“Something about singing for Shock Value and getting their big break,” I said.
“I’ve never heard them say any of this,” Brigitte said.
I peeked through one of the pinholes. Beef and Professor Camponi were in the lobby, talking. “They must have just overheard it. That’s why Beef wants to win so badly, so that she can sing for them. I guess she thinks they’ll love her and she’ll make it big.”
“That is not going to happen now,” Brigitte said. “She is so far in last place, she won’t catch up.”
“Because of the book of tricks,” Henri added.
“Because of me,” I said. I hadn’t played fair, and I’d ruined this woman’s dream. Sure, I wanted to win, but I felt terrible about my little maneuver.
22
We waited until the lacrosse team once again passed through the lobby, creating total chaos. Étienne might have seen me scoot out with the last cage, but by then we were in the clear.
Henri and I waited outside the hotel for the petmobile, which Brigitte had parked around the corner. Her preferred parking didn’t last overnight.
People pointed down the boulevard, so I figured it was approaching. I saw the snout first.
Did she really have a pig in that minivan?
A voice behind me asked, “Pig day?”
“Looks that way,” I said to Knit Cap, who’d walked up next to me.
“Should I ask about the birds?” He nodded toward the cages on the sidewalk next to us.
“I wouldn’t.”
“Fair enough.” He strummed and sang, “Fair is fair. Hair is hair. And I’d know you anywhere.”
“Hey! Look at you go. Good job with the rhymes.”
“You were right. It’s a good way to start.” He whipped the blue pages out of his back pocket. “Filled all these pages with rhyming lyrics.”
“Then you’re ready for lesson two.”
“Lay it on me,” he said.
“Here it is: Not everything has to rhyme.”
“Hmmm, really? So, I could do something like . . .” He played a few chords.
“Run away,
Be free,
Be yourself,
And leave your worries behind.”
In a way it didn’t matter what he sang, because his voice was so hypnotic. But the chords were soothing and the lyrics flowed with them perfectly. “That’s exactly what I meant,” I said. “You could write all along, couldn’t you?”
“I used to. I surely used to, but I’ve had a block that I couldn’t get past for a long time. Your idea of rhymes and a scratch pad were just enough to unplug the logjam in my brain,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”
“You are very welcome. Maybe someday you’ll write a song about me?”
“Maybe I will.” He strummed a few notes.
I smiled because I liked them. They were fun and upbeat and kind of caught the essence of me.
Brigitte honked the petmobile horn at me. And, yup, it oinked!
“That’s my cue,” I said. “I gotta fly.”
“To the last clue?”
“How do you know it’s the last one?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t. It was just intuition.” He picked at the strings and strolled down the street, singing about a girl. It sounded like the girl could be me.
Henri had loaded the birds in with . . . wait for it . . . a pig. The van was stuffed.
“Where to?” Brigitte asked.
I still felt bad about Beef, but we couldn’t both win. It was going to be hard enough for just me to win. “To the next clue,” I said. “I’ll read it again. ‘XX marks the spot. Number eighty-three is the place. In the Garden of Names.’”
“Let me see le papier, please,” Henri said. He looked at the paper. “This is not XX. It is how we number the arrondissements around Paris—they are like sections, or neighborhoods. It is Roman numbers. We need to go to the twentieth arrondissement.”
“Awesome. Could eighty-three be a street? Like Eighty-Third Street?” I asked.
“Our streets are not numbered,” Brigitte said. She cracked her window.
“Mon Dieu. What is the smell?” Henri asked. He rolled his window too. And then I did the same.
“Excuse-toi, Norman,” Brigitte said to the pig. “Sorry, that happens after breakfast sometimes.”
“Where is he going?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, where are you dropping him? Does he have a tap lesson or snorting practice or something?” I asked.
“No. He likes to ride around with me. It is his big day out. One day a week is Norman’s Day of Fun,” Brigitte said.
The birds said, “Day of fun!” “Day of fun!”
Great, I get to spend the whole day with Norman the farting pig. Poor Henri was in the backseat, closer to him. Right now he hung his face out the window and made no indication he was coming back in anytime soon.
“If eighty-three isn’t a street, what could it be?” I wondered aloud.
“Section eighty-three!” “Flowers to section eighty-three!” “Carnations!” “Section twenty-four!” “Section nineteen!” “Flowers!”
“What are they talking about?” I asked Brigitte.
“I do not know. Something from the flower cart, I think,” Brigitte said.
“They seem to know section eighty-three.”
“Section eighty-three!” “Section thirty-four!” “Tombstone!”
“Flowers on a tombstone?” I asked them.
“Carnations!” “Roses!” “Pansies!” “Tombstone!”
“Of course,” Brigitte said. “The flower cart goes to Père-Lachaise, the biggest and oldest cemetery in Paris. The graveyard and gardens are divided into sections that are numbered.”
“The Garden of Names,” Henri said, “is like a garden of names on the tombstones.”
“Makes sense to me,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“Let’s go!” “Let’s go!” “Let’s go!”
