“Now, now, Fairy Godmother,” soothed Sonderborg, sitting down opposite her. Natalie’s crying jags were a family legend.
“I’m a bum, a lazy bum,” insisted Natalie, and punished herself by taking a huge bite from a garlic sausage. Then she brightened. “Beer all round, Masterson!” she ordered. A long-legged man wearing smoked glasses, a leather suit, and a leather cape with a scalloped hem was hanging by his knees from an overhead tree limb. He squeaked to acknowledge her order and flew off on a staggered course through the trees in the direction of the beer keg.
“Blind as a post and doesn’t hit a tree,” marveled Natalie. Then she added, “Well, Sondy, what brings you here? Natalie hopes she can help, but since the Tooth Fairy Purges we’ve all had to lie kind of low.”
The count told his story. When he was done, he produced the glass slipper and asked, “Do any of your colleagues go in for stuff like this?”
Natalie sniffed. “Only one. She was never much for style. The see-through look went out a long time ago. Anyway, we don’t see her around here much nowadays.” Sonderborg waited for a name. But Natalie looked away. “Sondy, let me tell you a story with a moral,” she said at last. “Masterson and me hadn’t been married a week when we had this little lovers’ spat and” — she nodded at her crystal wand stuck in the horseradish jar — “I changed him into a bat. Oh, it was just a love tap and he changed right back. But that’s when we knew the honeymoon was over.
“Other quarrels followed as summer follows spring, and I — well, I did it a couple more times. That’s a hell of a whack to the old metabolism, believe you me. And gradually Masterson started favoring the bat side, until finally he got to be as you see him now. So here’s the moral to my little story, Sondy: don’t mess with fairy godmothers.” She nodded at the glass slipper. “Particularly, don’t mess with that one.”
“But Crown Prince Hugo—”
“May his father live forever,” prayed Natalie.
“Wants to marry the girl,” insisted Sonderborg.
Natalie popped the heel of the garlic sausage into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully for a few seconds. “Come to think of it, the fairy godmother in question might just find a godchild married into the royal family a real handy thing to have,” she concluded. Sonderborg’s fairy godmother wagged him closer with a ponderous finger. The count leaned forward like someone laying his neck on the axe-man’s block. “Donnabella,” said Natalie. The “d” and “b” were garlic knockout punches. Sonderborg sagged and grabbed the bench with the back of his knees.
Donnabella, a blue-haired woman in a smart business suit, with glasses on a rhinestone chain, answered the door of her apartment on exclusive Rose Garland Street herself. She listened coldly while Sonderborg explained why he’d come. But before he’d finished, she shouted over her shoulder, “Lovey, is that you I hear in the icebox?”
“Who?” came a muffled voice from inside the apartment.
“I said no snacks between meals!” called Donnabella in a voice that snapped like a whip. She listened for a moment. Then, satisfied, she turned back to Sonderborg. “Messenger boy,” she said through clenched teeth, “tell the royal nitwit to stop pestering my goddaughter. Tell him to waltz right on by if he runs into her at another ball. Tell him I’ve got bigger and better plans for her.”
“Maybe we should let the young lady decide that for herself,” answered Sonderborg sharply. He regretted his tone at once, for Donnabella’s eyes flashed fire and her wand appeared from behind her back, making runic notations on the air as it came. The light tap sent a cold, electric thrill through Sonderborg’s body. Suddenly his shoulders slumped violently down into a terrible stoop while his knees rocketed up past his ears. Donnabella and the doorway were looming high above him now. But there was something else. Deep inside him, from the very depths of his soul, a small hard bubble was making its way upward toward the light and growing as it came. Though Sonderborg struggled with all his might to repress it, the bubble crowded up into his mouth, bulging out his cheeks and the skin below his chin. He fought to hold it back, refusing to make the admission the bubble demanded. Suddenly he couldn’t hold out any longer.“Rivet!” he boomed.
Donnabella pushed him out into the hall with a fastidious toe. “Let’s don’t let our paths cross again,” she warned and closed the door.
Flatfooted and blinking, Sonderborg sat on the hall runner for a moment. Then the cold electricity returned. His shoulders straightened, his ears zoomed up above his knees, and in a twinkling he was himself again. More or less.
No man who has not experienced one can appreciate the full horror of a frog-change. As he sat there watching Rinaldo thumb through the filing-cabinet drawer, Sonderborg moaned inwardly over his vanishing hair and twisted his long mottled fingers in despair. Rinaldo yawned widely. The sump-hole raids had been a long-drawn-out business and weren’t over yet. “I’ll tell you what the law says, Sondy,” he said. “It says use the Sow’s Ear Rule of Thumb. That means a guy can’t use magic to change a less into a greater. He can’t change a sow’s ear into a silk purse. However, it is legal — though clearly bad business — for the guy to change a silk purse into a sow’s ear. So if you want to be technical, there’s no law against the guy changing someone like yourself into a frog, if you follow my drift. However, it’s definitely a felony to do it without your consent.”
“I should think so,” said Sonderborg, his indignation bordering on tears.
As Rinaldo pulled a file from the drawer, he added, “Of course, you’ll need witnesses to swear you didn’t ask Donnabella to do it to you.”
“But who’d ask somebody to change them into a frog?” protested Sonderborg loudly.
Rinaldo shrugged a swan’s wing and slumped down into his chair. “It’s a kinky world out there,” he said. Then he began humming through the file as though it was the score of a dull musical. At last he said, “You were wondering how a fairy godmother can afford Rose Garland Street, times being what they are. It says here that Donnabella’s gone legit. She’s started a place called Pedigreed-Pet Plaza, where the wealthy can board their dogs and canaries when they go on trips. It looks here like she’s doing quite well for herself in the world of business. A while back she became the first of her kind to be named to the board of a major corporation, Merlin Armor. At the time the bleeding-heart liberals called it tokenism. But she’s been named to others since. Seems to me she was just put on the board of what-do-you-call-it, the company that makes those divining-rod devices the fair-labor-practice people use for detecting the presence of elves on a job site.”
“Brownie-Point Industries,” said Sonderborg.
“You’ve got it,” said Rinaldo, closing the file and looking up at the clock with very tired eyes. “Well, you keep me informed, Sondy. If she’s up to something, we’ll burn her good.”
Sonderborg left the office, leaving Rinaldo to catch forty winks with his head tucked under his wing.
When he got back home, Sonderborg tried for a little shuteye himself, but his sleep was haunted by stork-filled dreams. By mid-afternoon he had taken up a position in a doorway across the street from the Pedigreed-Pet Plaza. Donnabella’s plans seemed to involve sending her godchild to one of the many balls held each night, this being the height of the social season. As fairy godmother, she would have to be there at her godchild’s place at the start of the evening to cast the spell. Ergo, reasoned Sonderborg, sooner or later Donnabella would have to lead him to the mystery girl.