by B. B. Wurge
“All I know,” Toby said, “is that the case has to get to Paris by tomorrow evening. It’s to be left at the foot of the Eiffel Tower at eight o’clock sharp, and someone will come by and pick it up. But only if nobody is watching. It’s all terribly secret.”
“I see, I see,” said Mr. Sclera. “That makes sense of course. In a situation like this. Yes, yes, I can get it there. Don’t you worry. I can find someone all right. I can . . . yes. But not without some hard payment. It’s all very exciting . . . but how can I know it’s a real pentagonal? And maybe I’ll never get to see it? I can’t eat and live off of excitement. No, no, you’ll pay me for the expense, won’t you? What will you pay me?”
“In about a week,” Toby said, “my dad will hear back, and if everything went okay I’ll be able to pay you. You know I have a Red Delicious. I’ll—”
“A Red Delicious?” Mr. Sclera said, in another gurgly scream. “That’s what you’ll pay me? Don’t mock me, Tyrone! I’ve got six Red Delicious already, and I don’t even know how to sell them, they’re that common. A Red Delicious! I might pay you fifty dollars for it, but a trip to Paris? On one hour notice? I thought you had a matched pair of Auburns. What about that as a start? As a start, I’m telling you.”
“My Auburns!” Toby said. “How did you know about my Auburns?”
“Well, well, Truman dear,” the voice said with a self-satisfied chuckle, “I know more than you think. I’m not so old and stupid as that. And I have my ways. Remember that Oval I sold you a few months ago? That and the Auburns would do it for me. Pay me that, and I’ll get your case to Paris for you, on time too.”
Squiggle couldn’t entirely follow this part of the conversation, because of all the strange and complicated names for different eyeballs and parts of eyeballs. In the end, Toby agreed to pay some part of his eyeball collection that was more valuable than he had wanted to give up, and less valuable than Mr. Sclera had hoped to get. But the deal was done, and on the whole, both sides seemed satisfied. Toby left, and for a little while the room was quiet except for the very low murmur of Mr. Sclera talking to himself. Squiggle couldn’t make out the words.
As she peered out of the hole in the suitcase, she saw the old man’s hand come into view holding a container that looked like a salt shaker. It was eyeball food, as she realized a moment later. He shook it over the tank, and the eyeballs swam up to nibble on the flakes of food.
“There now, darlings,” the man said. “Eat up, eat up! I’ll be away for a day or two, darlings. Yes, I’ll be going on a trip. An exciting trip! To Paree!” He started to chuckle.
He picked up the briefcase and felt all over it with his hands. “And to think, in a few days, a pentagonal will be packed in this suitcase and on its way to that hairy monster of a Sponge! Oh! It’s not fair. But it’s very exciting. Oh yes!” He put his eye to the hole, trying to peer inside. He couldn’t see anything except darkness, but Squiggle got a good look at his face. He had a skinny, spotted, liver-colored face with a thin nose like a knife. When he grinned, Squiggle could see that he had only three teeth, each one pointing a different direction. And he had a black eye-patch over his left eye. His gray hair stuck up on the top of his head as if something had startled him; but it was only the natural way his hair grew.
“Little briefcase,” he said, grinning and chuckling and snuffling, “you and I are off to Paree. There’s no time to lose!”
In a few minutes he had gathered together a few things, put on his coat, and left, locking the metal door behind him.
18
I hope you never have to travel to Paris, or anywhere, inside of a briefcase. Even with a towel to pad her, Squiggle was banged, bumped, bruised, bounced, and boggled. She didn’t eat any of the plastic leaves because she had no appetite at all. The motion made her seasick. And the trip seemed to take forever! I won’t tell you everything about it, because it was a horribly boring trip in total darkness. Mr. Sclera talked to himself almost constantly and she had to listen carefully to try to figure out where they were. For example, once he said, “Ah, such an amazing thing, an airport!” and that’s how she knew they had gotten to the airport. But long before the trip was over, she was sick of his snuffly voice and his constant muttering about the pentagonal eyeball.
