Three Face Flip

Cheeseburger Brown

CHAPTER 1

Linger flipped a grimy Euro while Miriam sought faces in the whorls of wood. It was noon.

The studio was small, quaintly twentieth century, steamy from the whistling kettle. "Heads, I get the kettle," drawled Linger from under heavy, half-closed eyelids. "Tails, you do."

"I'm busy," said Miriam.

The coin sang as it spun, bimetallic face flashing in the sun. Linger smacked it down against the inside of his bony wrist. "Ready?" he asked.

"I'm busy," repeated Miriam, eyes on the wood. Without turning away she reached to her workbench and selected a chisel. She touched its keen edge with her callused thumb, enjoying the quiet rasp.

Linger peeked under his hand. "Tails."

The kettle piped on. Miriam raised her hammer and tapped at the chisel's base, just enough to let its blade taste the wood's surface, barely sinking in. It was an introduction, after all. It was a courtship.

"It's tails, Mir."

She didn't acknowledge him. She wobbled the chisel gingerly back and forth, running the fingers of her opposite hand over the grain as if in search of braille messages or a secret compartment. As she hunkered over her work Linger was able to simultaneously straighten in order to give himself an unobstructed view of her breasts swaying free through the loose neck of her fraying yellow smock.

This was why Linger never called before he came over from across the hall: he hoped to catch Miriam without a brassiere. While Linger was ostensibly homosexual for professional purposes he was, in fact, interested only in women. Ever since he'd come to Paris he longed for a kiss without stubble.

"Tails," he said again, his practiced smirk straining.

Miriam looked up, blew a strand of dark, wooly hair away from her face. "What?"

"You have to get the kettle."

"You're the one who wants tea."

"Don't blame me, blame the coin."

Miriam frowned and drew her index finger down a line in the wood, tracing a turn in the grain that met up with the embedded edge of the chisel. She was beginning to detect her sculpture in there. There was a woman in the wood, she decided. A woman who had lost something, and was hiding behind her arms, her elbows rounded and pointy at the same time like the knobs on top of wrought iron fencing, small pine-cone ice-cream dollops of slightly twisted black ice metal. Elbows like iron berries.

Miriam squinted. She could almost see her. She worked the chisel free and let it hover over the surface, scraping gently, teasing the hammer.

"Mir, the kettle," whined Linger, uncrossing his long thin legs one way and then recrossing them the other. "It's not a radio, you know." He found himself hilarious.

"Can you get it?" she mumbled, licking her lips.

"I won fair and square."

She raised the hammer. Linger flinched in anticipation.

Something thumped, bumped and scuffled with sudden intensity. The studio door banged open to admit the righteous rage of Thierry the Moroccan painter. He was covered in paint. It looked like he'd thrown a tantrum with his colours. He reeked of linseed oil. He bellowed, "What's with the damn kettle?" in a voice that shook every rafter in every unit of the decaying Bohemian apartments. Everyone jumped. A dozen trances were broken at once.

The chisel took Miriam's thumb off.

Linger swayed in his seat, mouth agog, and then spilled out onto the floor limply. The coin, which had actually landed heads side up, bounced free and rolled across the uneven tiles. It skipped over Miriam's severed thumb and then fell to flutter on its face, one edge caught by a dime-sized spot of blood.

Thierry blinked as he stumbled against the jamb. "Holy Moses, Miriam -- are you alright?"

Miriam looked down at her hand. It was red and shiny, splattering meekly between her shoes. "No," she concluded.

"We have to get you to a hospital!" shouted Thierry.

"Okay," agreed Miriam distantly as she regarded her wound. She could still feel her thumb, but it felt like it was on fire.

Thierry charged into the kitchenette, exploded apart a drawer as he yanked it from its frame, and then savagely rummaged until he came out with a handful of clear plastic grocery bags with Monsieur Tang's logo splashed across them. He picked up the thumb between his own fingers and slid it into one bag, then put that package into a second bag into which he shovelled ice cubes from Miriam's largely empty, frost-encrusted freezer.

Miriam always insisted on ice cubes in her water.

She watched the splattered giant sedately, holding her slick right hand with her left. The kettle was still whistling.

Everywhere the painter went he left a trail of fingerprints -- alizarin crimson, cerulean blue, cadmium yellow -- including on the tea towel he bound around the dazed sculptor's hand. "Where's the telephone?" he barked.

"I don't have one," said Miriam.

"Merde."

"You should turn off the kettle."

"We have to get moving!"

"I can't go out like this. I'm not even wearing a bra."

"You're bleeding! You have more important things to think about than your tits. Come on, Miriam. I'll help you up. Let's go!"

They trundled down the narrow, rickety stairway leaving blue-green handprints and a trail of tiny dots of blood. The sound of the whistling kettle diminished behind them and was eclipsed by the rising thrum of street noise. Thierry threw open the front door with adrenalin-ramped strength, the glass pane shattering and tinkling down in a jangled slush to the sidewalk. "Taxi!" he shouted, waving his paint-soaked hand in the air.

"What about Linger?" asked Miriam, blinking against the sun.

"Fuck Linger," grunted Thierry.

Thierry was a genuine homosexual and he didn't like the way Linger looked at Miriam. There was something perverse behind the lank German's stare, something lustful and craven that made Thierry want to protect her.

He pulled open the back door of a red and white Taxi Parisien and propelled Miriam inside, then ducked in after her. "Hopital Saint-Lazare! Vite!"

