“That’s it?”
“Yes. We can go now.”
On the way out, Woolie stopped and studied a small glass greenhouse, affixed to the window sill, filled with plants. “Would you look at this,” he said, opening the lid and plucking one of the blue flowers. “Chatham Island forget-me-knots.” Albert looked at it, but it was just a flower.
Something about it, struck Woolie as incongruous. Twirling the bloom between his thumb and forefinger, he looked around the room which—beyond the window box in which the indigenous flower was forced to grow out of season—betrayed not the slightest nod to nature.
“Odd, that,” he said to the room.
What wasn’t? thought Albert.
It was a year later when Hester, Angela MacLauren’s sister, knocked on the door to Albert’s cottage to notify him that Interpol was on the phone. He asked her to take a message. When she returned she had a slip of paper in her hand. “It was Jean Minjin. He invites you to share a croissant and cappuccino on . . .” she read from the paper, “the Quai Amiral Infemet in Nice, on the 14th of April at 9:30 a.m., local time.” She sat on the arm of the Queen Anne chair next to the piano where he’d been working. “Sounds enigmatic.”
Not to Albert. It was an invitation to witness the raid on the offices of the Caduceus Corporation, the penultimate event in the year-long investigation that had resulted from the information he and Woolie had gathered on Pitt that night.
The surprise raid, if it netted the anticipated evidence, would lead to the ultimate event: the arrest, trial, and conviction of the nine individuals Interpol suspected, as a result of their surveillance, were the real head of the hydra that was Caduceus, the ones to whom Pyle and a handful of other functionaries stationed in obscure locations around the world, reported during extended yearly conferences held in leisure at various clubs and cafes in and around Nice.
“Tell him no,” said Albert. He had no desire to stir memories that were just beginning to settle themselves in the background of his thoughts. All the events of the intervening months had cauterized the horrors of the Trade. As Hester left the room, quietly closing the French doors behind her, he reviewed them. Jeremy Ash and Wendell were living quietly—or as quietly as Jeremy Ash could manage—with Mr. Sweetman at the Braemar. Where the Maori often reminded Jeremy Ash that he, Wendell, had been right. “Colonel Rivens murdered his wife. I told you.”
“Shut up and play.”
James Simon and Angela had married; the faltering atheist was now a pastor’s wife—who had taken to raising sheep and running an outdoor Sunday school for the island children—three of them—and they were finishing out his term on Chatham, oblivious to the fact that Albert had taken up residence with her sister, Hester, and brother-in-law, Gilly, in Christchurch, an arrangement that had been made, face-to-face, on the flying detour from Napier to Chatham.
What had made him think such an arrangement was possible, practical, or welcomed by people he’d never met, he’d never thought. He liked the name Hester, she was Angela’s sister, and the two of them had reunited over Phuong. That made him, well, something other than a complete stranger.
Apparently, during the two weeks they'd sheltered Phuong, Angela had told her sister and brother-in-law enough about him that she quickly overcame her shock when he turned up on their doorstep—with his suitcase, and his beard, and a green baseball cap emblazoned with ‘Sweet As!’ in bright yellow letters—and asked if he could live with them. “I'll give you a thousand dollars.”
A musical stray. They took him in.
“Colonel Riven served only six months in jail, given the extenuating circumstances,” said Mrs. Bridges, reaching for another of Mrs. Gibson’s blueberry scones. The latter had listened patiently to Albert’s recent history as understood by her guest.
“I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Gibson. “I expect that’s a prison he’ll carry with him forever. As far as he was concerned, he murdered his wife.”
Mrs. Bridges sighed. “Had he not yielded to her pleas, she might yet be alive.”
“Man like that—honor-bound—would find it hard to forgive himself.”
“He sold the piano—to Albert,” said Mrs. Bridges after a brief requiem of silence to Rivens’ fate. “I had it freighted to Christchurch aboard the Sea Queen. They owed him a favor.”
“No one else knows where he is?”
