Who Cut the Cheese?

by Jo Nesbo

  “Wait!” Yodolf cried. “Take off their handcuffs.”

  “But . . . ”

  “If we’re chewing them and we bite into the handcuffs, we might break a molar and then we’d have to go to the dentist and you know how I hate the dentist.”

  And as Nilly heard Göran fishing through his pockets for the keys to the handcuffs, swearing the whole time, he also heard the sound of the engine growing stronger. And the same went for the third song.

  “Ah, there it is,” Göran said, and Nilly heard the key turn first in his handcuffs and then in Gregory’s. Then he heard Yodolf’s wicked laughter.

  “And now, darn it, now they’ll be some filthy britches.”

  A Pop Song Saves the World. Maybe.

  ONE OF THE two guards at the palace’s front gate shielded his eyes and squinted into the low morning sunlight, in the direction the engine sound was coming from.

  “Say, Gunnar,” he said, tugging on his handlebar mustache. “Isn’t that an awfully large motorcycle?”

  “The biggest I’ve ever seen, Rolf,” the other guard said, raising his upper lip and sniffing his own Fu Manchu mustache. “Sort of looks like it’s pulling along a whole theater seating box. With, what’s that in it? A brass band?”

  “What’s that they’re playing? Sounds familiar . . . ”

  “Wait! They’re turning. They’re coming up here! Look, they’re coming! What’s going on?”

  “Something’s going to happen!”

  “Listen! They’re playing . . . they’re playing . . . ”

  “She luvs ya, nah, nah, nah?”

  “DRIVE RIGHT IN the front gate, Professor!” Lisa shouted from the sidecar.

  “Will do,” called Doctor Proctor, who was leaning in over the motorcycle’s handlebars, giving it gas as they approached Palace Square. “Just play as loud as you can!”

  “Did you hear that?” Mr. Madsen yelled from the sidecar, and started swinging his baton in even larger arcs. And the strangest band that ever played in a sidecar didn’t need any urging. Lisa was playing the clarinet, Mrs. Strobe was hammering on the keys of a toy piano, Janne was on the tuba, Beatrize was playing the saxophone, Lisa’s commandant father was rocking out on a guitar with two broken strings, Lisa’s commandant mother was playing a piccolo, Trym and Truls were on the snare drums, and Nilly’s sister was swinging a mallet against a base drum, while Nilly’s mother screamed so piercingly off-key, unappealingly, and loudly that the tourists in Palace Square gaped and covered their ears, “She luvs ya, nah, nah, nah! She luvs ya, nah, nah, nah!”

  The two guards snapped to attention, one on the left, one on the right, as the motorcycle drove through the gate onto Palace Square.

  NILLY HEARD THE music, heard De Beetels’ “She luvs ya, nah, nah, nah” drowning out BABA’s “Honeydew,” heard Agnes’s voice being drowned out by the kitchen-sink-style spectacle from Doctor Proctor’s sidecar band. Nilly knew it was his friends coming to save him. But what help could they be? It was too late. Göran had already given him the push, and Nilly fell, off the chair and down into the waffle iron’s searing heat.

  He saw his life flash before his eyes. There had been highs and lows, lots of fun, a couple of days that could’ve been better, but most of all there had been Jell-O, fart powder, and adventures with good friends. The short summary: a life that was way too short for a guy who was way too short. But now it was over.

  Slorp!

  What was that?

  There was suddenly a blue belt around Nilly’s stomach. And he wasn’t falling anymore. Or rather he was falling . . . up. Or the opposite of falling—he was rising. He saw the exterior wall of the palace rushing past and—plop!—he landed. The blue belt, which wasn’t a belt at all but a blue frog tongue, loosened its hold, and Nilly saw that he was back on the same balcony he’d been standing on a few days before. Gregory was standing next to him, spitting.

  “You jumped up here?!” Nilly exclaimed, peering down at the courtyard below, where the motorcycle was driving around the waffle iron pursued by Göran and Yodolf and Tandoora. “With me in your tongue?!”

  “Blech!” Gregory said. “You taste like grass and soap.”

  “You saved me!” Nilly said, throwing his arms around Gregory.

  “Hey, not so fast!” Gregory said, flailing his arms in an attempt to get Nilly off him. “I’m not sure we’re safe yet.”

