"I'm sorry", Vicks told me, "but mister LeBon has terminated his contract with our company".
"I'm sorry, did I understand correctly? He doesn't work with you anymore, why?"
"I'm not authorized to answer, I'm sorry mister..."
At that point, not knowing what mess LeBon had gotten me into, I preferred to lie. I looked around the kitchen quickly for a name and my eyes fell on one of the feed bags I kept in the house for Sheela.
"Uhm...Escobar", I answered. "I'm a client of his from Omaha. Well, can you at least give me his contact? It's important".
"I understand your urgency, mister Escobar, but I'm not authorized to give out this information. If you like, I can put you in contact with Robert Fols, our best sales agent and I would-"
"Yes. No thank you, goodbye".
I closed the call and thought about the news. If the people at Finlay & Pern had fired LeBon, they must have heard about the theft. Nobody likes to lose a million dollars, and poor LeBon had lost his job over it. But why didn't they want to tell me where he was? This secrecy only made me more restless.
The next day I went to my parents' house in Mountain Home, and after lunch I told them about what had happened, starting from the trip to Omaha.
"That's terrible, Jack", said my mom. "Did you call the police?"
"Yes, but they didn't believe me".
Sitting at the head of the table, my father took his pipe out from between his lips.
"And what happened to the whiskey?"
"The box? I don't know, it's still in my room".
"Hmm", he murmured letting out a puff of smoke from his mouth. "Well, you went to the police, you did what was right. Your friend, LeBon...he'll call you, sooner or later".
I hoped my dad was right. For a few days I waited for LeBon to appear, or at least send a message. But the damned French man seemed to have vanished.
And so two weeks after getting back from Omaha, on a simple whim, I took out the whiskey box. Yes, I know, LeBon had told me, really told me to not open it. That's exactly what bothered me. He had treated me as if I were a cheapskate that opens other people's presents. Does this seem right to you? The fact that I was actually opening his present didn't mean anything, I was doing it for spite.
And then really, we all know that if you give someone a closed box and tell him "listen, whatever happens, don't open this box", you're practically instigating him to open it.
Look at how the story about Pandora and the vase Zeus gave her ended up. I'm sure that if the king of Gods had told her something like:
"Pandora, my dear, look at what a nice present I have here for you: a vase!"
"Oh supreme Zeus, thank you! And what's in this vase of yours?"
"My divine dirty underwear, which my despicable spouse doesn't want to wash for me. Open it, open it, what are you waiting for?"
"Ew. Maybe some other time, huh", Pandora would have answered, with a disgusted face.
And the vase of indecencies would have ended up who knows where in the back of a closet, collecting dust. Therefore, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it was LeBon's fault. If he hadn't been so insistent on demanding that I not open the damned box, maybe I would have never wanted to open it, and none of the mayhem that happened afterwards would have ever taken place.
I had made my decision: I got the wooden box from the backpack and went into the living room. Just for the occasion, I took out one of the nice glasses (meaning fake crystal, for us poor Dragon Breeders from Idaho). Meanwhile, Sheela climbed up to the top of my armchair and started observing my every movement with her light blue eyes.
I sat down and held the box. The golden letters with the writing "Airigh Nam Beist" stood out against the black background. What kind of whiskey could it be? It must be Welsh, or maybe Scottish, in any case high class stuff. Without wasting time, I undid the leather ties and broke the black wax seal. I could already taste a sip of excellent whiskey.
To you, crazy French man, I thought taking off the top.
There wasn't any bottle in the box.
A metal cylinder was set on a black velvet padding, with a digital timer on one of the sides. The timer read: 23 hours, 43 minutes and 01 seconds. When I picked it up, the minute and second numbers had changed, passing to 42 minutes and 58 seconds. It was a countdown.
"Oh shit", I mumbled.
Sheela put her nose up to the cylinder in my hand, smelled it and then looked at me as if she were asking "Well, what's in there?"