"Pas des noirs," said the driver, a swarthy Persian. "I don't carry blacks."

Thierry frowned as he backed out of the cab and banged his fist on the roof, leaving a small, cadmium yellow dent. "Saint-Lazare -- allez, allez!" he commanded, spittle flying.

The Persian turned to appraise his passenger. "You an artist?"

"Yeah."

"Artists have no money," he said, shaking his head. "I need cash in advance."

He held out his open palm. Bewildered, Miriam handed him the plastic bag containing her thumb. "Somebody has to turn off the kettle," she told him seriously.

The Persian unknotted the bag and looked inside, then rapidly scrunched it closed again. He shut his eyes and made a brief, impassioned prayer to Allah.

"Allez!" boomed Thierry, kicking the door.

The taxi jerked forward as the driver's concern for his paint job outweighed his concern over being stiffed, nosing rudely into the thick traffic on Rue de Trevise and prompting a hail of horn honks. Miriam was tossed back into her seat. She banged her tea towel wrapped hand into the door post and squeezed her eyes tight as a wave of pain sizzled over her. She gritted her teeth and moaned.

"Are you having a baby?" gasped the driver, eyes on the road.

"No, my thumb's come off."

"Your thumb? I thought it was a penis."

"No. It's my thumb."

"That's a relief."

Miriam's eyes opened wider, her arteries suddenly alive with a new brew of pain-activated stimulants. She started to sweat. "Hurry, hurry please. I can't lose my thumb. I can't."

"It's right here on the seat."

"No, I mean I have to get it put back on in time. I can't be a sculptor with a missing thumb. Hurry!"

"I hurry, I hurry. What can I say? Traffic is bad."

"Hurry!"

Miriam sat back and leaned her forehead against the cool window. The blue sky was being eaten by a pack of hard-edged grey cloudlets, advancing from the west. Their shadows slid over the buildings, dampening the light, squirting over the cobbled road and drifting on. She wondered if it would rain.

Her hand was throbbing. The tea towel was soaking through.

They passed by Cecil's hardware store where she bought her wood-carving implements, and then Monsieur Tang's fresh grocery. M. Tang was out front misting the produce from a plastic squeeze-bottle and he looked up to wave at Miriam in the red and white taxi. She waved back with her bloody bandage. M. Tang turned pale.

A white man in an expensive suit shouldered past M. Tang. He had one of M. Tang's famous square watermelons under his arm. He wrenched open the taxi's door and pushed into the back seat while simultaneously ordering, "Get me to La Defense as fast as you can!"

"But Monsieur, I already have a passenger."

"There's a hundred bucks in it for you, you hear me? Two hundred if you get me there before that bastard Keith Dillons. Step on it!"

"I have to get this girl to a hospital, Monsieur."

"I'm talking about American money here, damn it! Did you hear me? Two hundred bucks, Ali! Now go!"

"She's bleeding!"

"Fine. A hundred for her, too. Okay, chicky? Let's move!"

The car lurched as Thierry rammed into it from behind, kicking the fender and then beating his multicoloured fists on the trunk. "What's wrong with you, idiot? Saint-Lazare! Drive!"

The Persian driver wailed plaintively because he didn't own the taxi, and he was sure his friend Ebrahim would punch him in the stomach again if he came back to the garage with any dents. He pressed his cheap shoe into the accelerator and felt the sole rip away. The car surged forward and hopped lanes. The Persian watched the furious Moroccan painter diminish in his mirror, then flicked his eyes back down to Rue de Trevise.

He should have looked down earlier.

"Watch out!" cried the American with the square watermelon.

Miriam had been overcome by a keen compulsion to rescue her thumb, whose bag was sliding back and forth across the front seat. She reached around to retrieve it but paused to lose her breath as she saw and appreciated the view through the windscreen. She recognized the nakedness of wearing no seat belt and it made her afraid.

The Persian stomped optimistically on the brake pedal.

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CHAPTER 2

Drago feverishly optimized an algorithm with a stub of splintered pencil and a profound erection. It was noon.

He was hunched over his desk, standing in his underwear, a perfectly functional ballpoint pen tucked behind his ear and therefore lost. His scrawny body still carried the imprint of the bedsheet's pressed folds, two dimensions of its dream-tossed topography tattooed in pink across his pale back.

The pencil broke. Drago swore.

He patted where his pockets would be if he were wearing clothes, then swore again. He spun to face his roommate. "You have the penicil?"

Guillaume looked up from his desk wearily, his handsome features broadcasting from their every inch a profoundly Gallic depth of contempt for the half-naked Serb. "You need antibiotics?"

"No, penicil! Penicil for to write!"

Guillaume shook his head with cruel languor, gesturing at the annotated books open around him. "Mine's more or less in use, I'm afraid." He paused, scratching the side of his jaw with the mechanical pencil, watching Drago's eyes track its motion desperately. "Say," he continued, "would you consider putting on pants? I mean, honestly. It's pointing right at me."

"This is more important than pant! Please, let me to borrow it one minute only, the penicil?"

Guillaume snorted. "I'm studying."

"I give it back quick like nothing. Okay? You need break, probably. Please, Gome."

"My name is not Gome."

"Please I'm sorry. The penicil?"

"Why don't you cover up your own penicil? Have you no shame, man?"

Drago threw up his arms with an exasperated grunt, then hugged his own narrow shoulders and paced in circles. Too much time was passing -- he was on the verge of losing everything he'd gained in his dreams...