“You, me, and Angela’s sister and her husband. I’m going out to see him again in a week or two. You’re welcome to come. He’d love to see you.”
“Me!? Oh, no. You won’t get me on no plane, not for love or money. Nor ship! No, thank you! I’ll stay right here and keep things ready for him when he comes back.” She shuddered. “Flying? You wouldn’t get me on a plane with a plunger!”
They laughed. “What happened to Mr. Dona? Where’d he end up?”
“He has no family of his own,” Bridges replied. “So he moved to Australia, to be near Bella’s family. Albert bought his house and made a wedding present of it to young Sergeant and Bindy Jeffreys, who promptly rented it out. Said she could never take a bath in that tub!”
“Amen to that!” said Mrs. Gibson.
“They moved in with her gran, and are awaiting the arrival of their second child, at present.”
“Second! Not ones to let the grass grow!”
Hester brought Albert his morning coffee in the little summer house in the back garden that he had made his home. Dimly inspired by the discovery of the forget-me-nots growing in Pyle’s window box, he had bought a book about flowers, because there were so many of them and he thought it might be a good idea to learn something about something.
He was surprised to find he learned quite easily and, within a few weeks, could identify every flower, bush, shrub, and tree in and around the yard by genus, as well as scientific and common name. He knew more than Hester or Gilbert, her husband, did about the plants that grew in their own yard. If knowledge was power, Albert was the most powerful thing this side of the hedge.
Of the world beyond the hedge, he neither knew, nor cared.
One day that yard within that hedge was taken over by some children celebrating the birthday of Paulina, Hester and Gilbert’s nine-year-old daughter. Paulina was strange. That is, other people called her strange. She seemed perfectly normal to Albert. She would sit for hours studying the flower book with him, pointing at pictures, repeating the names as he read them. Apart from these clipped exchanges, they rarely said anything. Even though Hester had warned him that Paulina didn’t like to be touched, she would often drape her arm over Albert’s shoulder as they leafed through the book.
He liked that.
The day of the party, Hester had hired a clown who was also a magician. Paulina didn’t join the other kids—apparently this was not unusual—but she watched with interest from the little wooden table in front of Albert’s cottage door. He watched with her.
The clown was funny, but Albert and Paulina were the only ones who laughed. Really laughed. Laughed ’til they cried. Then, as they watched, the clown rolled up his sleeve revealing a bare arm. He opened his hand and turned it palm up and palm down several times, talking all the while. Then, with a little flip of the wrist, something magical happened. There was a chicken in his hand. A real, live baby chick. Albert and Paulina suddenly stopped laughing.
How did that happen?
Where did the chick come from?
One second it wasn’t there, and the next it was! How was that possible?
In tandem, the duo rose from their table and, picking their way through the little semi-circle of preteen cynics surrounding him, confronted the clown. “How did you do that?” said Albert. He hardly noticed when Paulina wove her fingers in his.
“Magic!” said the clown. He flipped his wrist again, and the chick was gone.
Just gone!
“Magic,” said Paulina.
“Magic,” said Albert. “Can you teach us how to do that?”
“Oh, I’m afraid not,” said th
e clown, his painted mouth sagging in sadness. “A magician can never reveal his tricks. Trade secrets.”
“I’ll give you a thousand dollars,” said Albert—his own magical abracadabra.
“When would you like to start?”
Beneath the paint, the clown was a man, and the man had two identities: one when he was a clown, and his name was Buttons, and the other when he wasn’t a clown, and his name was Alan. Alan was the one who taught them the tricks. Every day except Sunday, for three months, he would show up just after dinner with books and a bag of odds and ends under his arm and teach them for two solid hours.
Albert’s manual dexterity made him a natural magician, as did Paulina’s capacity for mimicry, and they laughed whenever, much to their astonishment, a trick worked flawlessly. Three thousand dollars later, Alan had exhausted his repertoire and, after extracting from his students the same Magician’s Oath he had taken—and betrayed for money—bade them a final farewell.
