by Kirby Larson
The crumpled man took his seat across the aisle from the girls and their guardian. “Nice day,” he said, with a doff of the hat. Audie and her colleagues could not know it, but the man carried in his bag an assortment of magic tricks and handbills proclaiming the prowess of the Great Oberon, though the man’s given name was Wylie Wurme.
“Yes, it is.” Audie ignored Cypher’s glare. He had rattled off a series of instructions at the Swayzee station, including no speaking to strangers. But that surely didn’t apply to their fellow travelers, did it? “I do hope there’s some baghlava,” she said, attempting to change Cypher’s frown to a smile. She would never mention it, but in her opinion, he had consumed the lion’s share of Beatrice’s delicious home-baked treat.
“I think we should begin with something of more nutritional value.” Cypher held up two sandwiches. “Which would you prefer?” he asked, waxed-paper packages held in either hand.
“Tuna, please,” Bimmy said.
“Me too,” Audie said. “Please,” she added, almost as an afterthought. Hunger had taken the edge off her manners.
Cypher reached for the remaining sandwich, deviled ham, his least favorite, without complaint. One of his fellow operatives had told him about a Persian restaurant in New York City. He unwrapped his sandwich, dreaming about what he would order should he be able to locate that slice of heaven. Ghormeh sabzi. Morgh polou. Pilau, pilaf! He sighed to think of such dishes, taking a bite of the sandwich. He chewed, then paused.
“Is everything all right?” Audie inquired.
Cypher removed several strands of dark brown hair from his mouth. Not hair, he decided upon closer examination; the offending items were more fur-like. This was not only unpleasant but surprising given that Cook and Beatrice kept an immaculate kitchen.
Still, he was hungry. He carefully examined the remaining portion of bread, meat, and butter. There did not appear to be any additional foreign objects. Once the sandwich was dispatched, he reached for the volume in his pocket. Make what you will of its title, dear reader: Conversational French.
“It’s a long trip.” Audie daintily wiped her mouth. “And we’ve finished The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. We took turns reading it aloud. Bimmy does a smash-up job with voices.” She sat back against the hard wooden seat, planning her next comment carefully. Cypher was quite impervious to inquisitiveness. “We are in need of a diversion.”
Bimmy nodded in agreement, though she wouldn’t have minded rereading Mr. L. Frank Baum’s story.
“A diversion?” Cypher tugged at his collar band. He’d known the girls would be a bundle of trouble.
“Yes. That or”—Audie primly placed her hands in her lap, delivering the coup de grâce—“tell us about our mission.”
Cypher made a shushing gesture, indicating the man in the brown suit.
Audie gave a quick nod. “I meant, tell us about our missionary parents.” She smiled in the direction of their traveling companion. “They’re saving souls in Borneo. Might we share the Good Word with you?” She folded her hands as if in prayer, nudging Bimmy to follow suit.
The man adjusted his hat and found his feet. “I believe I’ll make my way to the dining car.” He exited their company with tremendous haste.
Audie grinned at her accomplishment. “Now you can tell all,” she said.
Cypher found himself in need of those headache powders again. The girl was much too imaginative. One adventure in the nation’s capital and she now fancied herself some kind of crime solver.
“Mission is an inaccurate term,” he clarified. Though it was a step up from assistant soup maker, the role she’d played in their last outing, Audie was likely to be disappointed by the reason she’d been brought along. He cut a glance at Bimmy, correcting himself. They’d been brought along.
Cypher slipped the book back in his pocket and reached for his leather valise, never out of his possession. He undid the latches as he brought it to his lap and then removed three ruby-red orbs.
“What are those?” Audie’s question was filled with wonder. She had never seen the like.
“Pomegranates!” Bimmy exclaimed. She might not be as well read as Audie, but her vagabond circus life had presented her with a richer variety of experiences.
“What are pomegranates?” The word felt magical in Audie’s mouth.
“Delicious!” Bimmy and Cypher answered in unison.
“Sorry,” Bimmy said, as if there was something to be forgiven.
