The Ministry of SUITs

by Paul Gamble

  Of course, as already noted, many houses in Japan were built of paper. So there wasn’t a need for many builders. If you really wanted a lovely house put together in the latest fashion, a stationer was of more use than a builder. Either that or an origami master who could fold your walls into interesting shapes.

  And so the master builders of Japan soon got called by the nickname “karate,” which means “empty hand” because at the end of the week they generally hadn’t gotten paid for any building work and so could never buy a round of drinks in the pub. Their hands were literally empty of money.

  As you can imagine, the builders got a bit annoyed with everyone making fun of them having no money. One night, one of the builders got so annoyed at being called “karate” (empty hand) in the pub that he attacked the man who called him by the shameful name. The builder hit the man with the blow that he normally used on house bricks and was pleasantly surprised to find that a blow that would crack a house brick into two neat pieces also had a very similar effect on a man’s arm.

  After that, the Japanese builders who had previously had no work found that they could charge people to teach them how to fight. Over several hundred years the term karate changed from being a term of derision into a term of pride.

  * * *

  33

  A MISSING FRIEND

  THURSDAY

  When Jack got on the bus the next morning David wasn’t there. The thing that had been worrying Jack all this time had finally happened—his odd-kid friend had disappeared. With another friend Jack would have put it down to illness, but that would never be the case with David.

  For all his lack of physical prowess and coordination, David was never ill. Jack and his classmates had several theories as to why this was true. Someone had suggested that as the outside of David’s body was so hopelessly disorganized, he was probably equally hopelessly disorganized on the inside. Therefore once a germ or a virus got inside him, it would take a wrong turn, get lost, lose all sense of hope, and die of starvation before it got to the particular organ it was meant to attack. Another suggestion was that germs were house-proud little creatures and none of them would want to live inside someone like David. Possibly the most likely explanation was that David fell down so often that any germs that managed to find their way inside his system were subsequently shaken like maracas and were therefore too bruised to make anyone seriously sick.

  As Jack was David’s best friend, he felt these explanations were nasty and mean … even if they were very likely to be true.

  Jack was desperate to find Trudy. He hoped she would know what to do, but the school bus seemed to be taking forever. Jack realized that he was inadvertently slowing it down with his negative emotions. Once at the school he dashed in the front entrance and found Trudy standing in front of the notice board.

  “Look at this.” Trudy was pointing at a poster on the school notice board. “Apparently they’re taking the school boiler away because thanks to Chapeau Noir Enterprises we’re getting solar panels.”

  “Trudy, I’ve got something important…”

  Trudy kept on talking. “Why would they take the boiler away? It’s too old to be of use to anyone.”

  “TRUDY!” Jack shouted.

  Trudy looked at Jack and her eyes widened. She wasn’t used to being shouted at by anyone, let alone her new friend. However, for once Jack wasn’t worried about being hit. He had something more important on his mind. “David’s missing.”

  “What do you mean ‘missing’?”

  Jack explained to Trudy that David hadn’t been on the bus that morning. Even after Jack explained that David was never ill she didn’t seem worried. Jack had to convince her that this was serious. “Remember yesterday you stuck up for me because we were partners?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well this is a partner thing again, Trudy,” Jack said as he stared into her eyes in deadly earnest. “I need you to trust me on this.”

  Trudy didn’t hesitate. “What do you want me to do?”

  Jack hadn’t thought that far ahead. They still had no idea if the missing children were being taken somewhere. Their clues seemed odd: wind turbines, new carpet, missing children, stolen dinosaur bones … and now a school boiler being taken.

  In fact, these things didn’t seem like clues at all. When he watched Agatha Christie mysteries with his mother, these were not the kinds of clues that turned up. Miss Marple never solved a mystery due to shag pile carpet and alternative energy sources. Her mysteries always involved foreign dukes with obscure pasts and untraceable poisons made out of Amazonian frogs.61

  “I don’t know what we can do.” Jack sighed, fidgeting with his hands. He was full of nervous energy but he had nowhere to direct it. His heart was thumping in his chest and his breath was coming faster and faster. What should he be doing? “If we go to the Minister, he’ll just tell us it’s a mystery and that we should solve it. The police would never believe any story we could tell them.”

  “Maybe there’ll be a clue at David’s house. We should go and speak to David’s parents, at any rate.”

  Jack nodded and tried to get his breathing under control. “We can cut across the rugby pitches. There’s a hole in the fence and it’ll get us to David’s house faster.”

  Trudy swung her bag over her shoulder and they set off at a fast trot. Within a few minutes they were halfway across the muddy pitches.

  Jack was lost in thoughts of what would happen next. “What if it’s my fault that someone kidnapped David? What if I hadn’t joined the Ministry—would David have been…” Jack hadn’t time to complete his thought because suddenly he was too busy falling ten feet straight down.

  It took Jack a few minutes to orient himself and realize what had happened. Generally you didn’t expect that kind of thing to happen when you were walking across the school rugby pitches. Some grass had gotten into his mouth and he spluttered, spitting it out.