By that time, making a chicken appear from thin air was child’s play for both Albert and Pauline. Alan had directed them to other books that, in the following year—practicing almost incessantly—took them far beyond the marvels of Buttons the Clown but, as he had been their inspiration, Albert arranged for Mrs. Bridges to send him a thousand dollars every month in perpetuity.
One day, during that year, Hester interrupted their practice—something involving playing cards, matches, and a stuffed squirrel—and handed Albert a newspaper. “It’s done!” she said.
Albert looked at the paper in his hand. “?”
“The trial. It’s done!”
Albert’s wasn’t a brain that could be drawn from one world to the next without preamble. That the journey was a long one was evident in his expression. “Caduceus,” Hester said, tapping the paper. “The Trade?”
“Oh.” Albert’s eyes drifted to the headline: Horrors Revealed: Worldwide Body-Parts Syndicate Collapses.
“Your name’s all through it,” said Hester excitedly. “Read it!”
Albert had asked that his name be kept out of it. He must have asked the wrong people. He looked at Paulina, who looked back. “Should I?” he said.
Paulina smiled and nodded.
Albert prestidigitated, and the paper disappeared in a puff of smoke.
The evening breeze, heavy-laden with a bouquet of scents, nudged aside the curtains and made a quick, light-fingered tour of their bedroom that night. Hester had been lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. Gilbert had been reading the article in the newspaper.
“You should have seen it, Gilly,” said Hester, not for the first time. “I thought they were just playing at magic—you know, balloon animals and that. Then he goes . . .” she shook her hand loosely in the air “. . . and the whole bloody paper disappears.” She turned to him, her eyes wide with disbelief. “Pardon my French. But, I mean it disappeared! Poof!” She splayed her fingers.
“Mm,” said Gilbert, more interested in what he was reading that what he was hearing. “According to this there were what they call nodes of this outfit all around the world. Each node had its manager. Here, it was Pyle. But he was small beans. There were fifteen or twenty others.”
“Poof!” said Hester. “Right in front of my eyes!”
“It had been going on for nearly ten years. Millions and millions of dollars.”
“I wonder what else he can do.”
“That nurse, Patricia Hogan, is the one who did for the Tanny girl. Just came in the house, bold as brass one evening, when Dona was out in his garden, and waited for just the right time and . . . ,” he pushed the atmosphere with both hands. “Down she goes.”
“Do you think Paulina knows any tricks?”
“Mr. Sweetman’s wife—he’s the one who owns the guest house or hotel or whatever—she was the only one who died of natural causes. Well, not natural. She really died of the brain cancer. That doctor, what’s his name. . .” Gilbert riffled through the paper. “Here it is, Marcos. Geraldo Marcos. He made what he could of her parts. Leaned pretty heavily on Sweetman to have what was left of her cremated. Someone’s grieving like that, you can get ’em to do most anything. Then he looks up and down Parliament Row and says, ‘Hmm’ and Tanny says, ‘why not?’ That’s how it looks anyroad. Course they’re both dead now, so we’ll never know for sure.”
“Where is she now?” said his wife.
“Tanny? Dead. I just said . . .”
“No the other one. The nurse.”
“Oh, Hogan! Patricia Hogan.” He tapped the paper. “She escaped from custody, not long after she was arrested. Feigned appendicitis and, on the way to the hospital, made short work of her attendant and ran away. Never seen since. Disappeared. Poof!”
“Poof!” Hester echoed. “Just like the newspaper.”
“Newspaper? What newspaper?”
Hester was not about to be derailed by superfluous questions. “He asked me to get him a book on electrics,” she said. “What do you suppose he wants with electrics?”
Each Monday morning, Richard Prebble, Minister of Transport and Elvis Presley fan, met with his secretary, Mrs. Brickmaker, whose musical preferences were not a matter of public record, to discuss the upcoming week. So that these breakfast meetings should be beyond reproach, they were taken at a designated table in clear view of the other patrons of the Old Bailey restaurant, a two-minute walk from their office. There, under the watchful eyes of ten or twenty other mid-to-upper level government functionaries who met to discuss politics and complain of their burdens, they set out their agenda for the week.