When they arrived in Paris, they didn’t go right to the Eiffel Tower. It wasn’t time yet; it was only late morning. Daylight filtered in through the hole in the side of the case. Squiggle could hear the outside sounds of the street. She felt better—only a very little better—being carried through the street, because the fresh air came in through the hole.
Mr. Sclera spent hours and hours sitting in cafes, or wandering around aimlessly, stopping every few steps to look at something. He was enjoying Paris in the slow, pokey way of an old man. But Squiggle wasn’t enjoying it at all. She felt like she had always been inside that briefcase, and would die if she had to stay in it for even a moment longer. She tried to be patient.
In the evening they went to a restaurant to wait. Mr. Sclera ordered a salad for dinner and put the briefcase on the ground between his feet while he slobbered over his food. Finally he finished and got up to leave. As he shuffled away from the restaurant Squiggle could tell that they were nearing the end of the journey, because Mr. Sclera muttered to himself, “Yes, here we are, almost, and I haven’t seen the Eiffel Tower in, ugh, five years. And this, the eyeball capital of the world! I should come more often. Here it is, yes, how nice to see you again, Madam Eiffel. Ha ha!” He put the briefcase down on the ground and Squiggle heard his footsteps fading away.
His instructions from Toby were to set the case at the northwest foot of the Eiffel Tower. Then he was supposed to leave and not look back. But Mr. Sclera wanted desperately to see the secret contact person. He thought that once he saw the person’s face he might be able to find him again, or follow him, or figure out some clever way to steal the pentagonal eyeball. Toby was exactly right—Mr. Sclera was an old villain. He pretended to walk away, but stopped in the shadow of a nearby phone booth and looked back.
For a few minutes nothing happened. People passed by on the street, but none of them seemed interested in the briefcase. Then the case began to shake. Suddenly it popped open and out jumped—Mr. Sclera screamed when he saw it—a little black monkey. The monkey looked around at the wide-open space and then scampered away.
Mr. Sclera stayed where he was for a long time, frozen in astonishment. Finally he decided that the monkey was delivering a secret message that had something to do with the pentagonal eyeball. The mystery intrigued him, and he was about to go look at the briefcase again to see if anything had been left behind in it. But he wondered if somebody might be hiding nearby, watching, to see if he had kept up his part of the deal. Maybe, to keep the deal entirely secret, they would take him away and kill him? He became horribly afraid and slunk off into the shadows. When he was a few blocks away he began to run, and soon caught a taxi to take him back to the airport.
19
Even to a large person, the Eiffel Tower is gigantic. To Squiggle, who was only eleven inches tall, it was so large that she didn’t even recognize it at first. What she saw was a city square crowded with people. Some of these people were hurrying from one end to another, some were hurrying back the opposite direction, some were just milling about looking at everything and taking pictures and talking. A row of booths was set up along the opposite side of the square where people bought things to eat and drink. Squiggle saw a scruffy-looking man mingling in the crowd, trying to sell tiny plastic statues of the Eiffel Tower. He didn’t seem to be selling very many statues, however, and looked annoyed. She also saw a group of five people on roller blades, going around and around the outside of the square. She heard voices popping out everywhere and mingling together in a roar. They didn’t all sound like French voices. They sounded German, and Italian, and Spanish, and English, all jumbled together.
The place was
simply enormous and so full of noise and movement and confusion that Squiggle felt overwhelmed, partly because she had just spent eighteen hours in a dark box.
She crept to the edge of the square and sat in the shadows, looking around for the Eiffel Tower. But she couldn’t see it anywhere, even though the area in front of her was lit up. Bright lights had been strung up everywhere. They were hanging all around her. Far above the busy city square was a patch of roof, blazing with lights.
“I wonder,” she thought, “how they built a roof so high up, over such a large square?” The roof seemed to be made up of metal girders, and. . . . “It IS the Eiffel Tower,” she thought. “I’m directly underneath it. It must be enormous!”
