EXCERPT FROM WITHOUT A HERO:

The way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as there is such and such an animal.
--Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa  

        You could shoot anything you wanted, for a price, even the elephant, but Bernard tended to discourage the practice.  It made an awful mess, for one thing, and when all was said and done it was the big animals--the elephant, the rhino, the water buff and giraffe--that gave the place its credibility, not to mention ambiance.  They weren't exactly easy to come by, either.  He still regretted the time he'd let the kid from the heavy-metal band pot one of the giraffes--even though he'd taken a cool twelve thousand dollars to the bank on that one.  And then there was the idiot from MGM who opened up on a herd of zebra and managed to decapitate two ostriches and lame the Abyssinian ass in the process.  Well, it came with the territory, he supposed, and it wasn't as if he didn't carry enough insurance on the big stuff to buy out half the L.A. Zoo if he had to.  He was just lucky nobody had shot himself in the foot yet.  Or the head.  Of course, he was insured for that, too.
        Bernard Puff pushed himself up from the big mahogany table and flung the dregs of his coffee down the drain.  He wasn't exactly overwrought, but he was edgy, his stomach sour and clenched round the impermeable lump of his breakfast cruller, his hands afflicted with the little starts and tremors of the coffee shakes.  He lit a cigarette to calm himself and gazed out the kitchen window on the dromedary pen, where one of the moth-eaten Arabians was methodically peeling the bark from an elm tree.  He looked  at the thing in amazement, as if he'd never seen it before--the flexible lip and stupid eyes, the dully working jaw--and made a mental note to offer a special on camels.  The cigarette tasted like tin, like death.  Somewhere a catbird began to call out in its harsh mewling tones.
        The new people were due any minute now, and the prospect of new people always set him off--there were just too many things that could go wrong.  Half of them didn't know one end of a rifle from the other, they expected brunch at noon and a massage an hour later, and they bitched about everything, from the heat to the flies to the roaring of the lions at night.  Worse: they didn't seem to know what to make of him, the men regarding him as a subspecies of the blue-collar buddy, regaling him with a nonstop barrage of lickerish grins, dirty jokes and fractured grammar, and the women treating him like a cross between a mâitre d' and a water carrier.  Dudes and greenhorns, all of them.  Parvenus.  Moneygrubbers.  The kind of people who wouldn't know class if it bit them.
        Savagely snubbing out the cigarette in the depths of the coffee mug, Bernard wheeled round on the balls of his feet and plunged through the swinging doors and out into the high dark hallway that gave onto the foyer.  It was stifling already, the overhead fans chopping uselessly at the dead air round his ears and the sweat prickling at his new-shaven jowls as he stomped down the hall, a big man in desert boots and khaki shorts, with too much belly and something overeager and graceless in his stride.  There was no one in the foyer and no one at the registration desk.  (Espinoza was out feeding the animals--Bernard could hear the hyenas whooping in the distance--and the new girl--what was her name?--hadn't made it to work on time yet.  Not once.)  The place seemed deserted, though he knew Orbalina would be making up the beds and Roland sneaking a drink somewhere--probably out behind the lion cages.
        For a long moment Bernard stood there in the foyer, framed against a bristling backdrop of kudu and oryx heads, as he checked out the reservation card for the tenth time that morning:

Mike and Nicole Bender
Bender Realty
15125 Ventura Blvd.
Encino, California

Real estate people.  Jesus.  He'd always preferred the movie crowd--or even the rock and rollers, with their spiked wristbands and pouf hairdos.  At least they were willing to buy into the illusion that Puff's African Game Ranch, situated on twenty-five hundred acres just outside Bakersfield, was the real thing--the Great Rift Valley, The Ngorongoro Crater, the Serengeti--but the real estate people saw every crack in the plaster.  And all they wanted to know was how much he'd paid for the place and was the land subdividable.
        He looked up into the yellow-toothed grin of the sable mounted on the wall behind him--the sable his father had taken in British East Africa back in the thirties--and let out a sigh.  Business was business, and in the long run it didn't matter a whit who perforated his lions and gazelles--just as long as they paid.  And they always paid, up front and in full.  Bernard saw to that.

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