In one hour and fifty-seven minutes, the auction would take place on the steps of the Whippet Hotel. Only one bidder would arrive with his sealed offer, just enough to cover the taxes and a promise to make the property produce much more tax revenue in the future. Exactly what the governor wanted. Even Merganzer D. Whippet, with his vast resources, couldn’t offer the great state of New York a skyscraper producing tens of millions in income for the city. Ms. Sparks knew what would make officials happy, and she could deliver it:
A clean transfer of title.
A moneymaking high-rise monstrosity on the property.
Tax revenue to die for.
Ms. Sparks could hardly contain her excitement.
But where were those boys? And Mr. Carp. Where was he?
The ceiling was high, covered with fluorescent tubes of light hanging from long chains. The room itself was vast, as wide as a football field and just as long.
“I can see the reason for the warnings on the door,” Remi said, stumbling a few feet forward as he gazed into the open room.
It was cold like frozen metal, and both boys could see their own breath. Giant circular gears as tall as a house were intricately pieced together like the inside of a gigantic watch. Steel beams ran all through the room, connecting gear to gear to gear. This thing was a monster, a colossus.
“I don’t even know what to say,” Leo said. “This time, Merganzer has completely outdone himself. What on earth could this be for? And how could he have built it?”
Nothing moved, which made the Realm of Gears a scary place. There was something about the stillness of such huge, dangerous objects connected to one another that left a ghostly dread in the air.
“It hasn’t been turned on in a while,” Remi said. “At least it doesn’t seem like it.”
“My hunch is you’re right, but what’s that noise?” Leo was listening intently, trying to get a better feel for a sound from far away. “It’s coming from over there. Come on.”
Leo moved cautiously in the direction of the sound, carefully stepping around and under the gears. It was like walking through the inside of a great grandfather clock that had stopped ticking. Everything was hard-edged, cold, mechanical.
“Should I wake Blop up?” Remi asked. “He might know about this place.”
“I don’t think we should. Let’s just see what the sound is. We’re almost there.”
They passed between three gears that were so close together, there was only room for them to slide through sideways.
“I feel like it’s alive,” Remi said, watching his cold breath as his breathing became choppy and afraid. “Like it’s going to wake up and tear us apart.”
Leo didn’t answer right away. He felt the same way, but he knew it wouldn’t help the situation if Remi knew they were both terrified. Leo was also afraid for a different reason. He’d never been this far underground, and it felt desolate in a way he’d never felt before.
He tried to put on a brave face. “It’s going to be fine. Just keep moving, and don’t think too much.”
The sound was getting much louder, and both boys thought they knew what it was as they came to the opening of a tunnel leading down farther still.
“It’s gears, don’t you think?” Remi asked.
Leo nodded, and as they crept slowly into the tunnel, they saw that it was true. There were smaller gears, the size of a tractor tire, spinning inside. Half of each gear was underground where they couldn’t see, but they were definitely spinning.
“Why are these gears moving?” Leo asked out loud, though he was really asking himself.
Curiosity got the better of them and they crept farther inside, each of them standing on the opposite side of the gears, which ran down the middle of the tunnel.
“They’re getting smaller,” Leo said. “That’s weird, right?”
“Kind of, yeah,” Remi said. “And the ceiling is getting lower. Everything is getting smaller.”
Twenty feet later, they were both crouched down low, the gears the size of dinner plates grinding against one another. Up ahead, the tunnel curved to the right, to places they couldn’t see.
“Um, Leo?” Remi said.
“Yeah?”
“These aren’t gears.”
“What do you mean they’re not gears? Of course they are.”
Leo’s eyes had been adjusting to the light, and he hadn’t been watching as closely as Remi had. When he took a closer look, he saw that Remi was right. The spinning had slowed, and the teeth of the gears were sharp.
“They’re saw blades, not gears,” Remi said. “That can’t be good, right?”
Leo was starting to feel afraid. “Let’s just get to the curve and see what’s on the other side. That’s as far as we’ll go.”
Remi moved ahead, crawling as he went, sensing a sparkling sort of light around the corner. The gears were as sharp as dragons’ teeth, but at least they had gotten even smaller, like dozens of spinning saucers.
“Sharper, but smaller,” Leo said. “Why?”
They rounded the corner and found that it opened into a dazzling cave of glittering light. They had discovered one of the best-kept secrets in the world, and the true source of Merganzer D. Whippet’s vast fortune.
The Whippet diamond mine.
“That’s it, I’m waking Blop,” Remi whispered. “He’s gotta see this.”
“No, don’t. He’ll only distract us,” Leo whispered back, putting his hand on Remi’s arm. It was a dangerous thing to do, because the blades were spinning right underneath his elbow.
“Let’s get a closer look. Take it slow,” Leo cautioned. Remi nodded and the two boys crawled carefully into the open space of the diamond mine. It was ten or eleven feet high and just as wide, with diamonds shimmering like stars from the floor to the ceiling.
“If Mr. Yancey or Ms. Sparks finds out about this, it could be real trouble,” Leo said.
“And Mr. Carp is down here somewhere,” Remi added. “That can’t be good.”
