“The ticket is not for the Madrid Express. Alors, I cannot flag the train when it comes through.”
“Death and damnation! Do I sit in this asshole of a village till the next train?”
Stationmaster and taxi man cogitated. “Monsieur,” the latter said. “There is no problem. Let me explain.” The Good Samaritan was distressed when the belated traveler was not interested in sleeping with the very nice girl who worked at the bathhouse of the hot spring. There was further dismay when Garvin made clear that he was not interested in a room at the Hotel des Thermes, with or without a girl. When he explained that he had a date with a girl in Bayonne, the natives realized that he was entirely sane.
Having failed as pimp or hotel runner, the taxi man was happy when Garvin snapped at the first bid for the thirty-mile drive to Bayonne. But first, he had to eat.
Garvin phoned Flora to say that he was in Dax and might be a bit late. “Just leave the front door lights on—the driver might have problems. Well, I looked at a map, I’ll see he doesn’t get lost.”
Then they ran out of essence and had to walk to a filling station.
There was time-out for a tire change.
Following the Adour downstream was confusing.
There were ambiguous road forks, especially deceptive by night. A number of times the driver, once he got a few kilometers beyond the corporate limits of Dax, took the wrong one and followed it to a dead end at some logging installation.
Garvin finally relaxed and found it amusing.
Reminiscence kept him company. When Lani and I started to shack up in Khatmandu, it took a split second of computer foulup to get us started on what was programmed as a one-way trip to Mars. Lucky they didn’t fire up the computer in Dax or that girl and I would be spending the next six years in the mud bath at Hotel des Thermes...but you cannot beat the game...there was no computer that got me and Lani back to Terra just in time to keep Flora from becoming Imperatrix instead of Lani.
The events following Alexander’s death in battle left Garvin conducting a silent, solo debate: Should Flora and Lani have cursed fate and Garvin, or given thanks?
North America revisited might give an answer.
Far too many hours after departing Dax they came to the confluence of the Adour and the Nive, and the St. Esprit Bridge, beyond which the spires of Ste. Marie’s cathedral reached into moonlight. Triumphantly, the cabby pointed.
“Voila! Bayonne! Now what is it that one does?”
Having studied his Guide to Southern France, English edition, while waiting for the wrong train to leave Gare d’Orsai, Garvin gave the answer: “You don’t have to wait for daylight to find the Lycée de Marracq. Cross both bridges, turn right and follow the river to Allees Paulmy to the Lycée, and from there it’s easy. She’ll have the lights on.”
Although he arrived at four-nineteen in the morning instead of about five in the afternoon, Happy Hour began at once. He need feel no qualms about disturbing Felix, Flora assured him. “He has his own quarters, topside of the garage.”
She had wasted no time when phone calls briefed her: The one from Paris started major shopping, and the one from Dax gave her time for last-minute frills of drink and delicacies. Starting with canned pheasant from the quaint, costly little shop on rue Pont Neuf, with Pommery Brut from her cellar, she later added a list terminating in cherry tomatoes stuffed with caviar, tropical palm hearts lined with Brie cheese, and quail eggs in piquante sauce. Before it was quite too late for messenger delivery service, she called for smoked albacore and aquavit, which would soon be chilled in the deep freeze. For good measure, there was a bottle of sherry that Monsieur Chevigny recommended: an unusually stern and manly Palo Cortado.
To relieve the tensions that built up during pauses devoted to clock-watching, there were changes of cosmetics. Flora was as fluttery as the time when, just qualified as a teenager, she had tried and failed to seduce her fifth cousin, Alexander Heflin, only to get even with him a couple of years later by marrying Garvin.
With Garvin’s arrival, spontaneous detonation was forestalled, and the honeymoon began. Despite gropings, shattered glass, and spilling a goblet of Pommery Brut laced with Peychaud bitters and Armagnac, Garvin finally had his chance for a few coherent words.
“I’m your cousin, Pierre d’Artois from somewhere in New York, on my way to somewhere else, because I do not want to draw a flock of media vultures. They’d include too many enemies from the Third and the Fourth Worlds, and I have a few surviving in North America, too. There would be no real problem in my home territory if I had to liquidate a few, but in France it would cause complications and the very kind of publicity I am shying away from.”
“Wait till I get my thermometer, darling.”
“Thermometer?”
“To take your temperature. Shying from publicity, you know.”
“Coming from the Sudzo Detergent Queen, that’s got me worried.”
There was a detour discussion of hot flashes and the special hormones he had brought, an improvement on the kind that might have accounted for Felix on that all too long ago farewell honeymoon.
“Now that that is settled,” he said finally, “I’ll get at this silly beard. The minute I landed at Lunar Depot, I made for a space platform to hide out until the start I got on a tourist flight would give it a chance to look convincing in a photograph.
“This is not cloak and sword,” he summed up. “All I want is a quiet furlough. A chance to get acquainted with our son. To see Dennis Kerwin, Number One Warlord, semiretired but carrying on. Not many of the old-timers left, and there are a few new ones I want to see some more. Better liaison.”
Flora’s apotheosis dimmed, and for an instant she was mortal again. This lasted only for an instant, yet long enough for Garvin to brace himself against a question. Although no question ensued, he was sure that he would learn that Flora had plans. Garvin changed the subject abruptly.
“Speaking of sons, what with all the hoopla, questions, and doorbells, and car door slammings—you mean he slept through all that or is he just too tactful to break in on a honeymoon?”
“When you phoned from Paris, I told you I’d already given housekeeper and staff vacation with pay, to have a family reunion without big ears auditing complicated Garvin family gossip.”
“Smart girl, always thinking of everything. But what’s that got to do with that young son of...uh, ours?”
“You just stopped short of calling Felix a son of a bitch.”
“In his mother’s presence, that would have been tactless.”
“Lot of the time I couldn’t think of better words! Whoever said that raising a son was a tough job, she spoke gospel.”
“Until her favorite daughter gets knocked up higher than a kite!”
Flora sighed, and looked far back into time. “You and I thought we were marrying to keep me from being an unwed mother, and it was a false alarm.”
Garvin chuckled. “Life’s funny! Lot of my mistakes turned out better than when I was right. The Holy Family would rather have had you give
