The Great Gold Robbery (7 page)

“We could bring some fartonaut powder for Lisa,” Nilly said. “And a big can of baked beans. Beans, beans, the magical fruit,” Nilly sang. “The more you eat, the
more you toot!”

“No!” Lisa said resolutely. “No beans, no farts. The peeing will be plenty.”

“Just one packet,” Nilly pleaded. “Just think, Lisa, once we’ve found the gold and we’re celebrating with the queen at Buckingham Palace and you’re all
dressed up and have been dancing with some prince or other who’s taking you on a romantic, moonlit tour of the gardens, then you can impress him by blowing all the leaves right out of the
garden with a single fart.”

“No, thank you!” Lisa said. “Forget I even asked!”

“But Lisa, the queen’s gardener would beg us for the invention!” Nilly said. “Maybe Doctor Proctor could finally make some money off it.”

“Well,” said Doctor Proctor. “Since the Americans don’t want to use the power to send their astronauts into space, I suppose we could bring one packet for the British.
It’s not like it takes much room.”

“Jell-O!” Juliette Margarine, Doctor Proctor’s girlfriend, called from the kitchen. Which was perfect timing, because they’d just finished packing.

“Now you guys be careful over there in London,” Juliette said, her face showing her concern as she watched the three of them digging into the Jell-O. “And you promise
you’ll take good care of them.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Doctor Proctor said.

“I wasn’t talking to you, Victor, I was talking to Lisa,” Juliette said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Lisa assured her with a smile.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Nilly said, trying in vain to stifle a burp. “These Crunch people aren’t even the worst in the world, just the worst in Great and
Small Britain. And we’re three of the cleverest people in all of Cannon Avenue.”

They toasted to that with their favorite pear soda.

Afterward, Juliette gave each of them a hug, and they each went home: Nilly to the yellow house, Lisa to the red one, and Doctor Proctor down into the basement to do the last little bit of
fine-tuning on the inventions he was going to bring.

When Nilly walked into the living room, his mother groaned. “You again?” without looking up from the TV.

“I’m happy to see you, too, Mom,” Nilly said.

“Shh!” his sister Eva snarled. “
Total Makeover
is on.”

“I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow. I’m going to London,” Nilly said, going into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of milk.

“Can you bring me two slices of bread with salami and a cup of tea, and three slices with Nutella for your sister?” his mother yelled. “And hurry it up, we’re starving in
here.”

When Nilly came back with the requested items on a tray, his sister Eva handed him a freshly ironed two-hundred-kroner note.

“For me?” Nilly asked, lighting up.

“For you . . . to buy me something in London, you gnome! A cream called Clean Coocoo’s.”

“What kind of cream is it?”

“Zit cream.”

“I thought you already had enough zits,” Nilly said.

“
Anti
-zit cream then, you rutabaga brain! Just buy it, because if you don’t, you’re not getting your bedroom back. So there.”

“My room?” Nilly asked.

“Oh yeah,” his mother said with her mouth full of salami. “You were gone so long I couldn’t stop her from taking over your room.”

“But—but she already has her own,” Nilly said, puzzled.

“So? Now she has two. So what?” his mother said. “A girl needs space for her clothes. But I’m sure she’ll let you sleep there tonight. Right, Eva?”

“I guess,” Eva sniffed. “But if you touch anything, we’re going to sell you to a traveling circus.”

“Keep your money and your zits!” Nilly said, crumpling up the two-hundred-kroner note and tossing it back to his sister. “I’m not buying you so much as an English tea
bag!”

Eva put her hand over her mouth in horror. “Did you hear that, Mommy?! Did you hear what that freak just said to your only daughter?”

“Show your sister some respect, Nilly,” his mother mumbled, turning up the volume on the TV. “And make sure you do the dishes in the kitchen. As you can see, there’s
quite a backlog since you’ve been away so long.”