When Drago had been small he lived in a displaced persons camp with his mother and his sister. His sister was deaf. She had been standing too close to a mine when someone stepped on it. She was very beautiful apart from the scars. Drago and his sister played chess, using pieces found, stolen or improvised. In time, their games became complex. In time, Dragana learned to speak to Drago through her moves. They had whole conversations that way.

Drago had loved her inappropriately: when she died he came to know that too keenly. He missed her like a lover. His heart baked and peeled. Forever after in his dreams Dragana spoke to him through chess. He always awoke enlightened and hard as a stud horse.

"Penicil!" he cried, balling his fists.

Guillaume looked on with indifference, but his expression changed as Drago vaulted over his rumpled bed and started thrashing around in his infamous tool box. "Oh no," started Guillaume, standing up from his seat, "no, Drago, not again -- we'll lose the Shah his deposit!"

"If there is no to be writing I can to do it with carving," said Drago, eyes roving the room for wood as he held aloft his chisel. Under his breath he muttered something about a bishop.

Guillaume had already suffered to have his antique bed-posts and the legs of his desk hacked into rude sculptures of chess figures in the name of Drago's unorthodox mnemonics. More often than not the sculptures were bafflingly eroticized, sporting engorged labia, upthrust breasts, towering cocks. Their surfaces were unerringly inscribed over every nook and cranny with bizarre and nonsensical chess notations -- angled, angry and tightly packed.

Similar etchings could be found gouged into the baseboards, the door frames, the kitchen counter, the toilet seat.

Guillaume cursed the Shah of Anwar. He cursed the man whose special scholarship to the Sorbonne he had accepted along with well-appointed but shared room and board -- he cursed the man who had never fully explained to him why Drago was called "the Mad Serb."

The Mad Serb had now seized upon Guillaume's antique humidor.

Guillaume threw aside his books, surged across the room, and smacked the chisel out of Drago's hand as he bellowed, "Enough!"

Drago watched sadly as his chisel sailed out through the open window. It tonked solidly on the sidewalk below, the impact echoing off the faces of the buildings. Somebody outside yelled, "Hey!" indignantly.

Guillaume and Drago both rushed to the sill. Nobody was hurt. The chisel lay in the gutter, its handle turning as a stream of wash water coursed over it toward the drain. Drago grabbed Guillaume's shoulders. "Please Gome, the penicil!"

Guillaume batted Drago's hands away and retreated into the room. "Here's a proposal," he said as he reached into his pocket and extracted a Euro. "Heads, I'll loan you my pencil; tails, you go chase your chisel. That's sporting, isn't it?"

"Why do not you just to lend me this penicil? I need forty seconds only."

The coin sang as it spun, bimetallic face flashing in the sun. Guillaume smacked it down against the top of his opposite hand. "Aw," he said, clucking theatrically. "It's come up tails, I'm afraid."

"Tails you give to me penicil?" asked Drago hopefully.

"No, tails you do me the enormous courtesy of fucking off for a spell."

Drago's face fell, then hardened.

He tugged and fought his way into a pair of grey track-pants and then put a burgundy Sorbonne T-shirt on backwards, the university's crest crumpled between his sharp shoulder blades. He tucked a pair of socks into his pocket, whispering about rooks.

"I be right beck," he said, whirling around in place as if in search of some final ingredient.

"Take your time," suggested Guillaume darkly.

After the door slammed Guillaume looked down at the Euro still resting on the back of his hand. It had come up heads, of course.

He got up and locked the door.

Drago shuffled down the steep, narrow stairway in his bare feet as he tried to commit bits of the refined mathematical description to memory, frowning and fretting as he felt more slip away. He'd been watching the Olympics in the cafe last night over dinner: he had dreamed about the shot put.

He emerged onto Rue de Trevise. He stopped short, running a hand through his bramble of black hair as he struggled to remember why he was outside. The ballpoint pen dropped out from behind his ear, but he didn't notice. It cracked when somebody stepped on it. The stream of pedestrian traffic bubbled with profanity as it diverted around him. "Idiot!"

The road was a border between informal districts. Drago's side of the street was upscale and quaint but the buildings it faced were dingy, cluttered and ramshackle. Drago only crossed to buy tools at Cecil's or fruit at M. Tang's. He didn't feel hungry so that left...

"My chisel!"

He plunged into a knot of pedestrians and they scattered. He came to his knees at the gutter just in time to watch his chisel clang against the tarnished sides of an ancient drain, spin under a gush of swill, then vanish.

His cry was forlorn. The pedestrians gave him a wide berth.

The sun slipped behind the first of a fleet of wooly little balls of cloud. Drago shivered. He spotted a small, jagged stone broken free from the cobbles and picked it up. Experimentally, he scratched it against the sidewalk. It left a clear white line. Drago grinned. "Penicil!"

He started scratching furiously, leaving a trail of chess notation weaving in rough parallel to the curb. He read a few symbols back from those he was engaged in writing: it concerned the spin style of putting the shot by a left-handed athlete, and the synthesis of his initial description of the event with the one Dragana's ghost provided while he slept.

Glass broke. Drago looked up. The street was busy.

He sat back on his haunches, rubbing his hand. He'd scored his knuckles against the pavement. They were pink and threatened to bleed. "White knight to early pawn, knight squared..." he mumbled absently, eyes back on the sidewalk. "Hyper-bishop. Mirror-queen."

