“I t was the flamingo that converted me into working for Black Chess,” Tom begins, still driving through the streets. He has to keep driving in case the Reds are still on our tail.
“The flamingo?”
“The one the Queen of Hearts sent to the asylum,” he says. I didn’t even know about it. “One day, I received an order from Her Majesty to cure a flamingo of hers.”
“Cure it? In an asylum?”
“The poor animal didn’t succumb to her orders, and wouldn’t let her use it as a mallet in a croquet game. She thought the flamingo had psychological issues and wanted it healed into submission.”
“Healed into submission? What kind of healing is that?”
“The Wonderland style. Anyways, I found nothing wrong with it, and began to befriend it,” Tom says. “In my darkest hour, when I had no one to talk to, it became my best friend.”
“What does all this nonsense have to do with losing the war?”
“The flamingo was the Queen’s bait.” Tom averts his eyes from mine and keeps them on the road. It’s easy to see he truly regrets his past and wishes to become someone better. Every passing moment, I am more able to believe he did actually lead the revolution.
“Bait?”
“The preposterous Queen fooled me,” he says. “She knew who I was. She knew of Lewis’ mission. And she was the one who put the pills into my coffee and mock turtle soups until I became an addict.”
I am speechless. The Queen of Hearts has always struck me as stupid, impulsive, and borderline naive, like an angry child farting its way through life. I never thought of her as a planner with hidden agendas. I thought she was just mad at the world because of the circus. “I still don’t understand the flamingo’s role in having you work for Black Chess.”
“I guess your IQ just dropped because you’re dying, Alice,” he says. “The flamingo became my best friend, the one I trusted, talked to all the time. I told it about the things I remembered, the exact details of Lewis’ plan. More shattering than anything else is that at some point, the flamingo talked telepathically to me, poisoning my thoughts until I weakened and joined Black Chess in exchange for a reputable position in Parliament. A position where I could be respected, feared, pay my children’s tuition, and get back my wife.”
“And the flamingo, what happened to it?”
“Don’t you know?” He glances at me. “The Queen chopped off its head after that. There are signposts everywhere about the incident.”
“I saw it.”
Suddenly, Tom’s glance turns into a glare, as if seeing a ghost.
“What is it?”
“The Reds.” He speeds up. “They’re after us again.”