, had once surrendered his wallet without protest. But now Truman could see that Gabriel’s size, strength, and air of easy athleticism would be excellent qualities in a profession that required hefting big, slippery animals in and out of the water. And there was something incongruously gentle about him, too, as he put down the binoculars and held out his hand to Julio Iglesias, who had come mincing in from the kitchen still munching on some rank and festering tidbit he’d dug up under the rhododendron. Ivy followed close behind him, commanding in a deep and no-nonsense voice, “Drop it, Julio. Drop! ”

Over his skinny shoulder the dog shot her a look of mild amusement, swallowed, and jumped onto her favorite, newly upholstered chair to buff his foul-smelling coat against the seat and armrests.

“Oh, you get down from there right now!” Ivy shrieked, flap- ping her arms at him as though to launch a flight of birds. He gave a leisurely yawn and hopped down.

“Do you see what I have to deal with?” she demanded of Truman and Gabriel.

“You can always give him up,” Truman said, just as he’d been saying off and on for the last nine years.

“Never,” Ivy said grimly, setting down a tray of thick mugs of coffee. “I’d never give him the satisfaction.”

“Here, sit down.” Truman offered her his chair and took her soiled one. Once she was settled in, he turned to Gabriel. “I think the best thing will be if you take it from the top— pretend I know nothing.”

Gabriel stirred sugar and cream—a surprising amount of both, Truman thought—into his coffee and licked the spoon before putting it down. “I’ve been looking in on this whale off and on since he got there,” Gabriel said. “And for the last few visits I’ve assumed he’d be dead within a year or two. Every time, he’s surprised me.”

“And now? Why don’t you think he’ll rally now? ”

“Call it professional intuition. Call it a worsening trifecta of insupportable realities.” Gabriel ticked them off on his fingers. “His food sucks. His water quality sucks. And his pool sucks. Nothing new there. But his immune system’s beginning to fail, and that is new. At some point he’s going to reach a tipping point, and when that happens—when, not if—even God won’t be able to save him.”

“And you think he’s at that tipping point now? ”

“No—if I thought that, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. But I do think he’s close. Really close.”

“Then why hasn’t anyone tried to save him before now? ” Gabriel shrugged, swishing coffee around in his mouth reflectively.

“Easy. No market.”

“What does that mean? ” Truman said.

“It means no one would buy an animal like him, and until recently the Colombians wanted to sell him, not give him away. There isn’t a facility out there that would fork out a million dollars or whatever for an animal that’s been socially isolated, is out of condition, and let’s face it, probably wasn’t the brightest bulb to begin with.”

“What makes you say that? ” Ivy asked.

Gabriel pressed his thumb and forefinger into the inside corners of his eyes as though he felt a headache coming on. “When you collect them in the wild, the smart ones don’t end up in the nets.”

“Poor thing,” Ivy said.

“Plus the market for wild-caught whales in general has dried up. SeaWorld, Loro Parque in Spain, Kamogawa SeaWorld, and Nagoya Aquarium in Japan—the big facilities have captive- breeding programs that spit out healthy, well-adjusted calves like clockwork. They’re in their third and fourth generations of captive-born whales, and they supply the second-tier facilities. There are almost no wild-caught animals left.”

“And are captive-bred animals better? ” Truman asked.

“You tell me. Captive-born animals never know anything other than a big pool and a buffet of the finest seafood. They have no diseases, no injuries from tangling with boats or fishing gear, and are given the best veterinary care in the world. Then, on top of that, there’s the cost of collecting animals, plus getting through the politics and permits—government regulations make it almost impossible to bring in captured marine mammals, particularly killer whales. Most institutions just don’t think the headache’s worth it. There are diverse enough bloodlines that the captive-breeding population is genetically viable.”

“But Ivy tells me he’s been in captivity since he was one. Isn’t that almost as good as captive-born? ”

Gabriel shrugged. “Sure, if he’d been living at a top-of-the- line place like SeaWorld his whole life. He’s not—he’s living in a third-world slum.”

Truman put his head in his hands. “Did you know all this?” he asked Ivy.

“For the most part,” she admitted.

“For god’s sake, why didn’t you tell me? ”

“Because if I had, you wouldn’t have considered taking him.” “For good reason!”

“That,” said Ivy, “is where you’d have been wrong.”

