chapter twelve

And in the gloom of the office, Alice unlocked and then opened the frosted glass door and pushed it to find the files and dental x-rays of thousands of teeth spread about the floor looking like so many sheets of paper and thinly filmed dental x-rays spread across the floor of a dentists office not yet opened for the day. It was 7.30am and it would take hours, days to get these rearranged again. She whistled through her teeth a thin, disgusted whine. If anyone wanted their proper dental x-rays, they may not have them. An 86 year old man with dentures may be getting the records of a first tooth cleaning of a seven year old. Maybe he would be young again. Maybe this is the secret of immortality, Alice thought, teeth. Teeth were the soothsayers of age and experience. While you are young, they are there and then fall out when you gain a few years, baby teeth and then you get ‘wisdom’ teeth and then you eventually lose those adult teeth for prosthetics and then hey maybe they get ground down continually? where did it all end, Alice didn’t know, but she knew that she had a hell of a mess to deal with. The thin films slipped through her hands. Damn and not even any coffee brewing, she thought miserably. She scooped a huge stack of x-rays into her arms and deposited them onto her desk. The coffee had to be started or she would never be able to face the day. But something drew her attention away from the promise of light and sweet. She walked to the front door and stooped to pick up an errant x-ray. All the others had been near the filing cabinets, but this one had strayed from its brothers, maybe in someones arms. Damn kids, she thought, they’ll steal just about anything for kicks nowadays. to think that she would be re-filing all of this mess was one thing, but another thing entirely to believe that someone had made off with a pile of x-rays. Why Doctor Christos would had have to subject everyone to more blind rays while weighted beneath the ole lead apron. She lifted this one and absent-mindedly looked at it through the sun that was filtering through the still closed blinds behind her desk. Henry G. Timamann. Oh yeah, she mused, that guy, that little man with the jet black hair and the stooped posture. 70 if a day, but had the healthiest teeth. Not one cavity and never a thought about Polident because they were all his. Wasn’t he due in soon for a cleaning and check up? Her clerical and office managing skills kicked into overdrive and her mind saw a mental time clock and scheduling list of the day’s patients and responsibilities. Yes, he was due in today. Today. Isn’t that funny?

chapter eleven

Major Majors had been sitting in his tiny office for the last hour realising how insignificant the human mind is when it came to brainstorming the required details and theories that were involved in combining seemingly random patterns and events into a coherent whole. Now, if x happens, that leads to y and z... but, if x happens and y doesn’t, call it x and a half, then y doesn’t necessarily lead to z, but it could come out on the other side as a, or even b, which may lead to c... or not. He was getting a headache just trying to make his mind pull the ole donkey cart at a donkey cart’s pace. It was impossible, but the supercomputers at NORAD and NOAA had put it into place with a 97% certainty that x would lead to a and then maybe jumping to g and then all the way to l or maybe back to z with a quick dropped by to just say hello to z again or maybe it would just stay put at a or b for the next hundred thousand years and that was something that the supercomputers couldn’t predict. His headache began to encircle the soft lines of furrows in his brow and he knew that he would have to begin staring at the oil paintingesque print hanging on his wall for some time before the self imposed meditation began to take effect and assuage the aches out. He could hear surf some thousand miles away as he sat and thought. The room seemed very empty and large.

chapter ten

Scrunched into the little Volkswagen, Mr. Black sat, surrounded by two lithesome, yet tired henchmen on either side of him. It was not exactly an evil genius’ wheels as they saw fit, but Mr. Black did and so it was to them to disprove it. And they did not want to. Mr. Black hurumphed. Damned Lisbon. It is not nearly so warm as they claim it to be in the Fodor’s guide in spring as he wished that it were. Lisbon passed by. The little black (of course) bug chugged through the streets. Old town. The streets were narrow and winding along the seacoast. Lights and fog. He was to meet the sea captain at the ports after midnight.
The alabaster angels gloomed in the night sky hanging onto the crests of buildings.
From here, Mr. Black could see the beginnings of the wharves, low hanging wooden buildings squatting in the dark. The smell of salt water in the air. They drove down a tiny cobbled street and could see the lights near the piers. Soon, the captain would have his report on his voyage out and come bearing good news. He hoped. Recuerdo Santocristo-Timex Sancristo was one of his best right hand henchmen, though Recuerdo was himself a lefty, which made him an anomaly and a good one at that for Mr. Black.
The sea hung in the air like a solid cape waved in front of a bull and Mr. Black tapped his driver on the shoulder.
“Faster.” He pointed a finger straight ahead. The driver nodded, half expecting a poison needle to strike him in the neck. You just never knew with these evil geniuses, he knew. Even a transparent plexiglas divider to come sliding, hissing up like a snake in a basket and sealing off Mr. Black and his two remaining henchmen in the back from the poison gas that would begin hissing, would not have been unexpected for this night.

