The opening of Peninsula Zoo’s new administration wing went off without a hitch. The only black spot CEO Gloria Farnham could find, was the guests had brought their children, who swooped like magpies on the expensive Japanese finger food.

The new building was made entirely of glass, using the latest European designs. In the heat of the day, the glass tinted while acting as solar panels. Gloria beamed for the TV cameras as the chief architect, Roland Prouse, bragged that the $36 million construction was the ‘cherry on top’ of his career. The ‘Glass Menagerie’, as the staff now affectionately called it, stood at the heart of the zoo. The primate enclosure stood to the left and the big cats lay to the right.

The open plan office design was the brain child of Gloria’s predecessor, Dr Peter Major, who only in his late 40s, retired late last year. He had a very public breakdown and had to be ‘detained’ by security. But all that was a memory as the champagne flowed and the laughter got shrill.

Gloria thought it unfortunate that the animal keepers couldn’t attend. The head keeper, Alexander Beavis, made his apologies on behalf of his staff as they had to move Bertha, a four metre boa constrictor, from her cage for surgery on Monday. An over enthusiastic child had thrown the snake a small Frisbee, which had lodged in its throat.

“We’re not sure where Bertha’s throat ends and where her stomach starts,” smiled Alexander. Gloria smiled and gave a half-hearted chuckle. Some men could talk easily with women. Alexander wasn’t one of them.

Lady Harriet Bolingbrook arrived dressed in lavender pants with matching jacket, set off by a double strand of Mikimoto pearls. Her grey hair was pulled back tight in a bun. Although in her mid 70s, she still carried the poise of a great beauty. Gloria filled Lady Bolingbrook’s champagne glass with Krug, rolling the bottle on the rim of the glass. Something she remembered as a teenager waiting on tables. Now it looked affected.

While Gloria might be the CEO of Peninsula Zoo, Lady Harriet was the power behind the throne. Her husband was the Chairman of the Board and her zoo volunteers, consisting of well-to-do older women, had raised $1 million dollars towards the new building.

“The weather Gods have been kind to us, Gloria, don’t you think?” Lady Harriet said. “A beautiful sunny day in October.”

It was Gloria’s idea to launch the new office block late in the season. Lady Harriet made no secret of her disapproval. Gloria tried to be gracious and magnanimous.

“But the real winner of the day goes to the catering company you recommended. The Japanese food is a lay down mesire.”

Lady Harriet smiled in to her champagne glass. Gloria was always saying things like ‘lay down mesire’ or ‘force majure’ without really understanding what they meant. In another person, striving for effect, it might have been endearing. In Gloria, it was irritating.

Gloria had not been Lady Harriet’s first choice for CEO. She told her husband that her background as the director of a health NGO made her totally unsuitable.

“She’s soft, Kenneth. She’ll buckle under pressure,” as they sat in the limousine on the way to the ballet. Kenneth stared out the window and lip-synced his wife’s closing remark, “you mark my words.”

Six months after Gloria started, revenue slumped by nine percent and expenditure rose by a staggering 17 per cent. Gloria was in the invidious position of not being able to blame her predecessor, who was languishing in a mental hospital, nor did she have a clear idea what to do.

She sacked two casual staff who helped disabled people around the zoo and the upgrade of the primate enclosure was put off until the following year. The staff Christmas party was moved from Hilton Hotel to the Glass Menagerie.

The primal response from men when Trixie Kensit walked past in a short skirt and summer blouse with two top buttons undone, was obvious. The director of marketing had long tanned legs, jet-black hair and wore a silver pendant, which lay cosseted between pert breasts. Her perfume had the opposite effect on the animals. They would chatter, trumpet, stampede and roar as she walked past. Their olfactory senses screamed ‘fear’.

Her affair with the director of finance, Randall Jennings, was on the quiet and as such, was public knowledge. They could be seen walking side by side past the bird enclosures most lunchtimes, as the birds screamed and fled to the back of their cages. Randall’s fantasy of having sex with Trixie on Gloria’s desk in the dead of night, as the animals watched through the glass, initially appalled her. Then, upon reflection, she found a trickle of erotic possibility, which widened in to a dead-set certainty as they stood by the tigers.

Randall knew that it was wrong to keep shuttling money between the zoo’s expenditure streams but neither Gloria nor his wife would ever find out and besides, keeping Trixie wined, dined and beddable, was almost an educational deduction.

Gloria had moved the Monday morning administration staff meeting to informal drinks on a Friday afternoon but most people preferred to go home. So, Friday drinks were cancelled and the Monday morning staff meeting was reinstituted. 12 people sat around a small circular table, which had been designed for six. The staff took notes on tablets perched on their laps.

