The Black Paw

by Heather Vogel Frederick

‘Never learned, myself,’ the bird said. ‘Don't quite understand what all the fuss is about.’

  Glory trailed her hind paws in the water. How could she answer that? She considered herself a mouse of action, but still, there was nothing she liked better than to curl up in a good book at the end of a long day. ‘Well, it's never too late to learn,’ she replied simply.

  Hank bobbed his head and scratched at his breast feathers with his beak. ‘Can't teach an old bird new tricks.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Glory. ‘A pigeon as clever as you could do anything he set his mind to.’

  Hank flapped his wings. ‘Kind of you, I'm sure. Maybe I'll give it a try some day.’ He cocked an eye at the fading sunlight. ‘Well, I suppose we'd best get a move on. Don't want you to be late for your rendezvous.’

  They were soon aloft again, and this time Hank didn't dawdle. He veered north-west towards Georgetown, flew over the White House and the National Geographic Society (home of the Explorers Guild), and shortly reached Dupont Circle. Glory gazed down at the roundabout with the park at its centre. A handful of chess players sat at stone tables by the fountain in the fading light, intent on their games. She glanced over at the entrance to the Metro station. There, deep underground, Dupont had his headquarters. There, her father had met his end. The fur on the back of her neck prickled as she wondered if she too would meet her end in the subway station's shadowy depths. Best not to think about that right now, she told herself sternly. But as Hank flapped onward, Glory couldn't resist one last look.

  ‘Wait, Hank!’ she called.

  The pigeon looked back over his wing at her. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Could you circle around again? I thought I saw something.’

  ‘Sure.’ Hank tilted his wings slightly and doubled back.

  ‘There!’ shouted Glory. ‘By the subway entrance! It's Dupont!’

  ‘I see him,’ said Hank. ‘No mistaking that ugly mug. Wonder where he's been hiding all week.’

  Dupont had spotted the two of them as well. He bared his sharp yellow teeth at them in an evil grin, and Glory shivered again, grateful that she was safely out of paw's reach atop Hank.

  ‘That no-good rat is up to something,’ said Hank. ‘I can smell it.’

  ‘Maybe we should take a closer look,’ Glory replied. ‘While there's still daylight. Can you get us in lower?’

  In response, Hank swooped towards the ground. As Glory leaned forward for a better view, the top of her backpack flapped open. The metal cylinder inside gave a lurch. Glory felt it sliding forward. She grabbed for it in alarm, but it slipped between her paws and went hurtling down, down, down through the air.

  ‘The Kiss of Death!’ cried Glory. ‘Oh, Hank, I dropped the Kiss of Death!’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Hank, and folding his wings closed, he tucked his beak into his gleaming purple breast feathers and took a nosedive straight towards Dupont.

  The metal cylinder flashed in the last rays of October sun as it spiralled towards the ground. The rat spotted it and raced forward, his paws stretched out greedily as he manoeuvred to position himself beneath it. Glory tucked her hind paws through the paper clip stirrups and stretched out into midair as she too reached for the Kiss of Death.

  In a flurry of feathers and fur, rat, mouse and pigeon collided. Glory grabbed not the Kiss of Death but a pawful of Dupont's mangy hide instead. Dupont grabbed Hank, and the Kiss of Death went clattering to the ground and rolled away.

  Hank let out a screech and pulled up sharply, leaving Dupont clutching a few purple feathers.

  ‘Try again, Hank!’ Glory urged, shaking Dupont's nasty grey hairs off her paw and grabbing the reins as they circled back. But it was too late. With a shriek of triumph, Dupont snatched up the metal cylinder and waved it at them like a trophy.

  ‘Oh, no!’ wailed Glory.

  ‘It ain't over yet,’ replied Hank, and dive-bombed the rat once again.

  Dupont was ready for them this time. As Glory reached for – and got her right paw around – the Kiss of Death, the rat grabbed her by the neck. The jolt nearly grounded Hank, who flapped his wings furiously trying to stay aloft. Dupont thrust his patchy face up to Glory's and fixed her with a fiery red eye.

  ‘A Goldenleaf, if I'm not mistaken,’ he said. His raspy voice sounded like a bucket of nails tumbling down a waste disposal. ‘I’d know those ears anywhere. Have a pair of ‘em nailed to the wall down at HQ.’

  Glory paled. Dupont was talking about her father. ‘You're scum,’ she croaked, struggling to free herself. ‘Nothing but rat scum. Always have been, always will be.’