Horns honked. Someone shouted. Drago looked up again. A brown man in colour-splattered coveralls was pursuing a taxi as it tried to nose into impatient traffic. The man took a flying kick at the bumper, then brought his fists down against the trunk and yelled again. They were getting closer.

Crazy people made Drago uncomfortable. He shifted protectively over his notes, clutching the stone. He was trying to decide what to do. His mother had instilled in him two basic responses to trouble -- it was either, "Run, Drago!" or "Put your head between your knees, Drago!"

Unwilling to abandon the algorithm, Drago chose to put his head between his knees.

He smelled smoke.

So did the passersby. They stopped to point to the column of hot soot erupting from a window in a decrepit apartment house down the block. They gasped when they saw flashes of flame. They wrinkled their noses when they detected the funk of burning linseed oil in the air. They hemmed backward nervously when they saw how quickly the inferno seemed to be spreading, window after window joining the roaring chorus.

The angry brown man in the painted coveralls had stopped in the middle of the road. He twisted to look behind him, then grabbed his own head and shook it with despair. He screamed an unprintable word.

Drago had seen people respond to fires that way before. It usually meant they had lost something important. It made him sad. His heart went out to the crazy taxi-chaser.

Several windows in the burning apartment house simultaneously popped, raining broken glass down upon Rue de Trevise. A dozen cars slammed on their brakes, unwilling to risk their paint jobs. People scrambled under shop awnings. A greasy cloud blossomed between the buildings.

Drago looked down in time to recognize that he was about to be run over by a red and white Taxi Parisien. Connection was inevitable. It was burning rubber as its brake-locked tires ground across the stones directly toward him. The man behind the wheel had a look on his face as if he were passing a baby. The grille flashed as it loomed.

Drago squinched his eyes shut and cried, "Heads! Heads! Heads!"

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CHAPTER 3

Like so. This summed up the sacred for Thomas: when things fit like so.

The world, he knew, was resplendent with chaos. In small pockets there were isles of natural order accumulated by the aeons -- isles in whose shelter a thing like a man might grow and live to cast his lot upon the froth. All he can do is exercise what little control he has available to build a bridge between his life and the spume: a woven cloth, gathered wood with flame, a source for water and a market for meat.

Whatever could be juggled into brief harmony, whatever could be arranged to work like so, might cohere long enough to do a man a service.

And so with this in mind Thomas rotated a final screw into place and then sat back to admire the architecture of gears inside the now restored antique pocket-watch. He put the screw-driver into his mouth and chewed idly on the handle, nodding to himself with satisfaction at the little corner of order he had wrought.

The watch was perfect. All of its parts fit like so.

Thomas snapped closed the cover, then gingerly turned the winding knob. The response was good, the clicking smooth and even. When he released his fingers the second hand began to walk patiently around the sun-faded face.

Thomas smiled.

No ticking could be discerned because the watch was not alone: everything in the apartment ticked. The radio, the oven, the ice box, the door bell, the toaster, the bathroom scale -- all of them built upon or extended by the artful application of clockwork. Thomas began each day with an hour of winding.

First to be wound was the crowning jewel of his labours, Wai-Po, a songbird. Her golden cage was framed by the window, a place of honour wreathed by Thomas' light-hungry plants. He would wind her before his morning Tai-chi on the balcony, asking after her dreams as he carefully inserted his fingers between the brass leaves of her plumage to twist the key.

When he righted her she would blink, tilt her head, and choose a song.

Thomas invariably said, "An excellent selection, my belle."

Today she favoured Chen Yi, interspersed with a little bit of Mozart. Thomas hummed along as he put aside his working glasses and squinted at the grandfather clock across from Wai-Po's cage. He held up the pocket-watch and dialed in the proper hour. It was noon.

He rubbed his hands. His knuckles were swollen, and they ached. With a sigh he wound up the crank on his workbench, then sat back while the clean-up routine ran. It wasn't a good run. The armature with the charged dust brush was squeaky, so he gave it a little oil. The sorting arm knocked one of his tools to the floor.

"H'm," said Thomas, brow furrowed. "Something's out of kilter."

Things being less than like so were a special source of anxiety for Thomas, because today of all days was supposed to be perfect. Today was the day he was going to get even with Henri Tang, the swindler -- Henri Tang, the grocer who told Thomas he was getting thirty percent of every sale of his carefully roof-gardened square watermelons, when in fact he was getting less than three percent.

Thomas had imagined the square watermelons arousing the curiosity of passersby, not the subject of back room deals to snobs and foreigners at grotesquely inflated prices. Instead of inspiring the imagination, the unusual melons were inspiring ridicule on behalf of anyone foolish and wealthy enough to indulge.

It was a crime against fruit.

It was an indignity to gardening!

And, worst of all, Thomas wasn't getting a fair cut of the action.

Feeling superstitious made him angry with his mother so he opted to curtail the emotion by flipping a coin to settle the matter. He withdrew a Euro from his change purse, then walked over to Wai-Po's cage, the light from the window warm on his face. "If Tang hadn't cheated me," he told the clockwork songbird, "I'd have enough money to make you fly."

She cocked her head.

The coin sang as it spun, bimetallic face flashing in the sun. Thomas was too slow to catch it but he saw where it landed, tracked it skittering over the floorboards. He leaned down but failed to resolve the image, so he was forced to fetch his work glasses.

"Ah ha," he said to the bird. "Heads."