Perhaps for those who don't know about egg conservation methods, the trick that Jean and Liu Dao had thought up could seem obvious since when I first told you about the bottle of whiskey, but the truth is that transporting an egg is a "delicate" affair, if I may make a pun. It's necessary to use special impact-safe cases, equipped with special thermoregulation devices to keep the eggs from deteriorating. That there could be a cryogenic container with an egg in it instead of whiskey was something I thought impossible. Nobody would ever run that risk.
First of all, there's only a 60% chance the live tissue won't deteriorate, once they're brought back to a normal temperature. And if 60% seems like a lot to you, you have to keep the time factor in mind as well. Which was why the container had a timer on it. There's a specific lapse of time that needs to be respected, after which it's not possible to recover the cryogenized tissue anymore.
There was less than one day until the deadline. Then, anything that was in the cylinder would be only an expensive and expired ice cube.
Two thoughts in a row hit me. The first was: Oh no, not another dragon!, and right after: But if the egg is here, what the heck was in the case?
There wasn't anything, of course. The hit men had killed mister Dao and Herbert for nothing, and I had kept a million dollar egg in my closet without even knowing.
For two weeks!, I thought jumping onto the armchair.
The three hit men could already be on my tracks. They could find me at any moment and I would end up like Dao. I started walking up and down the living room, almost panicking.
Zen calm, Jack. Zen calm, I told myself taking in a deep breath. They don't know who you are, or they would have already knocked at your door.
What traces had I left? Who knew my name? I thought about my trip again. The bunk reservation was last minute, no name, and i had left the railway police offices in Omaha without filling out a statement. The only living person who knew my identity was LeBon, and he had disappeared.
They can't find me, I decided. A bit calmer, I reconsidered the entire situation. The most important question was: what to do with the million dollar egg?
I could get rid of it. That way I wouldn't run any risks. I didn't have to do anything except wait for the timer to expire, and then throw the container and the box in the garbage. Or I could call the people at Finlay & Pern and tell them I had the egg (technically, it was still their egg, seeing as the money belonged to the company).
But here's an interesting detail, dear Jack, I thought. Nobody knows you have the egg.
And if I decided to try to defrost it, nobody would find out.
Darn it, what would I give to know what species was in there! You don't find such an expensive egg everyday and now that I didn't think I was in danger anymore, the curiosity was devouring me.
In the end, I decided to not decide.
I'm not clear-headed enough to decide now, I told myself.
With immense effort I put the container back in the whiskey box, I went to bed and tried to sleep. I tried is the right word, because I actually couldn't fall asleep all night. I kept on thinking about the egg's worth and who knows what fabulous species could be in it. And also about how much money I would make, raising it and breeding it (sorry if I'm so materialistic, but I have to eat too). Then, just when I was all excited about these thoughts, I saw mister Dao and Herbert dead at the McCook station. So I became restless between the sheets, and swore that the next morning I would destroy the egg.
I had fallen into a light half-sle
ep when the alarm went off, freeing me from a tormented dream. It was seven o' clock. I had slept for maybe an hour. I jumped up from the bed as if a bee had stung me on the butt and ran down the stairs to the living room. When I picked up the box, there were just over twelve hours left on the timer. Regardless of my fears, in the end I had decided: I would raise the egg.
I got dressed and went to the car.
My store, the "Ports Wild Dragons", is in northern Boise, on the West State, next to Far West Landscape Gardener (when the drought had forced them to close two of the outdoor greenhouses, I bought them and the store is now on that land). Seen from above, my store could look like an ice cream cone. The base of the cone is the entrance, with the service counter, bookshelves, toys and feed products for dragons; behind the entrance there's a hallway about thirty-five feet long connected to various rooms: infirmary, my office, the brooding room and the pantry. And then, on the tip there's the Flight Garden, the big dome where my dragons live.
As I was deactivating the burglar alarm at the front door my assistant Roger arrived, ready for his morning shift.
Crap, I thought, I had forgotten about Roger.