  Angered by her words, Dupont released the Kiss of Death and squeezed Glory's neck with both paws.

  ‘Scum, am I?’ he snarled. His breath reeked, and Glory's eyes watered. ‘I'll have you know I'm the descendant of kings! My ancestors kept your kind as servants!’ He squeezed harder, and stars swam before Glory's eyes. She gasped for air. ‘Did you get the little present I sent you?’ Dupont said, taunting her. ‘Didn't think I'd have the pleasure of your company so soon. But no one outruns the Black Paw. Not even a Goldenleaf.’

  Struggling mightily, Glory managed to free one of her hind paws. She aimed a kick straight at the rat's ugly nose. Dupont screeched and clutched at his wounded snout. As he did so, one of his claws caught in the chain around Glory's neck. It wrenched free with a forceful jerk that brought Glory tumbling off Hank. She landed on the pavement with a thud. Ignoring the pain, she leaped to her paws and sprinted towards the Kiss of Death, but Dupont was too quick for her. With a sinister grin, he snatched up the metal cylinder.

  ‘The only good mouse is a dead mouse,’ he sneered, and lunged at her.

  ‘Look out, Glory!’ squawked Hank as the rat's sharp claws raked her shoulder. Swooping in, the pigeon plucked her from the pavement and they soared upward, Glory clutching at her rescuer's feathers for dear life.

  ‘I'll make mousemeat out of you yet, mark my words!’ screamed Dupont, shaking his paw at them angrily.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Hank called anxiously to Glory.

  She nodded, wincing. She climbed gingerly up on to Hank's back and inspected her shoulder. Dupont had drawn blood. It could have been worse, though, she thought with a shudder. Much worse. And they still weren't out of danger. Below them, the rat had slung the homing device around his neck and was hefting the Kiss of Death on to his shoulder. He scanned the sky, then pointed it straight at them.

  ‘Look out, Hank!’ Glory cried out in warning. ‘Duck!’

  Not a moment too soon, the pigeon banked steeply left. A puff of smoke emerged from the mouth of the small metal cylinder, followed by a sharp report. Something whistled past them.

  ‘What in tarnation was that?’ shouted Hank.

  ‘I told you, it's the Kiss of Death.’

  ‘I thought it was a lipstick!’

  ‘That's what you're supposed to think,’ said Glory. ‘It's a pistol. Single-shot, four point five millimeters. It's Russian-made, circa 1965. KGB issue.’

  ‘A pistol?’ Hank faltered slightly, and Glory clutched at his feathers again to keep from toppling off. He gave a low whistle. ‘No wonder Julius's tail was in a twist. All we need in this city are armed rats!’

  No kidding, thought Glory, her injured shoulder throbbing ferociously. No mouse would be safe if that happened. Especially not one marked with the Black Paw. Dupont's razorlike claws would pale in comparison to armed rats. Glory's heart clutched in fear at the thought of platoons of rat snipers stationed throughout Washington, their sights all trained on her. She wouldn't be safe anywhere! She shifted uneasily on Hank's back, fearful that she had just signed her own death warrant.

  As she wedged her paws back into the stirrups, a cooing noise above caught her attention. Glory looked up. She gasped in dismay. High above them circled another pigeon. Around its neck was a small box. A fly-spy cam!

  Glory's heart sank. Could her luck possibly get any worse? The evening surveillance team had just captured the whole fiasco
on film. Glory buried her face in her paws. Her career was ruined, and Dupont had sworn to make mousemeat out of her. She was doomed.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  2200 HOURS

  The roundabout at Dupont Circle hummed with late-night traffic, headlights fanning out like bright spokes around the silent, dark hub at its centre. The stone benches at the stone tables were empty of chess players, and the surrounding streets were almost as empty. Only a handful of humans were still out, most of them heading for the entrance to the Metro station, where escalators would whisk them to the trains far below.

  There, deep in the bowels of the subway station, stood a bench in a shadowy corner. Beneath it lay a drain hole covered by a loose-fitting grate. The grate concealed the entrance to a tunnel that wound its way down, down, down to a lair far below the subway tracks. In that dank, cramped space as smelly as the ripe blue cheese for which he was named, Roquefort Dupont, Lord of the Sewers and supreme leader of Washington DC's rat underworld, paced back and forth in a fury.

