One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing

by David Forrest

  “So we can count on your help? ALL of you--without reservation?” Hettie watched her friends’ faces, anxiously, as they smiled their assent. “Good. We knew we could depend on you. And here’s how we can do it. We remember the late king. He loved children, and Christmas. And he used to do conjuring tricks. We remember one he did with a glass under a silk handkerchief. He used to wave a wee wand at it, and the glass would disappear. We had a look in his conjuring box afterward. There was a wire shape fitted in the handkerchief that only looked like a glass. He used to take the real glass away beforehand and nobody noticed.” “We’ll need more than a wee wand for a dirty great dinothaur,” said Susanne.

  “Hush,” continued Hettie. “You remember last year, when the museum people painted round the elephant display? They covered the animals with big canvas sheets.”

  “I remember Master Carl tipping over a can of their paint,” muttered Emily.

  “Aye. Well, we thought a bit more. And maybe this is the answer. If we could get the museum people to paint the dinosaur hall, they’ll have to cover the beastie with canvas sheets, like the elephants. Then we’ll be able to get underneath and dismantle the skeleton and take it away piecemeal--WITHOUT anyone noticing, because the canvas will still be kept in shape by the iron frame. It may mean camping under the canvas till we’ve finished. But we dinnae see that as a problem. It’ll take the painters the best part of a week to do that room.”

  “But this is urgent. How are we going to persuade a museum to paint one of its halls, and in a matter of days?” asked Una. “It’s quite impossible.”

  “That’s the problem we haven’t been able to solve yet,” admitted Hettie.

  Susanne grinned. “I’ll bet I could get them to paint it quickly,” she said. “We could deface a piece of it. You know, write thomething awful. They’d paint that out thoon enough.”

  “Vandalism,” growled Hettie. “Typical younger generation suggestion. Always sitting down for things. Rioting. Writing on walls. Completely irresponsible.”

  “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea,” suggested Melissa. “Perhaps we COULD write something that wasn’t too rude. Just rude enough to be lightly painted over. After all, it . .

  Emily’s voice broke in. “Wait a minute. I’ve just had a thought.” She looked at them with a smile of triumph on her lips. “I think I know a way we can get them to paint the ceiling, AND we don’t have to persuade them to. In fact, we tell them NOT to paint anything.”

  “How?” asked Susanne. “How do we get thomeone to do thomething by telling them not to?”

  “For a children’s nurse, you surprise me,” said Emily. “What happens if you tell a child not to touch an electric switch?”

  “They touch it,” said Susanne.

  “Precisely.”

  “But this is a museum, not a kindergarten.”

  “Ah,” Emily said, softly. “But it depends on what we tell the museum. Hettie, I shall want to borrow your royal testimonial, or one of your special letters, to make it work.”

  The other nannies looked surprised. The references and letters Hettie had received from the Queen at the end of her service with the royal family were guarded like moon-rock. They had only been allowed to see them after much pleading. A quick glimpse each, a warning not to touch them, and Hattie had replaced them in their envelopes, and the envelopes back into her small cash box.

  “My ROYAL testimonials?”

  “Or a letter. It’ll be quite safe, I promise. I only want it for a couple of hours tomorrow morning. I’ll give it back to you in the afternoon.” Emily leaned forward and whispered. “I want to do something quite naughty. I want to copy the palace notepaper.”

  “Och, no ...” gasped Hettie. The other nannies looked horrified.

  “Yes,” Emily whispered. “I need it to write a letter to the museum. And I’m quite sure Her Majesty wouldn’t object if she knew the reason.”

  It was early evening in the sewer headquarters, the time that the Tse Eih Aei spies hated most of all. Between seven and eight was generally shower time for guests at the Plaza Hotel, and hot perfumed steam penetrated the small room, turning it into an uncomfortable Turkish bath. The Chinese agents, wearing only loincloths, were still sweating.

  “So . . .” Lui Ho hissed through the scented fog. “Sam Ling, what information have your electronic listening devices revealed?”

  “Plenty of good information,” said Sam Ling, rubbing perspiration into his shoulders. He wondered if, after making his report, he should ask Fat Choy to give him a massage.

