Sinbad and Me

by Kin Platt

“Would you mind reading that last line again?”

  “One other was given to Secretary of the Treasury Meredith but remains unlocated.” He grinned. “Sixth line, page 35.”

  I thanked Herky. “After we take care of Mrs. Teska, you get half the profits,” I told him.

  “Money is the root of all evil,” Herky said. Then his face lit up again with his soft smile. “Now where did I read that?”

  The T-men wanted to be a little friendlier with us now but I knew how shy Herky is. I reached into my shirt pocket for the memo book.

  “I forgot to thank you for the help you gave me on the other cipher, Herk. I know you like puzzles, so here’s one you can do all by yourself.”

  “Thanks, he said, smiling happily.

  I read it off to him:

  AAB ABA BAA AAB BAA AAA BBB AAB AAA BBB

  AAB AAB ABA AAA BBB ABA AAB AAB AAA BAA

  BAA ABA BBB BBA ABB AAA AAB AAA AAA BAA

  It was fun watching him. The silent computers were clicking away like mad in his head. He would try one. Then, in a flash, shake his head ruefully, and immediately be changing and rearranging another. You could almost hear his marvelous mental machinery. Click click… no, that’s not it… click click… no, not that… click…

  It took him less than five minutes. Then his face was all flushed and excited, his black eyes snapping.

  “Did you find it?” he asked.

  I guess it was a good thing I had found the white square. Because I couldn’t have figured out that cipher.

  Mr. Peter Newbury turned out to be as thrilled as Big Nick Murdock thought he might be.

  “The 1804 silver dollar? Well, well, my merry young mercenary! That’s the good one, isn’t it! And the 1794 Bald Eagle? My, My! Aren’t we fortunate! And what’s this?”

  He picked up the 1849 Double Eagle. I explained what had happened with the Treasury men and with Herky Krakower’s total recall. As he was nodding, he murmured, “How nice! Not one but two!”

  Then I remembered. This was Joshua Murdock’s contribution. What had it said on the tombstone? One From Two. And the gold stella that Mr. Newbury was examining now, that was Adam’s. The Treasury man had said it could be worth fifteen thousand. What was Adam’s riddle? Double Your Due. Big Nick was right when he said the whole riddle would be clear to me soon.

  Jonah Jaws

  Bald With Claws

  One From Two

  Double Your Due.

  Then Mr. Newbury was dancing a little jig behind the counter. He had the last two coins Big Nick had given me.

  “Well, bless me! Paquet’s Reverse!”

  I asked what that was.

  He turned the coin over.

  “That’s the reverse side, my merry young cavalier. That’s why we call it the reverse.” He turned it over. “We call the top of the coin the obverse.”

  “So what’s so special about it, Mr. Newbury?”

  He was talking to that big summer beam again. As if I wasn’t around. “’What’s so special about it?’ he wants to know,” he told it.

  The top of the copper double eagle coin had a small S under the date, 1861. There was a head of Miss Liberty facing left. The band in her hair carried the letters LIBERTY. Encircling the whole coin were thirteen stars.

  Mr. Newbury jabbed his finger toward the date and the small letter S. “Only two known proofs,” he said. “Very fine.”

  He turned the coin over to its reverse. Across the top, in a semi-circle was UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. At the bottom TWENTY D. inside was an Eagle with stretched wings. And some small letters over his head.

  “The crest is gone. E Pluribus Unum is gone,” said Mr. Newbury. “Read what the motto says.”

  I read it. “GOD OUR TRUST.”

  “It was the first recognition of God on our coins,” Mr. Newbury said. “Only two known proofs. Rarity rating of R8.”

  I didn’t know what that meant either. “Is it valuable?”

  “He asks if it’s valuable,” he told his big wooden beam. “The same boy.”

  Then he pushed the coin aside carefully and looked at the last gold one Big Nick had given me. He didn’t pick this one up at all. He just looked at it.

  “The Brasher Doubloon,” he breathed finally. “Old Ephraim Brasher! This boy has brought me the Brasher Doubloon. Now fancy that!”

  I didn’t have the heart to ask Mr. Newbury how valuable the Brasher Doubloon was. I didn’t want him telling that big summer beam anymore what a dope I was.

