The desk was in an office, the office in a skyscraper. The sky-scraper was like any other, a slender tower of steel and glass, totally without embellishment or dash. Even its height — a mere twenty-three stories — was unremarkable. Its lone distinguishing feature was the neighborhood from whose midst it rose. Across the street from its entrance was a monastery and a cathedral, the limestone steps of which had been worn as radiant as blue serge trousers by centuries of pious comings and goings. To the right of the building was a block of bicycle shops and cafés; to the left a slate-roofed hotel where, a few decades past, artists had slept and worked within the same four walls, never dreaming that their miserable circumstances might be romanticized in the “studio apartment” market of the future. Above the building, the sky recalled passages from Les Miserables, threadbare and gray. Below it (everything sits on something else), were the ruins of a brewery that once had been operated by monks from across the street. In the 1200s, Crusaders returning from Palestine introduced perfume to France, and after it achieved popularity there, the monks had made perfume as well as beer. Vestiges of the ancient perfumery could be explored in the basement of the skyscraper. In fact, the LeFever family, which built the skyscraper, had purchased the perfume business from the monastery in the seventeenth century and was still in the trade.
On this day, already described as meteorologically evocative of Victor Hugo at his most dire, Claude LeFever had barged into the office of Marcel LeFever unannounced. Why not? They were blood relatives and both vice-presidents of the firm. Surely, formalities were unnecessary. Yet Marcel seemed annoyed. Perhaps it was because he was wearing his whale mask.
Claude put his hands on his hips and stared at his cousin. “Thar she blows!” he yelled.
“Kiss my ass,” said Marcel, from inside the mask.
“Forgive me but I would not quite know where to look for the ass of a fish.”
“A whale is not a fish, you fool.”
“Oh, yes.”
(Claude and Marcel LeFever were speaking in French. This simultaneous English translation is being beamed to the reader via literary satellite.)
Holding degrees in both accounting and law, Claude made the financial decisions for the LeFever family. Marcel, who had grown up in the perfume labs, learning to think with his nose, was in charge of “creativity,” a term that Claude did not completely comprehend, but which, to his credit, he recognized to be essential. If creativity was enhanced by pacing the executive suites in a papier-mâché mask, it was all right with Claude, no matter how it frightened the secretaries. It was Marcel's habit of making large cash donations to ecology commandos intent upon sabotaging the whaling industry that bothered the frugal Claude. Claude was well aware of the previous importance to the perfume industry of ambergris, a substance secreted by temporarily infirm whales, but he was convinced that petrochemical and coal tar fixatives were completely adequate substitutes. “Fish puke is a thing of the past,” he'd tell Marcel.
“A whale is a mammal, you idiot.”
“Oh, yes.”
In Marcel's office, as in Claude's next door, there was a floor-to-ceiling window from which one could look down on the cathedral spire. “We are closer to heaven than the monks,” Claude was fond of saying. On this day, however, the sky, layered with thin altostratus clouds and smog, appeared to reflect human suffering and failed to awaken in Claude visions of paradise. It did, in its grim emaciation, remind him that he had skipped breakfast in order to be punctual at a board meeting that Marcel, it was probably just as well, had not attended. “Why don't you take that stupid thing off and let's go to lunch,” Claude suggested.
Through the eyeholes of the mask, Marcel continued to stare out the window. “Something rather interesting arrived in the morning mail,” he said.
“What was that?”
“What else but a beet?” Marcel shifted his gaze from the window to the centerpiece of his desk.
“Oh, yes. I wasn't going to mention the beet. In my years as your cousin and business associate, I have learned that it is frequently best to let sleeping dogs lie. Now that you've broached the subject, I must admit there is a beet on your desk, rather prominently displayed. Arrived in the mail, you say?”
Without a trace of self-consciousness, Marcel lifted off the mask and placed it on the floor beside his chair, revealing an imposing Gallic nose, a gray-streaked spade of a beard, wet brown eyes, and black hair slicked back to resemble patent leather. Were it not that Claude's eyes were less moody, his hair more lightly greased, the cousins were identical, even to the cut of their pin-striped suits. Business competitors often referred to them as the LeFever twins.
“It hadn't actually been posted, if that's what you mean. Nor was it wrapped. It arrived in its corporeal envelope, which is to say, its own body of beet flesh. It was merely sitting atop the basket of morning mail when I came in.”
“A token from an admirer. Some woman — or man — in the building. A beet is not entirely devoid of phallic connotations.”
“Claude, this is the third time since I've returned from America that there has been a beet with the morning mail.”
“You see? Someone's got it bad, you handsome devil, you. Or else it's a joke.”
“The receptionist claims that on all three occasions there was a strong, unpleasant odor in the foyer just before the beet was mysteriously delivered. . ”
“A joke, as I said. An unpleasant odor in the LeFever Building? A practical joke.”
“Yes. And a trace of the odor still clings to the beet. It is something I've smelled before. Musk, but more intense. Claude, I encountered such a scent in the United States, but I can't seem to remember where and it is driving me coocoo. You know how it is with my nose.”
“Indeed I do,” said Claude. “I would never have allowed LeFever to insure your nose with Lloyd's of London for a million francs were I not convinced of its infallibility. All the more reason to be unconcerned. Your snout will solve the puzzle even if your intellect should not. Meanwhile, this silly talk of beets is whetting my appetite. Let's get to a restaurant before the noon rush.” He buttoned his jacket. After a short hesitation, Marcel rose and buttoned his. There was something about that morose sky scraped by the LeFever Building that indicated that protection against elements might be wise. “By the way,” Claude added, “speaking of the United States, what do you hear from V'lu?”
At the mention of V'lu, Marcel unbuttoned his jacket. He sat back down. He pulled the mask over his head and moaned as a whale might moan were it about to upchuck some ambergris.
Part I. THE HAIR AND THE BEAN
THE CITADEL WAS DARK, and the heroes were sleeping. When they breathed, it sounded as if they were testing the air for dragon smoke.
On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.
Blacksmiths hammered the Edge Serpent on the anvils of their closed eyelids. Wheelwrights rolled it, tail in mouth, down the cart roads of their slumber. Cooks roasted it in dream pits, seamstresses sewed it to the badger hides that covered them, the court necromancer traced its contours in the constellation of straw on which he tossed. Only the babes in the nursery lay peacefully, passive even to the fleas that supped on their tenderness.
King Alobar did not sleep at all. He was as awake as the guards at the gate. More awake, actually, for the guards mused dreamily about mead, boiled beets, and captive women as their eyes patroled the forested horizon, while the king was as conscious as an unsheathed knife; coldly conscious and warmly troubled.