She was quite right about that.
“How,” she thought, “am I going to get to the top of it?” She thought there might be elevators that ran up the sides, but she didn’t want to take an elevator because she didn’t want to be seen by anybody. Who knows what would happen to a little monkey caught by a crowd of people in an elevator? No, she had to climb the tower. Being a monkey, she was not as afraid as you might have been. But still, she was not certain that she would succeed. “If I take lots of breaks along the way,” she thought, “I just might do it. I hope Mr. LeFuzz is at home.”
At first she found it easy to climb. The iron girders and cables crossed everywhere and she had no trouble finding places to hold on with her hands, feet, and tail. And it was so much fun to climb higher and higher, above the city pavement. Pretty soon she could look down and see a beautiful river with lights reflecting in it. She could see hundreds of people; they were far below her now; none of them suspected they were being watched from above by a monkey!
She got to a kind of platform that was very high up above the ground. It was the first level of the Eiffel Tower, and it was crowded with people and shops and a little cafe where you could sit and drink things and look out over the railing at the city lights. She decided to take a break to rest her hands, which were beginning to hurt from hanging onto all that rough iron. She sat down on the flat top of a girder and leaned back against another girder, stretched out her legs, got comfortable and . . . suddenly leaped to her feet again!
She peered into the cafe. Two people were seated across from each other at a little table near the railing. They were so close to her that she could have jumped onto their heads. They didn’t look very happy; they weren’t talking to each other and they weren’t looking over the railing at the nice view. Instead, they were slumped over their coffee cups. They looked familiar, but Squiggle couldn’t quite see their faces in the dim light. Something about them made her strangely excited and she began to tremble. Finally one of them looked at his watch, as if he were bored and depressed and wanted to know if it was time to go home yet. As he turned his head Squiggle got a good look at his face and she nearly fell off the girder in astonishment. She caught herself just in time. The man was her father! And the woman sitting across from him was her mother. Squiggle had found her parents.
And what unhappy parents they seemed to be! Her heart went out to them for the first time in her life. Were they always that way and she just hadn’t noticed? She tried to remember, but Lobelia had spent so much time in a darkened bedroom, with her eyes glued to the TV set, that she had never really noticed the expression on her parents’ faces.
The amazing truth—this may be difficult to believe—is that Mr. and Mrs. Squagg actually missed their daughter. For the first few days of their vacation, they thought they were having a good time. This is because they had all the fuss and confusion of making travel plans, and finding a nice place in Paris to stay, and figuring out where the local shops and restaurants were, and where Mrs. Squagg could get her hair done.
Then after a while Mr. Squagg began to notice a strange, wistful look on his wife’s face. She seemed to be looking far away—not at distant buildings in the city, but at something much more distant than that. One morning when Mr. Squagg was shaving in front of a mirror, he realized that he had the same wistful look on his face too.
Neither of them said anything to each other, but they both understood each other, as married couples sometimes do. They missed their daughter. Even though Lobelia had been ugly and fat and a terrible nuisance, and even though Mrs. Squagg still had a bandage on the bridge of her nose from an alarm clock that Lobelia had thrown at her, and even though Mr. Squagg still had long red scratches running down his arm from the shoulder to the wrist, still, Lobelia was their only daughter. And if she was a pest, maybe it wasn’t really her fault, but partly the fault of her parents? Maybe they shouldn’t have bought her such a large TV and put it directly on her bed? Maybe they should have spent the time to teach her how to ice skate, and play chess, and go apple picking?
They called their lawyer back in America and asked him to sell their house, because they could not imagine going back and looking at Lobelia’s old bedroom. It would be too sad!
They took in a stray cat and made a big fuss over it. They cooked it special goose livers and gave it goat’s milk and let it sleep in bed with them. But the cat wasn’t actually a stray. It thought that it had been kidnapped. It liked the goose livers very much; but one day it saw its chance, ran for the door, and escaped back to its real owners.
