Maybe thinking is an exaggeration. I didn’t really have an idea. All I had was an itch—a tiny burr of coincidence that had caught in a wrinkle of my cortex. It didn’t amount to much, but I thought I might as well worry it a while, having nothing else on hand or in mind. What I thought I would do specifically was go back and see Faith Salem again. And I would go, if I could arrange it, when Faith and the sun were on the terrace. She had said to call ahead of time, and so I lowered my feet and reached for the phone, and that’s when I saw the gorilla. He was a handsome gorilla in a Brooks Brothers suit, but a gorilla just the same. There’s something about the breed that you can’t miss. They smell all right, and they look all right, and there’s nothing you can isolate ordinarily as a unique physical characteristic that identifies one of them definitely as a gorilla rather than as a broker or a rich plumber. But they seem to have a chronic quality of deadliness that a broker or a plumber would have only infrequently—in special circumstances, if ever.