They both spun in a circle and couldn’t help but smile. The room represented so much money, they couldn’t wrap their young brains around it.
“There must be a hundred million worth, you think?” Leo laughed.
“A hundred billion,” Remi said, but it was anyone’s guess.
Leo moved in close to one of the craggy walls and found small spinning blades whirling quietly. They appeared in the stone at various places, some as small as a quarter, whirling around silently.
“I bet they’re for cutting away the stone or something like that,” Leo said, amazed at how peculiar it all was. The cave made a T at the end, heading off in two directions. Turning one way led to what appeared to be more and more diamond and blade–encrusted walls of stone. To the left was a different story.
“Is that . . .?” Remi started to ask, then paused and tilted his head to the left as he sometimes did when he was trying to sort out a puzzling situation. “A pink rhinoceros?”
Leo knew the wacky logic of a pink rhino head blasting out of a cave without having to think twice about it. He didn’t waste any time walking up for a closer look.
“It’s like Daisy, the shark in the Whippet basement. Only this one’s a rhino.”
“And it’s pink, which isn’t making it look any less like it wants to skewer me with its horn.”
The horn was bright white, the face poised to strike, with an angry snarl that seemed, somehow, hilarious.
“Its name is Petunia,” Leo said, reading the brass nameplate beneath the snarl. “How dangerous could she really be?”
There were other things in the corner of the diamond mine as well, and Leo and Remi sorted through them, beginning to understand:
A clear plastic tube for putting things in, like the ones at a bank drive-through that get sucked into a long pipe and end up in the hands of a teller.
Two holes in the cave wall, one marked OUT, one marked IN. There was a button over the one marked OUT.
A table under Petu
nia’s head with a scale, weights, charts, notepads, pencils, and bowls of cut diamonds.
And lastly, a big pink button, the size of Remi’s head, on the floor under the table, which Remi accidentally stepped on while freaking out over the incredible pile of cut diamonds.
Stepping on the giant pink button made smoke billow out of Petunia’s nose. She made a sound like she might come barreling the rest of the way out of the wall, and then was silent.
A pink strip of ticker tape printed out of Petunia’s mouth. Leo pulled it off.
“Just like Daisy,” he said.
“Merganzer is the coolest.” Remi smiled, running his soft fingers over the bowl of diamonds. “What’s it say?”
Leo read the instructions: “‘NY Taxes, present-day calculation: $7,121,321.46. Property default in sixty-five minutes.’”
“Wow, that interest rate is harsh,” Remi said. “Remind me never to get a credit card.”
“And we’ve only got an hour. How could Merganzer let this happen?”
Remi picked up the bowl of shiny diamonds and poured them into the container that sat on the scale. Then Leo started setting weights on the other side. When the scale was exactly even, he saw that there were four pounds of diamonds on the scale.
“That’s a lot, right?” Remi asked.
“I think it depends on the quality,” Leo answered, picking up the chart sitting on the table. There were all kinds of drawings and notations someone had made.
“That looks complicated,” Remi said.
Leo read some of the categories that made diamonds valuable: “Shape, cut, color, clarity, carat.”
It was impossible to know how much they had in front of them, except for the marking on the bowl the diamonds had been in.
“A-plus-plus-plus,” Remi said, touching the rim of the bowl. “The best grade I’ve ever gotten was a B-minus, and I’m amazing. These diamonds must be perfect!”
“You might be right,” Leo said. “But let’s wake up Blop, just to be sure.”
Remi thought that was a fantastic idea. He pulled Blop out and set him on the diamond table, where the little robot’s eyes fluttered open.
“What was I saying?” Blop asked with his tiny tin voice. “Oh yes, about the . . .”
Blop’s head moved from side to side, taking in the surroundings. Before he could speak, Leo grabbed him and pointed him in the direction of the pile of diamonds on the scale.
“These are grade A-plus-plus-plus diamonds,” Leo said. “There are four pounds of them. How much is that worth?”
Sometimes, when Blop had a particularly difficult problem to solve, he would make small humming and beeping noises. When this happened, it could take a while to get him back.
“We don’t have time for this,” Leo said. He’d already put two and two together: The diamonds went in the tube in the hole marked OUT. What happened after that, he had no idea, but it had a certain wacky Whippet logic he had come to believe in.
Leo held the clear tube and Remi poured the diamonds in. The diamonds tumbling against one another sounded like broken glass rolling around and around inside a barrel. Remi sealed the tube shut and turned it around in his hand. Beams of light danced off the cave walls, and Leo had a thought.
“Someone had to get all these diamonds cleaned up and made into A-plus-plus-plus.”
Remi shrugged like he didn’t really care, placing the end of the tube into the hole.
“It would be a lot of work, getting this many diamonds ready,” Leo went on.
Remi wasn’t paying attention. He was trying to figure out how to make the tube get sucked into the hole. The only button he could find was the giant pink one under Petunia’s nose.
“You’d have to dig them out of the rocks, use all these different blades and tools to carve them just right. It would take some time, you know?”
Remi tapped his foot on the giant pink button again, just to see what would happen, and the tube was gone with the sucking sound of air.