The weak easterly sun filled the glass office as Gloria clapped her hands for silence. She praised Trixie for hiring a professional event management company to run the launch. Then she castigated two junior administrators for taking personal leave on the big day. Cynthia Aronson raised her hand and said her computer wasn’t connected to the network. The others nodded in agreement.

“There are bound to be hiccups folks,” Gloria said, “but let’s all pull together as a team and have some patience, shall we?”

She looked down at the 18-point agenda and was about to start on point one – the creation of a staff roster to clean the kitchen – when out of the corner of her eye, she saw the zoo’s surgeon, Dr Karl Kirkgaard, in a heated and animated discussion with Alexander Beavis outside the animal hospital.

She arrived just as Alexander was poking Dr Kirkgaard in the chest and accusing him of murder. A large hessian bag with Bertha’s head poking out, lay at his feet.

“Do you k-k-know what he’s done?” Beaver yelled, pointing at Kirkgaard. “He’s killed Bertha. A simple bloody incision and he botched it. A TV cooking show host could have done a better job. This is the fifth animal he has killed this year.”

Gloria put her hand gently on Alexander’s chest just as she’d been taught by workplace psychologists in her last job.

“I hear what you’re saying Alexander. Karl, what happened?”

Karl ran his fingers through his grey locks and even greyer beard and in a maritime voice used to giving commands, said that unless she removed Alexander from his sight, he’d punch his lights out. A month before, Gloria severely reprimand one of Karl’s staff for leaving the door of the bear cage unlocked. The young chap looked stoned. Karl had no control over his staff and was a liability.

Three male great apes stood on their hind legs and stared at Bertha lying in the hessian bag. Last month they had seen one of their own suffer the same fate. Kuto, a three-week old female had died of an infection after undergoing a routine inoculation. A female Bengal tiger died of a caesarian section but her cubs had lived. The apes turned their backs on the humans and practiced attack charges through the pampas grass.

Gloria shooed Karl back towards the animal hospital and told Alexander she would see him this afternoon. The men departed staring at each other like gunslingers. Gloria walked slowly back to the office and dismissed the Monday morning meeting. She looked through the window wall at the big cats staring at her. How was she ever going to afford another boa constrictor?

Gloria signed off on Trixie’s idea to stop buying icecream for the kiosk from a local ice cream maker and to purchase it from an interstate supplier. Randall calculated the zoo might save upwards of $10,000 a year. Two days later the local TV media set up outside Trixie’s office and pointed their lens at her through the glass.

In her haste to save the zoo money and replace the animals that Dr Kirkgaard had killed, she had over looked the fact that the local supplier ‘Sticky Fingers Icecream’ didn’t use pine oil derived from pine forests in Indonesia, which, according to the zoo’s vocal volunteers, was depriving the orangutans of their native habitat.

Lady Harriet watched Gloria’s shambolic explanation on the TV news that night. She leaned over to her husband – who was deep in thought about debenture stock – and whispered “mark my words.” Gloria Farnham was living on borrowed time.

Dr Kirkgaard felt bad about Bertha. His hands weren’t as steady as they once were and he had trouble seeing objects up close. He couldn’t chuck the job in as there was the holiday house to pay off and he’d racked up some serious credit card debt over the last couple of years. His wife had also booked their yearly cruise down any one of half a dozen expensive rivers in France, Austria or Germany.

He opened the safe where they kept the animal tranquiliser and tapped out a line of white powder, which he cut up with one of his maxed-out credit cards. He rolled up a $50 note and 30 seconds later, the world took on a rosy hue.

The deputation of large animal sponsors stormed out of Gloria’s office. They would have slammed the door behind them but it hadn’t been fitted yet. They were some of the biggest corporate names in town and for the last two years, had conducted a relentless campaign against the small animal sponsors – who were mainly small businesses and families – for more space for their animals.

Francine Peckham told Gloria that large animal sponsorship could not be guaranteed in the next financial year, unless the elephant and hippo enclosures were doubled in size. The big end of town wanted to see value for their money. They wanted more acreage. Gloria told them of her plan to turn Peninsular Zoo in to an Asian zoo, with predominantly Asian animals, as part of her plan to seamlessly merge, symbolically at least, with the Asian economies. The large animal sponsors conferenced this for a minute. They could see the economic value in the proposition until a terrible thought popped in to Francine’s ovoid head.

“What about the elephants?” Francine said.

“The Indian elephants would stay. The African animals would all be moved to the Zoo’s desert park 300 miles away,” Gloria said. “Indeed, the scrub is inimical of the arid lands of their homelands.”

