tororo

Continued from here


DAUGHTERS OF BASTET: the twelfth monkey


I stirred, slowly, the capuccino that had costed me half the change that two weeks spent taking Greyhounds and planes one after another and covering my traces in various ways had left in my pockets.... or so it seemed.
So, checking again my pockets's content was the brightest thing I could think of, at the moment.

There was a handful 50 and 10 cents coins.
There was the 100 sen lucky coin I had since elementary school.
There was a magicmarker and a pencil.
There was this small piece of paper, with a postal address and various doodles written on it with a ball-pen, I had found in my left breast pocket just after having collided into this tall dark-skinned woman that seemed to be in such a haste, in the airport's hall, the night before.
There was the small, white, roughly cubic thing I had inherited from the late Mr Carver.

It was a rather irrational pulsion that had made me catch this object without even having fully realized what it was..... prior to having recognized an object I had already seen years before.
The exact replica of Notre Dame Cathedral's facade, sculpted in the most exquisitely detailed manner out of a small piece of some hard substance, smaller than my thumb's nail.
One could even count the statues -figured by reliefs the size of a pinpoint- ranged in rows along the faade, and the ones framing the chiseled rosaces and the other openings. The only addition you could have asked for would have been a hunchback.
In LA, or in SF, or in NY... It would have been easy to sell the miniature, albeit unsigned, to one of these galeries specializing in Art Brut... after all, it was Art Brut, to some extent.
But if I decided to put the thing on the market, sooner or later one of its future owners whould have it submitted to various experts...
To a monument like Notre Dame, every decade brings perceptible changes, and it would have been possible to determine, by comparing with photographs of various periods of the XXth century, the moment the carving had been made: after the rows of statues of the Kings and the Judges, sheltered during WWII, had been reinstalled in the early '5Os, but before the missing ones had been replaced by copies in the late '70s.
The material it was carved out would have been identified as ivory... routinely, it would have been submitted to ADN tests, for ascertaining what animal this ivory was from ... and it would have been identified as a molar a well-fed and healthy Neanderthal male's in his twenties.

A Neanderthal that used to drink since childhood fluorized water.

The other age tests would have corroborated the dating, and by crossing data -the years the tooth's bearer had lived, the fluor level in the world's cities water supplies in the decades before 197O- they would have been able to locate -or, rather, confirm- what place the creature had spent his lifetime.

I needed money, but...

I knew what Kristi would have done.


to be continued...