  Pi Wun Tim sat on the edge of his bunk, swinging his feet. Sam Ling’s dedicated efficiency made him nervous. And the way he managed to make his Mongolian moustache smile, while his thin lips remained perfectly horizontal, didn’t help, either. Now that he’d become Lui Ho’s second-in-command, Sam Ling had ceased to be as friendly as he’d been. Pi Wun Tun felt that Sam Ling was almost as dangerous an ally as he could be as an enemy.

  Lui Ho mopped his scalp with a towel, and fanned himself with his copy of the Chairman Mao’s Quotations. “Go on, then. Tell me what you have discovered.”

  “The ladies are nanny-ladies,” began Sam Ling.

  “We knew that.”

  “Yes, we knew that. But, most important, and something we didn’t suspect, was that the red-faced one, who looks like an overgrown tomato fruit, was nanny- lady to the British agent who died.”

  “Ah ... so ... so ... so ... so said the five other spies, softly.

  “She killed him. He did not have that capitalist sickness--heart attack, known to us as American blight. She broke his suicide capsule.” Sam Ling grinned. The other spies giggled.

  “So...?”

  “The agent had time to speak to his nanny-lady before he died. He did not hand over the message. But he told his nanny-lady where it is hidden.”

  “Where?” breathed Lui Ho.

  “As you suspected, chief. In the museum. In the dinosaur.”

  “Marvelous!” exclaimed Lui Ho. “Who would have thought of looking in a dinosaur? Not even I. Er ... what is a dinosaur?”

  “A dragon,” said Sam Ling. “The greatest monster that ever left the moon to walk this earth.”

  “Aieee ... a dragon monster,” chorused the other spies.

  Lui Ho blanched. “Foolishness. Imperialistic poppycock. There are no such things as dragons. Monsters, perhaps. But not dragons.” Lui Ho stood and pointed towards the poster on the wall. “It is written there--in 48 the beautiful words of beloved Mao Tse-tung.” He read the wording in full. “People of the World Unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs! People of the World, be courageous, dare to fight, defy difficulties, and advance wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the people. Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.”

  The spies cheered, enthusiastically. Lui Ho folded his arms across his chest. “There it is, written by Mao Tse-tung. Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed. See how the words of the beloved Chairman cover all eventualities. We can safely assume that dragons do not exist, otherwise he would have specifically mentioned them.”

  “The monster is a dragon,” said Sam Ling. “I have seen it.”

  “Do not provoke my anger, you bourgeois revisionist,” roared Lui Ho, his scalp working its way through the full spectrum of colours. “Do you call our beloved Mao a liar?”

  Sam Ling backed away, hurriedly. “No, no. Of course not. The dragon must be an American capitalist hoax. Something to mislead the people. It is a fake, perhaps. Yes, definitely. The dragon in the museum is a fake. Nevertheless, the information is hidden in the dragon.”

  “In the likeness of the dragon,” hissed Lui Ho, his head beginning to regain its normal colouring. “Then we must destroy it. Tonight, we will blow open the doors of the museum, advancing wave upon wave, as our revered leader has written. We will then machine- gun the guards, and take away the paper dragon.”

  “The paper dragon is cunningly constructed of bone,” said Sam
Ling, quietly. “In all probability, it weighs ten thousand pounds. But, Comrade Leader, I have a further suggestion based on information I have gathered.” He paused. “On your orders, of course.” “Take care that you do not suggest yourself into oblivion,” warned Lui Ho. “Also at my orders.”

  Sam Ling blinked away a bead of perspiration running onto his left eyelid, crossed his fingers behind his back, and continued. “I am basing this suggestion on an idea of your own, Comrade Leader. You are so filled with wondrous ideas that we, of lesser thinking capacity, have difficulty in remembering all the great things you devise. But, by racking my poor memory, I remember something you said ... ‘let the enemy work for us.’ “ Sam Ling began to wonder if he’d get a permanent twist in his crossed fingers. “The nanny-ladies are themselves planning to take the dragon . . . er, the fake dragon, out of the museum. I believe you will want us to let them succeed in their plan. And you will want us to let them take it away to the hiding place they will have prepared. And then we’ll take it from them. This idea of yours would seem less risk for us.” “And why should they take the fake dragon?” asked Lui Ho.

