A siren screamed past, down in the street below, and I heard Benjamin fiddling with the blinds on the window.
“Laureth,” he said.
“Shh,” I said. “I’m trying to think.”
I was trying some random numbers, but every time the safe made a cross buzzing sound and the door stayed shut.
“Er, Laureth,” said Benjamin. “Please.”
“Shh!” I said.
“Laureth!” he yelled. “There’s a man coming. He’s crossing the street. He was in the café—I mean the deli. He was with that smoky man. I saw them earlier because they laughed at me when I dropped Dad’s book. He’s heading this way. Laureth! He’s just come into the hotel!”
“Oh, no,” I said. “No.”
I thought about the noisy entrance lobby. Dark and full of people. No one would notice a man heading upstairs. I thought about the Smoke, and how I had assumed that he had Dad’s room card. I thought about how the Smoke had said “we” a couple of times, and how I hadn’t picked up on that. Till now.
And I thought about the safe, and whatever it was these two men wanted out of it.
And then I thought about Benjamin.
“Benjamin,” I said. I tried to sound as calm as I could. “I want you to do something. Quickly.”
“What?”
“How many light bulbs are in this room?”
“Two. No, three.”
“And the corridor outside?”
“Only a couple, I told you, it’s so—”
“I want you to smash all the bulbs in here. And the sitting room. And then I want you to go into the corridor, and smash every bulb you can see. And then I want you to run to the stairs and hide in the corridor on the second floor.”
“Smash them? Really?”
He sounded kind of excited, but I knew we only had seconds to play with.
“Do it! Now! Find something hard and smash them. It has to be as dark as you can make it.”
“Right!” he said, and seconds later I heard the bulbs shattering as he clattered them with something hard and heavy sounding.
He went next door and did the same and then he ran back in, and in the dark he fell over the bed.
“What are you doing?” I hissed, and then he found me, shoving something soft into my hands.
“Look after Stan for me!” he whispered.
My heart pounded harder.
“I promise! I promise! Just go! Hurry!”
He stumbled away. He called out “Bye, Laureth!” in such a happy and excited way that I wanted to just howl with pain, and then I heard the distant pop of another bulb as our door shut with an ominous and very final click.
I felt for the safe again.
How to make three into four?
How to make 354 into a four-digit version of itself?
I counted seconds in my head, trying to remember how long it took the lift to come, and how long to get to the third floor. I prayed that Benjamin had finished his work and was safely somewhere on the second floor.
354 …
And then I had it. There is, of course, a four-digit number that is the same as 354, and that number is 0354.
I tapped the keypad once again, and the safe made a satisfied little beep and swung open. I fished around inside, and that’s when I heard a plastic card slide into the lock outside, and the sound of the door opening.
ONE GIANT LEAP
Faith. I needed it then, more than ever. It took every bit of nerve I had to send Benjamin away, but as soon as the man spoke, I knew I’d been right to.
“That’s right, sugar.”
His voice made me want to weep with fear. It was a voice that was hard, a voice that belonged to someone who knew just what he was doing, and I knew immediately that this was the man to really be scared of. The Smoke was probably just his sidekick. This guy wasn’t messing around, but at least I knew he hadn’t run into Benjamin.
“That’s right,” he said, slowly. “I know you’re in here.”
I heard him try the light switch.
He grunted.
“Whole floor’s down, huh? Never mind. You and me can still have a good time together. In the dark.”
My hand closed over the contents of the safe. It was paper, a single large envelope, flat, as if there were nothing much inside.
The door clicked shut.
“So? You gonna come out, or shall I come in and find you?”
I said nothing. My breathing sounded so loud I couldn’t believe he couldn’t hear me, even though he was still in the other room and I was in the bedroom.
I leaned back on my heels, and slowly stood, taking an age over it, listening for sounds of him from next door. His voice was coming closer. I remembered dimly how I’d started shaking when the Smoke had threatened us and I tried to keep calm, because I knew there was no one to help me this time. Not Michael or his friends. Not even Benjamin. And not Dad.
“I saw you come in here. Saw you from across the street, sugar. You won’t get away from me.”
I heard him take a couple of steps, heard a chair tumble over.
“Goddammit,” he said, and stopped moving. “Ow.”
I didn’t move. I could barely think. Fear seemed to have rooted me to the spot.
“Now, look, sugar. Why don’t you just give me the stuff, and hell, I’ll even make it easy on you. Won’t hurt you or nothing. Sixteen, huh? Sweet sixteen … Mmm.”
His voice trailed off into a horrible moan, and I wanted to be sick.
“They said you was blind. You sure fooled us. Had no idea. Not at first. Then we saw the way you was with that brother of yours. But you do pretty good, you’d never know. Unless you was looking out for it.”
He was coming closer still as he spoke, moving slowly and stealthily this time.
“Let’s get a little bit of light on the subject,” he said. I heard the roller blinds in the other room clatter up.
And then I really panicked. There must have been enough light from the street in the other room for him to see well enough.
