At the sight of her, there was an immediate and abrupt schism among the beet population of Mardi Gras. One beet peeled off to the left, heading for V'lu. A second beet whirled, if one could be said to whirl in so dense a congregation, and began to fight its way down Royal Street, in the direction of Parfumerie Devalier. The third beet, abandoned, stood its ground to await the passage of Pan.
Parfumerie Devalier was at the opposite end of Royal Street from the Canal intersection. It took the beet more than forty minutes to wade through the baboon boys, Dixieland high-steppers, and glittering transvestites who blocked its route to the shop. When it at last arrived, it found the shop unlocked. Madame Devalier was in the rear, seated upon the lime love seat, filling the space of two lovers, fingering rosary beads and nodding dreamily from the effects of the first hurricane drops she'd ingested in fifteen years.
The cop trial had ended on Friday with a verdict of guilty. Seizing the opportunity, the judge issued sentence on Saturday: two years, suspended. The judge was well aware that there could be no race riot during Mardi Gras. Potential participants would be too distracted, too dispersed, too happy, too drunk. The sentencing barely made news. Without fanfare, Madame and V'lu had returned on Sunday, in time to dust off their hundreds of perfume vials and attend the Bacchus parade.
Now, both under the influence of drops, V'lu had wandered off to view Pan, while Madame rested in the eye of the hurricane, hallucinating about Jesus, Wally Lester, a Mardi Gras baby, gris-gris, zombie butter, and the way things used to be. When the giant beet burst into the shop, she crossed herself and chanted:
"Eh, Yé Yé Conga!
Eh! Eh! Bomba Yé Yé!"
With deliberation, the beet bustled to the rear, snatched the ancient perfume bottle from the table where Madame had been contemplating it, off and on, and before the stout woman could revive enough to shriek in protest, rushed out of the shop and into the masquerade melee.
"Eh! Eh! Bomba Yé!
Hail Mary, Full of Grace!
Help, police! Police!"
Cradling the precious bottle, shielding it from the flailing appendages of dancers and drunks, it took the big beet the better part of an hour to navigate the treacherous human river, but when it reached the Canal Street intersection, its fellow beets were there, one on either side of V'lu.
“Alobar! Alobar!” Priscilla cried. She held the bottle up for him to see.
Alobar blinked inside his beet stem, scarcely comprehending what he saw. More from instinct than reason, he reached out for the bottle, trembling with excitement, fear, and desire as visions of jasmine boughs, goat hooves, and lost love swam past his brain.
At that moment, Priscilla tripped, pitching forward on her velvet-and-wire encircled belly. The bottle slipped out of her stubby fingers and went rolling into the path of the parade.
Later, Priscilla swore that she'd been purposefully shoved, and she clung to that story even though Marcel insisted that no one had touched her, even though V'lu testified, “Her always had butterfingers and two leff feets.”
Alobar was more sympathetic. Just as Pris fell, he imagined that he'd registered a strong goaty odor, and while he automatically attributed it to the nostalgic atmosphere of the float that was passing — a lofty wagon decorated with enormous plaster sheeps' heads and festooned with purple grapes as big as cannonballs, and on whose pinnacle there pranced in pastoral splendor, attended by nymphs in filmy tunics, the living image of old Goat Foot himself — Alobar was to consider, in retrospect, that the smell had been real and had originated at curbside. Was it an invisible arm that shoved her?
The question was probably academic. What mattered was that the bottle rolled beneath the tractor wheel of the heavy float, and as the Great God Pan (to be sure, an insurance adjuster who'd once played linebacker for LSU) looked down upon the prone beet in the gutter with the clownish contempt that the ribald deity has forever held for the puny failures — and accomplishments — of humanity, it was crushed. There was a pop! a gritty crunch, an earthy, mocking laugh from Pan above, and it was over.
Two of the beets tore off their stems and leaves and ran into the street. The third beet quickly followed, pulled by V'lu. The four of them dropped to their knees in the wake of the float, surrounding a tiny pile of ground blue glass as if it were a sacred spoor that they were worshiping.
Kudra's bottle, Pan's bottle, the K23 bottle, the bottle that three hundred years earlier had terrified an order of monks, beckoned to the Other Side, and negotiated the fishy seas, was now no more than a dust of glitter that might have sifted from a Carnival transvestite's cheeks.
But from the sparkling blue powder there wafted a marvelous aroma, an effuvium both sweet and bitter, a fragrance as romantic as the pollen-stained teeth of the floral Earth, the sexual planet; wafted the secret fetish and daring charm that creates a new reality for men and women, transcending and transforming nature, reason, and animal destiny.
In a matter of minutes, policemen forced the quartet back to the curb. Three of them moved reluctantly but with minimal resistance. The bottle had meant much to them, and they were in shock. The fourth, Marcel LeFever, to whom, on the other hand, the bottle had meant nothing, had to be dragged, kicking and screaming.
“That scent, that scent!” he exclaimed, his voice inflamed by passion. “What is that scent? Le parfum suprême! Le parfum magnifique!”
Several hours later, in the rear of Parfumerie Devalier, there occurred something akin to a wake. In turn, Alobar, Priscilla, Madame Devalier, and V'lu eulogized the bottle. And right when everyone was feeling its loss most keenly, Alobar, who, alone, still wore a beet costume — it was the most fulfilling garment he had worn since he was forced to abdicate his kingly ermine — lifted everyone's spirits by spilling the beans. Or, rather, the beets.
“Beet pollen. Yes. Simply beet pollen. Beet pollen and nothing else. The pollen of the beet plant, if you please. Exactly, positively, emphatically beet pollen. Beet pollen, don't you see? The answer is beet pollen.”
"Incroyable!" exclaimed Marcel.
"Sacre merde!" gasped Madame.
“Why didn't I think of that?” asked Priscilla.
“Beets, don't fail me now,” said V'lu.
“The theme was jasmine, of course. A deluxe jasmine, rare and costly. But the top note was merely citron—”
“Would tangerine work as well?” inquired Madame.
“Oh, tangerine is charmant,” put in Marcel. “It might be superior to the citron.”
“—and the bottom was beet pollen. Good old everyday beet pollen.”
“Hardly everyday,” said Priscilla. “I've never seen a speck of beet pollen in my life.”
“Me never.”
“Imagine, cher! Vegetable spore in a fine boof!”
The little group was so amazed by the revelation, and so fascinated by Alobar's subsequent tale of the intertwined roles of beet and fragrance in his life, that it failed to notice V'lu when she slipped out the door, a conspiratorial and purposeful set to her jaw.