“But you are most correct.” Cypher hefted one of the fruits in his hand. Then another, then a third. To Audie’s delight, the ruby orbs revolved like a sideways carousel in the air.
“You can juggle!” Bimmy clapped her hands in recognition. “I can, too, a bit.”
Cypher nodded without breaking the rhythm of his motions. He did some fancy crossover movements, and Audie was certain the pomegranates would fall. But they remained aloft. It was entrancing.
“Ready?”
Bimmy nodded and held out her hands.
“Zut!” Cypher called.
The southpaw Wayward expertly caught first one, then two, then three fruits. Bimmy gingerly rotated them in small concentric airborne arcs. When she bobbled one and they all began to tumble, Cypher deftly captured the fruits before they connected with the floor—one, two, three.
“Brava, young lady.” Cypher bowed in Bimmy’s direction.
She bobbed her head. “You learn a lot in the circus.”
Cypher waved his hands over the pomegranates, as a magician might. “And now for the best part of the trick.” A knife was removed from his vest pocket and, with expert motions, the skin was slashed in several places. Cypher turned a leathery portion inside out, revealing shiny seed jewels within.
He offered the fruit to Audie. “Try this.”
“What do I do?” she asked.
He showed her how to scrape several rows of the juicy seeds into her mouth.
“Oh, it’s like eating an adventure!” Audie said.
Bimmy almost declined her share of fruit out of shyness, but she had tasted pomegranates before. They were too delicious to decline because of social insecurity.
The girls ate, taking great care not to drip on their clothes, after Cypher warned them about the fruit’s staining properties.
“Where did you learn to do that?” Audie licked tart juice from her fingers. “The juggling, I mean.”
The slightest wisp of a smile briefly haunted Cypher’s handsome, ruddy face. He preferred not to reveal much of his past. “The house in which I was raised had many children.” As he spoke, a few small faces came to his memory, unbidden. The true danger in recalling his homeland revolved around the reason he had left it for America. He blinked away the faces, wrapping the now-seedless pomegranate skins in the waxed paper from his sandwich. “I think you have a saying here, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention.’ It was of utmost necessity that I invent what you have called diversions.”
“Well, it was marvelous.” Audie dispatched one last seed, stuck to her lower lip.
“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Cypher said. “Because it’s time for you to learn.”
“To juggle?” Audie asked. “There will be fruit rolling all over this train if I try.”
From his valise, Cypher produced three silk scarves. “This is how one begins.” As he had suspected, Audie proved a quick learner. All that reading had worked wonders with her eye-hand coordination. With Bimmy’s help, Audie soon graduated from scarves to beanbags to small wooden balls.
She was flushed with pride at the end of the lesson. And weary. Audie curled up on the seat, murmuring, “Bees and bonnets, that was good fun but I’m bushed.” Bimmy likewise curled up. In a thrice, two girlish heads, one with wild auburn locks, one with soft jet-black curls, leaned against each other in slumber.
Cypher pulled the aforementioned book from his pocket and read lists of conversational phrases to himself: Bonjour. Comment allez-vous? Quelle heure est-il? Throughout the night, he alter
nated his studies with watching over the girls, satisfied that the first elements of his plan were falling neatly into place. Très bien.
Theo’s landlord, Billy Bottle, rapped at the laboratory door. “Man here to see you,” he announced. For four or five years now, there’d been a steady stream of visitors to the boardinghouse, ever since Theo’s first paper had appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A. Generally, the visitors were professor types, all black wool robes and wild white hair and ink stains on their middle fingers. This fellow was no scholar, not dressed like a toff, in that three-button cutaway jacket, the way he was.
“Say I had an appointment,” the man suggested when the door did not open right away.
Mr. Bottle rubbed his nose, a remarkably large feature that wobbled this way and that over a scrubby moustache. “What I say won’t make no difference to Theo.” He patted at his pockets. Where had he left his tobacco and pipe? Sometimes it took Theo as long as an hour to answer a knock. If indeed the knock was answered at all.