The three of them talked well into the night, circling around and around the one point on which Truman wanted assurance that Gabriel was unable to give him: whether the killer whale would arrive in Bladenham alive. Truman rightly pointed out that selling his board of directors on rehabilitating a high- visibility, desperately sick animal would be hard enough. He didn’t feel he could recommend taking on an animal that might die on their doorstep.

“Look,” Gabriel finally said. “I’d be an idiot or a liar if I guaranteed the transport would go off without a hitch. You have to understand there’s a risk anytime you move any animal, no matter what shape it’s in. But what I can tell you is that this killer whale should have died years ago—years ago—and yet he’s still alive. He’s two thousand pounds underweight, his living conditions are deplorable, his diet is worse, and he’s lived like that for eighteen years. He’s a survivor. My professional instincts are that he’ll not only make it to your zoo alive, he’ll recover once he gets there. Can I guarantee that? No. Would I tell your board this animal’s worthy of a second chance? Absolutely. The bottom line is, you’ve got a state-of-the-art pool with no animals, and I’ve got an animal needing a pool.”

Truman sighed, considering Ivy, considering Gabriel. “Say I’m convinced that it’s a win-win for the whale and for the zoo. We still haven’t talked about money. I have no idea what we’re talking about here. Tens of thousands? ”

Gabriel and Ivy exchanged a quick glance. “More like a hundred thousand,” Gabriel said.

“For a year? ”

“For the transport. More, depending on what equipment we can borrow.”

“There’s no way we can come up with that,” Truman said. “Of course there is,” said Ivy. Julio Iglesias hopped into her lap, circled, and settled. “I have it. You know that. What the hell else am I going to do with it?”

“Let’s say the zoo accepts your donation. What about once he’s there? ”

“You must have budgeted something for the porpoise pro- gram,” Ivy pointed out.

“Yes,” Truman said. “A minimal amount. We knew we weren’t ready to open it yet.”

“Then I’ll make up the difference,” said Ivy, pulling on Julio

Iglesias’s ears absently. He put on his Greta Garbo eyes. “Ivy—”

“No!” snapped Ivy. “Don’t try to talk me out of spending my money on something I believe in! Honey, if you could just have seen him.” She swirled her fourth whiskey and soda around and around, finally looking toward Gabriel in a mute appeal.

“I’m sorry—I don’t know what more I can tell you,” he said to Truman. “I’d be glad to come talk to your board if you want.”

“But you honestly believe if he stays down there he’ll die? ”

“No question about it. I give him six months. A year, tops.”

“And if you can rehabilitate him, how much more time is he likely to have? ”

“We don’t know how much his life expectancy has been compromised by the crappy food and environmental conditions, but it could be years—a lot of years. Ten.”

Truman sat with his chin in his hand, gazing out the window into the darkness. Finally he said to Gabriel, “I have one condition if I take this to the zoo’s board.”

“What? ”

“That you head up the project—set up the transport and rehabilitation program and run it at the zoo. Without your experience and expertise, we could never take something like this on.”

“You mean would I work for you? ”

“Yes.” “No.”

“We’d pay!” Ivy assured him. “Whatever you’d ask for, we’d pay you.”

“What if we hired you as an independent contractor? ” Truman asked. “I’d recommend that the board consider a twelve-month, renewable commitment.”

“Oh, honey, say yes!” Ivy spilled Julio Iglesias out of her lap to lean forward. “Please say yes.”

Gabriel looked at her for a long time, considering. “I’ll give you one year. If the whale isn’t healthy by then, he never will be.”

Ivy clapped her hands. “You won’t be sorry. I know you won’t.”

The debatable Wisdom of opening the zoo’s doors to the sick killer whale circled around and around in Truman’s head long after Ivy saw him off on the next day’s midmorning ferry. The zoo was a small affair with roots in a turn-of-the-century menagerie privately owned by Maxine L. Biedelman, daughter of a Pacific Northwest timber magnate. Max, as she’d insisted on being called, had willed the property and all her exotic animals to the City of Bladenham upon her death in 1958. A wildly eccentric woman, she had lived in a hilltop mansion and housed her animals along winding pathways on the grounds in whimsical thatched and conical huts and pastoral barns, many of which still survived. By all accounts she’d been an eminently practical woman despite her penchant for swashbuckling and cross-dressing, and Truman suspected she would have advised that in the wake of Hannah’s loss, the rest of the animal collection should be found new homes and the zoo closed.

