by Orca Various
“It’s stuck!” Bunny yelled out.
“Give it a shove.”
The door gave way suddenly, and Bunny and his bag tumbled into the cottage. I got there in time to see him pick himself up off the floor.
“I got in,” he said.
“Now all we need is light and heat.”
It was still light enough outside to see, but inside it was dim bordering on dark. I pulled out my cell phone and used it to light a path across the living room and into the kitchen. My Grandpa’s golf bag leaned against the wall as if waiting for him to come back. I remembered a joke he always told about God and him playing golf together some day. Strange, I’d heard him tell the joke a hundred times, but I’d completely forgotten the punch line.
I flipped open the breaker box cover and hit the breaker switch, and the ceiling light came on as well as the light in the living room. One out of two things was done; now we needed heat.
“There’s hardly any firewood,” Spencer said.
Where there was usually wood piled high on both sides of the fireplace, there were only a few pieces. Of course, that made sense. Without Grandpa, there was nobody to cut the wood. That wouldn’t be a big problem. An ax was in its usual place, leaning against the wall behind the front door, and there’d be wood piled under the deck.
Bunny reached over and picked up the ax. “In jail they don’t let you have anything sharper than a butter knife, so this is real cool. I can get some wood. I like chopping.”
He was the most likely candidate to chop off his own foot, but who was I to point that out? “Go for it. We’ll use the few pieces that are left to get the fire started.”
“I can help with the fire,” Spencer offered.
I began scrunching up pieces of old newspaper and tossing them into the fireplace; then Spencer started to pile in some kindling and the few remaining pieces of wood. Bunny opened the door, and I heard the sound of a car.
“Adam and Webb are here!” Bunny called out.
Bunny had left the front door open, and cold air and snow flowed in. As I went over to close it, there was a loud thump behind me. I turned around and saw that part of the wall—a panel, really—beside the fireplace had fallen open. Spencer stood up. In one of his hands was a piece of firewood. In the other was a pistol!
TWO
Spread out in front of us on the table was everything that had spilled out when the wall panel had fallen open. Normally, it would have been hidden and held in place by the stack of firewood.
“I pulled the last piece of wood and it didn’t want to come, so I really pulled it and the panel fell open,” Spencer explained.
“You really must have given it a yank,” I said. “That last piece was nailed down and you pulled out the nails.”
“I guess I’m stronger than I look.”
“That’s a lot of money,” Webb said, looking at the table.
We had sorted the money by currency and then stacked it in piles.
“It’s pretty. It looks like Monopoly money,” Bunny added.
“The American money is real,” Adam said.
“What are the final counts?” I asked.
“Ten thousand dollars American and ten thousand Canadian,” Adam said.
“And exactly five thousand British pounds and another five thousand Euros,” Webb added.
“I counted two hundred thousand Argentinian pesos. I’m not sure how much that’s worth, whether it’s a little or a lot,” I said. “Spencer?”
“Oh, yeah, there are one hundred and twenty thousand Russian rubles.”
“This makes no sense,” I said.
“Maybe Grandpa didn’t trust banks,” Adam said. “I’ve heard about old people who stuff money into their mattresses and under their beds.”
“Should we check the mattresses?” Bunny asked.
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” I said, although now that he’d mentioned it, I wondered if we should.
“The money I understand, sort of, but why is there a mesh bag full of golf balls?” Adam asked.
“You know how much Grandpa loved golf,” Bunny said.
Everybody knew he was a golfer. A few times a year, he’d gone on golf trips down south. “That still doesn’t explain why the golf balls were behind the panel. Why hide them?” I said.
“They must have been his favorites,” Spencer said. He picked one up. “Funny markings.”
“Those are letters—Russian letters,” Adam said.
“The golf balls are weird, but the pistol doesn’t make sense at all,” I said. “He hated guns and thought only police and the military should have them.”
“Remember how he used to say that the only weapon a man should have in his hands is a golf club?” Adam said.
“Because then the potential wounds are self-inflicted,” three of us said in unison, and we all laughed. That was another one of Grandpa’s regular jokes.
“If I had that much money in my cottage I’d want to have a gun around too,” Adam said.
“It’s not just a gun,” Spencer said. “This is a Walther PPK.”
“Since when do you know about guns?” I asked.
“I don’t know about guns, but I know about the gun James Bond used in all the movies.”
“James Bond?” Adam said.
Webb laughed. “The reason we were late is we just saw the latest James Bond movie.”
“It’s the third time I’ve seen it,” Adam added.
“And you recognize the gun?” I asked.
“Well, not really,” Adam said.
“But I do,” Spencer said. “The documentary I’m working on for my school assignment is about agents, spies, moles and double agents.”
“Does that mean Grandpa was a secret agent?” Bunny asked.
“Of course he wasn’t,” I said. “He was in the import/export business.”
“Which would be a good cover for being a spy,” Adam added.
