“Whut's de difference?” asked V'lu.
As the public furor increased, so did the threats. Madame grew woozy and could no longer answer the phone. She would have her nose parked on the rim of Kudra's bottle, saying something such as, “You know, cher, I believe this to be a deceptively simple boof. A fine jasmine middle, a citrus top, and a single bottom. Oui, single. Three ingredients only. But, ooh-la-la, what could that bottom. .” And the phone would ring, and she'd turn woozy. V'lu would lift the receiver, and clear across the room Madame would hear the man. He had a voice like a biceps.
“Who dat say dat?” V'lu would inquire.
“The man who's gonna love lynching your black ass.” Click.
When Wiggs Dannyboy's most recent beet hit the floor upstairs, V'lu nearly fainted alongside Madame. Both were so convinced it was a firebomb that they actually smelled gasoline.
Madame was conditioned not to complain to the police. Eventually, however, she complained to the press. The press told everybody in Louisiana. And when it was through telling them, it told them again.
Meanwhile, the governor suggested to the mayor that it might be wise to move the hearing out of New Orleans, move it, say, to Baton Rouge. The mayor suspected the governor of wanting to bale a bit of political hay, but he didn't care. The mayor was scared of that hearing. He admitted to the governor that he was scared of demonstrations, scared of protests and violence. The governor could tell that the mayor was also scared of the bees.
Although the hearing was not scheduled to commence until after the holidays, the governor had Madame Devalier and V'lu Jackson moved to a motel near the capital. They had separate rooms and were guarded by state patrolmen around the clock. V'lu spent the days reading Edgar Allan Poe in French. Madame sniffed at the bottle and addressed Christmas cards. She addressed no less than three to Priscilla in Seattle, for as the holiday approached, she felt increasingly guilty about the bottle. “It is Pris's boof, too,” she said. Quoth, V'lu, “Nevermore.”
Priscilla, living close to the bone at the New Orleans Y, had her own guilt going. She wrote a long letter to Ricki, apologizing for having accused her falsely. She didn't post it, however. She decided she'd better first make sure Madame and V'lu had the bottle.
Once she took notice of the buzz about her, the contentious whirr, the apprehensive whisper, the unpredictable golden hum, the vibrating mantras of panic and revenge, once her ear focused on the buzz, and her brain examined its origins, variations, and ramifications, Priscilla quickly learned that Madame and V'lu were in Baton Rouge. The address of their motel was a secret, however. Incoming calls were forbidden, and inquiries were curtly discouraged. Resigned to a wait of several weeks, she settled in at the Y and began to look for part-time work as a waitress.
Naturally, she missed the dinner party at the Last Laugh Foundation. The party went on without her. A fresh group of scientists were introduced to Wolfgang Morgenstern, in the hope that this meeting would elevate the prestige of the foundation.
Dr. Morgenstern showed up at table so breathless from jumping that he could barely chew his lettuce.
Huxley Anne told everyone who'd listen about how she'd cleaned out the old greenhouse behind the mansion and was planning to cultivate flowers there: “My daddy's going to smuggle in rare jasmine plants from Jamaica, and I'm gonna be in charge of making them grow.” The biologists on either side of her raised their eyebrows. “Jasmine, all right,” whispered one to his wife. They'd heard the stories about Jamaican marijuana.
Dr. Dannyboy presided, consuming impressive quantities of wine and issuing periodic pronouncements, usually preceded by a knock on his eye patch with whatever inanimate object lay handy. “The most glarin' failure o' the intelligentsia in modern times has been its inability to take comedy seriously.” Things such as that.
At one point, Dannyboy announced, “Paris is yet another contribution o' the Irish. Look it up in your history books, gentlemen. A Celtic tribe called the Parisii founded the place some centuries before the birth of our Lord and Savior. 'Twas a gift from the Micks to the froggies to give them something to justify their arrogance.” Several guests were offended by this, but Marcel LeFever was amused, and fully intended to get a lot of mileage out of it when he returned to France.
In fact, Marcel and Wiggs hit it off famously. When a lonely (and horny) Priscilla telephoned Wiggs on Christmas Eve, Marcel was still there. “Your man is goin' to remain until after New Year's,” Wiggs informed her. “He's infected with perfume, he's its master and its slave. Perfume is beauty to Marcel, 'tis his glory, his opiate, his samadhi, his breakfast sausage as well as his midnight champagne. Oh, to feel about something as passionately yet coherently as your man feels about perfume! That, darlin', is the key to the piggybank o' life. How I wish I could speak to him directly about beets.”
Priscilla felt a pinch of jealousy. “But what about me?” she very nearly whined. Then she recalled the bottle, the ace she might yet play.
“Merry Xmas, Pris. If only I was there to put a little somethin' in your sock.”
“A big something,” corrected Priscilla, feeling sweaty and weak. “And 'tis in me pants you'd be puttin' it.” Her vulnerability to Wiggs was opening her up (as voluntary vulnerability often can) in unexpected ways.
“Ha ha. Indeed. And, say, have ye had a glimpse o' the bees?”
“Well, no, not personally. .”
But just then the swarm rounded the corner, flying in wedge formation, silhouetted against the sunset, screaming like a cutting tool, and a few paces ahead of it, running for his life, his beard and cap flapping wildly, his belly spilling feathers and his tin cup spilling coins, dashed Santa Claus.
The old pagan festival came and went. Neither Seattle nor New Orleans would consent to strike a seasonal pose. Seattle was mild and rainy and as green as Bing Crosby's royalties. New Orleans was mild and sunny and quite accustomed to stringing lights in banana trees.
Snows and ices decorated Concord, Massachusetts, you may be certain, but Alobar could spy no acre of greeting card tableau from his cell. He could see the famous Star of the East, however, and its gelid twinkle reminded him of his first Christmas, that commoner's winter in Aelfric when he learned, with some astonishment, that the face of an executed Eastern rabble-rouser had been carved in the pagan pumpkin.
Marcel and Wiggs sat before a yule log, in a room in which there was scant necessity for blaze, and night after night, in conversation after conversation, rebuilt “reality” from the ruins they'd left it in the night before. They slept late. Afternoons, they assisted Huxley Anne in the greenhouse, where the child was tending, with precocious expertise, an enlarging accumulation of exotic plants. Dr. Morgenstern jumped for something approximating joy.
Priscilla made the rounds of Mexican restaurants, but while there was no shortage in New Orleans of imperfect tacos, she failed to land a job. On New Year's Eve she got drunk and got laid. Upon that, it would be indiscreet to dwell, except to pass along the advice that before going home with a personage one has met in a French Quarter bar, one should make absolutely certain of their gender. Later, she was to refer to the episode, without bitterness, as “Ricki's revenge.”
Alobar boycotted the cell block Christmas party, preferring to sit alone in his cubicle and breathe, even though, thanks to his escalated aging, the sterile steel cubicle had begun to stink like a mouse nest or a potato bin.
The “season” crab-walked by in its emotional shoes, then it was over, it was January 2, the Western world blew its nose, took two aspirins, packed pagan ornaments and plaster mangers to the attic, and set about finding ways to finance the recent indulgences. Bing! The clock, after its celestial wobble, was back on mechanical time, and precise, or, at any rate, measurable, or at least, normal things could happen. Alobar was paroled from prison, the hearings got underway in Baton Rouge, Wiggs (with some help from Bunny LeFever) figured out Where We Are Going and why it smells the way it does, and Huxley Anne became the youngest member ever of the Puget Sound Orchid Society.