Swine Not? (11 page)
A Prisoner of Plumbing
RUMPY
C
ITY LIVING
was testing me.
Just when I had all my ducks in a row and was able to seriously begin my search for Lukie, Murray was back on the roof, and I was back in the closet. This time the whole boiler conked out. A major repair meant a new procession of plumbers, electricians, hotel workers, and the ever-nosy Boucher. Our once-quiet and secluded fish tank had turned into a miniversion of Grand Central Station. Mr. Flutbein offered to move Ellie to another hotel while the repairs took place, but we all knew that was out of the question because of my presence. We had no choice but to stay and wait it out. I was under house arrest again.
Bleak, gray days gave way to yet another storm, but this one just dumped an ocean of rain on our heads. Barley had school and his Red Bulls Academy, Maple had extra sewing to do, and Ellie was busy gearing up for the approaching holiday season. It seemed that my only friend in the world was the chubby but cheerful weatherman on TV, and even he was starting to sound unhappy. Now I understood why they called the storms “pockets of low pressure.” I was feeling both: low and pressure.
The sky remained that shade of gray humans paint their warships, and it was again void of birds. They obviously had better sense than humans and had taken wing to warmer climates.
If this pig had wings, she would do the same.
New York had slowly overwhelmed me — and I had just about lost all hope.
There’s a Diva in the House
BARLEY
I
WAS NOT
happy about Rumpy’s condition. She hated being stuck indoors, but something else was bothering her. I knew that talking to Mom about it would only stress her, so I kept it to myself. Maple and I were just fine, but Rumpy — as you know by now — was family as well. It was like having two happy children and one unhappy one.
Maple brought it to my attention that there were pet psychologists in New York, and we thought about sneaking Rumpy to one of them. Unfortunately that would involve giving out our names, address, and phone number. Bills would only form a trail that would lead to our fish tank. Boucher would have no trouble tracking down our pig.
We were at a loss about what to do. In the meantime, I had overheard Murray telling the crew on the roof that although they had been working straight through since the boiler blew, on Sunday there was a big VIP checking in, and security wanted no workers on the roof that day. I couldn’t wait to tell Maple and Rumpy. We would roll the next morning as soon as Mom left for work.
When the sun finally rose, we were ready to move. As we descended, the fresh air seemed to exhilarate our pig. She raced down the stairs, slashing the air with her snout as she picked up all the scents of the city.
We followed our now-familiar plan and dashed through the storage room to the hidden table. Maple helped Rumpy get her hooves through the holes as if she were trying on a new pair of shoes. I did my usual hall patrol and returned with the dirty breakfast dishes we needed.
I peeked inside the table. “All set?” I asked.
Rumpy wiggled with excitement, making the dishes above rattle.
“Whoa, big girl,” Maple added.
Since our last trip out, Maple had lined the box with a bit of carpet to make the escape vehicle more comfortable for Rumpy. We had also modified the peephole, enlarging and covering it with reflector tape on the outside so Rumpy would have a better view. The only problem with the box under the table now was the thickness of our pig’s winter coat. It was a tight squeeze, but Maple and I agreed it was worth it.
Maple checked the first leg of the trip to the elevator while Rumpy and I waited for the “all clear” signal.
“Let’s go,” Maple whispered happily from the first corner.
We were off and rolling. Maple was about ten yards in front of us, and although the escape vehicle maneuvered like a grocery cart with a bad wheel, Rumpy had come to master steering anywhere she wanted to go. She could move surprisingly fast, slow down at a moment’s notice, and even spin it around. It was like watching a mini– carnival ride.
Maple slipped ahead to check out the final turn before the elevator, and we were just about to start the last leg when her hand poked around the corner like a traffic cop’s, signaling me to stop.
Someone was coming. This was not unusual. It was part of the drill. Rumpy knew to position herself against the wall next to a room door. I always had a soccer magazine in my back pocket, and I would pull it out and act as if I were a typical self-involved New Yorker heading for an elevator.
This time, Rumpy made her move to the nearest door, and I brushed past the table to join up with Maple. I smelled trouble before I even got there.
The vile traces of Turkish-cigarette smoke came from only one source — Boucher. Suddenly I heard the crackle of voices coming from walkie-talkies. Could it be the police, too?
Maple and I did an abrupt about-face and headed back past Rumpy’s table, hoping to get to the nearest emergency exit. We didn’t make it.
“Stop!” I heard Boucher shout, and we did. We were quickly surrounded by four very large men in black suits with guns on their belts and headphones in their ears. Uh-oh.
The Hunchback from Hackensack stood among the men. He was talking with a tall, skinny man dressed in jeans and a long fur coat — obviously not an animal lover. One of the big men spoke into a microphone on his lapel. “Hold the package. I repeat, hold the package.” Something told me he wasn’t the FedEx guy.
“Do you know these kids?” the skinny man snapped at Boucher.
The chef clearly did not like the man’s condescending tone, but he was nervous. “They live in the hotel. They belong to my help.”
Help? What a jerk. Mom was one of the main reasons the restaurant was so popular. I started to get hot under the collar and had a brief fantasy of grabbing the table, accelerating Rumpy to ramming speed, and sending Boucher on an unscheduled flight back to France or New Jersey or wherever he came from. However, this was not the time or place to defend my mother’s good name.