Once back in Bladenham, Truman methodically worked through the steps he’d need to take in presenting the project to the zoo’s executive committee, a collection of small-town businesspeople more familiar with running family-owned diners and auto-body shops than high-profile rescue projects with budgets manyfold greater than their net worth. Before he and Gabriel Jump had left Ivy’s house that morning, they’d drafted a written summary of the killer whale’s current living conditions, health profile, relocation requirements, and budget, including the cost of one year’s rehabilitation at the zoo. At the same time, Ivy wrote a letter of commitment to send back with Truman, guaranteeing that she’d cover any or all of the expenses that exceeded the zoo’s preexisting budget for completing and operating the porpoise pool. If the committee showed interest, both Gabriel and Ivy had agreed to come to Bladen- ham and meet with the full board.

Feeling the morning’s cup of strong coffee turn to pure acid in his gut once he was back in Bladenham, Truman decided to drive straight to Woof! to caucus with Neva Wilson. The doggie day care business was housed in an empty Chevy dealership on Main Street, fueled by the bottomless guilt of commuters who spent twelve-plus hours each day working in and commuting to and from Seattle. As Truman walked in he saw his pot-bellied pig, Miles, mixing with the large-dog group. Three years ago, when the pig was just a piglet, Truman had given him to Winslow as an eleventh birthday gift, for reasons that had been sketchy even at the time and which he’d often come to regret. The animal snored, wheezed, and passed eye- watering gas; he scared the living daylights out of the UPS driver and the mail carrier. On the bright side, Truman no longer received unwelcome door-to-door entreaties to buy Girl Scout cookies, candy bars, magazine subscriptions, holiday wreaths, or any other merchandise formerly inflicted on him. And the pig was utterly devoted to him and Winslow. When they ate dinner every night in the kitchen he lay on his horse-blanket bed on the other side of a baby gate and mooned over them like a middle school girl. He was not as fond of Neva, whom he apparently viewed as competition, but he adored going with her to Woof!, and had a well-established social circle there, composed of several pit bulls, a Rottweiler, two chocolate labs, and a mastiff. The pig was black and white, sparsely haired, and blessed with an unsinkably sunny nature. The minute Truman walked in Miles sensed his presence and, beaming with porcine delight, tip-tapped over on the absurdly small hooves that reminded Truman of the bound feet of Chinese women. Truman patted his shoulder and told him what a good pig he was, and then suggested, with no hint of irony, that he go back to playing with his friends. Miles grunted his boundless adoration and trotted off.

The noise of two dozen dogs was nearly deafening, even once Truman was in Neva’s small office with the door closed. Both he and Winslow had unusually low auditory thresholds. Neva fished out a couple of noise-dampening foam earplugs from her top desk drawer, handing them to him wordlessly across her desk.

At thirty-six Geneva Wilson was small but mighty from years of hard physical work with large animals, and gingery in color, manner, and temperament. She sat across the desk from him in her messy office, wearing canvas army boots, a stained sweatshirt, and cargo pants, her thick red hair indifferently knotted and stabbed through with a chopstick. Truman thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

“Your aunt is reacting out of sentimentality,” Neva said after he’d given her a synopsis of the situation. “And pity. You know that, right? ”

Yes, Truman knew that. He remembered a number of un- likely orphans that Ivy had been sheltering when Truman came to visit—not just the usual assortment of hapless domesticated animals, but an owl, a nutria, and once, memorably, a male raccoon that washed its food in a dog dish Ivy had put on the floor expressly for that purpose, its splint tapping on the kitchen linoleum like a pirate’s peg leg. The animal had long, thin, artful fingers that deftly rolled pats of butter into perfect little balls the size of BBs before dipping them in the water. “She’s always had a soft spot for lost causes,” he said now. “Take Julio Iglesias. But it doesn’t make her wrong.”

“You know that politically having a cetacean—”

“A what? ”

“A cetacean. A whale or dolphin.” “Oh.”

“—having cetaceans brings the nuts out of the woodwork. They don’t mind so much when you have fish or lesser marine mammals—seals, sea lions, even walruses—but the anticaptivity people go absolutely nuts over whales and dolphins. You could end up being picketed day in and day out for years. I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but it could.”

“We’re helping an animal in need—a deserving animal. Our motives are purely altruistic. It seems pretty straightforward to me.”

Neva smiled at him fondly. “You’re so naïve. You haven’t seen it, but people lose their minds when it comes to killer whales. I’m serious. You can’t bring a killer whale here without making headlines. Ask anyone at SeaWorld.”