chapter nine

Orville wandered. It was all that he wanted to do, transfixed by the garish displays of colours that were making him vaguely nauseous. He turned right, stepping through a stucco finished alleyway that led down a short flight of steps covered in sunshine and shade. From somewhere overhead a parrot squawked noisily and he could smell frying bananas. From behind him, a voice that sounded like a boy’s at first cleared its throat. He paused. What did that mean? He was preparing himself to lure this hitchhiker down a deep and dark alleyway and either disembowl him and throw his body in the nearest garbage can or just lose him when he started to run in those big galloping steps that he took when he made up his mind (and dignity) to run. But now the stranger was summoning him from behind a clenched fist held over mouth.
Ahuuurrm, ahem. Orville turned, slowly.
Standing behind him with a hand clenched in a fist against his lips, was a tiny man dressed in an equally tiny black suit and tie. The tiny man’s fist came down when he had finished his last throat clearer and found its companion now joined agreeably with the other in a tightly knit bundle over his crotch.
“Yes?” Orville asked. His hand made a quick, but determined dash for a pencil in the loose flapping pocket of his coat. ‘Possibly could use it in a pinch,’ he thought.
The sight of the little man in front of him was a little ridiculous, as if this were Gulliver’s room service attendant. The little man was dressed neatly. The passageway was comfortably cool. Was this a dream? Or had the little man come as an assassin?
“Can... I... help you?” Orville asked him, not knowing what else to say at this juncture. It was either kill or give directions time.
“Oh no,” the little man began, “ but it is more than about how I can help you.” He stopped.
Orville looked at him, waiting for him to go on and the silence became, well... more silent. Orville wanted to begin to turn, but didn’t trust himself to walk away just yet.
“So... what can you help...” he trailed off. Orville was not sure if what he was seeing in front of him were truly there. He heard a peal of a single bell from far away.
“With many a thing.” The little man had a fine and wispery French accent. It reminded Orville of lace curtains hanging in a southeastern Asian bedroom, slightly stale and unused, just dangling there.
“You have to remember... Monsieur...” and the little man looked up at him with those big blue eyes again that made Orville wince slightly enough to want to sneeze, “Monsieur... Orville (the short man made it sound like Hor-veel, which made him think uncomfortably that he had said ‘horrible...’) Newton (his middle name came out with that peculiar to the French accent tone of forced air clipped through the nose...interesting thought, maybe I should use that as an affectation) Leone (and his last name with impeccable precision...), you must remember this.” The little man rose a tiny pink finger into the air and drew a circle of air, “when the parrot flies upside down, you know that the rose is ready to be planted.”
“What rose?” Orville sat himself upon a cement stairway banner that went up to one of many tiny apartment doors on the second floor. He heard another bell. Bells began to ring in his head, some Xmas tune. First one bell and then a few more. They all chimed in to begin a lilting symphony of bells.
The tiny man wrinkled his nose. “The rose that you seek.”
Now Orville was entirely not sure of what he was hearing. He had been on this trail for so long.
“The rose?” He wanted the little man to explain it to him. If I cannot be sure of what I am looking for...? Then let this man, this boy? Was he even sure that it was a man and not some little mourner from a fugitive cemetery.
“Yes, the rose...” The little man stopped and looked at his wristwatch. He drew up the sleeve and pointed his hand to the right of Orville. Orville knew that he must be careful. So many gadgets hidden inside of a shirtsleeve or in a watch, oh yes. Hadn’t there been that one in Sydney where the silent (to human ears...) chime had summoned the pack of wild wombats, alighting on his arms and legs, all of their tiny but stout marsupial paws trying to climb the length of him and the heiress had nearly escaped back into the outback? So many things hid in tiny crevesses and behind the familiar.
When he had finished checking his watch the little man sighed heavily. “The rose that you seek is the secret...” he paused looking around him at the empty courtyard, Orville thought mainly for effect. He could have told him that there was nothing hiding in the shadows.
“The secret of immortality...” The little man looked at him as if to check that he understood.
Orville did not understand, but nodded anyways. “I see.”
“Do you?”
The little man sighed. “I myself have never understood it. Would you believe that?”
“No.”

Chapter Eight

And last, but not least, Orville knew that when he began to think outside of his body in third person as though he were a gigantic omniscient presence looking over the clouds at his body on the street below, he knew that then that meant that someone was following him.
At that moment in a land not that far away, at least in the same time zone, Thompsen was humping his way through the streets looking for the flower man, wondering, where in the hell is that flower guy gone? He had walked through street after street of Pago Pago and learned little more than maybe how to construct a rudimentary dugout canoe and that he really did think that the smell of coconut can be attractive coming from the right Polynesian women. But what he didn’t know was that that someone had been looking for him as well.
The man in a white panama hat tilted it at the passing of a large Samoan. The man stood under the shade of a large palm tree. The base of the tree was littered with several rinds of husky coconuts as though some giant sitting around watching Monday night football had peeled them like peanuts and discarded the shells nearby. He wore a blindingly white cloth suit and casually cracked his knuckles. A coconut fell from the palm splashed up a tiny whisp of the salty white sand that it fell into.
From beneath the broad shade of the palm, the man in the panama hat checked his wristwatch, carefully turning the button on the side two full clicks until it stopped with a final tight ratchet. He had been watching the man in the oily black trench coat wander the streets of Pago Pago for the better part of the morning and found that he had nothing better to think of him than, let him wait. Recuerdo Santocristo-Timex Sancristo had amused himself with the man in the black trenchcoat. Already the man in the trenchcoat had passed him while Recuerdo had sat at the tiny outdoor bar/cafe, twice in a public mens room and once, just for the hell of it, Recuerdo had bumped into Thompsen slightly while passing him outside the Hotel Pago Pago Carlton. He had brushed his shoulder and then bowed grandiosely with his outstretched palm gripping the panama. Excuuuseee me, he had said and Thompsen readjusted (he could tell this by a glint of metal and the all too obvious form of a submachine gun under his coat) his Thompsen and walked on.
Recuerdo looked at his watch again. It was nearly the afternoon and he would have to approach Thompsen soon and deliver into his hand the greatest piece of news that horticultury and gardeners and heck, the world had ever seen.