  I wondered what Sinbad would say when I told him about everything…

  I could see his big sad dark wrinkled face.

  A face you might think was ugly until you saw how beautiful it really was.

  The dark brow always wrinkled with curiosity. The jaw thrust out and clenched tightly, always holding the expression of great sadness and pain that he was enduring without complaining about it. The quiet look of great dignity. That frightening red-rimmed eye. The other always shining with that mysterious glowing light of love.

  The face that looked like the most awful accident had happened to it!

  Then the strange sound when he tried to talk to me. Or the deep rumbling growl coming from his massive chest…

  “Is that what happened?” he would seem to be saying. “Too bad you didn’t figure it out right. Now here’s the way I think we ought to tackle it…”

  He always had something to tell me. And I would always listen.

  Because that’s the way it was with Sinbad and me.

  Solutions

  SOLUTION #1

  The Cipher In The Cave

  Herky was right. It was a double cipher. Concealment and substitution. I used the code of Lord Bacon. I was right the first time when I substituted A for the circles and B for the crosses.

  But the trick was in how to look at the secret message. Captain Billy had the last laugh on the Defoes and fooled them by using circles and crosses, which look the same upside down. Or from any position.

  When I took it down, I was looking into the cave. The trick was to look up at the ceiling of the cave from the inside, looking out. Just the reverse. You have to turn the cipher upside down, like standing on your head. Which is the way a real puzzle is supposed to make you feel anyway.

  Here’s the way you’re supposed to look at it:

  O X X O X O

  X O O X X U

  X O O X O T

  O O O O O A

  X O O X O T

  O O X O O E

  O O O O X B

  O O O O X B

  O O O X O C

  O O O O X B

  O X O X X M

  The secret message was: OUT AT EBB

  Signed with his initials: CBM (Captain Billy Murdock)

  SOLUTION #2

  The Cipher On Captain Billy’s Portrait

  Herky told me later how he solved this one. It was the same Francis Bacon biliteral alphabet. The trick was that Captain Billy separated the five letter code for each symbol into groups of threes! With Herky’s amazing mind he was able to do it mentally.

  If you remember, the secret message was this:

  AAB ABA BAA AAB BAA AAA BBB AAB AAA BBB

  AAB AAB ABA AAA BBB ABA AAB AAB AAA BAA

  BAA ABA BBB BBA ABB AAA AAB AAA AAA BAA

  Here’s the way it had to be put down to solve it:

  AABAB ABAAA ABBAA AAABB

  F I N D

  BAABA AABBB AABAA

  T H E

  BABAA AABBB ABAAA BAABA AABAA

  W H I T E

  BAAAB ABBBB BAABB AAAAA BAAAA AABAA

  S Q U A R E

  The secret message was: FIND THE WHITE SQUARE.

  Afterword

  Sinbad and Me…and Me

  By Christopher J. Platt

  Welcome back from the 20th Century! Yes, you took a big step backwards, to enter a wondrous time machine. Now, this wasn’t the vehicle that many of us may recall from books or film, a steam-powered H.G. Wells contraption composed of lots of polished brass,
opalescent glass tubes filled with mysterious fluids, and dials, knobs, flickering lights and levers that somehow, inexplicably, took whomever was sitting in its plush, Victorian armchair back to the age of the dinosaurs, or to the Stone Age, or to another somewhen equally marvelous and exciting.

  No, this machine was much simpler in design, composed of nothing but the product of a singular imagination. Still, the thought behind the composition and arrangement of the words you will read here has all the complexity of those Steampunk machines. This is truly state-of-the-art time travel. How else to explain a fully portable construct that can take you back a half-century simply by turning a page?

  You could say that Sinbad and Me is “just” a story about a boy and his dog—although many fans would put it the other way ’round: a story about a dog and his boy. I prefer the latter description, and I do so with some authority. You see, Steve Forrester, our 12-year-old hero, is a character imaginatively based on, well, on me. Sinbad, Steve’s stout-hearted canine companion, was inspired by my own English Bulldog, Romeo. Granted, the name Sinbad is one you would associate more with great adventures than the name Romeo, but Romeo he was, and, not surprisingly then, he almost always charmed everyone he met. For those put off by the gruff, wrinkled faces of bulldogs, that may be hard to imagine, but I have proof.

