Chapter 11
The front steps of Natural History Museum are flanked by fountains and mature trees and pieces of petrified wood that are the size of SmartCars. Four brass double doors, each tall enough to allow a giraffe to enter, await visitors at the top of the staircase. It conveys a message of grandeur and welcome befitting one of the great public institutions of the country. It’s only once tourists get to the top that they realize that three and a half of the doors are permanently locked and the fourth is obstructed by a maze of nylon crowd-control ropes that funnel people into a single file line in order to pass through the ramshackle security turnstyles hidden just inside the front door. Jack and Cable and Quinn stood at the bottom of the steps watching for guards. None were in sight. Families dragged strollers up the steps and then passed through the security lines. School groups and foreigners and even homeless people contributed to the steady stream of visitors. Nothing the boys could see from outside suggested heightened security.
They climbed the steps and entered the line. They passed between the huge columns holding up the portico and into the shade of the entry. Then they shuffled inside the open door where their single line fed three turnstiles and three metal detectors where three security guards probed backpacks and purses with wooden batons. The boys took care to split up, so that each one went to a different guard. Cable pulled his hair back into a ponytail in the hopes of looking different than he had looked when he left. Jack had pulled on a baseball cap with the Riverby Books logo on the front. And Quinn had borrowed Jack’s tie and tucked his shirt in. Makeshift disguises to be sure, but better than nothing, they thought.
Without bags to check or have searched, it was just a matter of passing through the metal detectors. With his heart beating hard in his chest, Jack stepped through first. The guard was an African American woman. Jack noticed that she had an earpiece in one ear where she could, presumably, hear the security headquarters reminding her to be on the lookout for three boys. But she never looked directly at him. Once clear of the metal detector, Jack checked on his brothers. Cable made it through without drawing a second glance. Then Quinn, flashing his grin to the security guard, ducked through the gate and joined them.
It had been only a couple hours since their dramatic flight from this same grand entry hall. The hushed bustle echoing up to the dome and back down to the elephant remained unchanged. The security guards, once nearly invisible to the boys in past visits to the museum, seemed to be everywhere. But they did not see any that they recognized and none seemed to recognize them. Still, it was not without an undercurrent of fear that they made their way in front of the famous elephant towards the Hall of Mammals.
Before getting all the way to the Hall of Mammals, Jack stopped.
“You guys go ahead,” he said. I’m not going back in there.”
“Why not?” asked Cable.
“Look,” said Jack, “this is your thing. I didn’t want to come back here at all. It’s too risky. Go see whatever you need to see. Test out this theory of yours. I’m going to call Max and see if he can tell us anything about before. Maybe he’ll know if anyone is still looking for us, or if they have nutty stuff like that happen every day.”
“It certainly doesn’t look like anyone is looking for us,” said Quinn, scanning the room.
“I’ll be over there,” said Jack. He gestured towards a quiet corner with a flight of steps leading down to the basement offices. He took out his phone and headed that way.
Jack’s paranoia put Cable and Quinn even more on edge than they had been. They were glad for the crush of people making their way through the mammal exhibit. Cable led the way towards the lion. It stood high on a clean white pedestal, glaring down at a cowering stuffed rodent of some kind far below it. Even though it was high above them, its eyes were clearly visible, golden green and shining as though lit from within. The boys took turns looking at it, not wanting to risk standing together in case anyone other than the lion itself was looking at them.
The tiger was at ground level, crouched at the mirrored watering hole. It was huge.
“Cable, what exactly are we hoping to see?” asked Quinn after he had squatted down and stared intently across the surface of the mirror to look at the tiger’s eyes.
“I was hoping for something obvious,” Cable confessed. “There’s a kind of gemstone called a Cat’s Eye. I thought we’d look at these and it would clear that they were something like that.”
“With the idea being that whoever was supposed to be getting the note from Souvlakis would know how to get the payment, or the gems, out of them?” asked Quinn.
“Something like that,” said Cable.
“Maybe it’s behind the eyes,” said Quinn. “Like, we have to pry them out.”
Cable nodded, “I wondered that too. But how would we have any hope of doing that?”
Quinn shrugged. “Just saying.”
The boys sat down on a bench build into one of the pedestals and watched people strolling through. The more the boys watched how people moved through the room, the more they appreciated what a remarkably constructed exhibit it was. The interactions between the animals was uncanny, despite the minimalist setting. Lines of sight and juxtapositions put each animal in the middle of some tense narrative. It wasn’t unusual for visitors to make their way across the room to get to some creature they wanted to see and then, as soon as they got there, turn around and look the other way to see what that creature was looking at. And, to the credit of the designers, that effort was usually rewarded. Rabbits were looking up at soaring hawks. The polar bear seemed to be looking over the moose’s back at a seal pup on the far side of the room. But nothing they saw shed any light on their particular mystery.
In the quiet of the outer edge of the main hall, Jack left Max a message on his phone. “Bonney here. Call me ASAP. Not kidding around. We’re on to something. Or should I say in to something.”
Then he flipped his phone shut and dropped it in his shirt pocket.
He took the blue piece of paper that Souvlakis had hidden in the pedestal out of his pocket and looked at it again. He read the awkward rhyme several times. It still didn’t make any sense to him and he was bothered by that. Usually puzzles of this sort thrilled him. It was the stuff of movies and adventure stories, exactly the sort of thing that he used to crave. But this series of puzzles, this ‘adventure’ left him feeling oddly cold. When he’d hung the ‘gone on an adventure’ sign on the bookstore door the previous day, he had thought of it as hyperbole. It was an adventure of his own making, then. One part adventure and ninety nine parts imagination. The truth was, he found that he preferred that ratio. Working in the bookstore, wearing a tie and freshly ironed shirts, carrying keys in his pocket – real keys that opened and closed things – it had made him feel more important than the his fantasy adventures used to.
