Upon learning of Alobar's release, Wiggs and Marcel jetted to Boston to greet him. Over bowls of borscht that resembled the steaming blood of Beowulf's monster, Alobar consented to accompany them back to the Last Laugh Foundation.
“He almost looks a thousand,” Wiggs said to Priscilla over the wire that night. “He's as wrinkled now as a lemon-suckin' prune, his hair has gone white, his torso has shrunk, and he walks stooped over like a dentist. Ah, but he's got the spirit still, and he claims he can recover his youth if he cares to. I've asked him in private if he won't pass the beet to Marcel, let him in on the K23 and all. He's thinkin' it over.”
Again, Priscilla felt an inflation of the green balloon. Striving to conceal her resentment and insecurity, she said, “Wiggs, remember that I said I was going to have a surprise for you? Well, the surprise is for Alobar, too. It's a great big surprise, and it will mean even more to Alobar than to you. It's not quite ready yet, but I think he should see it before he makes any major decisions.”
“Sure and that sounds swell tome, little darlin'. Maybe I'll be bringin' him to New Orleans in a week or two. Marcel is headin' there himself. To see V'lu. They've stayed in touch, and it would seem your man is bloody moo-eyed over her.”
“Ha ha,” said Pris, thinking all the while, I wish you were bloody moo-eyed over me.
The hearings in Baton Rouge lasted ten days. Hardly a session passed in which the two suspended policemen did not protest that the jasmine bouquet that the late Mr. Pajama pointed in their direction could have concealed a gun.
“Yes, it could,” the panel chairman finally agreed. “And the blind man's cane could hide a sword, and the wife's chicken and dumplings could be laced with razor blades, and the lunch boxes of school children could be ticking with bombs.”
It was the panel's recommendation that the cops stand trial, although as a compromise, they would be charged not with murder but manslaughter. When news of the compromise reached New Orleans, it did not exactly turn the Mississippi River into diet soda.
Roosters were heard to squawk at midnight in Central City storefronts.
A cross was burned in front of Parfumerie Devalier, blackening its show window and charring its door.
The bees, which except for a daily fly-by of the Times-Picayune offices had been little seen of late, attacked in a single afternoon six policemen, five politicians, four whiplash lawyers, three used-car salesmen, and two fast-talking disc jockeys — and put the fear of Beelzebub the Bug God into an agnostic from Dallas.
It was decided by the court that the trial should be conducted in Baton Rouge. The judge scheduled it for the middle of February. Concerned by the cross-burning, he ruled that Madame Devalier and V'lu Jackson be kept in protective custody until after the trial.
With difficulty, Priscilla resigned herself to a wait. Yet she did not stand still. Having exhausted the Mexican restaurants of New Orleans as a potential source of gainful employment, she suddenly spun on her dais of habit and set off in a relatively new direction. Abandoning her long-standing obsession to the same fate as the cottage cheese she'd left in her refrigerator in Seattle, she accepted a job in a coffeehouse near Tulane University, where the clientele played chess, wrote poetry, and debated matters of cosmic import (subjects forbidden to “mature” intellectuals unless they first sign an oath to be dry and dispassionate). Inclined to insert her own opinions, especially when a discussion broached issues of life and death, Priscilla rapidly revived her reputation as a genius waitress. For example, she dazzled a party of students one evening by declaring, “To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being."Next thing you know, I'll be drumming on my eyelid with an espresso spoon, she thought.
And she almost believed it.
Since the spirit of Wiggs Dannyboy was upon her, and since Wiggs contended that longing for the future was as antilife as dwelling in the past ("nostalgia and hope stand equally in the way of authentic experience"), Priscilla decided that she must de-emphasize the role in her life of the perfume bottle and its promise of future financial bliss. She refused, however, to relegate her ambition for wealth to the back of the fridge where she'd shoved the allegedly perfect taco. After all, it was Wiggs who once said, “I love the rich.”
Actually, his statement in its entirety was, “The rich are the most discriminated-against minority in the world. Openly or covertly, everybody hates the rich because, openly or covertly, everybody envies the rich. Me, I love the rich. Somebody has to love them. Sure, a lot o' rich people are assholes, but believe me, a lot o' poor people are assholes, too, and an asshole with money can at least pay for his own drinks.”
Priscilla was forced to admit that she missed such pronouncements. The radium-tongued rascal has contaminated me, she thought.
The radium-tongued rascal who had contaminated her, the windy cyclops who had brought both tornado and calm, fog and clear sky into her life, the defrocked anthropologist whom everybody, including Priscilla, suspected of having a bit too much fun, was on a collision course with death and tragedy.
Disaster struck while he was high above the world and its cares, relaxing aboard a Boeing 747 in the company of Marcel LeFever and King Alobar. Sometime during that flight, as the fields and peaks soaked up sweet darkness beneath them, the crowd outside the Last Laugh Foundation in Seattle went mad.
Somebody had supplied beer, cases of it, and many in the crowd had lost their reason in it. About seven o'clock, as much of Seattle was finishing its dinner, a dense, hot, rustic odor swept through the street, and as if it had one mind, one nose, the crowd spontaneously panicked. Something snapped in it, and it rushed the gate, tearing it from its hinges and throwing the guards aside.
Disturbed and anxious, pursued by the smell, the people ripped loose the fairy door knocker and streamed into the mansion, where they raced from room to room, looking for the divine magic that had been denied them. And when they found nothing — no gurgling test tubes or sparking coils, no vials of purple elixirs or leatherbound books bursting with esoteric information, no files, even, that they might plunder; when they found merely a posh modern residence lacking so much as a hint of scientific activity and occupied only by a red-faced man who'd been skipping and leaping about in a bizarre dance, and a young girl playing with potted plants, then they truly panicked.
They ravaged the furnishings, smashing chairs, coffeetables and lamps, defiling the white immortalist walls, hurling Escher prints through stained-glass windows. As mirrors shattered and food flew, several in the midst passed into further frenzy, went beyond the hot madness of disappointment and longing into the cold madness of fear and loathing, and seizing Papuan war clubs from above the fireplace, they bashed the skulls of Wolfgang Morgenstern and Huxley Anne Dannyboy.