“What about the tigers and lions?”

“Well, only Asian animals would reside on the city campus. The rest would be rehoused,” Gloria said.

“Homelands? Campus? Rehoused? What the hell are you talking about?” Francine said.

The conversation degenerated in to tit-for-tat mudslinging, which went on for 5 minutes, until Gloria made for where her office door should have been and pointed to the exit.

“Thanks for coming.”

Gloria took a deep breath and walked over to the glass wall and looked out at the big cat compound. The large male Bengal tiger, Rajah, was staring at her. Its body was completely motionless, as if it had spotted its prey.

Gloria’s phone rang and her stomach dropped as she saw Lady Harriet’s number come up.

“Good morning Gloria, I hope I have not disturbed you but I just took a call from Francine, who was most upset. Last week I got a call from a couple of my volunteers who said there was no workspace available for them. I’m sure it’s a storm in a teacup. Establishment problems and all that. But I was wondering whether you would be free for a chat with myself and Kenneth next week?”

“Of course.”

“Good. I will get back to you with the time and day. Thank you, Gloria.”

“Thank you, Lady Harriet. I’ll look forward to it.”

She made a mental note to look at the online job boards over the weekend. She finished writing a memo to staff that forbade men to take pictures of children in the petting zoo as part of the zoo’s ‘stranger danger’ campaign. She turned off the light and left the office for the day.

The full moon poured light in to the Glass Menagerie as Randall swiped his entry card. The office looked ghostly and ethereal. The red lights of the computers looked like tiny fire flies. Perfect, he thought. He cleared the papers off Gloria’s glass desk, hid the infrared video camera on top of the glass bookcase where Trixie would not see it and poured himself a glass of expensive champagne.

Trixie saw Randall staring out the glass wall at the big cat enclosure. She was tempted to yell ‘BOO’ as she crept up behind him but the childish impulse was subsumed by more carnal thoughts. Randall poured her a glass of champagne. The monkeys chatted an alarm call and the birds flew to the top of their aviary. Trixie dropped her skirt to the floor and was going to take off her high heels but Randall stopped her.

“Leave them on,” he said.

Randall took off his clothes and folded them neatly on Gloria’s chair. He took Trixie’s hand and guided her on to the glass desk.

“I feel a bit funny about doing this,” she said. “How will I ever be able to look Gloria in the eye again?” she laughed.

“I have enough trouble looking her in the eye now,” Randall said. “But needs must when the devil drives – or something like that.”

“Come here little devil”

She wrapped her legs around his hips. She wondered if Randall would ever leave his wife. She wondered if she befriended Lady Harriet Bolingbrook, whether she might be considered CEO material. Trixie knew Gloria would go just as Peter Major had gone.

The glass desk was hard on her bum. She could feel Randall’s breath grow short which meant he wouldn’t be long, when out of the corner of her eye, she saw two of the red computer lights move in tandem. Then the smell of animal sweat and bad breath hit her. It wasn’t the scent of a sexually excited adult male. Randall was calling her name, ‘Trixie, oh Trixie’ when Rajah, crouched and leapt, sinking his teeth in to Randall’s neck, pulling him off her and dragging him to the floor, where he ripped his throat out.

Rajah’s roar reverberated throughout the glass building, across the zoo and two adjacent suburbs. Trixie lay in mortal terror as Rajah dragged Randall’s lifeless body across the floor and out the glass sliding door towards his cage.

She lay trembling on the desk, frozen in fear. She looked to the side and stared straight in to Rajah’s red eyes. He had returned. His face and snout were covered in blood. His eyes were dead and fixed. Rajah put his face against her throat, sniffed, sneezed and backed out of the office.

The police found Rajah sitting quietly in his cage with Randall’s body neatly stored like overhead baggage on the top ledge of his enclosure. Alexander was standing by the cage door holding the tranquilizer gun when Gloria arrived, surrounded by TV cameras and reporters yelling questions at her about a hidden camera. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Randall’s hysterical wife held back by police.

“We have a problem,” Alexander whispered to her.

“I bloody well know we have a problem….”

“No. Not that,” he nodded towards Randall’s lifeless body. He shook the gun in her face.

“There’s no more tranquilizer left. It’s all gone. I’m not planning to walk in there unless we have a very tranquilized tiger. It will take 24 hours to get more flown in. What should we do?”

Gloria walked to Alexander’s office, unlocked the weapons cabinet and loaded the shotgun. When needs must, she thought to herself. The early morning sun flooded the office and in the distance, she could hear ibis.