Nilly went to the bedroom that was no longer his, pulled his toothbrush out of his plastic grocery store bag, brushed his teeth—the ones containing gold and the ones without—got
undressed, and crawled into bed.

He lay there for a while with his eyes closed, imagining that he could hear the sounds his friends were making: Doctor Proctor hammering and drilling and boiling down there in his basement,
Juliette snoring softly from their bedroom, and Lisa playing her clarinet from the other side of Cannon Avenue. But now she had finished practicing and had crawled into her bed as well.

So Nilly sat down in front of his window as usual and held his fingers up in front of his desk lamp so they cast shadows that turned into figures on his thin curtains. He was almost sure Lisa
watched his shadow theater performances. And tonight’s was about three friends who were pursuing three bandits and an entire little tiny country’s gold reserve of one bar of gold. And
before Lisa fell asleep, the three heroes got the bandits, the gold, half the kingdom, and at least two princesses.

IT WAS EXACTLY noon. It was a typical London day, and a typical London rain was falling over the city. And since it was exactly noon, Big Ben—which is a very precise and
biiiig
clock in a
biiiig
tower in the middle of London—started chiming. And as it struck the last of its typical twelve London clock chimes, the door of a hotel room at the
Regent Courtyard Badger’s Dingle Bottom Crossing opened.

“Look at this view,” Lisa said, leaving the hotel room door open and racing over to the window. “We can see the Thames, Westminster Bridge, and Big Ben!”

“Dibs on the top bunk!” Nilly shouted, pushing Doctor Proctor aside.

“Ach, laddie, I dunna think they’ve got truckle beds,” Doctor Proctor said in a funny accent. Nilly froze, staring dumbfounded at Doctor Proctor, who seemed to take no notice
and continued, “There are beds for you and Lisa in the bedroom. I’ll be sleepin’ out here on the couch bed.”

Nilly made a face and spluttered, “Couch bed? Truckle beds? What on earth are you talking about?”

Doctor Proctor sighed and set his golf bag down on the sofa. “Ach, I only had two language pills for the Queen’s English. So I let you have them. I took the one for—”

“Scottish,” Nilly said. “But still: truckle bed?”

“Scots English is a wee bit different, Nilly, but I’m sure you’ll be able to ken me.”

“Well, as long as you don’t start wearing a kilt and playing the bagpipes,” Nilly said, darting into the bedroom.

“Hey, you guys,” Lisa said. “We’ve got to get over to Madame Tourette’s Wax Museum. There might be a line to get in, and we have to be on time.”

“Nag, nag, nag,” Nilly called from the bedroom, where he’d spent a little time jumping on one of the beds before moving over to the other one and doing a little jumping there,
too. “This one is sproingier,” he announced. “Is it okay if I take the bed by the window, Lisa?”

“Yeah, sure. But what would you have done if I said no?” Lisa said with a sigh.

“Then obviously you could have had the bed by the wall,” Nilly said. “I’m not unreasonable. Hey, I can touch the ceiling!”

“Come on!” Lisa urged.

“I just have to change,” Nilly said.

“Nilly! If we want to make it there—”

“I’m ready!”

Lisa and Doctor Proctor stared. Nilly was standing in the doorway wearing a tweed jacket and a tweed deerstalker cap, which looked at least as ridiculous as the Secret Gourd horsetail-duster
hats.

“What’s wrong?” Nilly said. “Real detectives need disguises and secret code names, right? So from now on you guys can call me Sherl.” Nilly stuck a curved pipe into
his mouth. “And Lisa, you can be Ockolmes. And Doctor, you can be . . .”

“Doctor Mitten?” Lisa suggested.

Nilly scratched his sideburn. “No, it has to be something Scottish. Doctor MacKaroni.”

“Macaroni?” Lisa said. “Isn’t that Italian?”

“Yeah, about as Italian as MacElangelo or MacO’Polo,” Nilly said. “And it tastes a lot better.”

