“Mr. Diamond?” he said.
“Yes,” Herbert admitted.
“I’m the Fat Man.”
There was a long silence. Herbert was too afraid to talk, but I don’t like long silences. They make me nervous. “You don’t look fat to me,” I said.
The Fat Man chuckled unpleasantly. Even his laughter was hollow. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“Nick Diamond,” I told him, adopting my brother’s name. “I’m his kid brother.”
“Well, my dear boy, might I suggest that you keep your young mouth closed? I have business with your brother.”
I kept my young mouth closed. The Fat Man didn’t bother me, but I was interested to know what his business was. Meanwhile, the chauffeur had followed him from the Rolls, carrying a folding chair and a tub of corn. The chauffeur was wearing glasses that were so dark they didn’t show his eyes, but rather two reflections of yourself. He unfolded the chair and handed his master the corn.
“Thank you, Lawrence,” the Fat Man said. “You can wait in the car.”
The chauffeur grunted and walked away. The Fat Man sat down, then dug a hand into the tub and threw a spray of kernels across the concrete. The pigeons came at us in a rush. He smiled briefly.
“You look well,” Herbert muttered.
“Thank you . . . Timothy, if I may so call you.” The Fat Man was genuinely pleased. “My doctor advised me to lose weight.” He shrugged. “One must bow to the voice of reason—although some might say I have taken it a touch far. For the past year I have eaten nothing but yogurt and have shed two hundred and ninety-five pounds. I have, however, retained my old nickname for professional purposes.” The hand dug again, scattering more corn for the pigeons. “On the subject of which,” the Fat Man continued, “I will be brief. You were visited yesterday by an old friend of mine. A small friend. I am led to understand that he might have entrusted you with something, something that I want. Something that I’m willing to pay for.”
Herbert said nothing, so I chipped in. “How much?”
The Fat Man smiled at me a second time. He had dreadful teeth. In fact he was pretty dreadful all over.
“You seem a bright lad,” he said. “I’m sure the nurses will just adore you in the emergency room.”
I shrugged. “We don’t have it,” I said.
“You don’t?” His eyebrows lifted themselves toward his bald head. At the same time, he fed the pigeons.
“Our place was turned over last night,” I explained. “Perhaps you know about that already. Whoever did it took what you’re looking for.”
“That’s right!” Herbert agreed. “That’s what happened.”
The Fat Man looked at us suspiciously. He was pretty sure that we were lying. But he couldn’t be certain. A pigeon landed on his head with a flutter of gray feathers. He punched it off, then threw corn at it. At last he spoke. “Taken?” he murmured.
“Absolutely,” Herbert said. “When we got back from the movies, it wasn’t there. Otherwise we’d love to give it to you. Really we would.”
I groaned silently. We’d have been all right if only Herbert had kept his mouth shut. But he couldn’t have convinced a six-year-old and I could tell that the Fat Man had seen right through him. I glanced nervously at the chauffeur, who was watching us from the front seat of the Rolls. Was he armed? Almost certainly. But would he try anything in the middle of Trafalgar Square?
“Very well,” the Fat Man said, and suddenly his voice was colder than the winter wind. “We shall play the game your way, my friends. If you want to find out what the bottom of the Thames looks like on a December night, that’s your affair.” He stood up and now his face was ugly. Actually, it had been ugly before he had even started, but now it was even worse. “I want the key,” he growled. “Perhaps, soon, you will find it again. Should such a happy event take place, I’m confident you won’t be foolish enough to keep it from me.” He dipped two fingers into his top pocket. When he pulled them out again, he was holding a card, which he gave to Herbert.
“My number,” he went on. “I am a patient man, Timothy. I can wait all of forty-eight hours. But if I haven’t heard from you in two days, I think you may wake up to find that something very unpleasant has happened to you. Like you no longer have any feet.”
“Why do you want this . . . key so badly?” I demanded.
The Fat Man didn’t answer me. We’d hit it off—him and me. The way he was looking at my head, I figured he’d like to hit that off, too. But then his eyes wandered. He jerked his hand, sending the rest of the corn flying. The pigeons were all around him, bowing their heads at his feet.
