The Berwick Street dive bar is closed, and so the two figures who stand disappointed at its door are faced with a dilemma. Where to go instead? Where to talk?
“I could eat,” says the man in the green suit. “If you’re hungry.”
The other man shrugs. “I could not stomach food thank you Puck, not today. Not for a long while. But I could take tea. The Bloody Angle perhaps?”
They walk and take a turn, and arrive at four AM in New York. Down the long curved street they go, past the restaurants and barbershops, until they find a building between buildings.
The password for the Tie Kuan Yin Tea House is a gesture, a movement of the hand that will talk to doors and persuade them to open.
Once inside, they are taken to a quiet place out the back, away from the prying eyes and ears of the other Tea House patrons. The private room they’re escorted to is a desert with black sand, with dunes in the distance and a muted silver sun forever about to set behind them. In the middle of the desert room is a circular table made of blue stone, where the two men sit. The shadows cast here are long, and for a moment, before her eyes adjust, the waitress who has come to take their order sees Puck as a satyr, and his friend as a man with an orca’s tail.
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“Whiskey please dear,” says Puck without looking at the menu.
“I will take the usual,” says the other with a beguiling smile. The buttons of his shirt are undone, showing a chest covered in the scales of a fish.
“So, I take it your last gambit was a success?” Puck asks. “Thanks in no small part to my help.”
The man nods. “Yes. I won and now I am sated. It is a wondrous thing, what old legborn has done for us all. Long may it last. The ecstasy, Lord Goodfellow, it is… well, it is a taste of the divine.”
“So I hear.”
The drinks arrive. For the man in green, a large measure of ancient single malt dug from the dark earth and for the other, a small delicate cup of red tea.
“Are you happy with my payment for your services?” the merman asks. There is something in his voice. Is it uncertainty perhaps? Or maybe fear?
Puck looks the man in the eye, signaling that the words he is about to speak will be significant and binding. “Yes, of course,” he says. “You gave me exactly what I asked for. You gave me a son. Such generosity will not be forgotten.”
The man seems relieved and so he makes a show of waving away Puck’s gratitude. “It is nothing,” he says. “We are not close. I do not even know what he is called. You forget the names of your children, when you have so many.”