by Tony Abbott
“That carriage almost ran him down!” I said.
“He didn’t even notice,” said Frankie.
“The man is a machine!” said Passepartout.
“A robot,” said Frankie.
“A fast robot!” I said, as we watched Phileas Fogg walk quickly down the street.
Chapter 4
While Passepartout wandered off to explore Mr. Fogg’s house, Frankie took the book from me.
“We need to follow Fogg,” she said after reading a couple of pages. “He’s where the action is now.”
“Good idea,” I said. “Bring the book.”
“And the watch,” said Frankie, holding up the old watch. “I guess I slipped it in my pocket by mistake.”
“Do you think Mrs. Figglehopper will be mad that we borrowed her stuff?”
Frankie shook her head. “Nah, we’ll be back in no time.”
I remembered how the work guy was messing with the wires. I wondered if this was going to be like our other adventures or not.
Soon after heading out the door, we caught up with Mr. Fogg. He was walking along a London street, when he suddenly turned and climbed a set of stairs.
“One thousand one hundred fifty … one thousand one hundred fifty-one!” he said. Then he glanced at his watch. “At the Reform Club at exactly eleven-thirty.”
He stepped up to the door.
“Why do you count your steps?” Frankie asked him.
“The information may be useful one day,” he replied.
“In case someone gives you a test?” I asked.
“Life is a test,” said Fogg. “Let us enter.”
Inside the Reform Club, the noise of the street died away. All the horses clip-clopping, and carts and carriages and delivery wagons creaking, and people talking and walking and yelling, just stopped.
An old, bent-over little man met us at the door. “Your newspaper, Mr. Fogg,” he said. “The news today is about a robbery at the Bank of England, sir.”
“Indeed,” said Mr. Fogg. He took the paper and entered a big quiet room.
Frankie nudged me. “This place is like a—”
“I know,” I whispered. “A library!”
The rooms were paneled with dark wood. Bookcases reached from floor to ceiling. As soon as I saw them I started to feel sleepy, just like in our own library. And I wasn’t the only one. The loudest thing in the whole place was the snoring of a couple of really ancient dudes in deep leather chairs in the back.
Right away, I noticed a table laid out with munchies. While Fogg went straight to a table to play cards with his friends, I made an emergency pit stop at the food table and began stuffing myself with a bunch of tasty crackers. Crunch … crunch.
“Thief!” said one of the men at Fogg’s table.
I quickly swallowed the rest of my crackers. “I’m innocent!” I proclaimed. “I just ate two. Well, three. Okay, five. But some of the six were broken, which is why I only had eight of them. Nine!”
“Devin, calm down!” said Frankie, with a frown. “If you’d stop crunching and maybe pay attention, you’d know they’re talking about the other robbery.”
I looked at the men with Fogg. It was true. They were all buzzing about the same thing, and it wasn’t me.
“A thief stole fifty-five thousand pounds from the Bank of England last night, Fogg!” said one of the men.
Frankie and I went over to the old-guy table.
“Indeed, I heard,” said Fogg. “Disgraceful.”
I raised my hand. “How could anyone steal something that heavy?” I asked. “If there are two thousand pounds in a ton, then fifty-five thousand pounds is—”
Mr. Fogg set down his cards and turned to us. “The standard denomination of English currency is called a pound, just as American money is made up of dollars.”
“Oh, I get it,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Not at all,” said Fogg politely. “For you bring up an interesting point. Fifty-five thousand pounds, even in paper bills, makes a very heavy load. The robber must be very clever to have gotten away with it. The newspaper states that he may even be a gentleman.”
The other guys made noises at this.
“Detectives have gone off around the world searching for the fellow,” one growled as he snapped a card onto the table. “There is a large reward for his capture.”
“But of course, the world is such a big place, he could hide anywhere,” said another.
Fogg played a card. “The world is not so large.”
“I rather agree,” said the man to his left. “They say you can go round the globe in three months or so.”
