Stuffed by Brian M. Wiprud Read Free Book Online Page A

variety—I’ve been told they think the stuffed ones are sitting so still that they’re nesting on their turf. Never mind that they’re in a television studio and not on an ice floe. I lost one of my squad members (poor Sneezy, RIP) in just such a tragic incident two years before. The penguin squad is almost always rented as a set—nobody ever wants just one penguin, for some reason.
    This particular variety of penguin is not protected by CITES and is quite prolific along the Pacific coast of South America, though commercial fishing has put a serious dent in the Falkland Island populations. Estimates of breeding pairs is around 1,600,000. However, you do have to know your penguins to stay out of trouble, because the Magellanics can easily be confused with jackass penguins, from Africa, which are classified as “vulnerable” and thus protected. The jackasses (named so for their braylike utterances) have been decimated by habitat degradation at the hands of guano prospectors. The way you tell them apart is by the markings. The Magellanic has white brow markings that do not connect to the rest of the tux.
    I also had to pick up my zebra skins at the Expedition Club uptown, which I figured I could do on my way out to Astoria. (At least some of my zebra skins were out of the shop and thus spared.) You’d think they would have had enough of them lying around over there at the Expedition Club, but they needed a few extras as part of buffet table settings. I suspect that they preferred to have Richard Leakey and Robert Ballard spill wine and gravy on my pelts instead of theirs. So a light coating of Scotchgard goes on mine before I rent them out, and the tough stains come out with a dynamite little product called Furz-B-Clean. You’d be surprised how many people on the Upper East Side want to serve their cocktail weenies from a table cloaked in zebra skins. Better that than as a rug. Soak ’em in pinot noir, if you must, but nobody scuffs the hair off my skins with their boots. I don’t rent them as rugs, ever.
    I called the Elks and got a machine. So I rolled my penguins in bubble plastic and boxed them in foam peanuts. Appropriately, they looked like they were frozen in ice and up to their necks in snow. I had just grabbed my car keys when the phone rang—I hoped it was the Elks so I could save myself an extra trip.
    But it wasn’t the Elks. It was Pete Durban.
    “I heard” was all he said.
    “Word travels fast.”
    “Wanna talk about it?”
    “Not really. My penguins are waiting for me.”
    “You going out drinking with your penguins rather than me?”
    “Who said I was going out drinking?”
    “That’s what guys do when they feel sorry for themselves,” Pete said. “And believe me, I’m a much better listener than your seven dwarfs.”
    “Six. Remember the refrigerator commercial?”
    “Right.” Pete sighed. “Poor Sneezy. So, what say we get drunk and toast his memory?”
    “Can’t. Got business.”
    “A wet lunch, perhaps? One o’clock, the Mexican place?”
    “I’ll be there.”
     
    Pete’s a high-school dropout who literally ran away with the circus. Hard to believe that sort of thing has even happened in the last fifty years, but he apparently had a full beard at seventeen and they weren’t particular. He started on the lowest rung: cage cleaner. But like most people who really adore animals, cleaning up after them comes with the territory. That’s how he got close to the lions and mentored with the lion tamer, a man who had lost his own son in a car crash three years earlier. Pete stayed until his late twenties, when the circus went into receivership and threw everybody out of work. His mentor retired, but the bank hired Pete to care for the lions and find buyers. Well, to make a long story short, some of the buyers who came sniffing around weren’t exactly legitimate, and Pete helped the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the feds nab a chop shop, which in