Angelica Lost and Found

Chapter 31. Ingress of Volatore

I want to reach Angelica and I don’t know how to do it. I can only proceed by trial and error. It was in this way that I chanced upon the mind of Alexander Zhabotinsky. An interesting habitat in which the proprietor appeared riding through a jungle on the back of a painted and bejewelled elephant, reclining in a gilded howdah with an attractive woman who was wearing only a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. Entertainment was provided by a band of orang-utans in Cossack dress backing a parrot in a sequinned gown who sang, in English, tangos from Finland.

The mahout in charge of the elephant was described in Zhabotinsky’s thoughts as ‘dirtified pubic and counting’. This was of little interest to me until that individual turned and revealed himself to be none other than Vassily Baby, brother to Alexander.

‘Aha! Vassily Baby! Well met!’ Slipping into the mind I found in his head along with a cloud of Stolichnaya, I saw a tall building on which the name Jarley Goode Ltd was inscribed on a brass plate at the entrance.

The name had a moneyed sound, so I flew to the financial district of San Francisco. There stood Jarley Goode Ltd, where Vassily Baby was employed as a certified public accountant. In his thoughts as he studied a database on his computer I found that he had promised his widowed mother to look after his unworldly younger brother. So here was the source of the miserable pittance that kept Alyosha in beets and potatoes.

Recalling what a tight squeeze it had been to get into Vassily’s mind that first time I wondered why it was so easy this time. Was Vassily weaker now? Was I stronger? Drifting through the barren and dusty attic of his largely unused brain I realised that I was much the stronger one. Vassily had never been in love, while I, loving Angelica steadfastly through thick and thin, had acquired mental and spiritual muscle that took me through his feeble defences easily.

It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold. Mine had had plenty of time to cool and I was looking forward to a long-deferred feast. Hovering high above him, I watched him leave his office. He stopped at a nearby delicatessen, bought a sandwich and a six-pack of beer, took them to his Mercedes and, with me following, drove to the Fort Point parking spot I remembered from our last meeting. From there he walked to the overlook, taking with him Stolichnaya from the glove compartment, and sat down to eat his sandwich and drink his beer while waiting, I suppose, for his next beautiful stranger, or possibly hoping for a return engagement with Angelica.

Vassily waited and I waited, hovering high above him while the evening opened to that time that always catches in my throat; the sky was still light but the bridge lamps had come on and those in the houses across the bay. I descended to twenty feet above Vassily’s head — I wanted him to see me grow suddenly huge as I dropped on him from that height.

‘Vassily Baby,’ I yelled down to him, ‘here is Volatore!’

He looked up and screamed but I was on him like an owl on a mouse and there was nothing he could do, my talons had him pinned.

‘Call of nature! Trousers down!’ I commanded, exposing his nether parts to the cool evening air while he whimpered piteously.

Then I thought a little smaller but not too much, and really gave him something to scream about when I achieved ingress by that same passage from which he had evicted me one evening not so long ago. He was moaning, possibly not from pleasure, when I left him there and flew away. Vassily could not have imagined a hippogriff but Ariosto did, so an eventful evening was had by all.