I thought about the layout of the bedroom, where I was. The door was on the far side of the bed from me, where I stood by the safe. The window had blinds just like the sitting room.
“Hello, sugar,” he said from the doorway to the bedroom. I still didn’t know for sure if he could see me or not, but I guessed he couldn’t or he’d have been on me.
He took a step inside, and walked straight into the edge of the bed, which was solid metal.
“Give me the stuff!” he roared. I heard him scrambling around the side of the bed.
I leaped onto it, straight across, and felt his hand grab my ankle. I was lying on the bed, still clutching the envelope, and then I kicked out wildly with my free leg. My heel hit something that was sort of hard and soft at the same time, there was a crunch, and he yelled, really loud.
He let go of my ankle. I flung myself off the bed and ran into the other room, straight for the door.
As I opened it I heard him clattering into more furniture, but my hand was already on the door handle and I was running along the corridor for the stairs.
At the last second, I remembered the stupid way the stairs started in the floor of the corridor itself, and forced myself to slow down, find the edge, and then hurried down the wooden steps.
I heard him running after me, down the corridor.
He wasn’t speaking anymore. He was making noises, grunting, like an animal running wildly, and that scared me even more.
I prayed Benjamin had taken out any lights in the stairwell, too, and then I knew he had.
I was almost two flights down when I heard a scream. It was followed by a series of terrible thuds and thumps as the man fell down the long, wooden staircase. And then there I was, at the door to the ground floor, with the noise of the bar behind it. I was desperately trying to find the handle and wrench it open, when it swung away from me, and someone, someone I knew very well, shouted my name above the noise.
“Laureth!
”
Mr. Woodell can say what he likes, but of all the weird things that had happened, this was the weirdest thing of all.
Dad.
Dad was there. I felt his arms go around me, and I knew everything was okay.
BOY MEETS GIRL
Also, it’s a weird thing about hope. Why is it that when you need it the most, it seems furthest away? I’d given up on ever seeing Dad again, and then he walked right into my arms, and me into his.
Love is a funny thing, too. I think I may have already said that, but I’m happy to say it again.
Why is it that sometimes you forget just how much you love someone until they’re gone? Why are we so stupid? Shouldn’t we always remember that the people we love are more important to us than anything else?
Dad threw his arms around me and burst into tears. So of course I did, too. Then he started laughing, so I did that as well, of course, and then I shouted so loud in Dad’s ear that I think I deafened him.
“Benjamin!” I screamed. “Benjamin’s up there.”
“It’s okay,” said Dad. “It’s okay.”
“No! There’s a man on the stairs who was trying to—”
“Laureth!” said Dad. “It’s okay. Benjamin’s safe. He’s over there, talking to a very nice policeman.”
“But he—”
“He just came out of a set of service doors at the side of the hotel. He walked straight up to me and said, ‘Hello, Daddy, we’ve been looking for you.’ Cool as you like.”
I laughed again and then started crying some more, and then some other men pushed past us.
“That’s the police,” Dad said. “They’ll take care of our friend on the stairs.”
“You know about him?” I said. “You knew about us?”
Dad laughed.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s find Benjamin before he wrecks something, and I’ll tell you all about it. I got mugged, Laureth! Can you believe that!”
He sounded more surprised than upset about it, just like Benjamin sounds sometimes.
“Mugged?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” said Dad, and I would have told him off, because this is where Benjamin gets it from. But there were bigger things to think about.
“But what about the cult?” I asked.
“Cult?” said Dad. He sounded confused. “Listen, let’s get Benjamin first. Then we can talk.”
We found Benjamin, and Dad managed to get the police to agree that we needed to sleep, and that we’d come along to the police station in the morning to give a statement.
The hotel moved us into 355, because of all the broken glass in 354, but not until Benjamin had been reunited with Stan.
“You could have used something else,” Dad said to Benjamin.
“Sorry, Dad,” said Benjamin.
“What?” I asked. “To break the lights, you mean?”
“Uh-huh,” said Benjamin.
“He used my laptop,” said Dad. He didn’t say it like he was that mad.
“It was the only thing I could see,” Benjamin said, sounding defensive. “I had to throw it at the lights in the corridor to break them.”
I laughed.
“You did? Is it…?”
“Let’s just say,” said Dad, “that the Benjamin Effect has never been more … effective. Just as well I didn’t have a new novel stored on that thing, eh? Luckily for me, my daughter had already secured my valuables.”
“That envelope?” I asked. “Dad, what’s going on? Who were those men? Why did they think you had a fortune in your safe?”
“Is that what they thought?”
He was silent for a bit, and I knew he was thinking hard.
“Oh,” he said. “I get it now.”
* * *
And then he explained everything, or everything he knew about, anyway. Some of it we pieced together the following day, when we went to the police station. They were interested in two men, prisoners on the run, one of whom had been found tied by his belt to some school gates in Queens, and the other who’d fallen down a stairwell in a hotel in Manhattan, which he and his friend had been snooping around all day.