Impatient with Mr. Bottle, the magician stepped around the man and faced the firmly closed door. “Theo! This is Harry Houdini.”
Harry Houdini! The world-famous magician? Mr. Bottle bobbled the packet of Player’s, spilling bits of dried material down his stained shirtfront. What was a fella like him wanting with Theo? The landlord brushed himself off, then filled his pipe without further mishap. He tamped the tobacco with a yellow-stained thumb.
“Theo!” Houdini called again.
A match hissed and the aroma of pipe tobacco stung the magician’s nose. He sneezed.
“Could be buried in a book,” Mr. Bottle offered, puffing gently. “Theo does love them books. One time didn’t come out for a solid week.”
“I. Do. Not.” Houdini exhaled powerfully through his nose. “Have a week.”
Billy Bottle cleared his throat. “Something I could do for you?” he asked. “I’m handy in tight spots.”
“What? No, you cannot help me.” Harry Houdini pushed through the haze of tobacco smoke and bellowed at the door. “Theo! We had an appointment!” Houdini pulled out his solid-gold pocket watch. “For an hour ago.”
Billy Bottle consulted his own pocket watch, not that he cared much about the time. It was more to show Houdini he wasn’t the only one with such accouterments.
The magician rapped firmly, then leaned his ear to the wood panel, listening. “I can’t hear anything,” he reported.
Bottle shrugged, bony shoulders bouncing under a threadbare jacket. He put his pocket watch away. “It’s them books.” He removed a bit of tobacco from his tongue. “Not a durn thing to be done about it.” The man didn’t have to be so quick about turning down a genuine offer of help. He might be surprised at the tricks old Billy had up his sleeve. Some of them learnt when he’d traveled the roads, selling snake oil, bamboozling hayseeds, and working the sideshows. Billy Bottle knew a thing or two about many of the magical arts.
Houdini massaged the bridge of his nose. “There was money exchanged,” he informed the landlord.
“For one of them experiments?” Billy asked, incredulous. None of those professor sorts ever offered a penny for the contraptions and models and thingamabobs Theo created.
“Not an experiment.” Houdini was breathing hard. “Furthermore, it is not any of your concern.”
Those words made Billy’s teeth clamp against his pipe. It was always the same with these big shots. Thought they were too good for the likes of Billy Bottle. “Theo don’t much care about money. Says knowledge is all the treasure one needs.” Personally, Mr. Bottle would have preferred Theo care a bit more about finances, especially in regard to paying one’s rent in a timely manner.
Houdini’s face turned as red as the carnation in his lapel. “I am not interested in Theo’s life philosophy!” His hand formed a fist and battered the door with enough force to rattle it in its hinges. “This is Harry Houdini. Open up!”
Mr. Bottle puffed serenely. “Theo gets skittery at loud noises.”
Harry Houdini stamped his well-buffed oxford—rich brown with cream-colored spats—putting Mr. Bottle in mind of a two-year-old. “Surely you have a key,” the world-famous magician declared.
“Ain’t you the lock expert?”
A dagger could not have been sharper than the look Harry Houdini gave in reply to Mr. Bottle’s impertinent question.
Houdini drew himself up to his full five feet and six inches. “Kindly deliver this message to Theo Quinn.” He bit off each word as if it were coated in cod-liver oil. “If I do not get what I paid for, I will—”
A rattling doorknob stopped the angry declamation. Slowly, the door that had been shut so firmly against the magician, against distractions, against the world, began to creak open. There in a sliver of sunlight stood the object of Houdini’s powerful interest.
“So good to see you, Mr. Houdini.” A hand was extended to the visitor. Many fingers were adorned with tied bits of string.
Houdini took in the personage standing before him. “You are—?”
Dressed in a smart white blouse and navy wool gored skirt, Theodora Quinn completed the world-famous magician’s sentence. “The person who will help you vanish an elephant.” She gestured toward her study. “I am so sorry to have kept you waiting. Won’t you please come in?”