“Are you saying you don’t think we should take him? ”

“I’m saying you have to be prepared for whatever is slung at you. If you’re okay with that, I think it’s great.”

Truman laced his fingers together, regarding her thought- fully. “This man Gabriel Jump thinks the whale’s only got six months to a year, at the longest, if he stays where he is. I wish I didn’t know that, but I do. Ivy’s promised to pay for everything, if necessary. I’ve got Gabriel’s commitment to work with us for at least the first year. Would you be willing to come back to the zoo and work with him? It means Marla will have to find a new manager.” Marla was the owner of Woof!

“Honey, I don’t have any marine mammal experience. I’d kill to work with him, but I’ll be more of a liability than an asset, at least in the beginning.”

“He says if you can work with elephants, you can work with killer whales.”

Neva pressed Truman’s arm across the desktop. “In that case, of course I’ll come back. You know there’s no one I’d rather share a frying pan with than you.” from Woof!, truman drove to the Oat Maiden, a cheerful garage sale of a café in downtown Bladenham. It had gouged and rippling old floorboards, silvering mirrors, mismatched chairs, and heavy wooden tables brightly painted with celestial, aquatic, safari, and Bicycle-playing-card motifs in primary colors. Sitting at a back table waiting for him was Samson Brown, a seventy-one-year-old black man, tall and trim, his lined face testifying to a life of hard work cheerfully under- taken, including forty-one years of caring for Hannah. Truman shook his hand before sitting down.

“So what’s this all about? ” said Sam. “You got yourself a whale now? ”

“Maybe. Yes. And he’s right up our alley,” Truman said wryly. “He’s sick, he’s needy, he’s in a terrible facility, and bringing him here might kill him. Oh, and once he’s here he’ll be alone, just like Hannah. On the other hand, he’ll certainly die if he’s left where he is now.”

“I don’t believe the good Lord ever meant for death to be the right choice if there’s an alternative,” said Sam. “You got a way to move him? ”

“Yes.”

“You got a place to put him once you move him? ”

“Yes.”

“Somebody got the know-how to take care of him once he’s here? ”

“Yes.”

“Anybody else want to do the same thing? ”

“Evidently not.”

“Sounds like you got your answer.”

Truman smiled. “It sure does. The reason I asked you to meet me is, I want to know whether you’d consider helping.”

“Be glad to help, but I don’t know a thing about killer whales. Come to that, I’ve never even seen one except on TV. Can’t swim, either.”

“I’m sure there are ways you can help that won’t involve heavy physical work. Or swimming. You could be more of an observer. And you could work strictly on an as-needed basis. The main thing is, I’d feel a lot better about all this if I knew we could tap into your experience.”

“You don’t even need to ask that. It’s yours anytime you want it.”

“Thank you,” Truman said. “From my heart.”

A young girl approached the table wiping her hands on her apron. “I’m so sorry. We’re backed up in the kitchen. Can I get you something? ”

“I’ll have whatever he’s having,” Truman said, indicating Sam’s glass of iced tea and pizza slice. “And tell your boss we said hi.” Johnson Johnson was another member of Hannah’s band of schemers, a man of infinite shyness, few words, and great artistry, who had also recently taken over the Oat Maiden. The round table at which they were sitting was a piece of his work, painted with bright animals from the African veldt and Serengeti Plain in a never-ending circle.

“Perfect,” said the girl and trotted away.

“He’s doing a good job with the place,” said Sam. “Who’d of thunk? Your mom and dad still helping him?”

“From time to time,” said Truman. “Mostly it’s Neva, though. She does the books, helps him order things if he gets too busy, generally keeps an eye on him.”

“She’s a good woman.”

“That she is,” Truman agreed. “That she is.” The waitress set Truman’s drink and a slice of pepperoni pizza in front of him and trotted off again. Truman absently rubbed his thumb through the condensation on the side of the glass. “You know, you said once that Max Biedelman thought the worst thing she’d ever done was to bring Hannah here. I keep thinking about that.”

“She didn’t feel bad about giving shug a home,” Sam cor- rected him. “What she felt bad about was not being able to give her another elephant. She gave her me—that’s the best she could do except for those couple of years right at the beginning with old Reyna.”

