The Last Manly Man (15 page)

Jason nodded when she said this. He started taking notes.

“And what's the deal with the missing bonobos?” I asked.

About two years earlier, she said, a dozen bonobos disappeared, six male, six female. The bonobos move around a lot, the females in particular are peripatetic, so there was a chance they had migrated, or been slaughtered by poachers. But then she began to hear rumors that they had been abducted and smuggled out of Zaire. Subsequent investigation led her to believe they were somewhere in the New York area. That's when she contacted Dewey.

“How?” I asked.

“I got his name from a mutual friend, made contact through an Organization website, and then we exchanged encoded and anonymized E-mail,” she said. “He said he'd look into it. I didn't hear from him again until I received an encoded E-mail saying he was hot on the trail of the chimps and had been contacted by a scientist working with them. He suggested I might want to attend the women's conference in New York, where he would contact me. As I said, I heard from him the last time just before I left for New York last week, when he asked if I'd spoken with you or been contacted by you. I was waiting for Dewey to contact me. When he didn't, I got worried and remembered you. I called you.”

“I see,” I said. “Help me out with this. Why would someone steal a dozen bonobos? I mean, first of all, why would someone want a dozen horny chimps around all the time? Nothing personal.”

“I don't know why,” she said. “They're adorable, so at first I thought they might be part of the illegal pet trade.”

“Or some weird bestial porn or something.”

“But Dewey said no. They were being used in some experiment.”

“Well, why wouldn't someone just steal the ones at the San Diego or Cincinnati zoo, instead of going all the way to Africa?”

“These are endangered animals. They are well-guarded in San Diego, and if they disappeared, the media there would make a big stink about it, I'm sure.”

“It had to be expensive to smuggle out those bonobos. Why not just buy some lab monkeys?” I asked.

“I don't know, I just don't know,” she said, tearing up. “And the thing is, these were ‘my' bonobos. I knew them, they knew me. They let me observe them. They recognized me and smiled when they saw me. I gave them names. Want to see some pictures?”

She pulled out a packet of photographs of bonobo chimps in the lush Congo jungle, pointing out the ones who were missing by name. It was because she had given them all names, Binky, Popover, Ralph, Madonna (“she's a classic diva, this one,” she said), and so on, that made me tear up too.

“So you see, I want to publicize the Diogenes Project, but not the missing bonobos. We don't want whoever has them to panic in the face of a media frenzy and kill them. We want to find them.”

“I understand,” I said. “I noticed Alana DeWitt was at the fund-raiser. Do you know her?”

“Yes, she's one of our biggest contributors,” Keyes said. “The female domination appeals to her.”

“I bet it does.”

“She's not crazy about the sexual aspect,” Keyes said.

“No, she's anti-sex. I interviewed her last week, coincidentally. Does she know about the missing bonobos?”

“Yes, I told her, in confidence. I know you'll fall in love with the bonobos too.”

“I already have,” I said. “Have you heard about the female monkey who took over her community in the Tokyo Zoo? She's not a bonobo.”

“Well, word is spreading. Or monkeys are evolving,” she said, and laughed through her tears. “We have observed more and more dominant females in other chimpanzee communities that have traditionally been run by chest-thumper males. Perhaps the apes are evolving a little faster than we are.”

Whenever people use lower animal behavior as a parallel to human behavior, you have to look at the animals and wonder when was the last time one of them wrote a symphony, baked a pie, or built a stereo cabinet? When do they get any work done if they have sex eight times a day? Would they still have so much sex if they had bills to pay, or if they had other entertainment options, like television or video games? Or cigarettes? In lab tests, primates choose cigarettes over sex most of the time.

I put these questions to her, and she laughed again.

“The male-dominated chest thumpers aren't building pyramids or writing epic poems either. They're too busy fighting and killing each other,” she said. “Though there are chimps and gorillas who paint, and their artwork has been exhibited.”

“Do you think they would have so much sex if they were able to talk to each other?” Jason asked, looking up from his notebook. When his eyes met her eyes, he blushed and looked back down slightly.

“Sexual interaction seems to replace other forms of communication for them,” he continued.