Thomas kicked off his slippers, then sat down on the chair by the door and pumped up the shoe machine with his foot. It buzzed and chuffed as a rubberized platform inclined into place. The shoes were loaded in backwards but it was otherwise a good performance. Thomas didn't have to bend over very much.

Wai-Po started a cheerful set of Youlan variations. Thomas consulted the pocket-watch.

He stood up and put on his overcoat. It was too heavy for the weather, but it was the only coat Thomas owned with the proper pockets to ferry and disperse his cargo: nine clockwork rats swathed in very authentic looking fur, with ropey, worm-like tails that swayed as they scuttled. He methodically wound each tight with a master key, then loaded the rats in his pockets.

The overcoat was heavy and faintly alive. It seemed to rumble with portent. Thomas grinned to himself: there would be quite a panic at Tang's grocery.

"I'll be right back," he told Wai-Po. She twittered.

Thomas was old. He had been born deep in the maw of the twentieth century. Walking down the stairs made his hips hurt. If Tang hadn't cheated him he would've been able to afford to move to a place with an elevator.

Tang!

The street was busy. All of the girls looked like prostitutes. The boys looked like homosexuals. Thomas would consider moving back to Canada if his brother hadn't assured him it was worse there: the young people were hopeless, greedy and wanton. It was a world-wide phenomenon. The dollar had replaced the spirit, and race was reacting like animals.

Thomas, however, refused to live without honour. Thomas refused to be Tang's fool.

He stepped in dog shit on his way down the block to the grocery. A childish part of him wanted to take it as a grim omen. He soldiered on, picking his slow way through the throng. It was a warm day and he was beginning to sweat. The overcoat was getting heavier all the time. Wai-Po's last Youlan variation reverberated dully in his head.

Thomas lingered by the crates of produce arrayed outside Tang's grocery, casting a critical eye over bruised apples and over-ripened cantaloupes. He pursed his lips. Who did Tang have growing for him -- monkeys?

He worked a rat down his sleeve and deposited it between two boxes of cauliflower, then moved on.

He stopped short at the entrance when he saw Tang heading his way with a squeeze-bottle for spraying the produce. Thomas spun to loiter on the sidewalk, his back to the enemy. He glanced left when he heard the sharp crack of breaking glass. Down the street a black was shoving a white girl into the back of taxicab. A moment later he smacked his grimy hand on the roof and started shouting.

"Africans," muttered Thomas darkly.

He looked up and noted the apartment house the couple had burst out of had tendrils of white smoke weaving out of its upper windows. He looked down again: horns honked as the taxi tried to force its way into traffic -- the girl didn't seem to know or care about the fire. The black appeared to be chasing the car, like a dog.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Henri Tang wave to the girl in the taxi as she passed. The smile dropped off his face as he spotted Thomas. A second later he was rudely shoved aside by a white man in a fancy suit who hurried out into the street carrying one of Thomas' square watermelons.

When Tang recovered he found himself staring eye to eye with Thomas. "Zhang!" he sputtered. "I thought you said you would never set foot in my store as long as you lived."

"Hot words," said Thomas. "I have reconsidered our relationship."

Tang's hooded eyes went wide. "You have more melons for me?"

Thomas chuckled. "What would be my percentage?"

"We can work that out, Zhang. Trust me. Why don't you come in the back and we'll talk?"

Thomas hardened his face. "The time for talking has ended, Tang."

"What do you mean?"

Thomas hesitated, suddenly uncertain. This part was supposed to happen after he'd deployed the rats. He grunted, balling his fists. "This is now a matter of war between us. I...have come to inform you that my revenge will not be kind."

"Is this a threat? I told you, we can work out the details. I'm truly sorry about our miscommunication, Zhang. Please, come to my office. Let's have a drink."

"The time has come for your customers to see you in the same light of disfavour as I do," Thomas continued, glowering. "Behold," he cried, raising his voice, "this store is infested!"

He gestured dramatically to the cauliflower. Nothing happened.

Tang frowned sceptically and put his hand on Thomas' shoulder, giving it a sympathetic squeeze. "Your revenge is cauliflower?"

Thomas had no answer. His brow glistened. His mouth opened but no sound came out. He kicked at the crate experimentally, but nothing stirred. Suddenly the dramatic screech of brakes caused both men to turn toward Rue de Trevise where the taxi with the white girl in it was bearing down on a skinny, Slavic-looking kid sitting on the curb.

In a heartbeat Thomas knew the kid was going to die. He suddenly felt futile and stupid, petty and menacing.

In the face of real tragedy Thomas knew Tang was his friend.

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CHAPTER 4

When Nicole Gavrilovna was nine years old her life was saved by a watermelon. You know what they say: fruit is good for you.

She was walking home from school to have lunch with her father over a game of chess. He always let her be white. He sometimes let her win. She never told anyone, because if her mother found out she'd be grounded forever.

She brought scented hand-wipes, because everything in her father's studio was covered in paint or pigment or turpentine or oil. He mixed his own colours from ingredients bought at the chemist or ordered through the Web. When she went back to school she usually smelled like talcum but sometimes like lavender. She had two different flavours of hand-wipes hidden under her bed at home, and chose which to carry according to the flip of a coin -- a tarnished dirham, from her father's pocket.

Nicole had many such secret rituals. She was also very covert and serious about kissing the index page of all books regardless of their origin or content, apologizing to food before eating it, and her personal pledge to rescue small animals and babies from danger under any circumstances.

