by Colin Meloy
Chapter
TWENTY-ONE
The Headmaster was not the leering, medieval monster Charlie had envisaged. Instead, he had all the bearing of a dowdy English schoolmaster in his rumpled three-piece suit, spotted on the lapels with what could only be mustard, his oversized glasses, which hung askew on his face, and his disheveled gray laurel of hair around a liver-spotted bald head. He even spoke in such a manner, like someone who’d devoted his life to the poetries of Dante and Virgil only to find himself, year after year, teaching the same rudimentary arithmetic to an ever-revolving gang of unruly pupils. There was a sort of tired resignation to his plummy King’s English accent. His diet had obviously overstepped the bounds of his suit, as the buttons on his vest seemed near to bursting, barely able to keep the fleshy shape of the Headmaster contained within its fabric.
Charlie, seizing the initiative, began to speak. “My name is Charlie Fisher. My father is—”
“Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,” said the man as he flattened out the crossword puzzle against the desktop. “How was your travel? Comfortable, I hope?”
Charlie was thrown by the question. He had no answer readily available. His words seemed to catch in his throat.
“I’ll take that as a yes. What a very long way to go, what. Didn’t get a chance to pack a valise, I see. Five-letter word for ‘oceangoing vessel.’”
“Excuse me?”
The Headmaster seemed to answer his own question. “Yacht, yes.” He picked up his pen and scribbled the answer into the boxes on his puzzle. He began to read another clue, his eyes scanning the page lazily. Charlie tried again:
“My name is Charlie Fisher. My father is Charles Fisher Senior. You stole something from me. From my father. The Rosenberg Cipher. I’d like it back.”
The man looked up from the puzzle and studied Charlie with something approaching fascination, like a wildlife biologist observing the social habits of some rare species. “Have a seat, please,” he said.
“I’d rather stand, thanks,” said Charlie.
The Headmaster waved his hand impatiently at one of the boys behind Charlie; the boy gripped Charlie by the shoulders and guided him to the chair that sat opposite the Headmaster. Once Charlie had been seated, the man continued, “Yes, yes, I know. The Rosenberg Cipher. Yes, I stole it. No, you can’t have it back.”
Charlie couldn’t say anything in response. Admittedly, the Headmaster’s reply was the most obvious of all the answers he was bound to receive. But Charlie had been living under the spell of a kind of magical thinking—it was as if he hadn’t dared consider this most elementary response. To be fair, he’d never have made it this far if he’d considered anything other than full cooperation on the Headmaster’s part. This was a fault of Charlie’s, and it was something with which he was just now forced to reckon.
The Headmaster smiled at Charlie, perhaps guessing his feelings. His teeth seemed abnormally long and yellowed. They hung in his gums like weathered siding on an old barn. “Charlie Fisher. Junior. Son of Charles and Sieglinde. I do confess: I’ve admired your family from afar. Career diplomats, to a man. Did you know your grandfather was instrumental in bringing about the Russian Revolution? Idealistic fellow. A close friend of Lenin’s. Ilya was rumored to refer to him as his ‘little sparrow.’ You didn’t know that, did you? Not many do. Powerful piece of information, what. But, like your father, he was a man dedicated to a global vision. Not one of these dilettante ambassadors, propped up by some president or other because they happened to give enough money to the winning side, their little gamble having paid off. No, the Fishers stand alone. Men and women of cordiality and curiosity, education and strength.”
The man paused, then, taking a deep breath. He lifted a pipe from the desk, packed it with tobacco, placed its stem in his mouth. “Which makes it all the more perplexing as to why you, a boy of good upbringing and education, should make as rash a decision as this.” He lit the bowl, puffed at it a few times, whipped the match extinguished, placed it in an ashtray, removed the pipe, studied the ember, and, placing it back in his lips, happily smoked away. “What on earth were you thinking?”
“I thought—”
“You thought I’d just give it back to you, just like that?”
“I’m a cannon. I’m on the whiz,” said Charlie. “I ran duke, I hooked. I did all the stuff. And—”
“And it’s in with the pinches, in with the pokes, right?” the Headmaster said, finishing Charlie’s thought.
