Plankton We Have Heard on High, Page 2

light grew sparser still as I went on.

  I nearly crashed into another table, but this time the glow of a candle alerted me to the obstacle, and I managed to only lightly bump the table’s edge.

  The occupants did not scatter this time, and when I looked down to apologize, they beamed up warmly at me.

  They were a friendly, handsome couple in their early fifties. He was compact and strongly built, with a multi-directional mop of mostly gray hair that gave him a rugged look at odds with his rather delicate hands. She had jet black hair with a faint wave pattern most pronounced where its ends grazed the padded shoulders of her black blazer.

  Back in the dining room, the Lee Marvin guy started singing again, and most of his words carried fairly well:

  O molting night,

  Brittle stars are fattening nicely

  It is the night –mumble mumble….

  Long lay thee here, behind this clump of coral

  But when it’s clear, you can pounce and fill your gorge.

  A thrill of hope: that lurking cod has vanished

  And lookee: here comes a fat and tasty urchin!

 

  Faaaaaall on your cephalothorax!

  O hear the chitin bursting….

  It struck me then that the couple might have seen Allison, might even have spoken with her, this being a seemingly friendly place, and it being the holiday season. I described her and explained my situation, doing my best to impart the urgency I felt.

  They looked at one another, nodding knowingly, and the man handed me an extra drink the waiter had mistakenly brought for him. I sat and drank just to calm my nerves.

  The look that had just passed between them suggested that they had seen my wife, but now they seemed to be simply ignoring my question. Infuriating as it was, I realized I had to engage these two in conversation if I was going to get anything out of them. As I listened and nodded, I kept an eye out for Allison, and for any hitherto unseen exits from this room.

  The man was telling me about their visit to Turkey, but he called it Anatolia, explaining matter-of-factly, and with erudition that spoke of wondrous breeding, that they’d managed to arrive in Asia Minor in a different era, long before our own, and that his wife had gotten a job tending bar at a saloon frequented by a number of Knights Templar. The two of them were as much reminiscing as telling the story to me.

  “I’ll tell you, my young friend, those Templars always had a spectacular line of rubbish to spin once they’d got a belly full of Greek wine.” He turned to his wife. “Heavens! Can you imagine if they’d ever got their hands on any real booze?” Facing me again, he added, “There were no such things as distilled spirits in those days. Oh, there were stills, alright, but they were rare, and only alchemists had them, and they weren’t making scotch. No indeed.”

  “Please, darling,” said his wife. “Don’t let’s get started on the alchemists. We’ll bore this poor floater to tears.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “What did you just call me? What does ‘floater’ mean?”

  She gently put a warm hand on my arm and fixed her brown eyes on mine in a way that ought to have made her husband froth with jealousy. “Darling,” she said, “just be glad you live when and where you do, and that your floating doesn’t take you to certain other times and places.”

  “We were there to do a job, you see,” her husband explained. “We were in charge, and the Templars were simply the muscle to back us up, and the bartending gig was merely a cover until we made sure those careless knights hadn’t been infiltrated.”

  “A job,” I mumbled, wondering when he would get to the point so I could get up and get moving.

  “Our employers were dead set on making sure that Mozart, who wouldn’t be born for many centuries yet, would never be exposed to sitar music. The process of preventing that situation had to be started well in advance of the Viennese genius’s arrival in our world.”

  “Absolutely nothing Indian,” the woman explained. “No sarod, no veena, not even those lovely little finger drums. What are they called again, dear? Oh, it doesn’t matter. You see, our employers had been in contact with a certain group of veteran time travelers who assured them that, if Mozart ever got an earful of eastern music, so great would be the impact on Western consciousness that the world would come to an end within two hundred years of the great composer’s birth.”

  “Something to do with knowledge of the Higgs Boson falling into the wrong hands,” her husband added.

  I’d had enough.

  “Even though I’m no physicist,” I replied sharply, “I’m reasonably sure that what you just said makes no sense. And much more to the point, I really need to find my wife, and I get the distinct impression that you’ve seen her, and yet for some reason, you refuse to say what you know.”

