The Orchid Hunter. Sandra Moore K.
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probably for around ten grand.
Normally when you think of orchids, you think of the gorgeous, vibrantly colored petals of Phalaenopsis, or the pure seduction of Paphiopedilum, commonly known as lady’s slipper. Orchids are the most blatantly sexual flowers of any on earth, rampant in their attractions, decadent in their enticements.
The Bog Orchid is a runt. It’s a dull stunted foxglove of an orchid—long spikes studded with greenish, waxy-looking leaves that are actually flowers. Ugly thing.
Kew Gardens never succeeded in reproducing it despite their best efforts. There may be a few in Northern Ireland, but no one’s saying if or where.
Most orchid collectors have a couple of rare orchids like this one to trot out at flowering parties and green their guests with envy. The idea is to have lots of different orchids to show one’s taste, one’s style, one’s sensibilities.
Linus Geraint Newark von Brutten III has over fifty Bog Orchids.
I knew because in the thirty minutes I’d been kept waiting in Building 6, I’d counted them: fifty-seven ugly plants, fifty-seven ugly flowering spikes, 942 ugly flowers.
Tardiness is the privilege of the billionaire who feeds me. Ordinarily I wouldn’t mind. It kept us honest; we always knew where we stood. But von Brutten had pulled me away from Scooter, and I was ready to get this show on the road. In the time I’d not been counting, I’d been mulling over how to tell him I wasn’t going on a fishing expedition for him, at least not while Scooter was still around.
“Dr. Robards.”
I turned. A bow-tied, black-jacketed butler stood in the greenhouse’s doorway. His high forehead sprouted a light humidity sheen. The Bog Orchid does need, after all, a bog.
“Hullo, Sims,” I said. “How’s it going?”
He bowed. “Mr. von Brutten requests your presence in the morning room.”
Well, hell. That’d be a twenty-minute walk. “Then why did he send me here when I arrived?”
“I am afraid I cannot say, Dr. Robards, but I am sorry for the inconvenience.”
I wondered if all butlers were taught to speak without either expression or gesticulation. Sims might be being truthful about what he didn’t know, or he might not, and I’d never know. Couldn’t help but like the guy. “Lead on,” I said.
Von Brutten’s estate, fancifully called Parsifal, was a sprawling thousand-acre ranch fetched up against a low ridge about an hour outside Spokane, Washington. The ranch had two lakes and a great view of the Columbia River. I’d been in about half of von Brutten’s greenhouses, Buildings 1 through 9. The other half he kept to himself. It rankled, not being trusted. But if I’d been robbed blind for my plants as often as he had, I might be a little picky about my buddies, too. The only reason I knew those greenhouses were there was because I’d seen the satellite photos. Sometimes it helps to date the right people.
When it came down to it, as much as I hated to admit it, I owed Daley for getting me this job. My first year out of grad school, I managed to track down Cattleya turneris in Costa Rica, a rare blue orchid the year blue was all the rage in collecting circles. Plucked it right out from under Daley’s nose, in fact. I got the call from von Brutten within a day of arriving back in the States: he wanted to hire me as Daley’s replacement. “Daley,” von Brutten had breathed over the phone line, “has not lived up to expectations.” I’d been collecting for von Brutten ever since.
The morning room faced east, and light cast down through the glass roof for only a couple of hours. I liked this room because it opened onto a little shade garden surrounding an irregularly shaped man-made pond. Von Brutten’s orders must have been to make the garden look like a jungle, with its bowing palms and water-loving bromeliads. It didn’t. This garden looked like a place you’d want to rest in, maybe take a nap.
The word jungle is from the Sanskrit jangala, meaning “impenetrable.” The jungle smothers you with noise and odors and fear. Its trees tower, woody vines dangle, insects bite, birds screech, monkeys howl, jaguars stalk, and the whole time heat rises through the air like somebody threw water on a griddle. You don’t penetrate the jungle. It penetrates you.
“Dr. Robards,” Sims announced, his deep voice echoing under all the glass.
Were he true to the stereotype, von Brutten would have been huddled over a Dendrobium, clutching a watering can and muttering diabolically to himself about humidity. Instead, he relaxed his small, elegantly suited frame into a Lucien Rollin chair and smiled a frosty smile over his silk jabot.
“Dr. Robards,” he breathed. “Please, sit and enjoy a little something.” He snapped his fingers. Food and juice appeared, carried by silent bow-tied wait staff.
“Just tea for me, thanks.”
A French press of tea sat at my elbow. Poof. Just like that. Maybe money was the secret of Houdini.
“Did you enjoy your flight?”
“I always enjoy the Lear, thanks,” I said. “Very nice.”
While we traded meaningless social niceties, I studied him. His pale, even features seemed vaguely threatening in repose, but I’d gotten used to that. He resembled the guy who’d share his last smoke with you before smiling benignly and dropping you headfirst into a shark tank. Small eyes, aquiline nose, a thin-lipped mouth, a closely trimmed goatee. In some circles he might be considered genteelly attractive. I didn’t move in those circles. As far as I knew, there was no Mrs. von Brutten, nor was there a boy-toy wandering around. Von Brutten appeared to be either extremely celibate or extremely circumspect.
Or maybe he just got his rocks off pollinating nearly extinct orchid species.
After he asked me a polite question about my limo ride from Spokane to Parsifal, I realized he was desperately excited about something.
The more excited he was, the less likely he was to act that way. But I needed him to hurry up so I could get back to Scooter. The trick was to hustle him up without appearing to want to.
“Your jet’s much nicer than the crate I took out of Micronesia,” I said casually. I wished I smoked, so I could blow a stream negligently into the air while glancing away.
“A successful trip.” His hand strayed in the general direction of Building 3, where the siblings to Scooter’s Phalaenopsis were being studied in a high-tech laboratory.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Did you…have fun…in Micronesia?”
I shrugged carelessly. “I ran into Mrs. Thurston-Fitzhugh’s errand boy.”
“And you took care of him.”
“He came away empty-handed, as usual.”
A smile fled across von Brutten’s silvery eyes.
I waited. You can’t push someone like von Brutten too hard. And he was enjoying my news too much for me to rush him. Mrs. Thurston-Fitzhugh had consistently beaten him to the punch until I came along, and von Brutten had made sure I knew he was pleased with my performance. My ability to outwit and outcollect the handful of professional field collectors in the world meant von Brutten stayed top dog in the insulated and obsessive world of ultra-high-dollar orchid collecting. We had a gentleman’s agreement: he paid me generously and I didn’t work for anyone else.
The ten or so other professionals tended to freelance, sometimes for private collectors like von Brutten and sometimes for legitimate botanical institutions. Not that the institutions would admit to being party to breaking the CITES Treaty. The only other monogamous employer-hunter relationship I knew of was Mrs. Constance Thurston-Fitzhugh and Lawrence Daley.
I sipped my excellent tea, poured for me by someone I hadn’t noticed.
An irregular chuffing noise started up from von Brutten’s direction. I glanced over to see him holding an embroidered handkerchief to his mouth. His eyes wrinkled