“Yes,” answered Charlie warily.
The Headmaster let out a laugh. Smoke puffed from the side of his mouth. “They really did a fine job on you, I must say. Extra plaudits, all around, for the Whiz Mob de Marseille. Rarely has a chump been so taken in by the grift.” He chortled around the stem of his pipe as he took another long draw. “Tell me,” he said, pulling the pipe from his lips. “Tell me . . . What is the Rosenberg Cipher, hmm?”
Charlie searched for an answer that might satisfy his questioner. In fact, he did not have one.
“You don’t know, do you?” said the Headmaster, “This thing for which you have traveled so far. This piece of paper you’ve risked life and limb for. How can you want something so much and yet not have the faintest clue what it is?”
Again, Charlie had no answer.
The Headmaster continued, “Have you taken even a moment, Mr. Fisher, to ponder what sort of power this piece of paper has—or, indeed, if it has any at all? What if it were a kind of poison, hmmm? A sort of evil charm that bedeviled the man who took possession of it. Shouldn’t, in that case, you want it out of your family’s care? Have you even stopped to consider this possibility?
“Well, let me tell you one thing, Mr. Fisher. The Cipher, in all its traveling, in all the various hands through which it has been traded, is now safe. It is finally home, what. I would say that we did not as such steal the Cipher as save it. We saved it from its abuse in the hands of the too powerful. In the hands of America, the Cipher would be a cudgel, clouting and disfiguring the countries and kingdoms that did not come to heel. The powerless. Do you wish to have the powerless cudgeled?”
Charlie sat silently, assuming the question had been rhetorical. When a few seconds passed, he realized it hadn’t. “Uh, no?”
“I would think not,” replied the Headmaster. “I. Would. Think. Not. Rachel.” Here he spoke to the girl behind Charlie, his red-haired escort. “A cup of tea, please. Boiling hot. No milk.”
“Yes, sir,” said Rachel. She shot Charlie an annoyed glance, the sort of glance that might suggest that she blamed him for having to fetch tea when there were other things she could be doing, before turning around and walking briskly down the hallway. The two other boys who had accompanied them sidled in nearer to their captive.
The Headmaster continued, “Consider, Charlie: the Rosenberg Cipher has arrived in my possession the way that it has, since its creation, always transferred ownership. By theft. Ergo, it has come to me in a perfectly lawful way. Think on this, Charlie: the dozens and dozens of hands the simple piece of paper has passed through—the transference carried out always by sleight of hand, by the play of wits. Don’t think your father accepted this without some pound of flesh being paid, Charlie. No, no one is untouched by the stain of the Cipher.”
Charlie smarted at the idea that his father had worked in any kind of extralegal way—it seemed impossible. “That’s not true,” he said. “My father—”
“Your father is a good man, Charlie, yes. But perhaps you don’t understand the adult world as well as you claim—one must always be prepared to bend the rules to achieve justice, what. Your father knows this as well as anyone. It is a principle we share.”
“So why do you want it? What are you going to do with it?” asked Charlie.
“I suppose I should use it in whichever manner I choose,” responded the Headmaster. “Whether to wield its great power in the service of the powerless or to assay its value on the common market and reap whatever financial rewards it can
fetch. This is my prerogative. Surely you must understand this, one criminal to another.”
“I’m not a criminal,” said Charlie.
“Oh, but you are, Charlie,” said the Headmaster. “You’ve said it yourself. In with the pinches, what? That ship has sailed, my boy. You are forever tainted by your association. This is not something the straight world will likely forget. Oh, you poor boy. Look at your hangdog face. You hadn’t really thought that far, had you? No, you were too intent on somehow convincing me to give you back this thing. You’re checkered, Charlie. You’re ‘the Grenadine Kid’—isn’t that right? How does it feel?”
“I—I made a mistake,” said Charlie. “I can make it right. I know it.”
