The Fearsome Firebird
Page 19
Thomas could feel Pippa trembling. Her eyes were closed. She looked the way she did when she was struggling to think her way into a closed space, like a locked steel drawer—or somebody’s mind. Thomas couldn’t imagine why she was wasting her energy trying to read Rattigan, when he’d just told them everything they wanted to know. Maybe she was hoping to find information that would help them escape.
But it was too late. They’d reached Manhattan. Thomas saw a family cheering on a nearby balcony, waving streamers and homemade signs. Rattigan waved back at them, cooing a little, as if he were Santa Claus on a sled, bearing gifts.
“Well.” Rattigan turned away from the window. His face was practically glowing. “I think it’s time, don’t you? Mickey, release the hatch, please. It’s time to show the world what Nicholas Rattigan can do.”
“You got it, boss,” said the former Sir Barrensworth, shouldering his gun and moving toward the back of the dirigible. Now there was only Clyde Straw covering them.
Just beyond the tank containing the reaper gas, a giant hatch in the floor of the dirigible opened like a jaw, revealing the colorful patchwork of buildings and people and buses and cars beneath them. Wind whistled through the dirigible, sounding almost cheery.
A bead of sweat rolled off Pippa’s forehead and landed on Thomas’s arm. Her lips were moving, as if she were murmuring a prayer under her breath.
And Thomas saw that Straw had begun to twitch, jerking his head to the left as though to dislodge a pesky fly.
Suddenly he understood: Pippa wasn’t reading Rattigan’s mind. She was trying to get into Straw’s head.
She was doing her best to distract him.
Rattigan extracted a cigar from his vest pocket.
“I don’t usually indulge,” he said, lighting the cigar and gesturing with it, so the smoke whipped around his head. He had to speak loudly to be heard over the thrumming of the wind, which was growing louder by the instant. “But I think in this instance—” All at once he broke off, frowning. “What is that?”
As soon as he spoke, Thomas realized that the thrumming wasn’t the sound of the wind at all, but of something mechanical, like an engine.
Like a plane engine.
Outside the window, a small, two-seater propeller plane floated into view, pulling level with the dirigible. Lash Langtry was riding in the backseat, his face grimly determined. And in the front cockpit, goggles obscuring half his face, was a man hunched over the controls, his jaw working back and forth, back and forth, as though over an invisible piece of gum.
Or a toothpick.
“Is that . . . ?” Sam said.
“It’s Kestrel!” Thomas cried. He couldn’t believe it.
Rattigan sprang to his feet, his face contorted with rage. “Open the valves!” he snarled. “Release the gas!” He whipped around to Clyde Straw. “And you—take care of our new friend.”
But at that instant, Clyde let out a sharp cry of pain and staggered forward, bringing a hand to his head. At the same time, Pippa slumped backward. Thomas didn’t have time to see whether she was okay. Tucking his head to his knees, he hurtled forward like a bowling ball, colliding directly with Clyde’s ankles. Clyde went flying off his feet, letting out a spray of bullets that dinged off the metal tank and ripped through the airship’s thin shell. Thomas was on his feet again in an instant. Sam had lunged for Clyde’s gun and, with a simple series of twists, tied the barrel into a useless pretzel shape. Before Clyde could stand again, Sam gave him a nice plunk on the top of the head, and Clyde once again slithered to the floor.
“Nicely done,” Thomas panted. “But where’s Rattigan?” Rattigan had vanished, leaving only his cigar smoking in a silver ashtray.
“Sam, Tom, look out!” Pippa cried.
They turned to see Mickey McClure sprinting at them, gun drawn. But before he could fire, Max sprang to her feet. Her hands bound in front of her, she snatched up Rattigan’s still-smoldering cigar and fired it directly into Mickey McClure’s left eye.
“Aaaaaagggh!” McClure let out a howl, collapsing to his knees and simultaneously releasing a volley of gunfire. Several of the bullets tore through the window directly at Kestrel’s plane. Before they could hit, Kestrel sent the plane into a nosedive, then spun skyward, drawing level again with the dirigible
Before McClure could get to his feet, Sam shoved him forward onto his stomach. He removed the rope coiled around Max’s wrists and used it to lash McClure to Rattigan’s chair.