“It would explain the things in the bag. Maybe it’s an emergency escape bag.”
Along with the money, gun and golf balls was a small black leather bag, and inside it, now strewn across the table, was a change of clothing, dark sunglasses, a big floppy hat and a fake beard and mustache.
“That’s the sort of thing a spy would use,” Spencer explained. “That and the money would allow him to escape at a minute’s notice.”
I picked up the bag from the table, turned it over and then looked inside to make sure it was empty. I ran my hands along the bottom, inside and out. It was smooth and clean…and too thick.
“Can somebody get me a knife?” I asked.
“You could have a gun if you want,” Bunny said. He went to pick it up, but, thankfully, Spencer stopped him.
“I’ve got a knife,” Webb said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a jackknife, opening the blade. He gave it to me handle-end first.
I wanted to ask him why he had a knife, but I didn’t. I turned the bag over, hesitating for just a second, and then plunged the tip into the bottom. The soft leather sliced easily, opening up the body to reveal some stuffing, a few pieces of stiff cardboard…and a passport. I pulled it out, then found a second, third and fourth. I dumped the bag upside down once more and at least another half-dozen passports spilled onto the table. We scrambled to pick them up and look at them.
“This is British,” I said.
“And this one is from Spain,” Webb said.
“This one’s American,” Adam added. “Just like mine.”
“I’ve forgotten how to read!” Bunny said. “This one is just a bunch of squiggles to me!”
Webb took it from him and looked at it. “It’s Russian. They use a different alphabet.”
Bunny looked relieved.
“But why would Grandpa have a bunch of passports?” I asked.
“A better question is, why would Grandpa have passports from different countries in different names but with his picture?” Spencer said.
He opened the British passport
he was holding. Inside was a picture of Grandpa—taken when he was young—with the name Nigel Finch underneath.
“He’s in this one too,” Webb said. “But this time his name is Pedro Martinez.”
“German,” Spencer said. “In this one, he’s a German citizen named Helmut Schmid.”
“Grandpa spoke German,” I said. “And some French and Spanish. He said he needed those languages to import from those countries.”
“Or because spies need to speak different languages,” Spencer said.
“He wasn’t a spy,” I said.
“Then what other explanation do you have?” Spencer asked.
“Well…I don’t know.”
“Maybe the answer is in here,” Adam said. He was standing by the fireplace, holding up a small black notebook. “It was tucked into the back corner, almost invisible.”
“Can I have it…please?” I asked.
Adam hesitated but then handed it to me.
My head was spinning. I had to slow things down to make sense of it. I opened it to the first page. There was a note in my grandfather’s handwriting.
“I hoped I’d never have to use this book,” I read out loud, “but I needed to keep my own record, my own account, in case things ever came tumbling down around me. Maybe I know better than anybody that you can never trust anything or anyone, and I needed proof of who I was and what I did. I just know that I always did what needed to be done. Nothing more and nothing less.’”
“What does that mean?” Bunny asked.
“I’m not sure. Just let me think.” I started flipping through the pages. “It looks like it’s divided into sections, and each one starts with a date in the far right corner.” I did some rough calculations in my head as I flipped back through the pages, looking at the numbers. “The dates go in sequence and are all from times when Grandpa was in his thirties, forties and fifties.” I went back through the sections. “There are twelve sections.”
“What else is there?” Webb asked.
“Nothing that makes sense to me. There are random series of numbers, diagrams, illustrations and sentences, but the words don’t make sense.”
“That could be code,” Spencer said. “Secret code.”
I turned the pages, and an envelope dropped out of the book; Adam scooped it up and studied it intently.
“There’s something here,” he said. “Not words, but the imprint of words.”
He turned it around so that we all could see. “It looks like somebody wrote something and he pressed so hard on the paper that the words are imprinted right here on the envelope. You are a traitor and You deserve to die.”
“Still think he wasn’t a spy?” Spencer asked.
“Maybe he was a spy, but he wasn’t a traitor,” I said.
Everybody started to talk all at once, and then there was an explosion and we all jumped. Bunny sat there, holding the gun, smoke coming out of the barrel! He had fired it! There was a hole in the wall right above our heads.
“I didn’t know it was loaded,” he apologized.
“Give me the gun,” Spencer commanded.
Bunny turned toward Spencer, and the gun turned with him. Spencer ducked and Adam grabbed the pistol and took it from Bunny.
“It was very loud,” Bunny said. “I’ve never fired a gun before.”
“And hopefully never will again,” Adam said.
“But none of this is helping us,” Webb said. “What do we do now?”
“Maybe we should call our moms,” Bunny suggested.
“And tell them what? That their father was a spy or a traitor or something worse?” Webb asked.
They started to argue.
“Could everybody just be quiet?” I yelled. They stopped talking. “Just let me think this through, please! There has to be something else. He said there was proof in here. We just have to find it.”