  At first he had thought that he must have fallen down something like an old abandoned well or a mineshaft, but as soon as he started looking around him he realized that wasn’t the case at all.

  He was in the center of a large bowl-like indentation in the ground. It wasn’t that the ground had suddenly split open and swallowed him. It was more like a giant had suddenly reached down with his thumb and pressed it into the earth.

  Trudy was standing at the edge of the bowl shape, looking down at him. She had been quick enough to leap back when the ground had collapsed. “Are you all right?” she called down.

  “Yeah, fine,” said Jack as he spat out more grass. “Although I really don’t know how cows eat this stuff. It’s disgusting.”

  He stood up and scrambled up the slope toward Trudy. “So what on earth do you think this is? It looks like a meteor’s struck the ground.”

  “Mmmm,” said Trudy. “Although clearly that didn’t happen, because we would have noticed it.”62

  “I wasn’t suggesting it had,” said Jack. “But thank you for your sarcasm.”

  “I think this is another clue,” said Trudy.

  “Maybe it is. But it doesn’t matter. At the moment we’ve got to focus on trying to find out where David is.”

  “We’re looking for clues, Jack. If David is really missing, it’s bound to be connected to whatever’s going on at the school. I think if David’s anywhere, he’s under there.” Trudy pointed to the indentation in grass.

  Jack’s jaw dropped. “You mean he’s buried? Dead?”

  “No!” Trudy said, trying to calm Jack. “In a tunnel.”

  “A tunnel?”

  “Think about it. The only reason the rugby pitches would have collapsed like this is if someone’s been digging under them. And those mobile classrooms were full of digging equipment. Exactly what you’d expect if someone was tunneling underground. And if there is a tunnel, that would be the ideal place to hide missing children.”

  Jack looked at the ground. He wasn’t entirely convinced by Trudy’s explanation, but it was
the best lead they had. “So what do we do? Get a spade and start digging?”

  “No. We look for an entrance,” said Trudy. “If they’re kidnapping kids on their way to or from school, there has to be an entrance around here somewhere.”

  “So we look for the entrance. But where would they put it?”

  “Well, it has to be hidden. So they’ll put it somewhere that you would never go.”

  “The girls’ toilets!” suggested Jack.

  “Jack, you might not go to the girls’ toilets, but lots of girls do. We’re talking about a place that is useless for everyone.”

  “All right, then. We go back to the school and we search.”

  Jack and Trudy rushed back to the school and did their best to search anywhere they thought a tunnel entrance might be hidden. It wasn’t an easy task as they spent half their time hiding around the corner from teachers rather than having to explain why they weren’t in class.

  They searched under the stage in the assembly hall; they sneaked into the back playground and peeked through the staff room windows; they even searched behind the bike sheds.

  The problem was that the places where people said they never went were actually the places they went all the time. The teachers were always in the staff room marking homework, the sixth formers were always behind the bike sheds kissing each other, and the caretakers were always under the stage in the assembly hall watching a portable television.

  “Somewhere totally useless. Think!” Trudy stamped her foot.

  And then it occurred to Jack. “The P.E. teacher’s office!” he yelled. “At the end of the changing rooms there’s a P.E. teacher’s office. But P.E. teachers never mark homework, or prepare lesson plans, or set tests…”

  “And so…?”

  “Well, what is a P.E. teacher’s office actually for? It doesn’t make any sense. So it’s a pointless room. Unless of course…”

  Trudy finished his thought for him. “… unless of course that’s where the entrance to an underground tunnel is.”

  “Precisely,” said Jack, feeling slightly smug.

  His smugness lasted about ten seconds and then Trudy spoke. “And that would make even more sense as that’s where the odds and ends of the missing kids’ P.E. kits are found. In the box of spares.”

  “I would have figured that out if you’d given me time,” Jack grumbled.

  It was halfway through the last class when Jack stuck his head around the door of the P.E. changing rooms. “It’s empty,” he let Trudy know.

  “What is that smell?” asked Trudy as she walked into the changing rooms.

  Jack barely even noticed the changing-room smell anymore. “Yeah, it’s a bit of an acquired taste, isn’t it? And it always seems to be here. No matter how many times the place is washed, cleaned, or has deodorant sprayed around it, that smell remains.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Dawkins says that he thinks that it’s a ghost fart. You know, a fart that died years ago. And now it lingers in the air forever like a ghostly presence.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “A lot of what Dawkins says doesn’t make any sense.”63

  Trudy and Jack crept through the changing rooms until they reached the P.E. teacher’s office at the back. The door had a pane of clouded glass in it. Jack reached out and pushed the door gently, leaping backward when it squeaked open. There was no one inside the office. Jack assumed Mr. Rackham was outside somewhere tormenting some boys who weren’t any good at playing cricket by scratching his fingernails down his blackboard every time a batsman missed a ball.

  The office was hardly an office at all, perhaps nine or ten feet square. There was no natural light and no windows, so it smelled musty and felt claustrophobic. Hundreds of leaflets were piled up on the floor in stacks. They offered advice on how to avoid diseases like gout, leprosy, and polio. Jack was convinced that many of these diseases were out of date and didn’t exist; however, the school rarely spent money on new pamphlets to try and improve pupils’ health.