"Good morning, mister Ports", he said.
Even though it was only eight in the morning, his eyes were already red, maybe even redder than mine. It's not that I don't trust Roger, he's really a good kid, I had hired him so he could help me with the work, before Dafne had left me. He was the son of a neighbor of a cousin to whom I owed a favor, you know how these things are. In any case, I've suspected he smokes joints since I told him about Dafne and that bastard Bryan.
"That's what best friends are for, right mister Ports?" he had told me that day, commenting on the news.
"For stealing your future wife?"
He had looked at me as if I were making fun of him.
"Hehe, no I mean, friends support you, right?"
"You didn't listen to a fucking thing I said, Roger. Go get two bags of rice from the pantry".
"Yeah, two bags of rice. Rock and roll..."
You see what I mean? Eighteen years old and never a thought, our Roger here.
He had surely smoked that morning, because his eyes were bloodshot and as swollen as tomatoes. He could hardly keep them open.
"Go home, Roger. I'm giving you the day off".
"What? Really?" he mumbled, his mouth all pasty. "Thanks, mister Ports". And he left right away.
Once in the store I went to the main switchboard and turned on all the lights. Then I went to the rooms in the back. In the Brooding Room all the incubators were free, so I chose one and put the metal cylinder in the opening. Just five years before, I would have had to do the procedure manually, probably wearing a Hazmat suit(3). But modern incubators do everything automatically, including revitalizing cryogenized tissue.
The cylinder went into the protective dome and opened up in the middle with a click. The machine pulled out the mechanical arm and unscrewed the cylinder's top. A puff of water vapor came out, and the countdown on the timer stopped. Then, delicately, the mechanical arm extracted the egg, frozen and off-white. It applied a micro electrode on the surface and started the revitalization procedure with small and controlled electrical impulses.
For an hour I stayed in front of the incubator, waiting, hoping and at the same time fearing the process would turn out fine. What would I do with a million dollar dragon? I didn't know how to answer that question. A part of me still thought that LeBon, or some other anonymous worker at Finlay & Pern, would sooner or later come to my store to take the egg back.
When the machine finished the touchscreen rang, and the data appeared on the screen. The egg was healthy, and hadn't been damaged during the cryogenic process.
According to the incubator there were still two weeks left until hatching. A buzz came from the protective dome, a sign that the incubation process had taken way. Covered with a thin layer of water vapor, the egg was smaller than average. The shell was light brown, with thin bronze colored lines that went around the top and the base. The incubator monitored it using a tiny electrode and checked its evolution through sensors set on the sides of the dome.
If there has to be a device on which we Dragon Breeders don't pay attention to expenses it's our incubators. The egg was in good hands: the machine took care of it like a loving mother hen.
"What species are you?" I murmured staring at the egg.
Normally, you can recognize the type of dragon by how the egg looks. The Outbacks, for example, have dark brown calcium shells, and this is even in the case the dragon's scales become red-orange, once it's grown. But those bronze colored circular stripes? I had never seen them.
I went to my studio to consult the manuals I kept in the small library next to the safe. I immediately discarded "Draco Volans Volans: typologies" by Murray.
I didn't need to know that a dragon with two paws and two wings was a wyvern(4), one with only two legs is a Lindworm and one with four paws and no wings is an oriental dragon. I went to the manuals with pictures of the most common eggs, but without any success. So I tried online, and I didn't find anything that way either. I even consulted the Finlay & Pern website, but that type of egg didn't exists in their sales archives either.
Well, what are you surprised about?, I told myself. Considering the price, it's surely a Primus.
The first exemplary of a new species. This excited me and terrorized me at the same time.
THE NEXT TWO WEEKS I waited for the egg to hatch. Dragon eggs, you know, are similar to all other types of eggs: they sit there and don't move. They let themselves be brooded, that's their favorite activity.
