She offered the boy her hand. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
The lady noted his wary look, and told herself that no matter how young he seemed, he was obviously a true professional. She was not to know this was how Peter regarded all grown-ups.
“Ivana,” she murmured, which I must tell you was a fib.
“The name’s Pan,” said Peter, who I must admit was showing off. “Peter Pan.”
Neither of them was really on their best behavior. Spies rarely are.
“What will you have?” asked the bartender.
“Martini,” said Ivana. “Shaken, not stirred.”
“Milk,” said Peter. “Warm, not hot.”
The bartender and Ivana both gave Peter rather doubtful looks. Peter has been receiving such looks for more years than he could ever count, and he looked disdainfully back.
“Come now,” Ivana said, and reached for Peter’s arm. “I think we can do better than that. After all, you’re almost a man.”
Peter’s eyes narrowed. “ No. I am not .”
She was very clever, that Russian spy who was not really called Ivana. She instantly saw she had made a mistake.
“I meant to suggest that this affair must be boring you. After all, it really isn’t up to the excitement that a boy of your… many talents must be used to.”
Peter looked more favorably upon her. “I do have many talents. Thousands, really. Millions of talents. Nobody has ever had as many talents as I!”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“I keep them in a box,” said Peter, and looked briefly puzzled when Ivana laughed and then triumphant as he decided he had meant all the time to make a splendid joke.
He beamed at her, and Ivana reared back.
She quickly collected herself, however. Remember, she was very well-trained.
“I imagine you have done many things,” Ivana murmured. “Such as the affair of Lady Carlisle’s necklace in the embassy?”
“Oh that! Yes, I took it! I flew in under cover of darkness and stole it.”
Ivana blinked. “You did?”
“I am a master thief,” Peter said with some satisfaction.
“It was my understanding that the English were the ones who got the necklace back,” Ivana said slowly.
“Oh yes,” Peter told her. “I fought the dastardly thieves single-handed and restored the jewels to their rightful owner! I remember now.”
“I see,” said Ivana.
The spies in Her Majesty’s Secret Service have long been renowned for their discretion. To protect their country, some have been known to spin a deft tale. Some have died rather than speak. Some, even under torture, have preserved a perfect British silence.
No spy but Pan has ever confessed to everything.
Ivana the Russian was getting a bit of a migraine. She rather wished Peter would take a breath between highly incriminating confessions.
“The Taj Mahal,” she began.
“I killed him,” Peter said. “He was a tyrant.”
“It is a building ,” Ivana informed him with a certain amount of hauteur.
Peter, occupied with relating the details of the epic battle he had fought, chose to ignore her. They were sitting at a small table in low light, away from the bar. Ivana had quite a row of martini glasses lined up before her. Peter was working on his seventeenth glass of warm milk.
“And what about the documents regarding that invention the Americans were making such a fuss about last week?” said Ivana, who had abandoned diplomacy and cunning around the time of martini number nine.
“I have those,” Peter told her complacently, and Ivana was heaving another irritated sigh when Peter added, “Upstairs in my room. I have them hidden in the nightstand. I’m meant to hand them over to the Queen tonight, but my helpers needed to rest, so here I am at this boring party.”
Ivana hesitated. “I should very much like to see them.” She paused and then smiled a coaxing smile. “It would be so thrilling to see proof of how clever you are, Peter!”
“It would be very thrilling for you,” Peter agreed.
“And I would be terribly grateful.”
“How grateful?” Peter asked.
Ivana looked slightly startled. “Very grateful indeed.”
Peter’s eyes brightened. “Do you know any bedtime stories?”
“My dear boy,” said Ivana, not missing a beat. “Hundreds.”
Since Ivana really was very clever, and Peter could be extremely heedless, she might very well have got her hands on the American documents that night. Except that Peter, careless as always, had forgotten to mention one small detail.
His helpers were indeed resting. Pan’s elite team of killer fairies was having a little nap in the nightstand, right on top of the documents.
“Troops, troops!” Peter bawled over all the yelling. “Attention! Attention! That means you, Ninja Star! Stop kicking her in the earlobe right now!”
Ninja Star was his best fairy and was the captain whenever Peter was on a solo mission or got bored and wandered off. There was no denying zie had a temper.
“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” said Peter severely, because he knew that discipline was vital. Then he became bored with his role as stern commander, spun and levitated three feet in the air.
It was probably for the best. It hadn’t seemed to him like Ivana knew any bedtime stories at all.
Ivana made the discreet decision not to try and get up. She watched with wide eyes as the boy rocketed out of the window, a silhouette in the moonlight, with the fairies following him like a host of tiny stars.
Given the new evidence, Ivana was going to have to reevaluate some of Peter’s claims. With his ability to fly and his tiny helpers, a good many more of the missions he boasted about might be true.
And many of his stories were true, especially the wildest ones, because Peter often had strange and terrible adventures.
Which ones, we will never know. Peter does not even know himself.
Still, I think we—and Ivana—may be reasonably sure that Peter never fought a duel to the death with the Taj Mahal.
Her Majesty, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, was quite vexed.
She had been forced by abject pleading, several resignations, and (in one unfortunate case) an incarceration in a secure mental facility to receive Pan’s reports herself.
It was, however, growing extremely late. She had been up all day meeting with tedious ministers and an enormously dreary duchess, and she found her eyes traveling too often to the sack that lay at her butler’s feet.
I hesitate to tell a lady’s secrets, but she was wearing a dressing gown. It was sky blue and patterned with tiny silver crowns.
She was also wearing fluffy bunny slippers. The bunnies had crowns too.
“If I might be so bold, Your Majesty,” said her butler, who was called both Dawson and Night Shadow. He was a judo master and weapons expert, and his butlering was exceptional. “The boy is late.”
“The boy is always late. I gave him a watch once.”
“How did he lose it?” asked Dawson.
“He claimed ,” the Queen said in the magnificently noncommittal voice that made statesmen blush and prime ministers recall other engagements, “to have choked a mutant shark to death with it.”
Dawson bowed his head.
Hurtling through the purple sky of London, streamers of light thrown across it by the city, through the wide windows of Buckingham Palace, came a boy. Fairies danced around him, wreathing his wild hair like a crown made of lightning.
Peter touched down lightly on the carpet, presented a roll of documents to Her Majesty, and swept her a superb bow.
The Queen graciously inclined her head and unrolled the documents on her tea tray.
“The device illustrated in these documents actually expands mass,” she said absently. “Which would be most useful in the right hands—curing world hunger and the like—but since it seems to have been invented by the wrong hands—”