  ‘Rat scum, am I?’ he blustered, whipping his mangy tail through the air angrily. He could hear the excited squeaks and squeals of his underlings echoing along the lair's many side tunnels. They were still busy rejoicing over the capture of the Kiss of Death. Dupont himself was in no mood for celebration. He'd been in a rage for hours, ever since his run-in with Glory. ‘I'll show her rat scum. Blasted uppity Goldenleaf. Who does she think she is, speaking to me like that? Me! Roquefort Dupont! The descendant of kings!’

  Gnaw and Scurvy, Dupont's two top aides, exchanged a glance. The boss was in one of his moods again.

  A pair of young rats-in-waiting, Limburger Lulu and Limburger Louie, watched anxiously as Dupont, muttering angrily to himself, booted an empty yogurt container into the air. It landed on a heap of crumpled, grease-stained lunch bags. Piles of rubbish – the remains of rat delicacies pilfered from the litter bins in the subway station above – lay strewn about everywhere. Apple cores and mouldy crackers, half-eaten cookies, cartons of soured milk, leftover turkey sandwiches turning green around the edges, sweet wrappers and juice boxes and gum scraped from the undersides of benches.

  Dupont whirled around. Glory's button compass was slung around his neck, and it whirled along with him. ‘Who am I?’ he snarled savagely.

  ‘You are Roquefort Dupont!’ chirped his rats-in-waiting.

  ‘And what is my lineage?’

  ‘You are the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great –’ Limburger Lulu and Limburger Louie paused to suck in a lungful of air, then rattled on – ‘great-great-great-great-grandson of Camembert Dupont!’

  ‘That's right, and don't you forget it!’ roared Dupont. ‘Gnaw did once, and look what happened to him!’

  Gnaw, an unattractive creature with close-set eyes and scruffy grey fur, reached up and clutched anxiously at his sole remaining ear. He'd lost the other in a tussle with Dupont several years back, when he'd tried to rival him for leadership of the rat kingdom. He hadn't tried again.

  ‘That's right,’ warned Dupont. ‘You'd better hang on to it. Never know when someone might sneak up on you and bite the other one off!’

  Gnaw gulped. The Limburger twins' heads swivelled from him to their boss and back again. Their round red eyes were bright with fear.

  Dupont began to pace again. ‘Why should we be stuffed away down here in the dark, while Glory Goldenleaf and her kind enjoy the best this city has to offer?’ he growled.

  ‘But, Boss,’ ventured Scurvy, a bone-thin rat with prominent yellow teeth and whiskers that drooped nearly to the floor. ‘Rats like the dark.’

  ‘That's beside the point!’ Dupont thrust his sharp snout into his hapless aide's face. Scurvy quailed, his beady red eyes bulging in terror. ‘I'm the descendant of royalty! Camembert Dupont lived in a castle! He had mice for servants! We should be the ones ruling this city, not those miserable little small-paws!’

  Dupont kicked viciously at a slice of spoiled cantaloupe. Lulu and Louie quailed too. Scurvy and Gnaw exchanged another glance. A glance that clearly said it was best to stay out of the boss's way when he got like this.

  ‘You!’ said Dupont, whirling around again and whipping his tail towards Gnaw.

  Gnaw, who was still clutching his single, flea-bitten ear, swallowed nervously. ‘Yessir?’

  ‘I want that Goldenleaf brat!’ Dupont ordered. ‘That little spy is too clever by half. If it weren't for her and those other wretched spy mice, we'd have gained access to the museum's weapons weeks ago.’ He speared Gnaw with a glance. ‘Whatever it takes, bring her to me, or by the Black Paw itself, I swear your days are numbered too.’

  Gnaw shrank back in alarm. His boss bared his teeth in what passed for a smile. ‘That's right, ’ Dupont murmured, his voice oozing encouragement. He advanced menacingly towards his aide. ‘Fear is good. So is terror. I like to see both in an underling. Keep it up, Gnaw.’

  Gnaw nodded rapidly, and Dupont retreated and began to pace again.

  ‘I can't quite decide what to do with that snip of a mouse once I get my paws on her,’ he mused. ‘The possibilities are so delicious. Endless bondage as my personal slave? Or death by slow torture – piece by furry piece?’ He whirled around. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he screamed at his startled aide, who leaped straight up in the air in fright. ‘Bring her to me! And watch your back, you bonehead. She's a sly one, just like her father.’

  As Gnaw scuttled off to do his superior's bidding, Dupont frowned. ‘The nerve of her! Rat scum, indeed!’ His fiery red gaze landed on Limburger Lulu and Limburger Louie. ‘I think we've waited long enough, don't you?’