“In eighty days,” said Fogg, playing another card.
I thought about that. “That’s slow,” I said to Frankie. “With jets, it probably only takes a couple days.”
Frankie shook her head. “Jets haven’t been invented yet. Planes, neither. It’s 1872, remember?”
“Ouch,” I said. “Cruel ancient world.”
“Eighty days,” Fogg repeated. “Indeed, today’s newspaper even gives an estimate of the traveling time.”
He flipped open the paper to the travel section and showed everyone the timetable.
From London to Suez, by rail and steamboat…… 7 days
From Suez to Bombay, India, by steamer……… 13 days
From Bombay to Calcutta, by rail………… 3 days
From Calcutta to Hong Kong, by steamer……. 13 days
From Hong Kong to Yokohama, by steamer……. 6 days
From Yokohama to San Francisco, by steamer…. 22 days
From San Francisco to New York, by rail……… 7 days
From New York to London, by steamer and rail…. 9 days
Total: 80 days
One of the gentleman laughed. “Yes, eighty days! But that doesn’t take into account bad weather, shipwrecks, railway accidents, missed connections, and the thousand other mishaps that can happen in faraway countries!”
“All included,” said Fogg.
Another of the men made a gargling noise. “On paper it’s one thing, Fogg. But I’d like to see you actually do it in eighty days—”
Fogg set his cards down and looked at the man. “I have in my bank account twenty thousand pounds. I will wager that it can be done, and I will prove it by going myself.”
The other men put down their cards. They looked as if they would just keel over and hit the floor.
“You’re not serious, Fogg,” murmured one.
Phileas Fogg stood up from the table. “An Englishman never jokes about a wager. Gentlemen, I will bet twenty thousand pounds against anyone who wishes that I can make the tour of the world in eighty days or less. That is, in nineteen hundred twenty hours, or one hundred fifteen thousand, two hundred minutes. Do you accept?”
The other men stood up. One by one, they stared at him, then at one another. “Fogg, it’s a deal!” they cried.
It was then that I realized something. I pulled Frankie off a little. “You know what this means? If this happens, if Fogg goes on this trip, and that’s what the book is really about, we’ll have to go all the way around the world with him to get to the end of this book!”
My friend looked at me. Her face went pale. “Around the world? That’s a lot farther than we’ve gone before.”
“Now, gentlemen,” Fogg was saying, “a train leaves for the coast at a quarter before nine this evening—”
Frankie looked at Mr. Fogg. “Um … I think we have to come, too.”
Mr. Fogg made a face that looked as if he might be smiling, but it was hard to tell. “As you wish. So, gentlemen, my new friends here, my servant, and I will be on tonight’s train.”
“Tonight?” blustered one of the men.
Fogg made a brief nod and pulled from his pocket a small notebook. “Today is Wednesday, October second. Therefore, we are due back in this very room of the Reform Club on Saturday, December twenty-first, at a quarter before nine P.M. If we are not, I lose the wager and you men
are twenty thousand pounds richer. Agreed?”
“Agreed!” the men chimed together.
Frankie blinked. “So we’re going around the world?”
“Around the world,” said Fogg.
I gulped. “Now that’s what I call a field trip!”
Chapter 5
“Passepartout isn’t going to like it,” Frankie said as we strode back every single one of the one thousand one hundred fifty-one steps to Mr. Fogg’s place. “He was all about having a peaceful life serving tea and toast and keeping the water at the right temperature.”
Fogg seemed to understand what Frankie meant, then said, “We shall be leaving in twenty-two minutes.”
With that, the man disappeared into his room.
When Frankie and I burst into the little Frenchman’s room, he was in his pajamas and slippers, reading quietly in a chair. We had to break it to him about what we were doing and how it had happened.
“Aye-yi-yiiii!” he yelped. “Around the world! Around the world? But we are not packed—”
Fogg stepped in at that moment, holding a giant carpetbag. “We will not pack. We shall buy what we need along the way.”