“Thanks.” Max’s wrists were bright red and raw from the binding. She winced, massaging them gently, and then bent down to rummage through McClure’s pockets. When she straightened up again, she had her knives, the same ones he’d confiscated earlier.
“Rattigan.” Pippa staggered to her feet. She could barely stand. She looked exhausted. “We have to stop him from releasing the gas.”
“You’re too late.”
They turned. In that instant, Rattigan looked like a wild animal: ferocious and desperate, his jacket ripped and his shirt untucked, his ice-blue eyes wild and staring. He reached for the valve on the tank and gave it a quick twist. Thomas’s stomach plummeted as he heard the telltale hiss of leaking gas.
“I win,” Rattigan said simply. And before anyone could react, he’d thrown on a parachute and hurtled out of the hatch. The dirigible had drifted toward the East River now, and Thomas saw at once that Rattigan intended to land at the seaport, where a crowd of people was cheering him, clearly believing this was all a part of the show.
“No, you don’t!” Max leaped, hurling her knives.
For a moment the knives seemed to be suspended, like small metal birds, flashing in the sun.
Then they passed cleanly through the lines holding Rattigan to his parachute. The crowd gasped as Rattigan screamed and began to plummet—straight toward the foaming water of the East River. A second later he disappeared beneath the sparkling water, even as the parachute fluttered, handkerchief-like, down after him.
Sam threw himself at the gas valve and gave it a desperate twist. The knob snapped off uselessly in his hand. He looked up, an expression of pure terror on his face. The gas was still pouring out of the hatch, a dark gray chemical stream that quickly dissipated in the air. “Oh no . . .”
“And we’re heading straight into midtown . . . ,” Max said.
She was right. The dirigible, buffeted by the winds, was now veering away from the river and back toward the city.
“How can we stop it?” Pippa cried.
“There must be a way to steer this thing,” Thomas said.
They scanned the instrument panel, searching for a way to turn the airship around. But quickly, Thomas saw that the spray of bullets from McClure’s gun had blasted the controls into uselessness. The dirigible couldn’t be turned. It was going to continue on over Manhattan, spewing deadly poison over everyone who lived there.
And there was no way to stop it.
“Thomas!” Sam shouted. “Look!”
Thomas turned and, through the window, saw Kestrel’s plane hovering just below the hatch. Lash—his cowboy bandana tied over his mouth and nose as a makeshift gas mask—had edged out onto one of the wings.
“The mooring rope!” His voice, muffled by the cloth, was just barely audible. “Throw the mooring rope!”
Thomas saw immediately what Lash intended to do. He dove for one of the mooring ropes coiled at the back of the cabin and hurled it down to Lash. Lash snatched it from the air and, edging carefully back along the wing, fixed it to the airplane’s tail.
Thomas held his breath as Kestrel leveled out the plane and turned. They were now directly over the east side of the city, so close Tom could make out individual faces turned up to the sky, mouths open, shocked and confused.
“Come on,” he muttered. “Come on.”
“It’s working,” Pippa breathed. “Kestrel’s turning us around!”
She was right. Slowly, and then faster, the plane was turning. Kestrel was drawing them away
from Manhattan, away from all of its people, out over the East River and down toward the open water of the Atlantic Ocean, as the gas continued to hiss and steam, emptying out into the bright blue sky.
“I still don’t understand why Rattigan picked Barrensworth—or McClure, or whatever his real name is—to spy on us,” Sam said, rooting around in an enormous box of mixed chocolates for the caramel. He popped one in his mouth and then made a face. Banana. “Remember how he misspelled his own business card?”
“I still don’t understand how Mickey was spying. He only showed once or twice.” Max’s voice seemed to be coming from an extremely large arrangement of calla lilies—courtesy of Andrea von Stikk—which dominated the silk footstool in Mr. Dumfrey’s office. A second later, her head appeared above it, so that she appeared to be growing directly out of its branches. “Aha,” she said, brandishing a small paper-wrapped box. “I knew there was a box of toffee somewhere.”