  Jack had a theory that the school was never that keen on P.E. or anything that helped pupils become healthier. They wanted pupils to be unhealthy. The teachers’ favorite pupils were generally pale, weedy, and slightly anemic looking. Jack thought the reason for this was that unhealthy pupils were less likely to run around the place causing trouble. An unhealthy, unfit pupil could be put in a chair at the start of a lesson and you could rely on them being lazy enough to still be there at the end of the class. Healthy children got into all sorts of trouble, and therefore health was discouraged. Jack knew this to be true as it was impossible to stay fit while eating the kinds of lunches they served in the school canteen.

  Each of the piles of pamphlets had an object on top of it, pinning it down like a paperweight. Of course, none of the paperweights were actually paperweights. Rather, it seemed as if Mr. Rackham had used whatever object had been nearest at hand. One pile was pinned down with a hockey stick, another was pinned down with an old globe, and yet another was kept in place with a set of dumbbells.

  In one corner there was a small desk, an old rickety chair that none of the proper teachers had wanted, and a series of posters of sports stars of the 1950s.

  “What’s stickball?” asked Trudy, looking at one of the posters.

  “I’m not sure,” said Jack. “I imagine it’s a game where you hit a ball with a stick … or perhaps a game where you hit a stick with a ball. Either way I’m fairly sure that both a stick and a ball are involved.”

  Jack recoiled with a shudder when he saw the box of spare P.E. kits. He pointed it out to Trudy. “Maybe something of David’s will be in there.” Jack moved toward the box, mentally steeling himself to rummage around in the cardboard cube of despair.

  “I wouldn’t bother,” said Trudy. “Those clothes are only going to be from kids who went missing in gym class. As far as we know David went missing after school at some stage.”

  There was no obvious tunnel in the room and the only door was the one they had used to come in. Trudy looked around the tiny room. “There’s a passage here somewhere.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  Trudy lifted up a hockey stick from on top of the pile of leaflets. “This is a small room. There are no windows. So why are all these leaflets weighted down with random objects?”

  Jack didn’t quite get Trudy’s meaning. “To keep them in place?”

  “Yes, but why do they need to be kept in place? Only one door and no windows. That means there can’t be any drafts. No air blowing through the room. Unless, of course, there’s another door that we can’t see.”

  Jack and Trudy examined the walls, moved leaflets, and even turned the desk upside down. They found nothing. Jack tried kicking at the floor in the corner, hoping a trapdoor would reveal itself, but he only managed to scuff his shoe.

  “What we need to find is something that is out of place. Something you wouldn’t expect a P.E. teacher to…” Before Trudy had finished speaking Jack had grabbed the globe off a pile of leaflets. “The globe! Why would a P.E. teacher have a globe?”

  Trudy grabbed the globe from Jack. “Great! Even geography teachers don’t have globes these days.”

  It was an old-style globe with vast blue oceans and small green continents. They spun it around and looked at it intently. The oceans on the globe were marked with pictures of small sailing ships with billowing sails.

  “Umm, is there a country called Button?” asked Trudy.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Trudy showed Jack what she was looking at. In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, there was a small roundish, green country that had been labeled Button.

  “Worth a try,” said Trudy as she pressed the island labeled Button.

  For a few seconds there was silence; then a sound of grinding metal filled the air as if an enormous set of gears was moving into action.

  “I think that may have done the trick,” said Jac
k.

  * * *

  MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK

  UNDERGROUND PASSAGES

  HOW TO LOCATE THEM

  Frequently in the course of an adventure a Ministry operative will need to locate a hidden passage. When thinking about where to hide these passages, villains always think, Let’s hide it in the last place anyone would look.

  Therefore, the quickest way to locate such a passage is to make a list of all the places you are going to search. Then skip all of the list except the very last item on it.64

  * * *

  One day villains will figure out that they should hide their underground passages in places where no one will ever look. When that happens we will all be in trouble.

  * * *

  34

  THE TUNNEL

  The floor under Trudy’s and Jack’s feet started slowly moving and sloping down. At the same time the wall at the far end of the office lifted up slightly, and they found themselves standing at the entrance to a long tunnel. Jack wasn’t sure whether to be excited or terrified. He was sure the tunnel would lead them to finding David. However, he was equally sure it would lead them into some kind of horrible danger.

  The walls of the tunnel were dusty, gray concrete. Large luminous electric lights hung at shoulder height on either side of the passageway. Apart from Trudy and Jack there was nothing in the passageway to cast a shadow, and yet for some reason it felt sinister. It looked like a medical laboratory where ghastly experiments would be carried out. And for all Jack knew, maybe that was exactly what was going on.

  “So what do we do now?”

  “David’s down there,” said Jack. “We go and get him.”

  Trudy nodded. “You’re ready for whatever might be down there?”

  In the past few days Jack had been attacked by a bear, fought werecreatures in a museum, and met a squid-headed being of almost unbelievable evil power. “You know, I’m almost certainly not ready for this. But I’m still going to do it anyway.”