This week, though, they were having a hard time focusing on the upcoming week, because the preceding weeks had been so dramatic. Prebble passed Mrs. Brickmaker the marmalade. He had finished—coincident with his second coffee, two eggs, bacon, and toast—a fifteen minute recapitulation of those events.
Mrs. Brickmayer had been absorbing both the information and her breakfast in relative silence, apart from those occasional interjections required to keep the conversation flowing. “So,” she said when it was clear her boss’s monologue had come to a close. “If I understand correctly, there were two ships, both called the Venice Regent, one a passenger freighter, the other a—what would you call it—medical ship? Hospital ship? No,” she decided, before he could answer. “Certainly not that. Anyway, the ship where the . . . where the procedures were carried out.”
Prebble took a bite of toast and nodded, making a sound of affirmation at the back of his throat.
“Then the girl—Phuong—jumped ship on a raft of life vests and made her way to the beach where Albert and his friends found her?”
Again, Prebble nodded.
Mrs. Brickmaker took a sip of coffee and decided it needed another spoonful of sugar, even though she’d already drunk half of it. She performed the operation. “Then the ship was taken over by pirates?”
Prebble laughed percussively. “Ha! They never saw that coming! Two tits and a tat, that.” He laughed. “One gang of pirates taking over from another gang of pirates. The difference being that gang B was armed. They put the crew and passengers overboard in the lifeboats, keeping only the captain and the engineer!”
“The captain comes down with . . . something?”
“Heart-attack, girl! Heart-attack.” He toasted the atmosphere with his coffee cup. “Served the bugger right!”
“To be sure,” said his secretary. “And the chief engineer abandoned ship?”
“In an inflatable,” said Prebble. “Yes. That’s what he told the authorities, when he was plucked from the sea about a week after the Venice Regent caught fire at the pier.”
“And sank.”
“And sank. That was done by the original crew, of course. Too much evidence left on board. Records and that.”
“So, they’d made it back to N Zed okay.”
“Yes. The whole thing came out in court, of course.”
“How, when they found out the ship had been found and impounded, they decided to
take it out to sea and open the scuppers to get rid of the evidence.”
Mrs. Brickmaker took a bite of muffin. “But the pirates had broken it.”
“Wrecked the rudder, yes. Which is why they abandoned it.”
“And they were never found.”
Prebble shook his head.
The day after Dr. Marcos’ body had been found, Laura Pederson had been visited by the doctor the hospital had appointed to take over his rounds. “The fact is, Mrs. Pederson,” said the doctor who had taken over Marcos’ patient list, “these charts just don’t jibe with the results of the tests I’ve just had run. You don’t have cancer.” He was reviewing the charts clipped to the end of her bed, “though I can understand why it might seem that way, given the medications he had you on.
“Frankly, I don’t understand what Dr. Marcos was up to.” He sighed and returned the chart to its holder. “Between us, you’re not the only patient he was, well . . . I’m sure he had his reasons, but whatever they were . . . You just have pneumonia—and not a particularly virulent case at that. We’ll have you out of here and back home within two days, tops.
“Can’t have you taking up a bed that’s needed by a sick person.” He smiled. “You go have a wonderful life.”
“They took her parts, didn’t they?” said Colleen Ruakari. It was the first time she and her mother had really spoken about Tanny’s death, their openness consequent upon Colleen’s passing down the hall and finding her mother in Tanny’s room, weeping. Colleen entered and put her arms around her and, for several moments, neither of them had spoken.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Cindy.
“Got to some time, Mum” her daughter replied. “You know what I heard someone call someone today—at the cafe—a plaster saint. You know what that means? I looked it up. It means someone who you want to think is perfect, but ain’t.”
“Don’t Col,” said her mother.
Colleen, who had lived several weeks both avoiding and anticipating as inevitable this confrontation and, now that the wound was opened, was determined to see it through to the end. Only then, she felt sure, could healing begin.
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