“Since ewe won’t accept my terms, old ‘friends.’
I’ve changes the plans to meat my ends.
But wood eye leave you dry and high?
Ewe said ‘In TEAM there is no I.”
Jack didn’t like it at all. What terms had Souvlakis propsed, that were rejected? What was the change of plans? And why was the language so awkward? ‘Ewe’ for ‘you;’ ‘meat for meet;’ ‘wood’ for ‘would.’ It was all homonyms. All wordplay. Or was it? The expression was ‘high and dry’ not ‘dry and high.’ It was ‘there is no I in T-E-A-M,” not ‘In TEAM there is no I.’ Why had he reversed it? Was his English not his first language? Anthony Souvlakis. It sounded like a Greek name. Was it possible that his didn’t speak good English?
Jack agreed with Cable’s interpretation. No ‘I’ in Lion, Tiger or Bear certainly looked like it meant no ‘eye.’ A taxidermist’s pun. But what about the second half of the note?
“If my black Owl finds this note;
I’ll contact you in time
Till then in Berkeley lies the truth
Laid bear and knot in rhyme.”
It looked to Jack like this part of the note was written to someone different. “I’ll contact you in time.” Who? It sounded like this part was not written for the ‘old friends’ in the first stanza. Black owl? Jack remembered the stuffed owl guarding Souvlakis house. Was that the owl that he meant? But how would that owl find the note? What happened to the owl, anyway? Jack and Cable had meant to take it – the real estate agent said they could -- but they’d forgotten when they left with the loaded Element.
And the bit about “in Berkeley is the truth, laid bare and knot in rhyme.” That only goes to show that he knew that the rhyme was convoluted and that someone might prefer a clearer explanation. But again, who was he talking to?
“Keep an eye on the
prey my friend this has a happy end.”
Keep and eye on the what? There seemed to be a word missing. Or was it an intentional omission like the ‘I’ in Lion or Tiger? But what was missing? The gems? By the time Jack got to the last line of the note his head was spinning. All the word substitutions, the convoluted phrases, the different intended readers only made Jack long to ball the thing up and toss it in the trash. Or simply give it to the security guards or the man with the goatee or his big flunkie and be done with all of it.
Cable hadn’t read the note himself; he’d only heard it read aloud. No wonder it seemed so clear to him. Cable hadn’t even seen all the homonyms and muddled punctuation. When you read it out loud, it sounds perfectly normal. Jack tried to read it to himself out loud, but he couldn’t force to have single meanings again. Every time he read “I” he heard both “I” and “eye.” “You” and “ewe.” “meat” and “meet.” It might as well have been clouds in the sky for all Jack could do to force a single shape out of it. It seemed that anyone who was reading it might be able to extract their own interpretation.
Jack was relieved when his brothers found him and plopped down beside him on the cool bench.
“Well?” asked Jack.
“Nothing,” Cable shook his head.
Quinn pursed his lips and said nothing.
“Can I see the clue?” asked Cable.
“By my guest,” said Jack, handing it to him and then rubbing his eyes to try to wipe away the imprint of the note, “if it even is a clue.”
Cable read it over. “It’s like drinking sour milk,” Cable admitted. “Chuncky where it should be liquid and halfway down your throat before you realize it.”
Jack nodded.
“It seemed so clear in the car,” said Cable. “What do you make of this second part?”
“There was the owl at his house, right?” Jack suggested.
“What owl?” asked Quinn.
Jack started to tell him, but his phone rang. He checked the caller ID. “It’s Max,” he said, “hang on Quinn. Max!”
“Jackson,” said Max, “Holy God man what are you into? Where are you? Did you get out?”
Jack’s eyes darted around the room. The tone in Max’s voice reignited in him that paranoia that had dulled while his thoughts went elsewhere.
“I’m sitting in the main hall,” said Jack, “looking at the elephant’s rear end.”
“You’re still here?” exclaimed Max.
“Gone and back again, actually,” said Jack.
“Frack, Jackson,” said Max, “you are crazy. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m glad you’re still here. I mean, this is my place of work, dude. Do I come into the bookstore and cause a massive commotion? No I do not. But whatever. Whatever. We should talk. When can we talk?”
“Max,” said Jack, “take a deep breath. I’m trying to talk to you right now, but you’re just sort of vomiting words into my ear. Chill out.”
“What have you gotten me into, Jack?” said Max after a silence. “I though I was just doing you a favor, asking all these questions about Souvlakis for you, asking people if they knew him…”
“What of it?” asked Jack, “you said no one did.”
“That was before your little scene, earlier,” Max said. “Now suddenly there’s an All-Points-Bulletin for him and people are wondering why I was looking for him before anyone else.”
“Who’s wondering?” asked Jack.
“You said you were in the museum?” said Max.
“Yeah,” replied Jack, “over in the corner way behind the elephant. Why?”
Jack looked around the room again. His heart skipped a beat. Max stepped out from behind the nearest of the huge columns that ring the main hall, still holding the phone to his ear. With him was a security guard. They approached fast and there were nowhere to go. The Bonney Boys were cornered.
“I’m sorry Jack,” said Max, “I had no choice” Then he hung up the phone.
No comments:
Post a Comment