  And he was absolutely right about that, because the motorcycle was now surrounded by soldiers, and suddenly someone turned the BABA music way up. It was so loud that Cannon Avenue’s sidecar band was totally drowned out by the sound of Agnes: “HONEYDEW—FINALLY SLICING MY HONEYDEW!!”

  And Nilly saw Gregory grow pale again, saw his knees start shaking, saw him slowly buckle. Until Agnes took a breath after DEW, and in that gap, a desperate cry was heard from the courtyard:

  “Gregory! I love you!”

  “Hiccup!” Gregory said. “What was that?”

  “That,” Nilly replied, “was someone saying they love you.”

  “Love m-m-me? But wh-who . . . ?”

  “Who do you think, frog brain? Mrs. Strobe, of course! Duh!”

  And Nilly saw a healthy green color flood back through Gregory’s cheeks. His eyes started to twinkle, and a large smile spread across his face.

  “We have to do something before the soldiers get them!” Nilly said.

  But Gregory didn’t seem to hear Nilly; he was staring off into space with a blissful look on his face. “This is actually a pretty good song, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Honeydew?” Nilly asked, taken aback.

  “Yeah, when you really listen to it,” Gregory said.

  “Hello? Earth to Gregory! Wake up!” Nilly said, snapping his fingers just in front of Gregory’s face. “Uh, the end of the world and all that?”

  And then there was a swish! A slorp! A swoosh! A smack! And an eeeek!

  The smack! was the sound of the three soldiers—after Gregory’s tongue picked them up and flung them away—hitting the wall of the building. And the eeeek! was the sound of the one of those three who had the misfortune to hit the top of a picture window and was now slowly sliding down.

  Yodolf was jumping up and down and trying to issue orders to the soldiers: “Shoot them! Stop that god-awful clanking toy orchestra! Shoot them all!”

  Some of the soldiers hesitantly raised their weapons and aimed at the sidecar, but they didn’t fire.

  “Now! This is a presidential order! And anyone who doesn’t obey will have to face a court martial and treason charges and season charges and bleazon charges . . . and . . . and . . . JUST SHOOT ALREADY!”

  But no one shot.

  “My dear Norwegians!” Nilly yelled from the balcony, and the soldiers turned and gazed up at him in surprise. “Now is the time for us to show that we won’t let ourselves be ordered around by baboons and bandits and brutal bullies!”

  “Shooooot the traitor!” Yodolf screamed, pointing a trembling black index-finger fingernail at the balcony.

  “I can’t promise you that it will be easy,” Nilly said in a thunderous voice. “Quite the contrary, all I can promise is stinky feet! But . . . ” He raised his hand in a majestic gesture. “I can promise you this: No more choral singing on TV! So the question is: What do you pick? Brass instruments or choral singing?”

  “Shoot!” Yodolf sobbed, and then went suddenly quiet as he heard the trigger mechanism click and discovered that the weapons were finally being aimed—at him.

  “Waaaaa,” Yodolf said. And that very instant he disappeared. Vanished. Into thin air.

  “He camouflaged himself!” Nilly yelled. “Quick, don’t let him get away. Guards, shut the gate!”

  “Did you hear what he said, Gunnar?” Handlebar said to Fu Manchu. They were standing at the gate and had been following all the commotion in the courtyard with their eyes agog.

  “Yup, Rolf. He said we should shut the gate.”

  “That’s what I thought. And you know what,
Gunnar?”

  “No, what Rolf?”

  “I think it’s time for real Norwegians to switch sides.”

  “Yeah, it does seem like the tide has turned. We ought to turn with it, Rolf. Then we’ll be heroes of the resistance, little old us!”

  “Quick thinking, Gunnar, quick thinking.”

  And with that they shut the massive iron gate. And the second it clicked shut and locked, they heard a smacking sound, as if someone had run into the gate, followed by a horrendously ugly Swedish swearword that we won’t repeat here.

  IN THE COURTYARD, Doctor Proctor had stopped the motorcycle, and as the Cannon Avenue brass band continued to play, Mrs. Strobe leaped out and disappeared into the kitchen tent. And she must have located the device that was playing “Honeydew” in there, because Lisa heard Mrs. Strobe shout “Aha!” followed by the sound of a desk slap, and there won’t be any more BABA music heard during the rest of this story.