“It wasn’t Barrensworth,” Thomas said. He was perched on Mr. Dumfrey’s file cabinet, one of the few surfaces that wasn’t completely obscured beneath a layer of gifts, candies, chocolates, notes, flowers, and other thank-you gifts that still, a week after the almost-disaster, flooded the museum on a daily basis. A specialty cutlery designer had even sent Max a set of knives to replace the ones she had lost during their aerial battle with Rattigan.
“Don’t tell me you still think Emily had something to do with it.” Pippa, who was modeling a red silk kimono gifted to all of the children by a grateful downtown seamstress, had been angling to check out her reflection in one of the dusty windowpanes. Now she turned around to face Thomas, plugging her fists on her hips. “She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.”
“Not her, either.” Thomas jumped neatly off the file cabinet and dodged the stacks of unopened gifts. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you . . . Rattigan’s spy!” With a flourish, he swung open the door.
But there was no one there except for Mr. Dumfrey, just barely keeping hold of the enormous cage that still housed the Firebird. Sam peeked into the hall as Mr. Dumfrey staggered into the office, to see whether someone else was waiting there, but it was perfectly empty. He turned to Thomas, expecting him to look disappointed—maybe he had intended for Rattigan’s spy to show, but had somehow lost him—but to his surprise saw that Thomas’s eyes were practically glowing. And yet the hall was most definitely empty.
“I don’t get it,” he said. He hated feeling slower than the others and was relieved that, at least, Max and Pippa seemed as confused as he was.
“Is this a joke?” Pippa asked, shaking off the kimono and folding it neatly.
Max stood up, scowling. “Yeah,” she said. “What happened to your big theory?”
Thomas opened his mouth to reply, but whatever he said was lost beneath the bird’s screams of protest.
“Let go of me, you flabby-fingered frump!” the Firebird screeched. “Let me out, you dwindling dumpling!”
“Quiet,” Mr. Dumfrey said, between huffing breaths, “or by tomorrow you’ll be feathering my pillow.” Elbowing aside another hideous arrangement of flowers—this one, Sam had noticed, addressed specifically to Mr. Dumfrey from A Secret Admirer—he set the cage down on his desk with a groan. “You wouldn’t think,” he said, turning back to the children and mopping his brow with a handkerchief, “that a bird could be so heavy.”
“Maybe that’s because it’s not a bird at all.” Thomas strutted around the desk, his chest so puffed up that for a second it looked as if he might sprout feathers. Then, suddenly, he leaned forward, banging both fists on the desk on either side of the bird’s cage. Sam swallowed a yelp. “It’s a rat.”
There was a moment of silence. Thomas glared at the bird. The bird seemed to wither, ever so slightly, under the intensity of his gaze.
“Who you calling names?” the bird squawked, but Sam thought that the bird sounded nervous.
And at last, he understood: Rattigan’s spy was, very literally, a bird brain.
Pippa began to giggle. Then she began to snort. Finally, she was laughing so hard, she had to bend over and wrap a hand around her stomach. “I don’t believe it,” she said finally. “I really don’t believe it.”
“Think about it,” Thomas said. “It was perfect. Someone rung up claiming to have a rare species of bird for sale—Rattigan knew Dumfrey would bite.”
Mr. Dumfrey looked pained. “My half brother likely remembers the parakeet I had as a small boy,” he said. “Euclid was my very best friend.”
“The Firebird was trained to repeat anything it heard. Maybe at first Rattigan just planned to keep an eye on us, make sure he knew what we were up to. But after Farnum was arrested and we began poking around, the Firebird was necessary. Then Barrensworth—or McClure—popped up again, offering to help train the bird for the stage. But instead he’s bleeding it for information, so he knew what we’d found out about Benny Mallett and Ernie Erskine.” Thomas shook his head. “It was lucky that Farnum got pinned for Erskine’s murder, actually. Otherwise we would never have known what Rattigan was planning.”
Max made a face. “Some luck,” she said.
“How did you piece it together?” Sam asked. The Firebird was no longer strutting in its cage or puffed up on its perch. Instead, the bird was huddled by its feeder, looking, to Sam’s eyes, extremely nervous and unhappy. In less than ten minutes, it seemed to have shriveled to half its normal size. Sam wondered whether now, knowing its secret was out, it also knew there was nowhere for it to go, no one for it to return home to. After all, the Firebird had known Sir Barrensworth, or Mickey McClure, as its rightful owner.