“They communicate with sounds, gestures, smells, and with sex itself.… They love to make funny faces. And they laugh,” Keyes said.

“I thought man was the only animal that really laughed,” I said.

“Nature is full of surprises,” she said.

It was a lovely vision, her bonobo utopia.

I hated to cast a shadow over it. “You know, your life could very well be in danger. You should maybe lie low,” I said.

“But I have to be high-profile here. I need to raise money to save my babies,” she said. “I'm planning on using reverse psychology. Go about my business at the conference, happy-go-lucky, as if nothing is wrong. Not be alone if I can help it. Keep talking about how many of my endangered bonobos have vanished or been killed by civil war and environmental destruction. That way, it looks to the guilty parties like I am aware of the missing bonobos but blame other forces for it. See?”

“Yes,” I said. “That'll work, hopefully.”

We exchanged all pertinent numbers when she dropped Jason and me off at the Jackson Broadcasting Building.

“You like her,” I sang to Jason.

“Shut up,” he said.

“Nothing wrong with that,” I said. “She's older than you, not as old as me, but still …”

“Don't say anything to her about it!”

“I won't.”

After I cleared Jason through security, signed in as Theda Bara, I led him the long way to the Special Reports offices, avoiding the newsroom where my style of dress was sure to draw comments. My friend Louis Levin was on the sked as the supervising producer, and Louis would be sure to stop me, and talk to Jason, and maybe get suspicious. This was bad because, even though Louis was my friend, he also ran the rumor file, Radio Free Babylon, which floated around our companywide computer system.

“Don't move any furniture in there,” I said, waving Jason into Special Reports. “Do you want some coffee or something?”

“Do you have herbal tea?” he asked.

“I think so. There's the kitchenette. Help yourself. I'll be in that office there, cuing up some tapes.”

Jason came into my office with a cup of herbal tea for me, a thoughtful gesture, though I'd just as soon drink a cup of boiled peat moss.

“Let's go over the suspects again,” Jason said.

“Alana DeWitt, she has bucks, she's insane, and she's nasty. But according to Keyes she's a bonobo supporter. Dr. Budd Nukker. Know him?”

“No.”

“He's definitely into weird science, but geared toward longevity. I've heard of monkey glands being used before as youth potion, and sheep placentas and stuff. But these days, he hardly leaves his treadmill. Then we have Gill Morton. He has labs and they probably do or have done animal testing on their cleaning products.”

“Yes, they do,” Jason verified. “He has a pharmaceutical company.”

“Why would he have to employ a bunch of black sheep scientists? He has teams of legit scientists working for him.”

“Right, I see your point. So, what else do we have to do?” Jason asked.

“Mislead the Investigative Reports Unit. They've been sniffing around the Luc Bondir story. We start with them, then we mislead the rest of the news media, too, somehow. Once they get wind of this ‘man dead for fifteen years' business, they're sure to be on it like flies on manure.”

“I can help with that,” Jason said.

“How?”

“Send someone to them with a cooked-up story, lead them astray.”

“Investigative are gung ho on tobacco stories. Maybe you can lead them to believe Luc Bondir is connected to the tobacco industry.”

“Or the Cali Cartel,” Jason offered.

“Too dangerous. We don't want to get them killed. Tobacco is safer.”

“I can do that. I know some anti-tobacco people who can get me some legit-looking information,” Jason said.

“Let Solange and Reb harass tobacco lobbyists, keep them all out of worse trouble. Two birds, one stone,” I said, probably a bad choice of words with an animal rights nut. “Breast implants are good too—Solange has gone after them a lot. But be careful. Reb Ryan used to work in U.S. Army intelligence before he went into news, it's hard to slip anything by him. Unless you're wearing that dress and all tarted up the way you are. He's a raging heterosexual. He'd probably think you were a woman and fancy you.”

“We'll do tobacco with them, maybe use breast implants on a couple of other media outlets.”

“Misinformation is nothing new to you, huh? Have you done that before?” I asked, suspicious.