“You’ve got a gifted imagination, I’ll give you that much. Thing is, Charlie, you have no network. That’s really what separates us, you and me. See, when you’ve got a network, a community of your own, a state, a nation, you can do whatever you like. You can decide what’s true and false, what’s right and wrong. When you’re on your own, you’ve got nothing. You’re in a den of thieves, Charlie, and yet you are the trespasser. You are the transgressor. Isn’t that strange?”
The Headmaster did not wait for a response, but continued his hammering: “No, you’ll return to the straight world, branded a criminal. That’s what you get for straddling the two worlds, Charlie, living your two lives—you suffer the worst consequences of both and reap the benefit of neither.”
Charlie felt like he’d arrived at some sort of virtual dead end, where no direction was the correct one. The Headmaster was right: he could visualize himself sprawled, facedown, across a chasm. On one side was himself, Charlie Fisher, and on the other was this thing called the Grenadine Kid. The chasm was very wide; as wide as his life. Having never truly chosen one side or the other, he was fated to bridge that gap until the inevitable moment that his arms gave out and he fell, spinning, into his doom.
At this moment, Rachel returned. She placed the Headmaster’s tea on the desk. It arrived in a ceramic mug that read #1 TEACHER! He thanked the girl and gingerly took a sip. Giving a satisfied sigh, he placed it on the desk next to the crossword puzzle.
“TARE,” exclaimed the Headmaster abruptly, for no particular reason. Everyone in the room gave a little jump, including Charlie.
“E-excuse me?” asked Charlie.
“Four-letter word for ‘biblical weed,’ what,” said the Headmaster, his attention again diverted to the crossword puzzle on his desk. He inscribed the answer into the puzzle, giving the final letter of the word a little celebratory flourish. Having done this, he looked back at Charlie. “Credit where credit is due, Charlie,” he said. “I’m rather impressed you made it this far. You may be the first chump to have the courage, much less the gall, to come all this way and by whatever means arrive here, at my desk. It truly is unprecedented.”
“Thank you,” said Charlie uncertainly.
“All for this single thing. Quite remarkable.” He began to shuffle through some papers that had been stacked on his desk. “Now, where did I put it?” he muttered to himself. He stood up slowly from his desk chair and walked over to a filing cabinet, where he began thumbing through the contents of the top drawer. He paused for a moment, noticing that one of the many framed pictures—a collection of photographs, awards, and citations not dissimilar to the decorations that festooned Charlie’s father’s walls—had gone crooked. In the process of straightening it, he noticed something on top of a particularly untidy stack of papers atop the cabinet. “Oh. Here it is,” he said, brandishing a white envelope.
Returning to the desk, he waved it in the air in front of him. “I’m inclined to just give you the Cipher, in recognition of your stick-to-it-iveness. Your gumption.”
Charlie stared at the envelope. There hung the thing he’d traveled all this way to reclaim. He swallowed hard before saying, “You are?”
“Of course not,” said the Headmaster, rolling his eyes. He removed the document from the envelope and studied it closely, as if it were a wasp or a fly he’d caught. He wore a look that came close to disgust.
“Look at it,” he said. “This one sheet of paper. A bit of pulp, really, covered in tiny figures and symbols. It’s almost vulgar in its simplicity. And yet entire societies hang in its power—entire so-called ‘advanced’ societies. I wonder: If such a thing can topple a regime or bring down a political party, this simple piece of paper, what good is that regime? What real power does that party have, what?”
His rumination came to an end when he abruptly returned the Cipher to its envelope and slid it into the interior pocket of his suit coat. “No, Charlie, I will be keeping this with me. And you will be heading back to your father and the rest of the straight-world chumps. Is that clear?”
Charlie felt his hackles rise. He sensed his time was running short. “I’m not a chump, sir,” he said.
“There you go again,” said the Headmaster. “Which is it? Are you a criminal? Or are you straight? You don’t seem to be able to make up your mind.”
“It was just a . . . a . . .” Charlie searched for the word. “A lark. A sort of game. I didn’t know . . .”
“But you see, my boy, you are right on one front. The whiz is a kind of game. A puzzle in which everything in the world is its pieces. It is decidedly not for the faint of heart, this game. Perhaps you should’ve chosen a different one.”