  “Because, in their amateurish way, they have already searched it for the message. And I suspect the agent hid a microdot in a crack in one of the bones, and perhaps even plastered over it.”

  “So ...” said Lui Ho. “Yes, you are correct, my idea is a sound one ... based ...” he added swiftly, “based on the thinking of our beloved leader, Chairman Mao Tse-tung.” He saluted the two portraits on the shelf. “We will let the enemy help us. They will steal the fake dragon. We will take it from them and examine it at our leisure.”

  “Send it back to China,” corrected Sam Ling.

  “Yes, as I was saying, we’ll examine it at our leisure, in China.”

  For an ice cream barrow, it was extremely hot inside. Sam Ling sat, jammed between two ice cream cylinders, his legs hunched beneath him. He was adjusting the tape recorder monitoring the nannies’ conversation. The cart bumped and shuddered as Chou-Tan pushed it toward the nannies, sitting on their usual park bench.

  Sam Ling breathed out and tried to make himself smaller, so that he could peer out through the holes drilled in the front of the barrow. He twisted his arm above him and rapped on the low roof.

  Chou-Tan lifted the lid of the front ice-cream container and squinted down. “Yes?”

  “Not too near,” ordered Sam Ling, looking up through the dummy cylinder, and getting a distorted underneath view of Chou-Tan’s artificial Italian moustache. “And try to stop the wheels squeaking. They’re being picked up on the recorder.”

  Chou-Tan nodded at the container.

  Sam Ling pulled on his earphones. Not that he needed them for checking the tapes. It was just that the genuine container of ice cream was giving his left ear frostbite, while the rest of him was being pot-roasted in the confined space. He could hear the nannies’ voices clearly transmitted from the small listening bug drilled into the back of the park bench.

  “They’re amazing,” he heard one of them say. It was Una, as she held a sheet of white paper up to the sunlight. “The only difference is the watermark.”

  “I couldn’t manage that,” replied Emily. “Otherwise, I don’t think it’s a bad match for a photocopy.”

  “Let us see.” Hettie reached out a hand for the reproduction Buckingham Palace notepaper. It was really very good. It took a close examination to spot the difference. There were no signs that it was anything but a genuine piece of Buckingham Palace notepaper bearing the royal signature.

  “Here’s the one I’m sending.” Emily pulled an envelope from her handbag and extracted another sheet of notepaper. This had a letter, neatly typed, above the royal name.

  “I’ll read it to you,” she said. “It’s addressed to the Director of the Museum.” She paused and took a deep breath. “Dear Sir ... this is a request on behalf of our eldest son, who is, as you may know, a student of archaeology. He wishes to examine the specimens in your famous Early Dinosaur Hall--as they are among the finest available in the world. He will . . “

  Emily panted for a few seconds, then began again. “He will arrive in New York in about fourteen days’ time and will travel incognito. It is unnecessary for you to make any special arrangements, like redecorating the Early Dinosaur Hall or removing the direction signs to the ladies’ lavatories, or deodorizing the drains. Charles is well travelled and knows about things like that. Please just treat him as you would any other Crown Prince.

  “We ask only that he be given every help in the pursuit of his studies ... Yours faithfully ... There, how’s that?”

  “Och, that doesnae sound like a royal letter to us,” said Hettie. “It’s almost sacrilege.”

  “I composed it most carefully,” said Emily, peevishly. “It has to be friendly and chatty, not too formal. Just like an ordinary mother looking after her boy.”

  “How will that letter make them paint the museum?” asked Una.

  “Human nature,” replied Emily. “You wait. It’ll happen.”

  She put the letter back in the envelope and sealed it. Twenty minutes later it was in the hands of the U.S. Post Office. The following morning it was opened by the museum director.

  “Hmmmm.” He handed it back to his secretary. “Check it out with the British Embassy. You never know, might just be right.”

  By five that evening, it was collected, along with other refuse, by the museum garbage man.