A steady gloom settled over the Squaggs, until restaurant owners and cafe attendants got to recognize them as Monsieur and Madam Miserables.
As Squiggle watched them, she forgot for a moment that she was a monkey. In fact she forgot all about herself, and came very close to jumping into the middle of their table. She probably would have, except at that moment her mother looked up and said, “I had another nightmare about that hairy spider that attacked Lobelia. Ugh! I wish I could get it out of my head.”
“Officer Poe says it’s a gorilla,” Mr. Squagg said. “I always thought gorillas were larger than that; but he must know what he’s talking about. Smart man, Officer Poe.”
After that they slumped back over their coffee cups and were quiet again. It was as much as they had said to each other all day.
Squiggle backed away and crouched in the shadows. Of course she couldn’t show herself to her parents. They would scream again, just like last time, and the entire restaurant would be after her. If only she were a little girl again, then she could run up to her parents and everyone would be happy! Her only hope was to find Mr. LeFuzz.
She gritted her little monkey teeth and began to climb again. Soon the restaurant was below her. She reached the second level of the Eiffel Tower, another platform full of people, but smaller than the first level because the tower got skinnier as it went up. But she didn’t stop to rest this time. She continued up the side of the tower.
As she got higher, the climbing got more difficult. The wind picked up and the whole tower seemed to shake and shudder. When she looked down she saw the city stretched out around her like Christmas tree lights glittering and twinkling in the night. She was high enough now that it began to turn her head. She got dizzy and almost fell off, and decided not to look down anymore.
She had to cling tightly to each girder to avoid being blown off by the gusts of wind. At each step she would reach up with one hand and her tail to get a hold of the next iron bar, and then slowly pull herself up. The higher she got, the windier it got, and the slower she climbed.
What seemed like hours and hours later (it probably wasn’t that long), Squiggle neared the top. The tower was so skinny that she could see clear through to the other side. An elevator full of people passed her on its way up. She could see them, but they couldn’t see her in the darkness. Even if somebody had spotted the little fuzzy shape clinging to the struts outside, they would have thought it was another bit of garbage blown up from the streets. A few rags and newspapers clung in the cracks here and there, fluttering in the wind. Right above her, a whole cardboard box had gotten lodged between two metal girders and a cable. She would have to climb around it, and t
hen she would be at the top—or very nearly so. Just another few yards. Her arms and her legs and her tail ached.
The packing box was open on one side. As Squiggle climbed past it she looked inside. Lounging comfortably on a little chair, as if he were in his own living room (and I suppose he was), sat a little man in a perfectly neat little suit. His feet (which were bare) were stretched out before him and crossed at the ankles. He had a little glass in his hand, and a contented expression on his face. He was gazing out of the side of the box at the beautiful view of Paris. But when he saw a monkey climb into view and look in at him, he leaped to his feet so suddenly that his head bashed into the top of the box and he spilled his drink everywhere.
“Are you Mr. LeFuzz?” Squiggle asked, climbing into the box. The wind was not so bad inside. She was so exhausted from the climb that she could hardly stand up. Her legs shook under her.
The little man said, “Mon Dieu! What and who are you?”
“I’m Lobelia Squagg,” she said. “Remember?”
He stared at her for a long time and said nothing. His little mouth flapped open and closed a few times. Then he seemed to pull himself together. Even though his face was still pale, he made a graceful bow and said, “Mademoiselle, my pleasure. I remember you well. But, if it is not rude for me to say so, you are, in point of fact, dead. A most regrettable incident, I’m sure.”
“But you turned me into a monkey,” she said. Now that the moment had come, she was excited and afraid all at once. “Would you . . . I mean, would it be possible to . . . I mean, can’t you . . . turn me back into a girl again?”
He stared at her a moment longer and then said, “My dear Lobelia, please have a seat.” Suddenly a second chair appeared in the cardboard box. The two of them sat side by side. Squiggle was grateful to be able to sit down and rest her legs.