She liked to walk an even number of steps along each block -- even if she had to skip or stride awkwardly at the intersection to render proper accounts.

She was mulatto, but she told people she was black. Her mother told people she was white. Her doctor didn't care, when she asked for his opinion. He just recited colours to her: "White, black, yellow, brown -- we're all pink inside."

That was a cute thing to say. Useless, too.

Nicole rounded the corner to Rue de Trevise, sallying along the edge of the sidewalk as if it were a tightrope. She stumbled and put her shoe into the wet gutter, mouth falling open as she saw the great monster of smoke coiling up between the buildings. It was a nightmare thing casting a shadow in the light of day. Her father's apartment house was lost behind the pall.

The darkest part of the cloud took a breath and then gushed suddenly bigger, reaching out, guttering and flashing from within. It rushed down the street and over the cars, coming directly at Nicole like an avalanche.

She leaned into it, pursing her lips shut and squinting. The smoke washed over her. She smelled linseed oil and wood. Her eyes teared up.

She balled her fists and ran along the sidewalk, a lone figure moving against the grain as pedestrians fled the sound of glass smashing on the road. Some people yelled at her. "Arret! C'est dangereux!" The smoke was terrible but Nicole closed her eyes. With relish she had counted her steps along Rue de Trevise, again and again. Keeping track now was easy.

When she knew that she was directly opposite the studio she opened her eyes and turned to face the heat. There were bricks on the road. Between the waves of smoke she saw the building's half fallen face silhouetted by aggressive, darting curtains of flame. The sparks and embers made a million little eyes -- nasty fire spirits, mocking.

Nicole feared the worst. She screamed, "Father!"

And, somehow, his unmistakable baritone cried back: "Nic!"

She thought to herself: that was easier than I thought. She had been preparing herself to run into the burning building to save her father, but instead they were calling back and forth through the stinging haze, like playing Marco Polo in the pool except scarier and with a sore throat. And then there he was, coming out of the smoke, picking her up and spinning her around, reeking of paint and sweat, ganja and beer.

The see-saw wailing of sirens echoed closer. Horns honked.

Thierry jogged into the clearer air up the block, his daughter in his arms. He coughed a lot. His heart was pounding. "You were coming to see me," he accused, as if it hadn't been expected.

"I'm glad you're okay," she told him, knocking her head gently against his damp, colour-streaked brow. She coughed.

"If you hadn't been coming to see me it would never have happened," he muttered, then grunted as he shifted her gangly weight.

"But nothing did happen," she argued, rolling her eyes. "We came to each other's rescue."

Thierry allowed himself to smile. "I think I rescued you, child."

"Well, I was on my way to rescuing you if I had to so it's sort of the same."

He started to laugh then stopped as a firefighter in a black and yellow coat charged out of the debris cloud and skidded to a halt in front of them. "We're okay, we're okay," said Thierry quickly.

The firefighter advised them to get some oxygen. He pointed to an ambulance further up the block, its warning klaxon quacking and chirping importantly as it nudged its way through the seized traffic. Thierry nodded. He put Nicole down and held her hand, leading her along the suddenly abandoned stretch of sidewalk. People inside the shops blinked out at them like lemurs at the zoo.

"Are your paintings burned?" she asked.

"I think so," said Thierry.

"Oh, Father."

Thierry's pace slackened as he gaped at where the ambulance had stopped. There seemed to have been some kind of accident. "That can't be that fucking taxi," he said, slack jawed.

"Language, Father," warned Nicole.

"Miriam!" he cried. He squeezed Nicole's hand tighter, then barked, "Come on," and started walking again. "Close your eyes if I tell you to, Nic. You understand?"

"Why?"

"Somebody might be hurt. It might be bad. I don't want you seeing that, you understand? Close your eyes if I tell you to."

"Yes, Father."

Nicole thought maybe she might want to look anyway but lost that confidence as the scene of the accident drew nearer. She clutched her father's muscled forearm with both hands and pushed into his side as he walked. "Okay okay, chou-chou, okay okay," he murmured, patting her head and thereby putting streaks of crimson and cerulean into her dark hair.

The red and white Taxi Parisien had crashed into a tall iron light standard that, after three centuries of service, had been bent sadly a few degrees at the point of impact. The pole had gained an elbow while the front section of the automobile had been shredded, crumpling and collapsing as designed. There were bits of taxi everywhere.

Shards of plastic and cubes of glass crunched underfoot.

Thierry and Nicole came around the poster-plastered base of the iron standard. Two paramedics in shirtsleeves hovered over a skinny white guy on the sidewalk. He seemed to have smacked his head, because his hair was matted and bloody. One paramedic unpacked a neck-brace while the other timed the pulse.

"His legs are wrong," observed Nicole.

"Close your eyes, child," said Thierry.

There was a bunch of people hanging around the scene, including some who had stood up out of their cars to see what was going on. Nicole recognized her father's friend Miriam, the sculptor. She looked very pale and was cradling a red tea towel in her armpit. Beside her was a Middle Eastern man in a tight, dusty suit, twisting his hat in his hairy hands. He had a little cut on his forehead, and a raw, swollen look about his face -- he'd been hit by an airbag.

Inside the back of the taxi sat a businessman with aerodynamic hair. He appeared to be hugging something, his mouth a tight, colourless line.

