by Mike Lowery
“Wait,” I said. “That happened to me. How do you know that happened to me?”
The KGB Man shrugged. “I am KGB.”
He pointed to his desk.
“The world is a chessboard. Secret agents, they are merely pieces, moving in little patterns across the squares. Powerless.”
“But you’re a secret agent,” I said.
“For now.” He picked up a pawn and twirled it between his fingers. “Tell me. Who is the most powerful in the game of chess?”
“The queen!” I said. “She goes wherever she wants to!”
“But she is stuck on the board,” said the KGB Man. “No. It is not the queen. It is the player. The one who moves the pieces.”
“Oh,” I said. “OK.”
“Today I am a spy,” said the KGB Man. “But I will not be forever. I have plans.”
He set the pawn down on the board and smiled at me.
“You want this stuff back? I will give you a hance. You and I, we will have a competition.”
“Deal!” I said.
I reached for a white pawn. It is a lot easier to win at chess if you make the first move.
“Not chess,” he said. “Karate.”
The KGB Man tore off his uniform. Underneath, he was wearing a white gi and a black belt.
At this point it should be clear that I did not know karate.
“Hi-yah!” shouted the KGB Man.
He leapt across the desk and set upon me with furious chops and punches.
Books were knocked everywhere. The chess set was toppled to the floor. Freddie began barking furiously and wagging his tail.
For a time I was able to hide underneath the desk.
I flashed back to everything I knew about karate from listening to kids talk in the schoolyard. Derek Lafoy was always going on about pressure points. He said the human body had seven of them, and a single hit to one could knock someone out, or even kill them. Often he would demonstrate by aiming a slow-motion chop at the crook of my neck. “I won’t actually do it,” he would always say. “Otherwise I’d go to jail.”
Pressure points. They were my only hope.
“Hi-yah!” I cried. I rushed out from beneath the desk and attempted to land a chop to the KGB Man’s neck.
The KGB Man swept my legs and I fell to the ground.
“Give up?” he asked.
“Never!”
He twisted my arm behind my back and pushed my face into the carpet.
It was a beautiful rug.
“Give up?”
“No,” I said. My defiant answer was muffled somewhat by the carpet.
The KGB Man placed me in a vicious headlock. His bicep was lodged against my windpipe. I could hardly breathe.
“Freddie!” I cried. “Help! Attack!”
Freddie was in the corner, joyfully licking some spilled milk.
I rolled my eyes.
Then I got an idea.
I tucked my chin into the crook of the KGB Man’s elbow and licked it.
“Ew!” The KGB Man leapt up and wiped his arm off on his gi.
I rose to my feet and assumed a tough karate pose.
“Did you just lick my arm?” the KGB Man asked.
“Yeah!” I said.
I nodded at Freddie, who seemed to be wagging at me admiringly.
“Hmmm,” said the KGB Man. “OK. That is enough karate.”
He picked up his chair and sat back down at his desk. With a fancy tea towel, he wiped my spit off his arm.
“I won!” I said.
The KGB Man shook his head. “No. You did not win.”
“OK,” I said. “Then let’s call it a draw.”
“No,” said the KGB Man. “You were very much outmatched. But you did not give up. I admire your spirit. And so I will offer you a trade. Please, sit down.”
I did.
“What do I want with this spoon? I have plenty of spoons. What do I want with this painting? It does not go with the decor of my house. What do I want with this Game Boy? I have already beaten the game SPY MASTER.”
“You beat it?” I said.
“Yes. First try. It is an OK game. Pretty fun. But why do the bad guys have to be KGB Men?”
“That’s how it always is,” I said.
“Not in the Soviet Union,” said the KGB Man. “In any case, I will trade you all these things for something much more valuable. Your American blue jeans.”
“What?” I said.
“Da,” said the KGB Man.
“What does that mean?”
“Yes.”
“But why would you want my blue jeans?”
“I will tell you a story,” said the KGB Man. “In 1898—”
“Oh boy,” I said.
“In 1898,” said the KGB Man, “the building we are sitting in now was built. It was the offices of the All-Russia Insurance Company, which was a giant company that sold insurance in all of Russia.”
“Good name,” I said.
“Da,” said the KGB Man. “But in 1917, there was a revolution. The emperor of Russia was executed—”
“Regicide?” I said.
“I do not know this word,” said the KGB Man.
“It’s from the Latin,” I said.
“The Emperor of Russia was replaced with the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union.”
“Long name,” I said.
“They got rid of the eagles on flags and replaced them with hammers and sickles.”
“And in this building, they got rid of the All-Russia Insurance Company and replaced it with the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.”
“Really long name,” I said.
“Too long,” said the KGB Man. “So the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage started calling itself the Cheka. Then the Cheka started calling itself the GPU. The GPU started calling itself the OGPU. Then the OGPU started calling itself the NKVD. Finally, the NKVD started calling itself the KGB. Who knows? Maybe one day, we change our name again. All these names, they mean the same thing: secret agents.”