“Do you think that was a good idea?” Leo asked. “We just sent four pounds of grade A-plus-plus-plus diamonds into an airhole.”
Remi hadn’t thought of that. The hole did say OUT, but that was all he’d really known. He felt a little dumb as they stood in the diamond mine without any cut diamonds, wondering what to do next.
Several minutes went by in silence as both boys waited and Blop calculated, then Petunia blasted some smoke out of her wide nostrils and pink ticker tape poured out of her mouth. Leo ripped it free.
“What’s it say?” Remi asked, worried it was terrible news like We are pirates — thank you for the four pounds of diamonds! Make more or we bring out the cannon!
Leo read the pink ticker tape: “Word for word, it says: ‘Assuming A-plus-plus-plus per usual. Comptroller reviewing account now. Where have you been hiding? The Gov.’”
“The Gov?” Remi couldn’t believe the real governor of New York was sitting in a room somewhere with the diamonds. “Incredible!”
“I wonder how long it will take,” Leo said. They still hadn’t found Mr. Carp — he could be anywhere in the enormous room of gears — and the clock was ticking. By now it was late at night, pushing close to the midnight hour, when the Whippet might not be his anymore.
“Come on, Governor!” Leo yelled. “Get a move on!”
Blop whirled and beeped softly, calculating what Leo and Remi hoped would be a big number. His eyes fluttered again, as if he might go to sleep, but then he started to speak.
“Hold on!” Remi said, cutting Blop off before he could say anything.
Remi had heard something.
Something important.
The sound of air moving fast through a pipe.
“I think it’s coming back!” Remi shouted. He got his face right up next to the hole marked IN and peered as if it were a spyglass.
“I don’t know if I’d stand that close, just in case,” Leo said.
The tube arrived with Remi’s head in the way, which sent Remi flying backward, landing inches away from a whirling saw blade the size of a bottle cap.
“I’m okay!” Remi yelled before anyone could ask, hopping to his feet and rejoining his brother and his robot under Petunia’s watchful gaze.
“I have completed my calculations,” Blop said. He sounded annoyed. “It was a big project. A lot of work.”
“Sorry, Blop. Tell us what you know,” Leo said. He opened the tube and fished out an envelope and a maple donut.
“Gov, my man!” Remi said, snatching up the donut and ripping into it hungrily.
“The value of four pounds of A-plus-plus-plus Whippet estate diamonds is . . .” Blop had the answer on the tip of his robot tongue, but Leo had the envelope open and started talking excitedly before Blop could finish.
“Ten million dollars and change!” Leo yelled. “Yes!”
“Ten million, thirteen thousand, and twenty-one dollars, to be exact,” Blop said. There was satisfaction in his voice, for he had been correct and this made him happy.
Leo continued reading the letter from the governor: “‘Present enclosed certificate of payment to subcontractor: Ms. Lenora Sparks. Adult eyewitness must be present. Keep carbon copy. Complete transaction before midnight to avoid auction. I tried to reach you. For three years. I want that noted. Depositing extra funds in escrow. You’re clear for at least a year. Enjoy the donut! The Gov.’”
Remi had munched down half the maple donut and handed the other half to Leo.
“How much time do we have?” Remi asked, wiping his sticky hands on Leo’s overalls.
“I don’t know for sure, maybe forty-five minutes. Possibly less.” Leo stuffed the rest of the donut in his mouth all at once. He was a little bit of a stress eater when donuts and worry were in the same place at the same time.
“All we have to do is get back upstairs and we’re home free!” Remi said. “How hard can that be?”
The trouble was, they still hadn’t found hapless Mr. Carp.
“He
only had one job, to keep an eye on us,” Leo said, shaking his head. “And now we can’t even find him.”
Remi wasn’t one to leave a man behind, even if he’d barely met him and he was the enemy.
“We can’t just leave him down here. He’ll never get out. Who’ll take care of his cat?”
Leo looked around the cave at all the sparkling diamonds and thought of all they’d accomplished. They had the iron box, the zip rope, and the four Floogers. And they had paid the taxes on the hotel — Leo had a piece of paper to prove it. They decided to have Remi hold on to it, because of the flaps on his red doorman’s jacket. The note would be safe in there.
But none of that changed the fact that Remi was right: They couldn’t leave Mr. Carp behind.
“What are we going to do?” Leo wondered out loud.
And then the question answered itself.
It came in the form of a sound from outside the diamond mine: the clanging of a pipe and the sound of a man yelling “Ouch!”
Mr. Carp had stumbled within earshot, and with thirty-seven minutes to go, Remi and Leo bolted for the Realm of Gears as fast as their feet would carry them.
It was Ms. Sparks who felt it first: a faraway trembling from somewhere under her feet.
The first tremors of an earthquake? she thought. But she knew better, and a split second later, another thought crossed her mind.
Merganzer is up to his old tricks again.
She tried to imagine what he could be doing that made the hotel tremble as it did. Was it some sort of strange magic? Were there a million ducks stampeding across the grounds, flown in to land in her hair and drive her away? She fussed and fretted in the quiet of the hotel lobby until she couldn’t stand it any longer.
Floors #2: 3 Below Page 13
