The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
morning when he strides through the proverbial door with his prize.
Fortunately, I trust I know you better than that. If I can presume to
advise you: keep a close eye on this man. He has about him an air of
incompleteness, and when he sits, he sits too far forward in his chair.
Were I a man who hungered for worldly fame, the contents of this
package would ensure it. You hold ten unique beauties (red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, indigo, violet, black, white, and translucent) crossbred
and fertilized using techniques of my own invention. Some are fragile,
and I will have to send replacements yearly; others should outlast us—or
at least Voskresenyov, let us hope—after a single successful planting. All
flowers descend in lineage from a tulip garden that the Petrossian patriarchs
have tended for nearly fifteen hundred years. The same garden, I
might add, from which the Petrossians—then Persian contract soldiers—sent
tribute to the court of King Roger II. An average man will
see these in bloom as beautiful flowers: you will see an unbroken line
made of petals, alive and radiant before you.
I look forward to receiving payment in the amount, manner, and
time we have previously discussed. Should you ever have occasion to
skate across the North and Baltic seas, turning southward at the
English Channel and following the fog that rolls off the Thames through
the Meadows, up the cobblestone streets leading to the Bear, across the
High Street and up Calx Street to the Porter’s Lodge, you will find the
warmest of welcomes, and in my greenhouse I will show you things of
which even you cannot dream.
—DD
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