“I hate pigeons,” he said in a faraway voice. “Flying rats! London is infested with them. I hate the noise they make, day and night, the filth that they leave behind them. The government ought to make them illegal. And yet they’re encouraged! It makes me sick to think of them scuttling across the pavements, infesting the trees, carrying their germs and diseases—”
“So why do you feed them?” I shouldn’t have asked, but I had to know.
The Fat Man laughed briefly, mirthlessly. Then he spun the empty carton in my direction. “Poisoned corn,” he said.
He walked back to the car and got in. A few feet away, a pigeon suddenly gurgled and keeled over on its side. A moment later, two more joined it, their feet sticking up in the air. By the time the Rolls-Royce had reached the corner of Trafalgar Square and turned off toward Hyde Park, we were surrounded by corpses.
“Do you think he’s trying to tell us something?” I said.
Herbert didn’t answer. He wasn’t looking much better than the pigeons.
OPENING TIME
Before the bus had even arrived to take us back to Fulham, we both knew that we were going to have to open the dwarf’s package. We hadn’t had it twenty-four hours, but already our apartment had been ransacked and we’d attracted the poisonous attention of the biggest crook in the country. Okay—so Johnny Naples had paid us five hundred dollars. He made us promise not to open the envelope. But promises are easily broken. So are necks. I knew which I wanted to see get broken first.
There was a woman waiting at the door when the bus dropped us off. What with the dwarf and the Fat Man, I figured I’d already seen enough weird people for one day, but it seemed that today, like buses and musketeers, they were coming in threes.
She was an old woman with gray, curling hair that stuck out like someone had just electrocuted her. Her lipstick, a vivid shade of crimson, was pretty electrifying, too. Her skin was a mass of wrinkles, hanging on her like an old coat. An old coat hung on her, too, a sort of seaweed green color with artificial fur trimmings. She had a hat like a tea cozy on her head and a bulging carpetbag in her hand. Although this was a main street in the middle of Fulham, her feet were lost in blue fluffy slippers.
We assumed that she had drifted out of the local lunatic asylum and let ourselves into the apartment, ignoring her. It was only when we got into the office and found her still behind us that we realized that she had been waiting to see us. Now she took one look at the wreckage and whistled, smacking her lips together afterward as if she’d just swallowed a gumball.
“Cor blimey!” she exclaimed. “Luv-a-duck! What a blooming mess!”
“Who are you?” Herbert demanded.
“Charlady,” she replied. She gave us a big, crimson smile. “I saw your ad in the newspaper.”
With everything that had happened, we’d quite forgotten about our advertisement for a cleaning lady. But here a cleaning lady was.
“Oh yes,” Herbert muttered. “What’s your name?”
“Charlady.”
“Yes. I know.” He frowned. I shrugged. Maybe she didn’t understand English. Maybe somebody had dropped her when she was a baby. Herbert tried again, more slowly. “What—is—your—name?”
“Charlady!” she said for a third time. “Betty Charlady. That’s my name. But you can call me Betty.”
Without waiting for an invitation, she stepped farther into the room, waving a feather duster that she had produced out of nowhere, like a demented magician. Herbert and I looked at each other as she brushed it lightly across the remains of a shelf. The shelf fell off the wall. The cleaning lady scowled. “Crikey!” she said. “Wot a disaster. You don’t need a blooming cleaner ’ere, luv. You need a master carpenter!”
“Wait a minute—” Herbert began.
“Don’t you worry!” she interrupted. The duster had vanished and now she was holding a hammer. “It won’t take me a minute. I’ll soon ’ave this place looking like new.”
I didn’t doubt her. The carpetbag was so bulky it could have had a box of nails, a screwdriver, and even a stepladder concealed in it, too. But Herbert had managed to hold her down long enough to get her attention.
“I . . . we . . . well . . .” He’d gotten her attention, but he didn’t know what to do with it.
“How much do you charge?” I asked.
“Twenny a day,” she chirped, then, seeing the look of dismay on our faces: “Well . . . a tenner for you. You look nice-enough lads to me. And a private detective, too! I love detective stories. Ten dollars a day and I’ll bring me own tea bags. What do you say?”
I could see Herbert was about to send her on her way, so I moved quickly. We’d spent the five hundred dollars, but we still had the check that Mum had sent us that morning. If Betty Charlady could rebuild the flat and then clean it, too—and all for ten dollars a day—it seemed too good a bargain to miss.