“It wasn’t my choice,” said Charlie. “I was taken in.”
“I needn’t give you a lecture on free will, Charlie?”
“Let me ask you this,” said Charlie. “If I was a graduate. Of the School of Seven Bells. Would you have still stolen from me or my father?”
“I’m not interested in answering hypotheticals,” said the Headmaster testily.
“But if I was. You wouldn’t, would you.” Charlie gestured to the kids planted behind him, the two boys and the girl named Rachel. “What about them? Their parents? Would you steal from them? Would they be considered chumps, suckers? Where do you draw the line?”
The Headmaster shifted in his chair. His eyes strayed warily to the kids behind Charlie. “Well, now,” he began, “there are considerations . . .”
Charlie turned and looked at the boy to his left. He was a few years younger than Charlie; he was staring uncertainly at his captive. “You,” said Charlie. “You think your parents are safe from this man? Do you think you’re safe?”
“Mr. Fisher . . . ,” interjected the Headmaster.
“What about you, Rachel?” asked Charlie, swiveling to face the redheaded girl. “How can you be sure you’re not the mark in some long con, huh?”
The girl gave no response; she shot a confused look at the Headmaster.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at, Charlie, but it’s a dangerous game you’re playing,” said the Headmaster. His voice then changed; his tone became almost assuaging as he addressed the kids behind Charlie as much as Charlie himself. “Of course there are protections in place. That is to say, there is an accepted immunity. For students, alumni, and various associates. We’re not Neanderthals, after all—” He interrupted himself, saying gruffly, “But this is a fool’s line of questioning. You are not a graduate of the School of Seven Bells.”
“But I was conscripted—I was an equal to everyone in the mob. I worked for you. I made money for you.”
The Headmaster tittered. “I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say you worked for me. Not in the way you think, leastways. See, in this arrangement, you were the chump. The sucker.”
“I told you, I’m no sucker.”
“Yes, yes,” said the Headmaster, his voice now showing his impatience. “We’ve argued this point. Now, if you don’t mind, I do have a school to run. So long, Charlie. Best of luck.” He gave a look to Charlie’s captors; Charlie felt the familiar grip of their hands at his elbows.
“I’ve got the know. The whiz know,” said Charlie defiantly, louder now. “I’m a turned-out cannon.”
“Thanks
for your interest in the School of Seven Bells, but we’re not looking to fill any vacancies in the student rolls at present,” said the Headmaster. “Don’t call us. We’ll call you, what,” he said. He’d returned to his crossword, was filling in the boxes. Charlie felt himself pulled from his chair.
“Let me take the test,” Charlie said suddenly.
Many things can happen in a very small amount of time. Your eyelid will rise and fall in three hundred to four hundred milliseconds; a hummingbird will beat its wings ten to fifteen times in the span of a single second. It takes just about half a second for a fifty-pound weight to fall five feet, perhaps even onto the toe of the person who dropped that weight; it will take even less time for that fact to register, via expedited telegraph through the nervous system, from the foot to the brain of this unfortunate soul. It could be said that Charlie, in a similarly expeditious amount of time, made a very complex decision in the dispute between the warring twins inside him.
And you may be pleased to know that the Grenadine Kid won out.
“Pardon?” asked the Headmaster.
“The Test of the Seven Bells,” said Charlie. “Let me take it.”
The finger grips on Charlie’s elbows had not slackened. Indeed, the kids were still intent on leading him out of the room. Charlie had to set his feet squarely to resist their force.
“You,” said the Headmaster. “You want to take the test.”
Charlie nodded, his eyes fixed on the Headmaster’s.
“That is impossible,” said the Headmaster.
“It’s not. I can do it.”
The man seemed flustered by Charlie’s insistence. “I mean to say it’s impossible for you to pass it, Charlie, no matter how highly you esteem your supposed whiz know. It denigrates the school itself to even suggest such a thing.”
“You’re afraid,” said Charlie. “You’re afraid I can do it. You’re afraid I’m right, that I’m a cannon.”
“Nothing could be further from the truth, my boy, it’s just that—”