I started to flip through the pages again. There had to be something here; I just had to see it. Then I saw the little diagram in the bottom corner of a page. It was a crudely drawn UK flag. I flipped to the next section, and in the same place on the page was a flag that I recognized from the World Cup as being from Argentina.
“How many passports are there?” I asked.
Spencer counted them. “Twelve.”
“Maybe I do understand,” I said. I ripped out the first three pages of the book—the first section—and everybody gasped.
“What are you doing?” Adam yelled.
“Put these with the passport from England.” I ripped out the next three pages. “And put these with the Argentinian passport.”
There were twelve sections, twelve little maps of the world and twelve matching passports.
“Okay, they connect,” Webb said. “What now?”
“Probably nothing,” Adam said. “Well, short of going to the places in the notebook and trying to figure it out.”
Everybody stopped talking, and I knew we all had the same thought. Who was going to be the first to voice it?
“We can figure it out. We have almost a week before our parents will even know we weren’t here,” Spencer said.
“And enough money to get wherever we need to go,” Adam added.
I picked up the Spanish passport and the notes that went with it. “Steve is already in Spain.” I wished he was right here to help make sense of things. As soon as I had a minute, I’d text him and try to explain what had happened—assuming I could explain it to myself.
Webb nodded his head, and a grin came to his face. “We could do it, right?”
Everybody turned to me. “I think it’s even more than we could do it,” I said. “We need to do it. One more adventure that Grandpa didn’t even know he was going to send us on!”
THREE
DECEMBER 27
“Come on, come on, hurry up,” I muttered, as if my words would make the scanner work faster.
My flight was leaving in less than thirty minutes, at 8:10 PM, and I had to email Steve the pages of the notebook. He had to actually see the pages because there was no way I could describe, translate or explain them—any more than I could interpret the pages that were powering me forward.
The last scan went into my computer. We’d already exchanged texts, and I’d tried to explain the craziness to him, but it was all so hard to put into words. I even added a few pictures that I’d taken with my phone, hoping that each picture was worth a thousand words.
Hey Steve,
Attached are some pictures from the cabin that I snapped, the pages from Grandpa’s notebook that apply to Spain. I don’t know what they mean any more than I know what my pages about England mean but you’ve always been good with puzzles. If you can figure any of it out let me know and I’ll do the same. I’ve also scanned relevant pages from his fake Spanish passport. I don’t know if there’s enough here to help you but at least you’re already in the right country.
My plane leaves almost immediately and I’ll be in England by early tomorrow morning. I’ve contacted Doris and she’s going to help me—although I have no idea what she’s going to help me with. None of this makes sense. This might be nothing more than a strange vacation. At least you and I will be in the same time zone.
Finally, I’ve transferred 2000 Euros into your PayPal account. I don’t know if the money will help but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to have it.
DJ
I pushed Send and it was gone. Now it was time for me to go.
DECEMBER 28
The wheels touched down and I opened my eyes, finishing up my silent prayer for a safe landing. I hate flying. I hadn’t slept all night during the flight, and now it was morning in England. It wasn’t just the adrenaline rush produced by my fear of flying that had kept me awake: I had been concentrating, trying to figure out what the notebook pages meant. So far all I had done was make myself a little crazy and almost cross-eyed. Eight hours of flight, and it was all still a mystery. I was no further ahead, just thousands of kilometers farther away from home on a fool’s
mission with almost no clues.
The longer I looked at it, the less it seemed to make sense. I guess being up almost forty-eight hours wasn’t helping my ability to focus or think. I needed to get some sleep.
As we taxied to the gate, I did a mental inventory. In my pocket was my passport, my cell phone and my wallet. In the wallet was two hundred pounds. The rest of the five thousand pounds—minus airfare—was in the bottom of my carry-on luggage, right beside Grandpa’s fake passports from England and Spain. I pulled out Grandpa’s beret—my beret—and put it on my head, adjusting it. It still didn’t feel completely right, but it was getting to feel more like it was mine.
The plane came to a stop, the seat-belt light went out, and I carefully folded and tucked the notebook pages beside my wallet and then joined everybody else in jumping to my feet. I knew it made no sense. We weren’t going anywhere until the doors opened, and even then there’d be a wait for luggage before getting to customs. I wouldn’t have to wait for bags though, because everything was in my carry-on. I could go straight to customs and, if I hurried, I could get there first. I really didn’t want to keep Doris waiting for me in the terminal any longer than I had to. She had been incredibly surprised when I’d called the day before to tell her I was coming, but she still sounded happy to have me come. Not surprising, since she was such a kind and gracious person. We were nearly fifty years apart in age, but she was still my friend.
The doors opened, and the first-class passengers started to get off. I could have bought a first-class ticket—I had the money—but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. In the end we’d have to tell our parents what we had done, and I’d have enough to explain without having to justify the extravagance of a first-class ticket. I grabbed my bag from the overhead compartment and shuffled down the aisle, nodding goodbye to the steward as I left the plane.