Billy Bottle watched from the shadows as Mr. Houdini parted company with Theo, possibilities scurrying through his mind like rats through a dark alley. Houdini thought he was Mr. Muckety-Muck, did he? Maybe he’d like to be taken down a notch or two. And Billy was the man to do it.
What Billy heard when he eavesdropped through the vent weren’t dull as dirt as Theo’s conversations with all them scientist types. This time he could almost follow the conversation, and it perked his spirits up considerable.
Seemed like there was money to be made from Theo’s crazy ideas and schemes, if that didn’t beat all. A great deal more than the fifteen hundred dollars Mr. Houdini was set to pay her. Though it was a strain on his gray matter, Billy Bottle could parse out that Theo’s ideas could be desirable to magicians. But why stop there? For that matter, why stop with vanishing elephants? If she had figured out how to do that, what else could she vanish? Or whom?
Being so young and book-minded, it would be burdensome for Theo to properly grasp the implications of the opportunities that had ventured her way. It was Billy’s duty to relieve her of that burden. And if she didn’t see it his way, he had some tricks up his sleeve from the good old days to convince her, did old Billy. He would help Theo envision her full and glittering future. A full and glittering future that did some good for old Billy Bottle himself.
In celebration, the man of the hour let his impressive nose lead him straightaway to the nearest beer hall where he treated himself to a pint and a goodly slab of shepherd’s pie.
The safest place to conceal herself proved to be one of the baggage cars, and the one in which she’d taken refuge had a fragrant straw-lined floor. The mouse family that had set up housekeeping there soon regretted their decision. Aside from one tiny nibble of a deviled ham sandwich from the picnic hamper, Min had eaten nothing for quite some time. And she did enjoy the clover taste of fresh field mice.
Her picnic complete, Min explored the rest of her surroundings: a jumble of valises, wooden trunks, steamer cases, and crates. Two of the crates contained chickens. Black Orpingtons. Noisy, grumbling biddies apparently determined to keep Min from her post-meal nap. A carefully placed paw through the chicken wire quieted them for a short time, but chickens are not known for long memories. Min barely got herself curled into the perfect position of feline repose before they started nattering again. She was not fluent in Chicken—why ever would one bother to learn? From what she could discern, however, it seemed they were complaining about her.
More interesting traveling companions were found in the identical pair of Welsh Corgis on their way to a new home in what they referred to as the Empire City. The dogs tended to finish eac
h other’s sentences—they were littermates, after all—but otherwise proved pleasant conversationalists. Are you surprised that cat and canine could and would communicate? Don’t be: It is a complete myth that the two species are inevitable enemies. That old rumor was started by a troublemaking parrot.
Like her dear human friend, Min was not well traveled. Still, she was a quick study. For example, despite there being few motorized vehicles making their way to Miss Maisie’s, Min had acclimated quickly to the Commodore’s touring car, as well as to all the other automobiles rumbling and roaring their way along the streets of the nation’s capital. She also had never been to France, but was immediately enchanted by the young woman Audie had brought home from that same trip to Washington, D.C. It does not hurt that the word for cheese is the same in Cat as it is in French. Feline and pastry maker were so simpatico that Min had been able to plant the idea about baking baghlava in Beatrice’s head.
Despite her abilities and intuitions, Min was stymied by the cargo put aboard at the most recent stop. More cage than crate, it took six men to load it into the baggage car. The creature inside was ten times greater than the heft of both Corgis combined and a thousand times more intelligent than the chickens. Min struggled to interpret the new creature’s language, reminiscent of Bison, with a hint of Eagle. It didn’t help that the language—or perhaps it was the speaker; Min hadn’t worked that out yet—was rather nasal in tone. Min had worked out that the creature was either named Punk or was a punk; at least that’s what the men had called it. By its limited vocabulary, she had also surmised it was not full-grown. It smelled of hay and apples and something else: The young thing reeked of sorrow. Once the cage had been situated in the baggage car, that smell did more to keep Min awake than all the clucking of those flibbertigibbet hens.