  The man lit a cigar, sat back, and nodded smugly as he regarded me. “Yes, I can see you’re a man of action.” His tone of voice was sweating out plump little beads of sarcasm.

  I looked from one to the other. “Why on earth won’t you simply tell me whether or not you’ve seen my wife? It’s a simple enough question: There’s a women about five-foot-six, late twenties, chin-length black hair, wearing sunglasses. I’m sure you’d remember if you’d seen this person in just the last few minutes, and I can’t imagine why you won’t just say yes or no.”

  The man mimicked me in a mock dramatic voice: “Just say yes or no! I’ll get to the bottom of this!”

  “Better to get to the surface of this,” came a new voice from somewhere behind me.

  I stood and looked around to see who had spoken. There was no one.

  The man sitting at the table had begun to bellow: “And the sixth horseman likened unto a baby-faced, middle-aged badass, and the grey hair over his sunburnt beer belly was sealed with a varnish that contained silver and charcoal flecks in tight abundance.”

  That was it. The couple were clearly insane – or if they weren’t, they were having themselves a good old laugh by deliberately delaying me when they could see I was frantic.

  The gnarled old piano player had migrated back here to the bar and taken a seat at yet another baby grand, this one coated with shining mother of pearl.

  Plankton we have heard on high,

  Coursing sweetly through the brine,

  Stretch thy baleen open wide,

  Receive thee now this rich delight.,

  Glo – aw-aw-aw-aw-aw

  …aw-aw-aw-aw-aw

  …aw-aw-aw-aw- AWWWWriaaaaaa

  In excelsis …

  The old codger really bawled out the last few beats of Gloria, then stopped two syllables short of the end of the verse and addressed the room with great confidence and panache.

  “Say, did I ever tell you folks the one about the two Jurassic mosquitoes who fell asleep during an amber alert?”

  A wave of laughter from the crowd.

  I was moving along the rear wall of the place, desperately searching for another way out. Then I suddenly realized that Allison might just have gone to the restroom, and if I could find that, I’d simply wait for her outside the ladies’ room door, or get a waitress to go in and check for her. That look I’d seen on Allison’s face might have meant she was getting sick.

  In fact, I thought, her feeling ill was the most likely explanation for her sudden disappearance, and maybe also for her apparent distress. In my earlier panic I had missed the obvious.

  But what was up with the way people were reacting to me? I looked around and saw faces turning away to avoid meeting my gaze. Maybe I’d raised my voice a little too much when I got exasperated with the Higgs Boson couple.

  Said the Gulf Stream to the tiny sprat,

  "Do you see what I see?

  Do you see what I see?

  Way up on the surface, little sprat,

  Do you see what I see?

  A skiff, a skiff, trawling on the waves

  With a gillnet big as a cave,

  With a gillnet…

 
Again the pianist stopped and addressed the crowd. “You know, folks, I always thought that the Lord of the Rings movies would have been better if Michael Caine had played that talking tree character. And maybe Gandalf, too.”

  The crowd roared with laughter again, but this time I didn’t get the joke. Then I cursed myself for getting distracted again. Just think about finding Allison, you idiot!

  At last, practically feeling my way along the curved wall of the bar, I found another archway, the room beyond totally black.

  Before entering, I opened my cell phone, using its screen to light my way. But just as I lifted my foot to take the first step through, a face began to emerge out of the darkness in front of me.

  I took an involuntary step back. The face seemed to float on air. I stepped back some more, and in a moment I saw that it was the old piano player himself. As he emerged into what little ambient light graced the bar room, I saw that his outfit was neither a tuxedo nor black, but something strange and skin tight, the pale green of rain-slicked moss.

  He fastened his eyes onto mine with a burning laser glare that sent a million-volt sizzle through me.

  And he spoke.

  “Now you listen up, and listen good. I’ve gone free diving at hydrothermal vents on parts of the ocean floor where puffed-up college boys like you wouldn’t venture in a billion-dollar mini sub with robotic arms. No air tanks for me. No GPS, no depth gauge. No quaint little let’s-get-retro compass, either.” Grinning at me through a jagged landscape of alternately brown and missing teeth, he drew hard on the slender silver stem of a polished applewood pipe carved in the shape of Neptune