  As a child, I had always wanted a dog, but my parents never allowed it. So, I’d bring home strays from time to time (the big Doberman Pinscher was the most exciting), caring for them until their owners turned up. In those days, the owners always turned up. But, one day, my father took me out in his hulking 1954 Hudson Hornet, a car that figured prominently in his first book, The Blue Man. We drove out to Southhampton, Long Island, where I learned we were to meet a woman who bred and raised English Bulldogs. That was the breed of dog my father thought I should have, and I must say I wasn’t convinced. The dogs of my dreams were always big, sleek and athletic—German Shepherds, Dobermans, Collies, Setters, Pointers, Boxers, Labs…not these smallish, misshapen creatures with their underslung jaws and little pigs’ tails.

  We sat in the woman’s living room, where a litter of Bulldog pups was scampering about, getting into typical puppy mischief. I picked up two of them and held them in my lap. One sat quietly, licking my hand. The other just kind of shivered. In strode their father, a huge, grey-brindle and white dog, appropriately named Bellows’ Prince John. As he stood on all fours beside the armchair I sat in, his head was at my eye-level, and he eyed me suspiciously for a few seconds before sticking his massive head over the arm of the chair and licking my terrified face. I was stunned and charmed in the same instant. The 90-lb dog then moved around to the front of the chair. The shivering pup whimpered at his approach and huddled under my arm. But the other one stood up on my leg and swatted at his father with his paw. In that moment, I knew which dog was meant to be mine. I handed the cowering puppy back to the lady, and held on tight to my brave, little, and—Yes! — beautiful new best friend.

  As we drove back the 80 or so miles to our home in Great Neck, I was wondering how to introduce my still-nameless pup to my mother, who was very fearful of dogs and had no idea we were bringing one home. Somehow, my father had neglected to mention that we might be doing that today. Maybe he was thinking about his next book. I walked in to our tiny house, saw her sitting on the living room couch, and watched her eyes go wide in panic as I dropped the eight-week old puppy in her lap. She sat there a moment, frozen in fear. Then she looked down at the dog’s face and began to chuckle. They are funny-looking when you first meet them. The dog immediately responded, planting his front paws on her chest and licking her face for all he was worth. After a few minutes, still laughing, my dog-fearing mother turned her slobber-coated face up to us and said, “Well, he’s quite the little Romeo, isn’t he?” Yup!

  While the town of Hampton, where Sinbad and Me takes place, is a fictional amalgam of perhaps a dozen towns and villages on Long Island, many of the characters who inhabit the place are based, very loosely, and with lots of artistic license, on people we knew. Of course, all the names were changed to protect the innocent. “Sheriff Landry” was actually the Chief of Police of the neighboring village. “Minerva” was his daughter, a classmate and friend of mine. “Mrs. Teska” was an ancient woman from somewhere in Eastern Europe, whose tiny, decrepit candy store was just up the street from our house. She hardly ever moved from the dilapidated armchair in the corner of the store, and rarely spoke in a language we could understand. “Herky Krakower” was a composite of a boy with the same first name, and a girl with a similar last name. Neither one of them was anything like Herky, though. As for “Mr. Snowden,” my eight-grade science teacher was Mr. Dodin, a handsome and brilliant teacher who knew how to make science fun, and who gave me a lifelong interest in the sciences. Thanks to his influence, science quickly became my best subject. “Frankie Shorten” was the composite of several big kids from large families, all of whom delighted in bullying me for years, until the day I finally decided to fight back. “Manning Bagler,” at the Hampton Observer, was named for my mother’s brother, Manning Begler, but he had nothing to do with journalism. As I said, the characters are based quite loosely on real people. For instance, “Steve” is depicted as a tall, gangly, skinny kid. This was fiction, remember.