“Are you guys ready, Sherl? Ockolmes?” Doctor MacKaroni asked. “Because we’ve got to go now.”

SURE ENOUGH, THERE was a line of tourists waiting to get into Madame Tourette’s.

After they bought their tickets, our three friends entered the wax museum. They elbowed their way through the crowd of people and life-sized wax celebrities, with Doctor Proctor pointing out
Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, and Winston Churchill.

“Hey, I was that guy once!” Nilly said, pointing to a short figure in a uniform and tricorne hat.

“That’s right, it’s Napoléon,” Doctor Proctor said.

“Ugh,” Lisa said with a shudder. “It’s impossible to tell who’s alive and who’s made of wax in here.”

“Oh, look over there!” Nilly said, pointing. “It’s Ibranaldovez!”

They stopped in front of a wax figurine in a soccer uniform.

“Are you sure?” Lisa asked. “The face doesn’t look that much like Ibranaldovez.”

“No, but
that
looks a lot like him,” Nilly said, pointing to the wax figure’s hand, whose fingers were all clenched into a fist except for the middle one, which was
sticking straight up.

“Here’s the Michael Jackson figure,” Doctor Proctor said. He stopped and scanned the room, but neither he nor Lisa could spot the secret informant. Nilly wasn’t looking
around at all; he was too preoccupied studying this strange wax figure. The man was wearing a short sequined jacket. One of the figure’s hands was positioned over its crotch, exactly like
soccer players forming a wall for a free kick. He was holding his hat with his other hand, which was wearing a silver glove.

“Is that an aiming glove?” Nilly asked, squinting. “Why is he standing in that weird position?”

“Silly,” Lisa said. “That glove was his signature. He’s moonwalking.”

“Oh, right,” Nilly said, and turned to the crowd, which was streaming past them. “But if this meeting is supposed to be so secret, why are we meeting somewhere that’s as
crowded as a Tokyo escalator?”

“Because you can hide in a crowd, the way fish hide in a school,” the Michael Jackson figure said. “No one notices who you’re talking to, and there’s so much noise
that no one can hear what you’re saying.”

“I wasn’t talking to you, Michael,” Nilly said.

“What?” Lisa said.

“I said, I wasn’t talking to him,” Nilly said, pointing behind him with his thumb.

Lisa turned around and realized that it wasn’t so much that the figure looked like Michael Jackson as that it looked so
alive
. So alive that it actually seemed totally normal when
it kept talking.

“Now listen up, because both my legs are going to cramp up any minute, okay?” said Michael Jackson. “You’ll find the Crunch Brothers at a pub in Eastburnwickside called
the Lion, the Hamster, and the Very Crooked Oxcart of Mr. Woomblenut Who Used to Sell Rye Beer Down by the Old Mill.”

“I’m sorry,” Lisa said. “I forgot to concentrate. Can you repeat that?”

“Just take a taxi and say you’re going to the Lion on Buck Street,” Michael Jackson whispered. “Now, get out of here before I collapse.”

Doctor Proctor said, “Come on,” and started to walk away.

“Hey, Michael,” Nilly said. “Could I . . . uh, get your autograph?”

“Come on!” Lisa said, pulling Nilly along with her after Doctor Proctor. “He’s dead!”

“Dead? He was just talking to us!”

“No, Michael Jackson! That guy isn’t the real . . . oh, just come on!” Lisa said.

“But I want a souvenir! Please?” Nilly pleaded.

“Come on, Nilly!” she hissed.

Pouting a little, Nilly followed the other two. But by the exit he stopped, lit up again, and pointed.

“Like that! I want one of those!” Nilly exclaimed.

At a counter, there were wax museum souvenirs and celebrity masks for sale.

“Well, hurry up, then,” Doctor Proctor said.

Nilly pushed his way over to the counter. “Excuse me, my lovely lady,” he said to the saleslady, who was standing with her back to him, filing her nails. She turned and looked around
at the air over Nilly’s head, surprised not to see anyone.