Nicole looked to the boy on the sidewalk. He looked back at her. Velcro growled as the neck-brace was fitted around his head. His hands were folded on his chest. He looked almost comfortable. "Hi," said Drago.

"Hi," said Nicole.

"Stand back please," said one of the paramedics. "D'espace, s'il-vous-plait."

A red Lamborghini with tinted windows turned into the end of the road and then its driver jammed on the brakes as he saw the gridlock. The stink of burning rubber mixed with the other aromas: fire, oil, fear. A blonde man in a sport coat leapt out of the car and yelled in a caustically American accent, "What the hell is going on here? Move!"

"There is an accident!" the Persian taxi driver yelled back.

The blonde man stared right past the driver, into the back of the ruined car. The businessman inside the car burst into a flurry of action, slapping his hands all over the door in an apparent search for the handle to release himself. He found it and the door rocketed open, hit the limit of its motion, and then swung back and caught the businessman on the leg as he tried to jump out. "Shit!" he cried. "Damn!"

He was balancing a square watermelon. "Dillons, you bastard!" he hollered, face turning red. "You goddamned backstabbing asshole!"

"Fiona makes her own choices," retorted the blonde man, Dillons, angrily. "She chose me. Cope with it, Banting."

"I'll kill you!"

Dillons reached into the Lamborghini and hauled out his very own Monsieur Tang square watermelon, acquired to impress coy Fiona just like Banting's. Dillons lofted the six-sided fruit over his shoulder and, with a bestial grunt, tossed it at the businessman. Banting flinched away. The melon impacted on the taxi's trunk, breaking open wetly.

An agonized cry sounded from an old Asian man wearing a bulky overcoat. "My watermelon!" wailed Thomas.

Banting turned to Miriam. "Hold this," he hissed, shoving his square watermelon into Miriam's arms. He ran at Dillons with his fists up. Miriam screamed when the watermelon pressed into her wounded hand, then lost her grip.

Thomas could not stand to see yet another of his creations spoiled. With a plaintive cry he lunged at Miriam's feet, his knees hitting the ground and his cupped hands shooting out to intercept the watermelon just inches from the stones.

He said, "Ouch."

Banting and Dillons rolled over one another as they screeched and scratched and slapped like schoolyard girls. Banting pulled Dillons' blonde locks and then Dillons managed to get him off-balance with a kick to the groin. Banting rolled into the gutter, his face pinched tight and his breath knocked out.

"Hey!" shouted one of the paramedics. "Jesu' Christ!"

A elderly lady taking shelter from the fracas under the ultramarine awning of a patisserie gasped theatrically and tried to back away from the fight, simultaneously releasing the six leashes that had been wrapped around her forearm, leaving pink welts and friction burns. This, in turn, released her six terriers who yipped and barked as they charged directly at Thomas and his watermelon.

Thomas, who was very much afraid of dogs, started to frantically turn in place as the terriers surrounded him and tried to claw at his overcoat. A long rat popped out of a pocket and was quickly snapped up by one of the excited hounds. "No no, not my rats!" cried Thomas, still whirling. "No!"

The line of dogs trailed from the outswept edge of his coat like a spiral streamer, barking and leaping as another rat tumbled free.

A strange, creaking groan sounded.

Nicole looked up. The bent light standard was slowly but inexorably beginning to lean more sharply. She had a second to wonder whether her eyes were playing tricks on her before part of the standard's iron base buckled with a loud bang and the leaning accelerated. The tall, metal pole was falling.

It was going to fall on Nicole.

She was paralyzed. Her breath wouldn't come. She couldn't even shout for her father.

Drago was the next person to appreciate the situation. The shadow of the standard swept over him. At the right extreme of his peripheral vision he took in the scene: Nicole, staring upward; Miriam and the Persian, still looking around for the source of the groaning noise; the paramedic at his side, chittering into a radio; the spinning Asian man with rats pouring out of his pockets as he turned, holding aloft a great green fruit.

Drago didn't have time to think, but Dragana's ghost did.

"Shot put," he coughed.

The paramedic looked down at him, frowning, and tried to shine a light into his left eye. With a supreme effort Drago forced his head and shoulders off the pavement despite the neck-brace, his pupils flitting as they tracked the watermelon orbiting Thomas, propelled by terriers. Equations danced in his mind.

He drew a deep breath that stung his ribs and called out, "Rat man!"

When Thomas glanced his way he urgently bellowed, "The watering melon -- LET GO NOW!"

Thomas, flustered, panicked and scared, did not think: he simply obeyed. His fingertips opened. The melon sailed away from him, launched like a fat discus.

Nicole never saw it coming. She was knocked aside like a bowling pin.

The heavy iron standard boomed to the pavement with a resounding, metallic complaint. Its fixtures clattered and broke, and the watermelon smashed. Chips of broken stones skittered away, bouncing.

"Holy crap," said Miriam, eyes wide.

Thomas dropped to the sidewalk, his legs folding beneath him. A gang of ticking rats scurried out of his pockets and were enthusiastically pursued by the yipping terriers. "Mes chiens!" cried the elderly lady, but nobody cared.

The Persian taxi driver turned to Thomas. "You just saved that little girl's life...with a watermelon."

Thierry picked up his daughter. She was trying to regain her breath, making the same wheezing noises as Banting, the snotty businessman in the gutter. Nobody ran to his side. Nicole's knees were scraped raw. "Oh Nic, Nic," cooed the tall Moroccan painter as he hugged her, eyes watering. "Slow breaths, Chou-chou. Easy, easy."

