Momo’s closing of the Time Warehouse’s cold-storage door turns the Men in Gray’s dependence on stolen time into their undoing. Guided by Cassiopeia, she seals off their reserve of hour-lilies; as the pursuers fight over the last flower and lose their smouldering cigars, they disappear. The confrontation reverses the power that the Men in Gray have exercised throughout the city: Momo, small and initially uncertain what to do, acts where their control over time has left them helpless.

Causes and Background

The struggle rests on the book’s account of time as more than a measure tracked by calendars and clocks. An hour may feel long or pass quickly according to how it is lived; time is identified with life itself, which resides in the human heart. The Men in Gray understand time as something to take and store. Like leeches that know blood, they recognize its value, make long-term plans to appropriate it, and conceal their presence while gradually taking over the inhabitants’ lives.

Their method becomes concrete in their recruitment of Mr Figaro. The gray agent advises him to shorten customer appointments, reduce the time spent with his mother, send her to an inexpensive old folks’ home, sell his budgerigar, see Miss Daria less often, and abandon reading, singing, and conversation with friends. He also recommends a more accurate clock so Mr Figaro can time his apprentice. Mr Figaro follows the program believing its resolutions are his own: he cuts customer appointments from half an hour to twenty minutes, hires two assistants, watches them closely, and organizes the barbershop around the notice TIME SAVED IS TIME DOUBLED! He sends Miss Daria a brief note ending their meetings, sells the bird, and visits his mother only monthly. These changes show how the theft advances through ordinary routines and relationships, turning time-saving into a rule for work and private life alike.

The apparent gain conceals a loss. Mr Figaro’s work ceases to please him, while across the city life becomes poorer, bleaker, and more monotonous. Children feel the deprivation especially because adults no longer have time for them. The novel’s reversal—that the more people save, the less they have—clarifies what is at stake in the final confrontation: the Men in Gray’s stored time is not an independent commodity but life taken from people.

The Door and the Hour-Lily

At the end of the pursuit, Momo enters a vast excavation pit where the workers, trucks, bulldozers, and excavators are motionless. She finds Salvatore, the bricklayer who painted a flower on the wall of her room, frozen with one hand cupped near his mouth and the other pointing toward a large pipe. Taking his pose as a sign, she climbs into the steep, twisting pipe and slides down into a maze of tunnels beneath the housing development. She keeps hold of both Cassiopeia and the hour-lily as she descends.

The tunnels bring Momo to a huge underground chamber. The surviving Men in Gray sit in two rows along a conference table; their clothes are torn, their heads and faces marked, and their cigars still smoulder. A massive steel door stands ajar in the wall beyond them, with an icy draft coming through it. The men are discussing how carefully to husband their reserves because they do not know how long those reserves must last. Their conference makes the danger plain: while the door remains open, they can continue to replenish their cigars from the cold store.

Momo first sees no way to move the heavy door. Cassiopeia nudges her and spells out the instruction to shut it. When Momo doubts that she can move it, the tortoise directs her to use the flower and assures her she will succeed. The hour-lily is already wilting, with most of its petals gone. Momo hides it inside her jacket, then crawls beneath the conference table, passing the six pairs of legs without being seen. At the far end she takes out the flower, holds its stem in her teeth, touches it to the door, and pushes at the same time. The oiled hinges are silent; the door swings shut and ends with a clang that echoes through the chamber and tunnels.

The Men in Gray have assumed that no one else can move during the universal standstill. Momo’s sudden movement therefore shocks them, and she runs for the exit as they give chase. Their own realization is immediate: with the door shut, the reserve is no longer available to them, and they identify Momo’s flower as the one thing that might save them.

The Pursuit and the Gray Men’s Disappearance

Momo escapes into the tunnels, where the Men in Gray know the passages better than she does. She survives by zigzagging, while Cassiopeia repeatedly anticipates where the pursuers will go and positions herself in their path. The tortoise’s small body trips the leading men, sending them sprawling and causing those behind to fall over them. Though the chase sometimes throws Cassiopeia against the walls, she continues, and her interventions more than once keep Momo from capture.

The pursuers’ hunger for the hour-lily turns them against the conditions on which they depend. Several become so consumed by their desire for the flower that they drop their cigars and vanish. Only two remain. Momo doubles back into the conference chamber, where the last pair circle the table and fail to catch her before splitting up to approach from opposite directions. Cornered, she holds the flower against her chest; only three shimmering petals remain. One man is about to seize it when the other pulls him away, claiming the flower for himself. They grapple, and one knocks the other’s cigar from his mouth. The man whose cigar falls turns transparent and disappears.

The last pursuer advances with only a tiny smouldering cigar butt. When it drops and rolls under the table, he reaches after it but cannot recover it. He turns back toward Momo and raises a trembling hand. His final response is not another attack: he acknowledges that he is glad it is over, and then he, too, vanishes. Cassiopeia emerges after his disappearance and tells Momo that she will open the door.

Consequences and Significance

The door’s closure is the decisive change in the encounter. It does not merely keep the Men in Gray out of a room: it cuts them off from the cold store on which their continuing supply depends. The chase exposes the fragility beneath their earlier command of other people’s time. Once deprived of the reserve, they cannot preserve their existence simply by organizing, pursuing, or fighting over what remains.

The diminishing flower gives the struggle its urgency and its measure. Momo risks capture to use it, then keeps it close while the pursuers vanish and its petals fall away. The Men in Gray, by contrast, make possession their last hope: they pursue the flower, quarrel over it, and lose their cigars in the struggle. Their disappearance follows not from Momo defeating them through superior force, but from the failure of their dependence on stolen time once the supply is shut off. Against the gray agent’s program of clocks, schedules, and reduced human contact, Momo’s decisive act is a careful, cooperative use of the living flower and Cassiopeia’s counsel.