He felt almost sorry for it.
“Something Rattigan said on the dirigible,” Thomas said, and for a second the memory of what had happened high above the city passed over them like the shadow of the airship itself, plunging them all into cold. “He said he had spies parroting information back to him, and he kind of winked at McClure. I knew then.”
Pippa sighed. “So Emily . . . ?”
“Is completely innocent,” Mr. Dumfrey said firmly.
“I’m glad,” Pippa said. “Kestrel will be so happy.”
Now Thomas looked puzzled. “What’s he got to do with anything?”
“Not you, too.” Pippa threw up her hands. “How can you be so smart and so dumb at the same time?”
Thomas grinned at her. “Natural talent.”
“But what are we going to do about the bird?” Sam asked.
Max was fiddling with one of her new knives and didn’t glance up. “Maybe we can let Freckles have a turn with it,” she said. “He’s had the right idea all along.”
The Firebird had, by now, begun to tremble. Sam definitely felt sorry for it.
“Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said. He reached out and gave the cage a tentative pat. “I imagine that now Rattigan and his friends are gone, we’ll find that with the right training and just a little luck, the Firebird’s attitude turns around.”
“Go train yourself, you ball of blubber,” the Firebird replied, but without any real conviction. It even settled onto its perch and preened in silence as Mr. Dumfrey began to sort the gifts that had arrived since that morning, without once criticizing the way Thomas smelled or calling Pippa an animal.
The Firebird even, Sam thought, looked ever so slightly relieved.
Later that afternoon, Pippa, Thomas, Sam, and Max gathered with the other residents outside the museum to await the triumphant return of General Farnum, who’d recently been cleared of all charges related to the murder of Ernie Erskine. It was perhaps the last perfect day of autumn. Tomorrow, the papers were predicting a dramatic temperature drop and rains that would strip the trees of their singed-gold leaves. But today was perfect: brilliant sunny, sharp and cool, the air just edged with the faint smell of wood smoke.
“What do you think?” Gil Kestrel wobbled a little on the ladder as he gave one end of the museum’s newest banner a tug. “Look about right?”
Kestrel made several adjustments. “How about now?”
Lash gave a noise of appreciation. “Straight as a preacher’s sermon.”
“It’s perfect,” Emily agreed, taking Kestrel’s hand and giving it a squeeze as he came down the ladder. “General Farnum will love it.”
Thomas and Pippa had spent the morning painting a large banner announcing his return, which Mr. Dumfrey proudly proclaimed would hang above the entrance of the museum at least until Christmastime.
Welcome Home, General Farnum*! it read in bold red letters, with a special star next to Farnum’s name. Mr. Dumfrey had insisted they add in a secondary bit: Cleared of all charges related to the notorious and fantastic murder of Ernie Erskine, victim of the murderous Nicholas Rattigan and his plot to take down Manhattan! This had resulted in a banner rather larger than usual, especially after a third addition became necessary when General Farnum, through Rosie Bickers, had communicated that during his time in prison he’d come up with an idea for a new act.
“Listen to this.” Thomas had for days been obsessed with reading all the newspaper coverage about their role in saving the city from certain disaster. Now he had at least several different editions, including The Journal-American, The Daily Screamer, and The New York Herald-Examiner, spread out on the stoop. He snatched up The Screamer:
“‘There is no doubt that the police department’s grossly incompetent search for Rattigan, and failure to tie Rattigan’s reappearance to the string of bank robberies that paralyzed the city, nearly resulted in a catastrophe of unknown proportions,’” he read. “‘The police’—blah blah blah, hang on, we can skip how Rattigan was able to get an airship all to himself. Wait, here’s the good part.” He cleared his throat. “‘“If it weren’t for the extrapotential children of Mr. Dumfrey’s Dime Museum, who knows what would have happened?” said Miss Andrea von Stikk, of the recently renamed Von Stikk Home for Extrapotential Children. “It’s obvious that Mr. Dumfrey’s educational methods should be commended for their untraditional approach—an approach, I might add, I’ve long admired. As for the police—”’” Thomas broke off, grinning. “From there it goes on for four columns.”