“What, no carry-on luggage?” I said.
“But I wanted rest! Quiet! Peace!” Passepartout said.
“You can rest in quiet peace eighty days from now when we are back in London,” said Fogg, “for I intend to win this wager.”
He flew past us, went to his safe, and took out a chubby wad of money and stuffed it in the bag. Then he turned, checked his watch, smiled slightly, and said, “We’re off.”
Nineteen minutes later, we were at a big train station in London and rushing after Fogg, who was calmly striding toward a train that was blasting out steam and already starting to roll down the tracks.
The next thing that happened was strange.
Just as Mr. Fogg was about to hop onto the train, he spotted a poor woman holding a small child in her arms, huddled against the station wall.
Without a word, Fogg trotted over and gave her a giant silver coin. “Here, my good woman,” he said. “I’m glad I met you!”
Then he shot back and hopped onto the moving train.
“Ah, my master,” whispered Passepartout, his eyes twinkling. “Perhaps he is not such a robot ….”
A moment later, the train blasted out of the station and we were chugging toward the coast of England.
“Do you believe this?” I said when we settled into our seats. “We’re going around the world. I mean, I know about the world pretty well from TV, but the real thing is supposed to be even better!”
Frankie looked out the window at the countryside whizzing by. “I guess if we had to drop into a book, this isn’t a bad one. We’ll see the sights at least. Hey, look.”
She had pulled that old watch out of her pocket and was glancing at it. “It just started ticking again.”
“You probably knocked something loose when we scurried for the train,” said Passepartout. “And now, my new friends, prepare to see Paris, my beloved City of Light. It is just a few hours away. I guarantee you will love it!”
But by the time we got to the coast of England and took a boat to France and then another train straight to Paris, it was the middle of the night. We were in the train station the whole time, and we left Paris in twenty minutes, anyway.
Passepartout pressed his nose up against the window as we left the Paris station. “Oh, dear, dear. This trip around the world is fast. Good-bye, Paris!”
“What’s next?” I asked.
“Rome,” said Frankie, peeking into the book. “Which I think is the Paris of Italy. Where they make all that Italian food. It’s the official home of the meatball—”
“What a coincidence!” I said. “I love meatballs! And most other types of food.”
But we didn’t get any meatballs or anything.
Whoosh! A bunch of lights flashed by the window.
“What was that?” I asked.
Passepartout sighed. “Rome.”
“We’re going fast, all right,” said Frankie as the train chugged and rattled through the countryside. “But we’re not exactly seeing the world.”
I chuckled. “Not stopping anywhere does solve the whole problem of how to pack the souvenirs!”
Soon it was Saturday, which from the book we realized was the third day of our trip, and we were all the way down at the very bottom of Italy.
It was there, in a city named Brindisi (Brin-DEE-zee, according to Passepartout), that we got onto a steamer called the Mongolia.
“The Mongolia will take us from Italy across the Mediterranean Sea, through the Suez Canal to India,” Mr. Fogg said when we tumbled out of the train and zipped over to the Brindisi harbor.
He was right.
For the next four days we steamed across the blue Mediterranean. Frankie and I were getting tired reading page after page, so it felt good when we arrived on the south shore of that big sea for our first real stop.
“Suez!” called out one of the ship guys.
“Finally, some sight-seeing,” said Frankie.
Another bunch of ship guys slid a ramp out from the steamer to the dock where we were stopping to refuel.
Together with Passepartout, Mr. Fogg went straight to the office where they stamp passports, so he could prove to his friends in London that he’d been there.
“According to the book,” I said, as Frankie and I stepped down the plank to the dock, “Suez is a port in Egypt. Egypt is the home of the pyramids. I love those things. I always wanted to climb to the top, then slide down—what’s the matter?”