  The soldiers were running around in the courtyard, fumbling, searching for moon chameleons, who had all made themselves invisible by now. Suddenly Doctor Proctor fell off the motorcycle, and someone tried to start it up. But Lisa’s commandant father swung his guitar as hard as he could down onto the driver’s seat where it struck something—even though it looked like there was just air there—and the center of the guitar splintered with a crunching sound.

  “I’ve got one of them!” Lisa’s commandant father yelled, holding on tight to the neck of the guitar.

  A desperate female voice wailed from inside the guitar, “Yodolf! Don’t let them take us! Save me! Yodolf! Yodolf, you big letdown! Yodo—”

  Tandoora didn’t have a chance to say anything else before she was tackled by soldiers and someone snapped the same handcuffs onto her that Gregory Galvanius had been wearing.

  In a snowdrift over in the corner of the courtyard, two of the soldiers had gotten ahold of something, but both got bopped in the nose and fell over backward.

  “Welcome to a world of hurt, you idiotic creep!” Göran screamed. “Come to Daddy now! Come—umph!”

  The umph sound was because Göran had just been struck by something big and heavy that came from above, which shoved him down into the snow.

  “Umph!”

  The second umph sound was because Göran was struck a second time by something big and heavy that came from above and pushed him even a little deeper into the snow.

  “Double umph!”

  The third umph sound . . . well, you’ve probably figured it out.

  And when Göran, now several feet deep in the snow, gasped and looked up, he saw something way up above him in the air, a frog man in midjump, on his way down. Filthy britches, he thought, closing his eyes.

  BUT WHERE WAS Yodolf?

  Lisa had set down her clarinet and was standing in the sidecar, surveying the chaos in the courtyard, but there was no Yodolf Staler to be seen.

  Doctor Proctor came over to her and said exactly what she was thinking: “If Staler gets away, he’ll be back. Maybe with an even more dastardly plan.”

  Lisa looked around at the stone walls surrounding the courtyard. They were tall, but a desperate baboon could probably make it over them. There was no time to waste. She jumped out of the sidecar and ran over to the fire hose, picked it up and released the lever that was stopping the flow.

  “What are you doing?” Doctor Proctor asked, staring at the lumpy yellow waffle batter that the fire hose started splurting out.

  “I’m going to find Yodolf,” Lisa said, pulling on the lever and aiming the hose straight up.

  The yellow jet grew more vigorous and traveled up toward the blue morning sky and the sun that was shining with dismay on the bizarre things the people and animals of Oslo were up to. When the waffle batter decided it had gone high enough, it turned and came splattering back down again. It coated the ice-covered cobblestones, balconies, uniform hats, freckled nose tips, jumping frog men, and scrambling soldiers. But most important of all: It coated a form that until now had been invisible.

  “Thewe he is!” cried a waffle-battered shape that was suspiciously reminiscent of Mrs. Strobe.

  And sure enough, in the middle of the courtyard they saw a waffle-batter-dripping silhouette, shaped like a baboon. It was bending over the same manhole cover that Nilly and Gregory had climbed out of several days earlier. And just as the soldiers were storming over to the waffle baboon, it got the cover up, jumped down into the hole, and was gone.

  Nilly slid down from the roof on the downspout and came running over to Lisa and Doctor Proctor, who were already standing next to the hole peering down.

  “It’ll be catastrophic if he gets away,” Doctor Proctor said.

  “I know,” Nilly said, and then mumbled, “And it would be extraordinarily good luck if someone here happened to have a flashlight on them, wouldn’t it?”

  All of the soldiers standing around them started fishing around in their uniforms, and a second later twenty-four flashlights were being held out to Nilly.

  “Standard-issue field equipment, Sergeant,” one of them explained.

  “As you were,” Nilly said, grabbing one of the flashlights and pinching his nose between his thumb and index finger: “Who’s coming?”

  “I am,” the professor said, checking that his swim goggles were on securely and pinching his nose as well.

  “And me!” called Gregory, who had stopped jumping up and down on Göran and was instead over by the kitchen tent eating waffle batter off the face of a waffle-batter-covered form that bore a suspicious resemblance to Mrs. Strobe.