One of the paramedics scrambled over to check her out. The other gestured to the ambulance driver to help load Drago on a stretcher. Down the block, firefighters shouted over the din of their roaring hoses as they doused the burning apartment house. Mist carried by the wind made everyone feel cool and oddly refreshed.

Miriam looked down and saw the plastic bag with her thumb inside. The bag had a footprint on it, and her thumb had been flattened and rudely deformed. She picked up the bag and considered it forlornly.

"It was him," said Thomas in a husky voice. He wiped the sweat from his brow, shook his head and pointed to Drago. "He saved her," he said. "He told me to throw."

"Shot put," murmured Drago from the stretcher.

"Keep still," said the paramedic.

A second ambulance arrived, chuffing to a halt beside the first as Drago was loaded in. Everyone else sat on the curb for a little oxygen: the taxi driver, the distraught owner of the terriers, Thomas, Nicole, Thierry, Miriam, Banting and even Dillons. They introduced themselves to one another.

"Miriam, I'm so sorry about your thumb," said Thierry sadly.

She sighed, staring down at the gruesome plastic bag between her shoes. Thomas tapped her on the shoulder, then drew down his oxygen masque to say, "Young lady, it would honour me to build you a new thumb."

"I was a sculptor," lamented Miriam, offering a wan smile. "Thanks, Mr. Zhang, but I need a thumb that works."

Thomas cocked an eyebrow. "My things work," he assured her. "I work until they work. Believe me, young lady. Did you see my rats?"

The skin around Miriam's eyes crinkled as she smiled for real. "I believe you," she said, wiping her eyes on the back of her wrist.

"That boy is a hero," said the taxi driver. "What is his name? I bet you he's Persian."

It was too late to find out: the doors banged shut and the ambulance reversed up the block, siren winding up to sing. An attendant from the second ambulance ran up to Miriam and started unpacking his kit at her feet. As he examined Miriam's thumbless hand he asked how long ago she'd been injured, but she couldn't answer him because time had become all screwy. Everything before the little girl had been saved by the flying watermelon seemed to have taken place a million years ago.

She took another deep breath of oxygen through the plastic masque.

In the next moments the more tragic consequences of the day were discovered: M. Tang lay between two parked cars, dead from a heart attack; and from the remains of the apartment house a firefighter carried down Linger's body, asphyxiated by fumes. They were laid out straight and covered by sheets, awaiting the coroner.

"Aw shit, Linger," whispered Thierry. "Aw shit."

He felt terrible. He knew the fire had blossomed on the back of his oils and turps. Miriam felt terrible, too. She knew her kettle had started it all. Nobody knew it but the Persian felt terrible as well -- he'd been the one who accidentally stepped on Miriam's thumb. He longed to wash his shoe.

Miriam was carted off in the second ambulance. She waved. Nicole waved back. Thomas sat on the curb and rubbed his bruised knees, wincing. Despite the role he had played in saving the girl from being squished he felt depressed and empty. He was just about ready to give up on everything, and he'd continue to feel that way until he found out that Henri Tang had awarded him the grocery store in his handwritten will.

To honour his friend, Thomas would not change the name. It would remain Monsieur Tang's for years to come. Newer customers assumed Thomas was M. Tang, and so he would live his twilight years under an alias.

Wai Po would be installed by the front door, to serenade the clientele. She would one day be stolen, but that's another story and shall be told another time.

He would build Miriam a new thumb. He would even figure out a way to wire it into her nerves. It clicked when it moved which always bothered Thomas, but Miriam swore she liked it. She showed it to everyone. In time, more people came to Thomas seeking clockwork anatomical solutions. He would take on an apprentice, and through him eventually find himself and his work tangled once again with the life of Drago, the Mad Serb.

But that is also another story, and shall be told another time.

Nicole and her mother would move to the United States. Thierry would follow them, despite a restraining order. He would be captured at the border by suspicious customs officials and rendered to Syria for special questioning. In time he would escape, however, with the help of a fellow prisoner -- a battered old Spaniard with the face of a Cro Magnon.

Other stories, other times.

Twelve years later Drago would find himself sitting across the candle-lit table of a Montreal bistro from a lush, precocious, raven-haired undergrad with whom he was, against his will, falling in love. She would say to him, "Tell me something unusual about yourself, Professor Zoran."

"Call me Drago."

"Drago."

"I am sexually aroused by chess," he said lightly, swirling the beer in his glass. "What about you, Miss Gavrilovna?"

She smiled. "You won't believe me."

"Try me. I'm quite gullible."

"When I was nine years old my life was saved by a flying watermelon."

His eyes widened. His moustache quivered. He furrowed and brow and asked, "In Paris?"

"Yes," she admitted, startled.

"On Rue de Trevise?" he prompted, leaning across the table with sudden intensity.

"Yes," she repeated, breathless.

Drago sat back in his chair and drew a long, pale hand over his beard. "I had been obsessing over the Olympics," he said quietly. "I never knew it would save you."

"Oh my God," said Nicole.

"You were a child. You look so different now."

"Oh my God," she said again.

They would be married, but neither of them knew that yet. As they walked home through the light snow Drago fondled a bimetallic two dollar coin in his pocket. When they came to the stoop in front of her residence he would flip to coin to determine whether or not to try to kiss her.

It came up tails, but he kissed her anyway.

The rest is history.

CHAPTERS

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