“Well, get them out of here.” In a nasty voice, the skinny man added, “I told you this passageway from the elevator to the Presidential Suite was to be sealed and cleared, especially of pesky little fans. Royal T has no contact with anyone in this hotel. What about those instructions? Did you not comprehend, Monsieur Boucher?”
Whoa. I looked beyond Boucher and saw Maple mouth the words “Royal T!” So that was who was checking in. Royal T was a former child star on the Disney Channel who had blossomed into one of the biggest pop stars in the world. I knew she was one of Maple’s favorites, and I had seen her videos. Maple said she didn’t sing that well, but her outfits were outrageous. She had taken to dressing in wigs and long dresses from the old days, which were ripped and cut in some pretty revealing places. I didn’t know much about Royal T, but I did know that her boyfriend was the star rookie goalie for the New York Rangers. I wondered if he would be coming to see her.
Recoiling from his tongue-lashing by the man in the fur coat, Boucher snarled at us. “You must leave here at once!”
“At the Grammys, Royal T wore a House of Wu dress! How cool is that?” Maple cooed.
“Who said that? Who mentioned her name?” the skinny man shrieked. The men in black suits pointed at Maple. “Out of here. N-O-W!”
The guys in black weren’t cops. They were bodyguards for the young diva. As they made their way toward us, they were followed by an odd procession of hotel workers who were rolling a big, round awning down the hallway. It looked like one of those tubes the players run through at the beginning of a football game. It was very strange to have one in the hallway of a four-star hotel.
Two of the men took up positions on either side of us. They stopped right next to the room-service table and began inspecting the dishes. Uh-oh.
Please, Rumpy! Try to be cool, I prayed.
“What is that doing here?” the skinny man yelled.
Boucher immediately shouted at one of the hotel workers to get rid of the room-service table, and the next thing I knew, we were being escorted to the stairs.
Rumpy was moving at high speed in the opposite direction.
A Roomful of Room Service
RUMPY
I
MUST SAY
that although the room-service table was hard to maneuver, I had come to master steering it on my unscheduled trips to the park. Now it was like a runaway go-cart as I moved my feet as fast as I could down the hallway to keep from being run over by my own escape vehicle.
Everything went so fast. Amid the clamor of the rattling dishes above my head, I only had a moment to catch a glimpse of the shocked looks on the faces of Barley and Maple as I whizzed by them. I wound up in a roomful of room-service tables just off the kitchen, where several busboys were removing the dishes and cleaning the tabletops with disinfectant. It almost made me sneeze, but somehow I held it back.
As I caught my breath from the mad dash down the hall, I could hear all the noise coming from the kitchen. Every now and then Ellie’s cheerful drawl rose above the din of a dozen different languages that were being spoken at once. I could hear her, but she couldn’t help me. If I gave away my hiding spot, she could be fired.
To add to the misery of my confinement, I was surrounded by the succulent smells of fresh-baked bread, simmering sauces, and steaming vegetables. I was getting hungry — really hungry. As I reveled in the scents and watched the action out my window, my survival instincts fortunately kicked in to show me the very dangerous, even life-threatening, situation I was in.
My table was in a line of tables, and as room-service orders were put together, each table was filled and whisked away to waiting diners. This was not good — because whoever tried to put an order of pancakes or a cheeseburger into the warming oven of my table would be met with the rump of Rumpy. I could just imagine the hysteria that would cause in the kitchen.
Now I was really starting to sweat — because my table was only two from the front of the line. With my luck, once I was captured, I would be taken to Boucher, who would send me right to that dungeon filled with chilling carcasses. I would be dressed out with an apple stuck in my mouth and probably fed to Royal T’s bodyguards.
As I was envisioning my own demise, I felt the table moving. Oh no — this was it. But I was moving backward, away from the front of the line. What was going on? I saw the line of tables disappear, and soon I was around the corner. Then, through my peephole, I saw Barley’s face.
Tears streamed down my cheeks. I had been rescued!
Barley and Maple steered me down an alternate route back to our hiding place, then covered me with a tablecloth and sped me up to the fish tank. I was never so glad to see my four-star cell.
“You must be starving,” Maple said, and pulled a frozen pizza from the freezer. Twenty minutes later, I was stretched out on the couch with a pizza in my belly and my two best friends beside me. I wasn’t even annoyed by Syrup, who was coiled on the pillow next to my head. I was just glad to be in the fish tank and not in a box or an oven.
The kids told me the story about how they saw Royal T. As they had been roughly escorted along the hallway, down the stairs, and out to the street, a huge limousine had pulled up, and Royal T got out. She was dressed like a French queen in the era of Louis XIV, but she was a lot smaller than she looked on TV, even in nine-inch heels. There were paparazzi everywhere, and she waved once to the cameras, not to her fans. Then she disappeared into the hollow awning, which snaked through the lobby of the hotel to the elevator, down the hall where we had been spotted, and right to the door of the Presidential Suite, where she was now lounging.
“I am not a big fan anymore,” Maple said. “You don’t treat your fans like that.”
As a pig somewhat familiar with fame, I couldn’t have agreed more.