The wait was consuming me. I would go into the Brooding Room several times a day hoping the incubator would give me some news. But despite all my excitement and curiosity, this small mysterious dragon didn't have any intention of coming out of its egg before its time. As the days passed, some of the fear that had tormented me when I opened the box disappeared. Sure, a small part of my mind kept on worrying the three hit men would appear at my store at any moment, but the truth is that nobody showed up.
In the meanwhile, I sold my two Jade Ming Tangs. A man from Boise, an old client of mine, bought Lao Tzu. He already had a black wyvern and he wanted to form a couple. Awful combination, in my opinion, but I wished him the best none the less. Sun Tzu went to a girl from Caldwell, who was looking for an animal to keep her company. Without the two Tangs to torment, Deirdre, the Mustang matriarch, put me through a week of hell, attacking anyone who came near her. But when Henry Woods, one of my suppliers(5), came back to sell me a couple of eggs I told him I was fine.
"What's up Jack, did you decide to retire?"
"You guessed it", I answered, flooring him.
"I don't believe it", answered Woods. "And how do you plan to compensate?"
It was a legitimate question. Raising dragons isn't cheap at all. The Flight Garden alone cost me five hundred dollars a month in expenses.
"I'll take care of other animals", I explained. "horses, for now. I have one in the infirmary right now. His name is Zephyr".
"Well, I'm sorry to hear that", said Henry. He really was sorry, considering he had lost one of his best clients.
I shrugged my shoulders and said goodbye. I remember that moment very well. It was a Saturday and there was still one day left until the egg was supposed to hatch. I couldn't think of anything else. I wandered around the store without a mission; I forgot about things while I was doing them; I bit my nails and checked the clock every ten minutes, complaining because time wouldn't go by fast enough.
Sheela, who could feel my tension, wouldn't stop jumping on my shoulders suddenly and hissing her thin tongue in my ear (dragons have fun doing it, I don't know why. Maybe to see our scandalized expressions). I had to free myself from the grasp of her white and pink tail from around my neck every time.
The next day I went to the store as excited as a child on Christmas day. The store's main software told me that the egg, according to the
incubator's data, would hatch between 10 a.m. and 9 p.m.
"What kind of forecast is that, huh? Stupid scientific machine!" I protested in front of the incubator.
I was jumping out of my skin. I spent the whole time wandering around the Garden disturbing my dragons. The Outbacks were sleeping in the burrow, so I went to wake them up, just to make sure they were all alright. They grumbled quite a bit, and let me know that yes, they were fine and they wanted to go back to sleeping in the warm and welcoming hole.
The Mustangs were concentrated on their usual schemes. They were all hanging on the lower branches of the cherry tree and were discussing among themselves. Hissing. It seemed like a senate meeting, I don't know, maybe they were putting on Julius Caesar by Shakespeare.
From their point of view, what they do in the nests on the cherry tree is none of my business. So as soon as they saw me get closer they became quiet and all ten of them stared at me until, after a few seconds of awkward silence, I left, feeling like an intruder in MY garden. Mustangs are like that: loyal and courageous, but don't you dare touch their dragon empire.
Finally, at four twenty-two p.m. on May 18th, thirty-two days after my trip to Omaha, the egg hatched. I was in the small stable checking up on Zephyr's oat rations when the incubator alarm went off.
I rushed to the room, just in time to see the little dragon break the shell. The incubator's protective dome had opened. Inside, the little dragon was fighting to come out into the world. A piece of the egg had already come off the top. In the crack a tiny toothed face appeared, with dark smooth scales, like burnt earth. The small dragon opened its jaw, let out a weak "Waaa!" a couple of times and then widened the crack in the shell using its paws. When the hole was finally large enough, the dragon came out of the egg. He moved around the bottom of the incubator and looked at me, his head to the side, with his small green eyes.
"Waaa!" he roared again. A miniature roar.
I had put my face at his level, my nose just a few centimeters from the dragon's. I was smiling like a fool. I petted his head with a finger.
The Dragon Seller: A Tale of Love and Dragons Page 3