  When you step out of a time machine at your destination, it is tempting to judge what you see against the time you came from. Reminded of this by my dear friend, Dr. Mark Estren, whose brief review on the back cover of this edition is one of many book reviews for young people you will find at www.infodad.com, I hope that you haven’t judged what you read here too harshly. Older readers, who were young teenagers when we first read Sinbad and Me, will notice a lot of anachronisms upon revisiting it. The first one that merits discussion is towards the beginning, when Steve’s parents are set to leave him alone for several days, to go help Uncle Fred and Aunt Martha get their Maine tourist hotel ready for the summer. In the timeline I inhabit, those parents would be arrested for abandonment and child endangerment. Last week, the news reported that a woman was arrested for letting her seven-year-old son go to the playground by himself.

  When I was Steve’s age, nobody thought twice, or even once, about leaving their kids to fend for themselves for a few days, to wander through the woods, ride their bikes—without helmets, mind you—off to visit neighboring villages, or even to get into a little trouble, now and then. In many suburban communities across America, kids were allowed, and even encouraged, to go off on whatever adventures they could and have fun, just as long as they didn’t get into anything that their parents had to bail them out of. Real-life exchange from my youth: Chief Ray, the book’s Sheriff Landry, stops my father one day as he’s driving our Hudson Hornet somewhere in his jurisdiction. He looks at my father’s driver’s license and says, “Oh, are you Chris Platt’s father?” “Yeah,” says my Dad, “What did he do this time?”

  In any old book, you can find things that you couldn’t depict in a believable way if you were to try doing so today. The original cover of Sinbad shows tall, skinny Steve, posed with stoic Sinbad, poised with a pad and pencil in front of a tombstone, where he’s trying to unravel the mystery he’s uncovered. Codebreaking? With a pencil and paper? Today’s kid would see that and say, “But…but, there’s an ‘app’ for that!”

  But that’s the charm of a book like this. While it depicts a simpler, if not gentler, world, and the plot lines might not work as well today as they did when first written, the themes in a well-crafted book are timeless. Here, of course, the major theme is a classic one of a young person using his wits and his friends in trying to overcome his own limitations and dire circumstances, to save his friends and himself. In the process, he discovers internal resources and deep friendships, he never knew he had.

  These themes are trotted out and reexamined in every generation. When my father was a child, it was Tom Swift, boy inventor, whose clever contraptions would always save the day. Tom invented electric runabouts,
giant telescopes, diving “seacopters,” and much more. In fact, according to author Philip Purpura, in Criminal Justice: An Introduction (1996), the modern-day “TASER” is an acronym for “Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle.” When I was a young reader, it was the Hardy Boys, two teenage amateur detectives whose adventures were always fraught with danger as they and their friends matched wits with nefarious villains, and investigated (and solved) more serious crimes than any single, small American town should ever have to deal with.

  I do want to point out that both of these classic series are still in print today, but both the Tom Swift and Hardy Boys books were written over the course of decades, by several generations of ghostwriters. Kin Platt wrote all 34 of his own books himself, beginning with The Blue Man, in 1961. He also wrote in more genres than any other author I know of. He wrote I Can Read books—his classic Big Max series, including Big Max and the Missing Giraffe, published after his death…teenage adventures like the Sinbad trilogy—Sinbad and Me, Mystery of the Witch Who Wouldn’t, and The Ghost of Hellsfire Street, as well as The Blue Man, their dogless prequel…books about teenage gangs crafted from horrific newspaper headlines of the day…adult mysteries…even a lone historical novel, A Mystery for Thoreau, published posthumously from a manuscript we found after his death. As Nick West, he also ghostwrote two titles in the popular Three Investigator series.

  The task of trying to revive interest in his early books today has been hampered by editors carelessly deciding they are all “of their time,” so filled with anachronisms that today’s readers wouldn’t be able to relate to them. There is a certain quaintness, an innocence about these books, as if my father was ignoring the world around him while creating an unreal landscape on the printed page. In fact, current events were the inspiration for most of his books. But that’s the time-travelers’ bias I mentioned above. In a review of one of my father’s early whodunits, Newgate Callendar, the pseudonomyous crime novel reviewer for the New York Times Review of Books, wrote that reading the book was like seeing a dinosaur romping through Central Park. Oh, wait! Then my initial premise isn’t entirely correct. My father’s time machine actually did carry at least one reader back to the Jurassic.