“So was that a mistake? ”

Sam shrugged, stirred his ice cubes around in his glass with a straw. “She always kept on forgetting shug would’ve probably died over there in Burma. Elephants have to earn their keep over there, and who’d have hired an elephant who was blind in one eye? And she was just a little bitty thing even after she was full-grown. Don’t get me wrong, it would’ve been nice if the girl would have had another elephant or two to play with, like she does now. But it’s apples and oranges—there wasn’t anything like that back then. I think Miz Biedelman gave her a fine life. Girl never wanted for anything, always had the best food, never had a sick day in her life except for her foot sores.” Truman frowned. “But she was alone here. This whale will be, too. Does that make it morally wrong to bring him here? ” “Never heard anybody say the right thing is the perfect thing.” “Max Biedelman—what do you think she’d do, if it were up to her? ”

Sam grinned. “Heck, that’s easy. She’d have already packed her bag to go down there and get him.”

On June third the board of directors of the Max L. Biedelman Zoo voted unanimously to bring the killer whale to its facility as soon as arrangements could be made. Three weeks later, Truman and Gabriel departed for Bogotá to transport him home.

That evening, Ivy and her older brother, Matthew Levy, sat at their respective dining room tables, Ivy on San Juan Island and Matthew in Bladenham, connected via Skype. Matthew, a retired state appellate court judge, had drawn up a legal agreement between Ivy and the zoo, even though he had told Ivy numerous times and in no uncertain terms that she was poised on the brink of a headlong dive into a yawning black fiscal hole. His had always been the Levy family’s voice of pragmatism, even when he was a boy, and over the past several weeks he had spent significant energy trying to dissuade both Ivy and Truman from undertaking such a high-risk, low-yield project. Then, when it became clear that he wouldn’t prevail, he crafted as ironclad an agreement as he could between Ivy and the zoo, protecting her assets as much as possible, not only in the event of the animal’s untimely demise, but also in the case of a flood of surplus revenue.

While Matthew reviewed the terms of the agreement, Ivy filled in the Os in the document’s immaculate title page with a leaky ballpoint pen and drifted away, wondering if she should burn a little sage to cast out any negative energy and attract positive energy to the whale transport scheduled for first thing the next morning.

“Are you listening? ” she was suddenly aware of Matthew asking her.

“Apparently not,” she said. “Honey, can’t we do this when Icome down there tomorrow? ”

“You should have done it a week ago. Until you and the zoo president sign this, you’re not protected,” Matthew said. “And neither is the zoo. You don’t seem to realize how vulnerable you are.”

Ivy sighed.

“Look, let’s just get through it. It won’t take long.”

And so he took her, page by numbingly tedious page, through an agreement between her and the Max L. Biedelman Zoo (henceforth referred to as THE ZOO) that laid out the conditions under which she (henceforth referred to as THE DONOR) would and would not finance the ongoing care and maintenance of the killer whale Viernes. Under the agreement, she would be the sole contributor to a trust, blah blah blah.

It wasn’t that Ivy didn’t care; as a rule she managed her significant fortune very attentively. Her grandfather Levy, the family patriarch during her childhood years, had always stressed that it was her duty to support the Needy, including food banks, homeless shelters, and women’s centers; the Greater Good, including the local police and fire departments; and Our Cultural Legacy, including the Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, and several local arts and historical organizations— all just so much bland philanthropic toast, though worthy. Ivy had dutifully supported all of them in generous, though reasonable, ways. This gesture, right now, was the one and only rash financial move she had ever made.

“And you understand that you will have a vote—not the controlling vote, but a vote—in decisions affecting the animal’s ultimate disposition,” Matthew was saying.

Ivy snapped to. “What does ‘ultimate disposition’ mean? ” “It means any decision affecting where the animal lives. In the event of his relocation to another facility, for example.” “Why on earth would he be moved to another facility? ”

“I don’t have the faintest idea,” said Matthew. “I’m just trying to cover all possible eventualities.”

“Oh.” Ivy subsided, nibbling at a cuticle. “You know, if I were you I’d have opened a vein years ago.”

He gave her an exasperated look. “Ivy, Truman has told me these things can become very political. We want to be sure you have a say, if and when it becomes necessary to move him.”

“Can I have the controlling say? ”

“I’ve looked into that. It would be illegal, given that the zoo is a municipal organization. Besides, giving you the controlling interest in a specific animal’s welfare would set a terrible precedent.”

“Well, I don’t see why,” Ivy said sullenly, aware that she was just being difficult. “It’s not like I want to have anything to do with the sloth or the dik-diks.”

“Nevertheless.” “Oh, all right.”

In fifteen minutes more, Matthew directed Ivy to sign there, there, there, there, and there, and the ship of Ivy’s impulsivity

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