23
Brigitte extended a ramp from under the van for Norman to walk down.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“It’s Norman’s Day of Fun. He won’t have much fun locked in a petmobile all day, will he?”
Norman waddled down the ramp, and Brigitte strapped on a leash.
“The birds?” Henri asked.
“Bring one cage. They can sit on the flower cart, if it is here.”
Henri said to the birds, “Who wants to come?”
“Come!” “Who!” “Who wants!”
He scrunched his mouth from one side to the other, clearly having trouble deciding which birds should come along. He pointed to them. “Eeny, meen—”
I grabbed the cage closest to the door and ran on ahead.
We found Monsieur Cliquot at the entrance to Père-Lachaise Cemetery. He kissed Brigitte on each cheek and took the cage from me. “Bonjour, Marlène. Bonjour, Jacqueline. Bonjour, Gary . . .” He greeted each of the birds by name as he let them out of their cage and perched them on top of the cart while they stretched their multicolored wings.
“Bonjour, Norman.” He gave Norman the tops of some red carnations to eat.
“Will they let him inside?” Brigitte asked Monsieur Cliquot.
He gave her a small bouquet of yellow roses. “Get your ticket from the first teller. That is Monique. Give her these and she’ll let him in.”
“Thank you,” Brigitte said. “I’ll bring the other birds home later.”
“D’accord.” He wished us luck with the rest of the hunt.
Brigitte gave Monique the flowers as Monsieur Cliquot had advised, and voilà, pigs were welcome to roam the Père-Lachaise grounds.
With map in hand, we set out for section eighty-three, with Norman leading the way. Someone
needed to explain in pig language that we were racing against the clock here. Norman checked out every smell the way you’d expect a dog to, and he nibbled flowers off the grave sites, generating dirty looks. At this rate it was going to take us forever to find section eighty-three. We had major ground to cover!
This cemetery was bigger, and more beautiful, than any I’d ever seen. I estimated that the walk to section fifty-two was probably a mile. Norman slowed down, and I expected that soon he’d need to rest. I plucked a few dead flowers from a grave and used them to lure Norman along. “Come on, boy. Good pig,” I said, while I was thinking, Just hurry up, you stupid pig!
“Many famous people are buried here,” said Henri.
“Like who?”
“Chopin and Molière,” Henri said.
“I know Chopin was a great musician, but I don’t know Molière,” I said.
“That is because you are not French,” Brigitte said. “Molière was a very famous playwright and actor. You probably know Jim Morrison.”
“I’ve heard of him,” I said.
“He was an American musician. Very popular,” Brigitte explained. “Ah, section eighty-three,” she announced.
It was not hard to find the grave we were meant to find because it was surrounded by royal blue shirts. Camera flashes snapped in our faces as we approached.
We were first! Even with the pig slowing us down, we’d won!
But then I saw Jean-Luc, Sabine, and Robert talking to Murielle duPluie. They smiled broadly when they saw us.
Seriously? My heart dropped.
Now we wouldn’t get the tickets or backstage passes, and I wouldn’t be featured on the French news.
A girl in blue said, “You are the first team to arrive with a pig.”
“But the second team to arrive,” I pointed out glumly.
“Yes, second. Second is good. Only the first and second get a chance at the box,” she said.
Wait, what? “The box?” I asked.
“Yes. The game isn’t over for you,” she said. “There is one more challenge, and only the first two teams get to try it.”
“Are you kidding?” Robert asked. “We were here first!”
“So you get to try with the box too.” She smiled like this was exciting news, but Jean-Luc, Sabine, and Robert glared at her. Clearly, they hadn’t seen this twist coming.
Murielle duPluie looked into the camera, shining her white teeth, and said, “It seems this contest is not over, Paris.”
A microphone appeared in my face. “Hi there,” she said to me. “Murielle duPluie with Music News. What are your names?”
I stared into the camera. “We are Gwen—from the US—and Henri and Brigitte—”
Brigitte interrupted me. “From Boutique Brigitte—Pour les Petits Animaux.”
Murielle ignored her and asked me, “How does it feel?”
“It’s amazing, like, with a capital A,” I said. “I am so happy to be representing my country at this event. I mean, we’re talking front row, and backstage passes!”
“Are you aware that Shock Value has sweetened the deal?”
“Sweetened?” Was that even possible?
She reached down and held up two identical boxes. Each had four drawers. The outside of each drawer had a different type of lock. “The first team to unlock all four of these gets an additional bonus ticket and invitations to a VIP reception with the band after the concert, in their greenroom. That’s a total of five tickets!”
“With the band?” I repeated.
“Yes! Like a private party!” Murielle confirmed. Then she added, “Of course, I’ll be there too.” She pointed to the boxes. “You’ll see that each of these drawers is locked. You need to use all the clues you’ve gathered so far to open them.”
She gave one box to Robert, Jean-Luc, and Sabine, and the other to us. “The clock is going to start.” The Shock Value rep gave Murielle duPluie a nod. “Now!”
I took our box and set it on the tombstone. “Okay.” I pointed to a lock on one of the drawers. “This one looks like a regular keyhole,” I said. I took the ribbon from my neck. “Easy, as long as this key works.” I slid it in the hole and turned.
