“Sometimes I almost think she understands. Honestly, Dipsy, I do hate to leave you, but you're going to have a very superior keeper taking care of you; he just came from the reptile house at Babylon with the finest credentials.”
A little old man dressed in the blue uniform of the zoo attendants shuffled creakily into my cage, his eyes on the ground. “You'll take good care of Dipsy, won't you, Sol?”
“Yessiree, Mr. Halbfranzband,” Sol said in a cracked voice, “I sure will. You just leave her to me; I'll treat her right.”
I snorted, but there was something . . . something . . .
Even after Manfred had left my cage, I still had the peculiar sensation that came to me whenever a prince was in the immediate vicinity.
I looked at Sol. Sol looked at me. There was something terribly familiar in those bloodshot gray eyes. “Prince Suleiman!” I exclaimed. “C’est toi!”
“See, I told you,” he cackled. “Made myself immortal so I could stay and gloat over you.”
“You’ve certainly come down in the world,” I observed. “Whatever happened to your Oriental riches?”
“Spent a lot on those two spells; they were both expensive ones,” he explained. “Finally had to trade in my carpet. And then prices went up so during the last nine centuries I couldn’t afford other transportation to go to Scotland for the gloating season.”
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ve been working at various zoos off and on for over a hundred years, ever since I lost my last shred of magic power. Knew you’d turn up at one some day so's I could resume gloating.”
“By the way,” I said, “I may have been misinformed, but I had understood that Babylon was kaputt.”
“That’s Babylon, Babylonia,” he told me. “I worked for the zoo in Babylon, Suffolk County, Long Island.”
I looked him over critically. “You haven’t kept yourself in very good condition. You look more like a thousand than only nine hundred and fifty-two years.”
“Forgot to sign up for perpetual youth along with immortality. Ah, if only, when I was a student, I had paid more attention to the classics and less to Hermes Trismegistus,” he sighed, “this would never have happened.”
I had a smashing idea. “Listen, Suleiman,” I burbled, “you'll always be a prince, come what may. And in 1957 I can afford to be broad-minded; after all, what is a goose girl in the family tree compared to what current royalty
