The gorilla was sleeping.
When he woke up he’d find a clown in his cage. There would be no reasoning with Gargantua. He was not a reasonable gorilla. Maybe there are no reasonable gorillas. This was the only nonhuman one I had ever met, and if fate didn’t step very gently in and let me out, it was the only gorilla I would ever meet.
His keeper had told me that Gargantua was so mean that they had to throw live snakes into his cage just to get him to move out so they could clean the floors.
“But gorillas, they don’t eat people,” said the keeper, a knotty twig named Henry Yew. “That is a misnomer. They rends ’em apart or chomps ’em sometimes, but they don’t eat ’em.”
So when Gargantua woke up looking for some succulent head of cabbage to bend or chomp, he would find instead a private detective named Toby Peters. With the war in the Pacific going badly and reports of the Japanese bombing Los Angeles and Seattle, I’d just make a curiosity item in the entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times: FAMOUS CIRCUS GORILLA RIPS PRIVATE DETECTIVE. “Maybe the Times would wonder why I had been in his cage dressed as a clown. Maybe not.