“But what does this have to do with jeans?” I asked.
“After the revolution, everything was different. No emperor. No eagles. No insurance companies. And no jeans. In the Soviet Union, American blue jeans are banned.”
“Banned?”
“Against the law.”
So it was true.
The KGB Man gazed sadly at his pale green walls.
“When I was a child, I caught jeans fever. I saw a picture in a magazine, a boy and a girl in America. They were dancing, in a basement, wearing their blue jeans. They were so happy. Their jeans were so perfectly faded. I wanted a pair.”
For a single moment, the KGB Man seemed to be just a KGB Boy, begging his mother for some back-to-school jeans.
But he slammed his fist against the desk.
“Russian jeans, they are no good!” said the KGB Man. “They do not fade. I have tried to boil them, run them over with a motorcycle, tie them in knots and throw them in the river. No good.”
“But you travel around the world,” I said. “Why don’t you just buy some American blue jeans and bring them back?”
The KGB Man shook his head.
“That is a crime. Jean crime. For smuggling blue jeans, a Russian would lose their job, go to jail. That is why I needed you, an American, to wear your jeans here.”
“Wait,” I said. “This whole thing, the spoon, the Mona Lisa, it was all a ploy just to get some blue jeans?”
“Yes.”
“Stealing my Game Boy?”
“Yes.”
“Even the call to my hotel in Paris?”
The KGB Man sighed. “Yes. Obviously.”
“But you told me to drop the case! Why would you tell me to quit if you wanted me to follow you to Moscow?”
“There are some children,” said the KGB Man, “when you tell them not to do something
, they want to do it even more. I thought you seemed one of these children.”
“That sounds like something this guy I know, Craig, would say, only he speaks in better English.”
The KGB Man shrugged. “Well, I am Russian.”
“I find this all hard to believe.”
“And yet this is totally real,” said the KGB Man. “You see? I am the one who is moving the pieces.”
“Seems like a whole lot of trouble to go through for some jeans.”
“What do people want more than anything else?” said the KGB Man. “They want what they cannot have.”
I looked down at my jeans.
They were perfectly faded.
And there was no way my mom was going to buy me a new pair.
But I had a duty to the Queen.
“OK,” I said.
“Excellent,” said the KGB Man.
I handed over my jeans.
The KGB Man handed over the loot.
“Can I at least have another pair of pants?” I asked.
“You know, for the road?”
“Nyet,” said the KGB Man.
“What does that mean?”
“No.”
It was a cold walk through Moscow.
And a very long flight.
But the Queen of England got her spoon back.
France got the Mona Lisa.
And I got home. It was Saturday morning.
My mom was happy to see me. She had missed me very much, plus the rabbits’ litter box needed to be emptied.
There was a package for me on the kitchen counter.
It was from the Queen of England.
There was an envelope addressed to my teacher, and a box wrapped in purple paper and tied with a gold bow.
The tag said, “Something delicious from Britain!”
I eagerly unwrapped the gift.
It was a tin covered with fancy royal decorations.
I opened the tin.
Biscuits.
I tried one, to see if these were any better than the last batch.
They weren’t.
This was not the reward I had been hoping for.
To be honest, I had been expecting to get knighted.
But I wasn’t a knight.
I was a secret agent.
And being a secret agent is not easy.
I swallowed the biscuit.
Then I leaned back in my chair and turned on my Game Boy.
“No!” I said.
“No!” I said again.
I was looking at the high-score screen.
It was going to take me forever to beat that.
(The KGB is only three letters. Great name.)
Before I could even get past level one, the phone rang.
It was Derek Lafoy, inviting me to his birthday party!
Just kidding.
That would have been a nice ending, but remember, this story is real.
It was the Queen of England.
“Hullo,” said the Queen. “Don’t even bother thanking me for the biscuits. There isn’t any time! Mac, I need another favor.”
I smiled.
Mac Barnett is a New York Times bestselling author of children’s books and a former secret agent. His books have received awards such as the Caldecott Honor, the E. B. White Read Aloud Award, and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. His secret agent work has received awards such as the Medal of XXXXXXXXX, the Cross of XXXXXXXXXX, and the Royal Order of XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX the Third. His favorite color is xxxxxx. His favorite food is xxxxxxx. He lives in Oakland, California. (That’s true. You can look it up.)
Mike Lowery used to get in trouble for doodling in his books, and now he’s doing it for a living. His drawings have been seen in dozens of books for kids and adults, and on everything from greeting cards to food trucks. He also likes to collect weird little bits of knowledge and recently collected them in his book, Random Illustrated Facts. Mike lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with a little German lady and two genius kids.
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First published in the US by Scholastic Inc., 2018
First published in the UK by Scholastic Ltd, 2019
This electronic edition published by Scholastic Ltd, 2019
Text copyright © Mac Barnett, 2018
Illustrations copyright © Mike Lowery, 2018
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author and illustrator of this work have been asserted by them.
eISBN 978 1407 19857 6
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