ave been a twin to Bivins admitted him,
pointing out a rambling white building that lay behind the stuccoed
mansion, and shut the gate. Oliver parked his truck before the
menagerie building--it had been a stable in the heyday of the
Prohibition-era gangster, when it had held horses or cases of
contraband as occasion demanded--and found Bivins waiting for him.

Bivins, looking upset and sullen in immaculate new whipcords, opened
the sliding doors without a word.

The vast inside of the remodeled stable was adequately lighted by
roof-windows and fluorescent bulbs, but seemed dark for the moment
after the glare of sun outside; there was a smell, familiar to every
circus-goer, of damp straw and animal dung, and a restless background
stir of purring and growling and pacing.

Oliver gaped when his eyes dilated enough to show him the real extent
of Mr. Furnay's menagerie holdings. At the north end of the building
two towering Indian elephants swayed on picket, munching hay and
shuffling monotonously on padded, ponderous feet. A roped-off
enclosure held half a dozen giraffes which nibbled in aristocratic
deprecation at feed-bins bracketed high on the walls; and beyond them
three disdainful camels lay on untidily folded legs, sneering glassily
at the world and at each other.

The east and west sides of the building were lined with rank after
rank of cages holding a staggering miscellany of predators:
great-maned lions with their sleek green-eyed mistresses; restless
tigers undulating their stripes back and forth and grinning in sly,
tusky boredom; chattering monkeys and chimpanzees; leopards and
cheetahs and a pair of surly black jaguars whose claw-scored hides
indicated either a recent difference of opinion or a burst of conjugal
affection.

The south end of the vast room had been recently partitioned off, with
a single heavy door breaking the new wall at its center. On either
side of this door the bears held sway: shaggy grizzlies, black bears,
cinnamon and brown; spectacled Andeans and sleek white polars padding
silently on tufted feet.

The sick bear sulked in a cage to himself, humped in an oddly doglike
pose with his great head hanging disconsolately.

Oliver sized up the situation, casting back to past reading for the
proper procedure.

"I'll need a squeeze-cage and a couple of cage boys to help immobilize
the brute," he said. "Will you--"

He was startled, in turning, to find that Bivins had not accompanied