Animal Appetite

called, training in aggression, still puts me off, but I’ve had to wonder who’d really been the fascist trainers?
    A lot of people know about Schutzhund. Brat still wasn’t impressed. I’d begun to make an impact, though. She backed up, took a seat in a battered wooden chair in front of a littered rolltop desk, and silently pointed a finger at an old green-upholstered armchair about three yards from the desk. I lowered myself obediently into the chair. Johann nuzzled my hands. I stroked his head-
    “Beautiful dog,” I said. Then I really, really showed off. “Sally Brand did a good job.” I’d recognized Sally Brand’s work the second I’d seen those tattoos on Brat’s arms. Sally does genuine portraits. She has a great eye for a likeness. A great needle, too.
    Brat finally cracked. For the first time, she looked like the little girl in the old photograph, the child who’d craned her neck to return her father’s grin.
    “I wrote an article about Sally Brand once,” I explained. “The one I’m doing about your father is mostly about his dog.”
    “Daddy wouldn’t have minded that,” Brat said. “Chip went everywhere with Daddy. Chip adored him. They adored each other.” Her own Johann was at her side now. His worshipful eyes studied her face. Her hand rested on his powerful neck.
    “I’m sorry I got Chip’s name wrong.”
    “That was Claudia. She probably forgot it. She hated him. My parents fought about Chip all the time. Him and everything else. Or as Claudia always said, ‘We don’t have fights! We discuss things.’ ” The abrupt shift from gruff silence to intimate family matters made me feel slightly disoriented. Before I could ask an innocuous question about Chip, Brat leaned forward and confided, “Money was the other thing. Daddy was very generous. He was the original soft touch. I remember one time, someone came to the door asking for a donation to something, Greenpeace, some clean-water group, something like that, and Daddy wrote a check for a hundred dollars. And Claudia sat Gareth and me down and said that if we couldn’t go back to school in the fall, it’d be all Daddy’s fault. Gareth started crying and screaming. He took Claudia’s side. He always did. It was a real scene.”
    “You both went to Avon Hill?” It’s one of the most prestigious private schools in Cambridge. My cousin Leah once worked at the Avon Hill Summer Program. She taught a course in conversational Latin. That about sums up Avon Hill. 1 hastened to tell Brat that I’d read her father’s obituary and that Avon Hill had been mentioned.
    “Yes. We both went there. I didn’t fit in too well. It
    wasn’t big on sports. But the music program was really good. That’s why my father wanted us there. It was just Claudia who was always threatening that we’d have to go to public school. Her other favorite theme was that the gas and electricity would be cut off, and we’d have to sit in the dark eating cold sandwiches.”
    “You lived in Cambridge?”
    “Yes. Not where Claudia does now, not on Francis Avenue. We had a house in North Cambridge, right off Mass. Ave. We lived on the first floor. A humble abode, but our own. Or the bank’s. But it was okay. The yard was fenced. Chip was one of those goldens that go crazy ^ for tennis balls. We had an old hammock out there, and I used to lie in the hammock and throw his ball for him. He loved water. You’d be in the shower, and he’d be trying to jump in with you. Claudia went wild over that one. One time in the summer, there was a heat wave, and we didn’t have air-conditioning, and Daddy and I bought a wading pool. And when Chip ever discovered that! He was a really fun dog. High energy. He jumped on people. Daddy never trained him, and at the time, I didn’t know how.”
    “Brat, when did your father get Chip?”
    “Four years before he died.” Her face looked pained. Her voice shifted to its little-girl pitch. “Four years be-fore Daddy died.”
    “Your mother told me that your father’s murder had been written up in a book.” When I’d spoken to Claudia about a photo and been given Brat’s number, I’d asked for the title of the book. Claudia had said she couldn’t remember. I told Brat so.
    “Bullshit. She has about a hundred copies of it. It’s called Mass. Mayhem.”
    “Do you happen to own it?”
    She shook her head. “I read it when it first came out. I threw it away. It was a piece of trash.”
    “Do you remember the