  Lisa groaned, pinched her own nose, and said in a nasal voice, “Why do we ALWAYS end up down the stinking sewers?”

  “How else would we be able to . . . ,” Nilly began.

  “Get out of them again?” Lisa sighed and jumped. And presto! She was gone. And presto! Nilly was gone. And two prestos later, the professor and Gregory were right behind them.

  “WELL, THIS IS quite dark,” Doctor Proctor said, once they’d all landed with some large and some not quite so large splashes in the sewer water.

  “Oh, and it reeks!” said Lisa in disgust, trying to wring out her hair.

  “But at least it washed the waffle batter off us,” Nilly said, switching on the flashlight.

  “That’s just it,” Doctor Proctor said. “How will we find Yodolf if all the waffle batter has washed off?”

  “We don’t even know if we should start heading right or left,” Lisa said.

  Three of the four friends looked at each other, perplexed.

  The fourth, Gregory, started hiccuping.

  “Hiccup!” he said. “Hicketty hick!”

  “There, there,” Doctor Proctor soothed. “This is no time to get all stressed out, Gregory.”

  “He’s just asking which way Yodolf went,” Nilly explained.

  “Asking who?”

  Nilly swung his flashlight around. It landed on a pair of shiny frog eyes.

  “Hiccup,” the frog said. “Hic-hiccup!”

  “This way,” Gregory said, pointing, and Nilly waded down the pipe with the beam of light ahead of him.

  The others followed, Doctor Proctor bending over so that he wouldn’t hit his head on the top of the pipe. Suddenly Nilly stopped. They were at a crossroads where the one pipe split into five different pipes.

  “Hiccup!” Gregory said. “Hicketty hick!”

  And a brief croak came from the darkness in response.

  “Ugh,” Gregory said.

  “What?” Lisa asked.

  “They didn’t see anyone go by here.”

  “Well that’s that, then,” Doctor Proctor said. “Yodolf must have washed the rest of the batter off and now he’s camouflaging himself again. We’ll never find him.”

  And the others realized that the professor was right.

  “Bummer,” Lisa said. “I was so hoping that this would have a really good ending, with Yodolf safely under lock and key.”

  “We’ll have to make do
with a fairly good ending,” Doctor Proctor said. “And hope that Yodolf Staler doesn’t show up again anytime soon.”

  They nodded to each other.

  “Let’s go back,” Doctor Proctor said.

  “Hiccup.”

  Three of the four friends started wading back the same way they’d come.

  “Nilly!” Lisa yelled. “Aren’t you coming?”

  She turned around and looked at her little friend, who was standing there staring into the darkness.

  “What is it, Nilly?”

  “That last hiccup,” he said. “It sounded familiar.”

  “I’m sure all frog croaks sound kind of the same,” Lisa said.

  “That was no frog,” Nilly said, aiming the flashlight into the darkness in one of the tunnels. “It was . . . it was . . . !” he cried out in joy.

  And the others saw him hold out his hand, but couldn’t tell what for. But then they understood.

  “Perry!” Nilly cried. “Perry, you made it! Have you been down here this whole time?”

  “Hiccup.”

  Lisa and the others turned around and came back to Nilly.

  “Amazing!” Doctor Proctor laughed. “Now, my dear friends, despite everything, we have no choice but to be satisfied with the ending of this story!”

  “Almost,” Nilly said. “Shh!”

  He cocked his head to the side, toward the little seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider that he had placed on his shoulder.

  “Perry wants us to go this way,” Nilly said, and started running down one of the tunnels. There was less water there, but what little there was splashed around his feet. The others hurried after him. And when they rounded a turn, they saw Nilly standing there, legs apart. And in front of him was a large, beautiful cobweb that stretched across the whole sewer tunnel, its strands glittering in the light.

  “Look!” Nilly whispered.

  And they looked. They saw that the cobweb was moving. As if something large and invisible were thrashing about helplessly in the network of threads that was so strong they must have been spun by a spider who had consumed Doctor Proctor’s Strength Tonic with Mexican Thunder Chili, Maximum Strength. And when they looked more carefully, they could see that the shape still had splotches of waffle batter here and there.