Click.
The door slid open, and inside was one Shock Value ticket.
“One down,” I said.
Henri looked down.
“It’s an expression,” I said. “It means we’re done with one.”
Brigitte studied the other three. “What do you think about those?”
One of them was a hole about the size of a dime. Another was a number pad, one through ten. The last was a twisting combination lock.
I glanced a few feet away at Sabine, Jean-Luc, and Robert, who were also huddled around their own set of locks, whispering. “Where are the other clues?” I asked Brigitte.
Brigitte took them out of her pocket. “We have la place de la Concorde, the Statue of Liberty, and then the one that led us here.”
“The Statue of Liberty and cemetery both have numbers, but not la place de la Concorde,” I said. “Do you have the obelisk?”
She reached into her lab coat pocket, where, of course, she had the obelisk, and probably a shower cap, crowbar, and bottle of maple syrup.
“Do you want to do it?” I asked her, and pointed to the dime-size hole.
Brigitte slid the model monument into the dime-size hole and turned it.
Click.
“Two down,” Henri said.
“Now the numbers. The twisting combination of my gym locker is three numbers.”
“Then let’s use the clue for the cemetery. It is the twentieth arrondissement and section eighty-three. We need a third number,” Brigitte said.
“Is there a grave number?” All three of us looked around. There wasn’t. “Row?” Nothing. “How about year? When did he die?” I indicated the grave we were standing at.
Brigitte looked. “Last year.”
I tried that combination of numbers, but it didn’t work. I looked over to see how Robert, Jean-Luc, and Sabine were doing. They were already on the last drawer—the number pad. We were so close.
Think, Gwen, think.
“How about his age?”
“Whose?” Brigitte asked.
“The dead guy.”
It took her a few seconds to calculate. “Twenty.”
“Oh, that’s so young. Poor guy.” I tried twenty, eighty-three, twenty.
Click.
It opened.
The third ticket was in the drawer.
“Let’s try the GPS coordinates on the number pad,” Brigitte said.
“Yeah. Yeah.” I waved my hand in front of the number pad. “Hurry!”
Jean-Luc, Robert, and Sabine were arguing. It looked like they had the Statue of Liberty clue, but maybe it was ripped up, or someone had thought it was trash. Whatever had happened to it, now there was a section of paper missing, so they didn’t have all the coordinates. The boys were yelling at her in fast French. She worked her phone. Probably to find the GPS numbers.
Brigitte referred to the paper and pushed in the keys. It opened easily. We had the fourth ticket!
“You did it!” the Shock Value rep said, and gave us the fifth and final ticket.
All three of us shot our hands in the air. “Done!” I yelled. And I launched into a hip-rotating happy dance complete with hands swinging over my head. Brigitte and Henri copied me, although we probably could have benefited from a little practice. We all high-fived.
“Belly bump?” Henri asked Brigitte.
She took a step back and walked into him for a chest bump, but once she hit Henri, she fell flat on her back.
Henri and I reached down and helped her up. She brushed dirt off her butt.
“We won!” I yelled to both of them again, because it was wort
h saying again and again. “We WON!”
“Bravo!” Murielle duPluie cried, and dragged her cameraman over to us. “Are we ready to roll?” she asked him.
“Ready. And . . . action.”
24
“This is Murielle duPluie reporting live from Père-Lachaise Cemetery, where the American underdog Gwen Russell and her friends have just won the contest for tickets to Shock Value’s special one-night engagement.”
She put the mic into my face again. “How does it feel?” she asked—her signature question.
“Fantastique!” Brigitte said.
“Formidable!” Henri said.
“Oink,” Norman snorted.
“Incredible!” I yelled. “I cannot wait to meet Winston, Alec, and Glen.” Then I added, “U-S-A!”
“I’ll be reporting all the backstage action from the VIP reception at the concert tomorrow.” She paused and flashed her perfect smile.
The cameraman said, “Cut! That’s great!”
“What?” Jean-Luc yelled at Murielle duPluie. He looked at the Shock Value lady and again asked, “What? Are you kidding me?”
“I can translate,” I said. “I mean, if you wanted me to.”
Jean-Luc got just an inch from my face. “No,” he said. “I do not need a translation.” Then Jean-Luc took a step backward, landing his foot right into a pig present that Norman had so perfectly placed at his feet.
Good pig!
“Aw! Gross!”
Robert said, “You are not getting into my car with those shoes.”
“So disgusting!” Sabine said.
Jean-Luc said, “Get that stupid pig out of here.”
“Or you could just leave,” Brigitte suggested. “We still have to talk to the Shock Value people about winner business.”
Jean-Luc harrumphed and walked away, sliding his feet on the grass.
Brigitte, Henri, and I enjoyed a high five, and we all petted Norman. After a short meeting with the Shock Value people to sort out all the deets for the next day, we began walking back to the petmobile.
“OMG!” I said. “This is just perfect. I made the news, I won the contest, and now I get to attend a VIP reception with the band.”
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