  Lulu and Louie nodded instantly in agreement. They always nodded in agreement. That was their job.

  Dupont's beady eyes turned towards Scurvy, who began chewing anxiously on his scrawny tail. His long whiskers drooped even farther and his skinny nose wrinkled in distaste as Dupont drew close. The commander-in-chief's breath smelled of three-day-old peach yogurt and rancid ham. Disgusting, even for a rat. But how did you tell your boss he needed a breath mint? The answer was, you didn't. Not when your boss was Roquefort Dupont. Scurvy closed his eyes and tried not to breathe instead.

  ‘Call the troops together,’ Dupont ordered, hefting the Kiss of Death on to his shoulder and sighting along its barrel. ‘With this in our possession, we've finally got the upper paw. I'm moving up the schedule for Operation P.E.S.T. Control. We go in two days from now, on Hallowe'en.’

  Lulu and Louie gasped. Scurvy's eyes popped open. ‘Hallowe'en?’ he squeaked in protest. Hallowe'en was every rat's favourite holiday. All that lovely candy! And all you had to do was slink around in the shadows and wait for the short humans to drop a piece. ‘Aw, but, Boss –’

  ‘You have a problem with that?’ Dupont aimed the Kiss of Death at his aide and squinted menacingly.

  Scurvy gulped. He shook his head.

  ‘Good,’ growled Dupont. ‘It's time we showed those puny small-paws who's in charge here.’

  As Scurvy darted off to do his master's bidding, he tripped over his whiskers and went flying head over tail to land in a heap of orange peels. He picked himself up, looked back fearfully, then slunk away into the shadows.

  Dupont watched him go. He shook his head in disgust. ‘Idiots,’ he snarled, snapping a mouldy potato crisp in two with his razorlike yellow teeth. ‘I'm surrounded by idiots!’

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  DAY TWO – SATURDAY 1145 HOURS

  Oz glanced at his watch. ‘Hurry up, DB,’ he said.

  ‘In a minute, in a minute,’ his classmate replied.

  They were in the Spy Museum gift shop. The two of them had spent the morning roaming the exhibits together, and then they'd sat in on a workshop on disguises. Two former Central Intelligence Agency experts had demonstrated how real spies used tools of the trade to change their identities, transforming a young woman in the audience into an elderly crone with the use of a grey wig, thick gl
asses and makeup.

  ‘Hey, Oz, look at this!’ said DB, holding up a fizzy drink can. She unscrewed the top to reveal a secret compartment.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Oz. ‘I've got one of those at home. Pretty cool, huh?’

  ‘I'm going to buy it,’ his classmate said, adding it to the pile of souvenirs she was clutching – invisible ink, dissolving paper and a fingerprint kit.

  Oz had picked out a black baseball cap with SPY emblazoned across the front of it and a new book about James Bond. The book alone cost two weeks' allowance. Even though Oz had a whole shelf of books at home about his favourite secret agent, he still felt it was worth it. An aspiring spy could never know too much about James Bond.

  ‘Are you ready yet?’ he asked, glancing at his watch again. It was almost noon.

  ‘Not quite,’ answered DB.

  Oz trailed after her. ‘How about I meet you in the cafe in a few minutes? I have to use the toilet.’

  ‘Sure,’ DB replied vaguely, inspecting a CD of spy music.

  Oz paid for his purchases and hurried across the lobby towards the cafe.

  ‘There you are, my little pizza pie!’ cried his father, spotting him. ‘I've saved a booth for you and Delilah and me. How do grilled cheese sandwiches sound for lunch?’

  ‘Great, Dad,’ said Oz, his stomach rumbling in anticipation. ‘And don't forget, it's just DB. She doesn't like Delilah.’

  ‘Of course,’ his father replied, smacking his forehead with the heel of his hand in mock dismay. ‘How could I forget?’

  Oz slung his bag of purchases on to the seat of a booth marked RESERVED. His father eyed it curiously. ‘What did you buy?’

  ‘Oh, just a hat. And a book.’

  ‘Let me guess – James Bond?’ Luigi Levinson smiled fondly at his son.

  Oz smiled back. His dad knew about his secret ambition. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Let's see the hat on you.’

  Reluctantly, Oz pulled the baseball cap out of the bag and put it on. He glanced around at the crowded cafe, but no one was paying him the least bit of attention.