  Lui Ho cleared his throat and spat noisily, as the thick steam from the Plaza showers gushed into the Tse Eih Aei headquarters.

  “Learn to play the piano,” he said, through the fog. “It is written here, in the book.”

  His spies, relaxing naked or loincloth-clad in their bunks, tried to look wise, and prepared themselves for the inevitable lecture.

  “Our beloved Mao writes that, in playing the piano, all ten fingers are in motion; it won’t do to move some fingers only, and not others.”

  ”But if all ten fingers press down at once, there is no melody. To produce good music, the ten fingers should move rhythmically and in co-ordination.” Lui Ho paused. On his bunk, Fat Choy counted his fingers. He could find only eight, and two thumbs. He suddenly felt sorry for himself. Mao Tse-tung was NEVER wrong. Therefore he, Fat Choy, must be deformed.

  “It means that we fingers must work in rhythm,” continued Lui Ho. He peered at Sam Ling, whose head was contained in a turban-like bandage. “Two of our fingers were not working rhythmically today, were they? Wounded? Wounded? How does one get oneself wounded in an ice cream barrow?”

  “I was wounded, almost trepanned, by a certain colleague who forgot which was the dummy barrel, and tried to spoon ten cents’ worth of my head into a cornet,” protested Sam Ling.

  “But, Comrade Leader, I made a day’s profit of nine dollars, fifty-three cents,” said Chou-Tan, proudly.

  “Good,” replied Lui Ho. “Dollars are always useful. And now . . . play back the recording of the nanny-ladies’ meeting.”

  The spies listened as the tapes spun through the machine. Lui Ho’s frown wrinkled back on to his scalp.

  “Those strange noises are smackings, and children crying,” explained Sam Ling. “And one must remember to ignore the normal domestic conversation. You will readily see that these nanny-ladies lack any form of sophistication in the art of intrigue.”

  “Will their plan work?” asked Pi Wun Tun. He hoped that no one would suddenly suggest they should all stand to salute Chairman Mao’s portraits, as the soft voices of the nannies and the slapping noises had given him an erection.

  Sam Ling shook his head in silent reply.

  “Then,” said Lui Ho. “Tonight we will mount our portable short-range rocket launcher in the bushes of Central Park. We will fire an explosive missile into the museum, in the appropriate gallery, thus necessitating redecoration of that part.”

  “Not only redecoration, Comrade Leader, but certain rebuilding. And we cannot wait that long.” Sam Ling’
s fingers wound themselves automatically as he went on. “I believe that, earlier, you had ideas which could be put into excellent use at this time.”

  Lui Ho peered at him from under his straight black eyebrows. “Yes?”

  “You suggested, with your usual luminosity, Comrade Leader, that we should assist the nanny-ladies. You said we should help them, but remain anonymously in the background. They can be helped in many ways.”

  “As you say,” grunted Lui Ho. “I am indeed brilliant, but cursed by such a poor memory. No doubt it could be traced to some inherited imperialistic weakness that will, no doubt, be bred out of future generations.”

  “A minor fault, Comrade Leader,” said Sam Ling, his fingers relaxing. “Now, here’s what you probably suggested . . .”

  Two full days passed before there were any developments in the nannies’ plans. Nothing seemed to be happening. They waited anxiously. Then, on the third morning, an excited Emily arrived at the park bench. She was puffing and out of breath. Her spiky hair stood out around her cap, and her pince-nez were steamed up.

  “It worked!” she gasped, happily. “I told you it would work, I’ve just come from the museum, and they’ve already started to do something. I saw men carrying lots of steel tubing, and tins of paint and things along the corridors.”

  Hettie looked at her in disbelief. “Away with you,” she said.

  “Absolutely honestly,” Emily protested. “I swear it. They’re going to redecorate that hall.”

  “Then the museum director must be a wee bit daft,” said the Scots nanny. “That letter didnae sound at all as though it was written by Her Majesty.”

  She noticed Emily’s hurt look, and she reached out and patted her arm. “There, we’re sorry we didnae completely believe in you. But we’re VERY pleased to hear your news. We’re sure the 25th Earl would be delighted.”