“You can start on Monday,” I said.
“Nick . . .” Herbert protested.
“Do you really want to live in this?” I asked, pointing at the room.
“ ’E’s right,” Betty chipped in. “’E’s a lovely boy, ineee! Wot is ’e? Your bruvver?” Herbert nodded. “ ’E’s a real knockout.” She curtsied at me. “A proper little gentleman. Monday, you say? Well, I’d still like to start now if it’s all the same with you. Strike while the iron is ’ot, as I always say.”
“The iron’s in about a hundred pieces,” I said. “Along with the ironing board.”
It wasn’t that funny, but she threw back her head and laughed like a drain. You know the sort of gurgling sound that water makes when you take the plug out of the bath? Well, that was the sort of drain she laughed like.
“We’re rather busy now,” Herbert said. I could see he was itching to get at that package. “Can you come back on Monday?”
“I’ll be ’ere,” Betty promised. “Nine o’clock on the dot.”
“Make it ten.”
“Ten o’clock, then.” She curtsied again. “Wot a little darling—eh?” She winked. “Ten o’clock. Blimey!” Then she went.
We waited until we heard the outer door close before we retrieved the package. There was a loose floorboard in the office—in fact there were more loose floorboards than sound ones—and I’d hidden it underneath, covering it with a layer of dust. Herbert took the envelope and I shook it. Once again it rattled. He was about to open it, but then he froze.
“It could be a bomb,” he whispered.
“A bomb?” I repeated. “Why should Naples have left us a bomb?”
“Well . . .”
“And who would search the place for a bomb?”
Herbert nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “You’re right, Nick. Of course it isn’t a bomb. I mean, there’s no way it could be a bomb.” He laughed. “I mean, who could possibly think . . .” He thrust it into my hands. “You open it.”
With a little smile, he retreated into the far corner of the room, leaving the package with me. I shook it again. The Fat Man had said he wanted “the key.” Whatever the package contained, it certainly wasn’t a key. It sounded more like marbles—a lot of marbles in a cardboard container. I could feel the lid bending under my fingers. Herbert was watching me like a hawk. No. He was more like a rabbit. I tossed the package into the air and caught it. He blinked and shivered.
A bomb? Of course not.
But it could still be booby-trapped.
I stuck my thumb under the flap and slid it slowly sideways, trying to feel for a concealed wire or thread. Johnny Naples hadn’t used a lot of spit when he stuck it down. Perhaps his tongue had been as dry as mine was now. The flap came loose without tearing. I caught a flash of red inside. There was a box of some sort. I tilted the package.
The box slid out onto the floor. Herbert dived for cover. But there was no bang.
And then we were both looking down, wondering if we’d gone crazy. Or perhaps we were about to go crazy. Certainly someone, somewhere, had to be crazy.
There was only one thing in the dwarf’s package.
It was a box of candy.
D FOR “DWARF”
Maltesers. That’s what it said on the box. You can buy them just about anywhere in the world even if the name isn’t always the same. Maltesers are those chocolate malt balls that crunch when you eat them. Personally, I’ve never been that keen on eating them at all. I’ve got better things to spend my pocket money on. New pockets, for example. The old ones are full of holes.
The question was, why had Johnny Naples paid out five hundred dollars to have us look after a box of candy? Why had someone gone to so much trouble—wrecking the apartment—to get his hands on them? And how had the Fat Man gotten mixed up in all this? Chocolates were the last things he needed—he was on a diet. It just didn’t make sense.
We’d opened up the box. In for a penny, in for a pound (or 5.15 ounces, to be exact). The contents certainly looked like ordinary Maltesers. They smelled ordinary. And they tasted ordinary. Herbert had some sort of idea that they might be chocolate-covered diamonds or something. It was only after I’d eaten half a dozen of them that he changed his mind and suggested that they might contain some sort of newfan gled poison. If looks could kill, I’d have buried my brother.
“What we’ve got to do,” Herbert said, “is find Naples.”
For Herbert that was a pretty brilliant piece of deduction. The Fat Man had given us two days to get back to him. Johnny Naples had said he’d return in about a week. That left five days in which all sorts of unpleasant things could happen. The only trouble was, Naples hadn’t told us where we could reach him. We had no address, no telephone number.