Frankie pointed to two men pacing the dock below. One was like an official British man in a blue uniform.
The other guy was small and wore a wrinkled suit that had probably been white in the age of the pyramids.
“Check him out,” said Frankie.
“I’m checking,” I said.
The man’s beady little eyes darted from one passenger to the next. He also had a strange mustache under his nose. It was all gunked up with wax, and the ends were twisted into two points. He tried not to attract any attention, but he jumped when he saw Mr. Fogg.
“It’s like he knows Mr. Fogg or something,” I said. “Could he be another character in the story?”
“Check the book.”
I flipped it open. “Okay, here we are in Suez on day seven of our trip. We’re on the dock … wait … sorry, the pages are getting too blurry to read.”
This is another thing that happens in the books we get dropped into. If the words get blurry, it means we’re getting too far ahead in the story, and we have to stop reading. We’re not supposed to jump ahead to stuff that hasn’t happened yet—just like you shouldn’t skip anything when you actually read a book.
“Well,” I said, closing the book, “if he is a character, he’s a suspicious one. We should find out what he’s up to … but how …?”
Suddenly Frankie grinned. “Hey, Devin, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Where to find cheeseburgers at this time of day?”
“No, I’m thinking we go into sneaky mode and listen in on the dude’s conversation.”
I grinned. “You think good, Frankie. Entering sneaky mode … now!”
We crept up behind the guys pacing the dock and hid behind a carriage hitched to a horse. The man in the blue uniform was talking. “Are you certain?”
“I tell you,” replied the mustache man, “I’ve found him. And a good job I’ve done of it, too. I searched the steamer’s list of passengers, and found my man. Now I need you to issue me a warrant for his arrest.”
Frankie tugged my robe. “The guy in white is some kind of detective. Shhh …”
“I tell you,” said the detective, “the bank robber is right on this ship. Mr. Fogg is our bank robber!”
I nearly exploded. “What?”
“I’m sure of it,” the detective went on. “Phileas Fogg, gentleman of London, has stolen fifty-five
thousand pounds from the Bank of England!”
Chapter 6
Frankie and I turned to each other and gasped.
“A police detective!” she hissed. “And he thinks Phileas Fogg is the guy who robbed the Bank of England!”
“So that’s why we got so much information about the robbery back at Fogg’s club in London,” I said. “It didn’t really seem like part of the story. But now it all makes sense. Wait, there’s more. Shhh!”
“But, Detective Fix,” the officer in blue was saying, “Phileas Fogg appears an honest man and a gentleman.”
“Great robbers always resemble honest folks,” said the detective. “It’s easy for gentlemen to make their escape that way. But I can’t arrest him outside England unless he’s in an English colony, such as Egypt. And I can’t do it without an arrest warrant.”
The other man pointed down the dock. “Here comes his servant now.”
“Good. I shall interrogate him!” said Detective Fix. He whirled around quickly and purposely bumped into Passepartout on the dock.
“Oh, sir, I beg your pardon,” said the detective, twirling the ends of his mustache. “Are you traveling with Mr. Phileas Fogg?”
“Why, sir, yes I am!” said Passepartout, giving a bow.
“And where is your master traveling to?”
The servant chuckled to himself. “Why, Mr. Fogg is going around the world. In eighty days! Our next stop is Bombay, India! After that China, then Japan!”
Fix nodded at this information. “Is he rich, then?”
“He carries a great deal of money,” said Passepartout.
“Oh, man!” I whispered. “Don’t tell him that!”
“A great deal of money, eh? Does he, really?” Fix’s eyes lit up. “Well, perhaps I’ll meet him on board. Because I’ll be going to Bombay also.”
Then the detective wandered away, practically twisting his mustache ends right off.
“I knew that mustache was up to no good,” said Frankie. “We need to tell Passepartout the truth.”
Clack! Clack! The carriage suddenly rode away and there we were, huddled on the dock like a couple of scared monkeys.