“Sometimes, to cover our tracks on an operation. Had to lead some mercenaries astray in South America recently, because they had a contract out on me.…”

“Were you people behind that mad cow beef hoax last year?”

“
No
!”

“You swear?”

“I swear. That was cruel. I know those guys though.…”

“The guys behind the mad cow beef hoax?”

“Yeah. They're not with the Organization. Why?”

“I'm the reporter who put that story on the air. It just about killed my career.”

“Oh. That explains a lot. Like, why you hate animal rights people.”

“I don't hate you. So you know those assholes behind that hoax, huh? You know where to find them?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I might need you to do me a favor if and when this bonobo business is resolved.”

“Did that hoax get you to stop eating beef?”

“No, I still eat it once in a while. I just don't eat ground beef,” I said.

“Why?”

“Two things, one involving a run-in I had with mobsters. Long story. That put me off burgers for a couple of months and then …”

“Then?”

“Well, have you noticed how few homeless there are in the city these days? Where did they go? Did they all suddenly get self-esteem, jobs, and apartments? Until I have answers, it seems wise to avoid all ground meat products. Call me paranoid …”

“I wouldn't call that paranoid,” Jason said.

“No,
you
wouldn't. Were you always a vegetarian animal lover?”

“I used to eat meat.”

“What made you stop?”

“In high school, I was dating a vegetarian and she got me into it.…”

“Oh yeah. That's how my Uncle Fred became a Mormon.”

“I met Dewey because of a girl too.”

Dewey and Jason had met freshman year at college because they were in love with the same girl, Marcia, who worked with PETA on campus. Jason joined PETA to get close to her. Dewey, it turned out, had done the same thing. Neither of them got Marcia, but Dewey and Jason became fast friends.

“You've done a lot on account of girls.”

“I bet you've done a lot on account of boys,” he said.

“Touché,” I said. “Would you eat meat if it didn't involve killing an animal?”

“How—”

“Nanotechnology. It's amazing. One day they might send little tiny machines into your arteries to Roto-Rooter out the fat blocks, and microscopic machines could also be used to assemble beef molecules, for example, from raw materials like carbon and whatever, and then assemble the beef molecules into whole steaks.”

“It's playing God,” Jason said.

“What about cloning? It seems like that would be a boon to endangered species.…”

“We're against all genetic engineering.”

“What about the scientists who are trying to find a way to put the gene that makes a snake lose its skin into fur-bearing mammals. See? No more trapping? People could just follow the animals around picking up their molted pelts, and everyone could wear fur in winter without guilt.”

“Monster making, playing God,” Jason said.

The phone rang. It was Belinda, one of my call-girl connections. She knew a Charlotte who fit my description, a woman who worked with the Sterling Escort Service. When I called, Charlotte was out on a job. The dispatcher didn't want to take my number and was suspicious of my attempts to book her later that evening. This was a job for a man.

“Jason, I need you to do me a favor,” I said.

“I can't believe I'm doing this,” Jason said as we looked for a cab to take us to the Plaza Hotel to meet a hooker named Charlotte. I picked the Plaza because I had a date with Gus there later and this way, perhaps, I could make my date.

“What's the big deal, Jason?”

“I just hired a hooker. That's not a big deal with you?”

“Jason, I want to talk to this woman. She wouldn't talk to me, so I had to use you. It's not like you're going to have sex with her,” I said.

Ironically, the cabbie who took us over to the Plaza Hotel thought we were hookers. “You going to meet a john?” he said.

I'm old enough that I would probably be flattered by the idea that I could make a living on my back, if I wasn't a feminist.

Our eyes met briefly in the rearview mirror and then I looked away. Discretion being the better part of valor and all that, I didn't answer, while Jason giggled nervously.

“Didn't I see you on Channel Thirty-five?” the cabbie asked, looking at me. Channel 35 is a leased-access cable channel that shows escort agency commercials and sex-oriented programming like Al Goldstein's
Midnight Blue
talk show. (In addition to lots of porn, the superhumanly unsexy Goldstein does annual London theater reviews, in which he offers such erudite and memorable criticisms as “That actress was so ugly I wouldn't fuck her with
your
dick!”)