Dad told us how he’d gone up to Providence, the day before. He’d been getting really desperate about that book. He needed to write it, but it just wasn’t happening. Thinking he might find something useful, he’d left Switzerland to come to New York to meet the woman at the Poe Museum because he was still fascinated by the Richard Parker story. I guess he didn’t tell Mum he was coming, because of the cost of the flight and so on, but he felt it was his last-ditch attempt to make that book work, and then they could stop worrying about money.
On a whim, he’d taken the train to Providence because Poe has some connections there, too, and because he wanted to visit the grave of another of his favorite writers who’s buried there.
He’d been having a chat on the phone to his editor as he stepped off the train when, just outside the station, he’d been mugged, by the Smoke and the other man.
They’d taken his stuff, all his stuff, and run off.
They’d taken a train straight back down to New York, because they thought there was a stash of jewelry in Dad’s safe. They’d stolen Dad’s room card so they knew which hotel he was in, but not the exact room. They’d spent all day watching the rooms from the deli across the street, and had already been thrown out by Margery Lundberg for hanging around the hotel. A maid had seen the Smoke trying Dad’s key card in every door on the second floor.
Dad, meanwhile, had been stuck in Providence. He had a thumping headache because the Smoke had whacked him with something.
He had no money, no phone, no passport or ID of any kind, and he told us how in moments you go from being a citizen of the world to a tramp, invisible. He knows a few people in the States, but he couldn’t phone anyone.
He realized later he should have gone to the police station straight away but he’d got a concussion or something and wasn’t thinking straight. He got it into his head he had to go to the British Embassy, and the nearest one was in Boston.
“Boston’s fifty miles away,” said Dad. “In the end I managed to hitch a lift with some old guy driving a truck, which was great, except he turned out to be the only person on the planet without a mobile. So I got to Boston, and you know what I found? It was a public holiday or something and our embassy was shut. So I couldn’t get a new passport, and without it, all the banks I tried weren’t prepared to give me any money. I was stuck. I tried to find an Internet café to email Mum, but you had to pay in all the ones I found.”
Finally, Dad said, he gave up for the night and slept on a bench in the railway station.
Then, that morning, he’d tried again.
Eventually, he wandered into a public library, and it was a librarian who’d saved the day, because she recognized his name.
“You wrote those great books!” she said. “I love them! Well, the funny ones, anyway.”
Dad was laughing himself silly as he told us that, and the librarian not only loaned him her computer, but a hundred dollars of her own money, too, when he explained what had happened.
He emailed Mum, who picked up the email on her Blackberry at the services on the M6.
She’d gone straight home to organize sending some money to Dad, and then she’d seen a letter sitting on the tray of the printer. Apparently I’d hit the key more than once when I was printing that letter, the letter from Mum and Dad giving me permission to travel on my own, to New York. There were five copies of it sitting there.
Then she’d phoned me. And the police. Who’d phoned the New York Police Department.
And the NYPD had arrived just the same time as Dad got back to the Black King, just as Benjamin walked calmly into the street and up to Dad, and said, “Hello.”
“Then I told Dad and the police about the bad men,” said Benjamin. “And they came to find you.”
“But there’s still so much I don’t understand,” I said.
“Me too,” said D
ad. “But you go first.”
“Well, why did they think you had jewelry in your safe? When all you have is an empty envelope?”
“I’ve been wondering that, too,” said Dad. “But I think I get it now. Sophie and I were talking about the American contract I’ve got now, and some rights issues, and then…”
He stopped.
“What?”
“I told Sophie I had a great new book idea. It happened on the flight over to New York. You know how I often get ideas when I’m up in the air.”
“So?”
“So you know how she and I always talk about my ideas? If they’re any good or not?”
“Oh, Dad,” I said. “What did you say?”
He chuckled.
“‘Diamonds and pearls. And gold. A fortune. Worth millions.’”
“The men who mugged you must have overheard and thought you meant it. That you really meant it.”
“I did mean it!” he said. “I’ve had the best idea for a book ever. And it’s worth a fortune. It’s in that envelope. That’s why I put it in the safe. I wrote it down in my notebook so I wouldn’t forget it, but I put it on that piece of paper, too, in case I lost the book.”
“Which you did.”
“Ha!” said Dad. “Yes, I did, didn’t I? So I was right to put the idea in the safe.”
He sounded very pleased with himself. He’s just like a big kid sometimes.
“What exactly is this amazing idea, anyway?”
“Top secret,” said Dad.
“Oh, Dad!” Benjamin and I wailed together.
“Bedtime. But tell you what, I’ll show you tomorrow.”
* * *
Mum arrived on the first flight she could get, and by lunchtime on Sunday we were all back together, sitting in the deli across the street from the hotel, eating large and complicated sandwiches.
The funny thing is, they weren’t even cross. Not one bit. I kept waiting for them to be angry with me, but they just didn’t seem to be.
We sat and talked about it all, piecing everything together, and then Dad told us something amazing.
“I’m not going to write that book anymore,” he said, and there was a stunned silence around the table. I felt as if the whole deli was watching us, though I know that’s ridiculous.
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