“Oh dear,” my brother said. “I think we’ve had visitors.”
That was the understatement of the year. A stampede of wild bulls would have left the place in better order. The desk had been torn open, the carpets torn up, the bookshelves torn apart, and the curtains torn down. The old filing cabinet would have fit into so many matchboxes. Even the telephone had been demolished, its various parts scattered around the room. Whoever had been there, they’d done a thorough job. If we’d been invited to a wedding, we could have taken the office along for confetti.
“Oh dear,” Herbert repeated. He stepped into the rubble and picked up what was now a very dead cactus. A moment later, he dropped it, his lower jaw falling at about the same speed. “My God!” he shrieked. “The envelope!”
He stumbled over to the remains of his desk and searched in the rubble of the top drawer. “I put it here,” he said. He fumbled about on the floor. “It’s gone!” he moaned at last. He got back to his feet, clenching and unclenching his fists. “The first job I’ve had in six months and now I’ve gone and lost it. You know what this means, don’t you? It means we won’t get the other five hundred dollars. I’ll probably have to pay back the five hundred we’ve already spent. What a disaster! What a catastrophe! I don’t know why I bother, really I don’t. It’s just not fair!” He gave the desk a great thump with his boot. It groaned and collapsed in a small heap.
Then he looked at me. “Well, don’t just stand there,” he snapped.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.
“Well . . . say something.”
“All right,” I said. “I didn’t think it was a very good idea to leave the package in your desk . . .”
“It’s a fat lot of good telling me now,” Herbert whined. It looked as though he was going to cry.
“I didn’t think it was a good idea,” I continued, “so I took it with me.” I pulled the envelope out of my jacket pocket, where it had been resting all evening.
My brother seized it and gave it a big wet kiss. He didn’t even thank me.
THE FAT MAN
We didn’t get much sleep that night. First we had to make our beds—and I’m not just talking sheets and blankets. Whoever had wrecked our office had done the same for the rest of the apartment. It took about forty nails and two tubes of Super Glue before the beds were even recognizable, and then I found that Herbert had managed to stick himself to the door handle and had to spend another hour prying him free with a kitchen knife. By then it was morning and I was too tired to sleep. Herbert sent me out for a loaf of bread while he put on the teakettle. At least they hadn’t dismantled the kettle.
There were three letters on the doormat and I brought them up with the bread. One was a bill. One was postmarked Sydney, Australia. And the third had been delivered by hand. Herbert filed the bill under W for “wastepaper basket” while I opened the Australian letter.
Darling Herbert and Nicky [it read],
Just a quick note as Daddy and I are about to go to a barbecue. They have lots of barbecues in Australia. The weather’s lovely. The sun never stops shining—even when it’s raining. You really ought to come out here.
I hope you are well. We miss you both very, very much. Have you solved any crimes yet? It must be very cold in England, so make sure you bundle up well with a vest. I know they tickle, but pneumonia is no laughing matter. I’m enclosing a little check so you can go to Marks & Spencer.
Must go now. Daddy’s at the door. He’s just bought a new one.
I’ll write again soon.
Love, Mumsy
It was written on the back of a postcard showing a picture of the Sydney Opera House. There was a check attached with a paper clip: seventy-five dollars. It wasn’t a fortune, but at least it would pay for a few more tubes of Super Glue. Herbert pocketed the check. I kept the card.
The third letter was the most interesting. It was typed on a single sheet of paper with no address at the top. It was a big sheet of paper, but it was a short letter.
DIAMOND—
TRAFALGAR SQUARE. 1:00 P.M .BE THERE.
The Fat Man.
“Who the hell is the Fat Man?” I asked.
“The Fat Man . . .” Herbert muttered. His face had gone a sort of cheesy white and his mouth was hanging open. The last time I had seen him look like that had been when he found a spider in the bath.
“Who is he?”
Herbert was tugging at the letter. It tore in half. “The Fat Man is about the biggest criminal in England,” he croaked.
“You mean . . . the fattest?”
“No. The biggest. He’s involved in everything. Burglary, armed robbery, fraud, arson, armed burglary . . . You name it, he’s behind it.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“From when I was a policeman,” Herbert explained. “Every crook has a file at New Scotland Yard. But the Fat Man has a whole library. He’s clever. Nobody’s ever been able to arrest him. Not once. A traffic cop once gave him a parking ticket. They found her a week later, embedded in concrete, part of the M6 highway. Nobody tangles with the Fat Man. He’s death.”
Herbert pressed the two halves of the letter together as if he could magically restore them. Personally, I was more puzzled than afraid. Okay—so there was this master criminal called the Fat Man. But what could he want with a loser like Herbert? Obviously it had to be something to do with the dwarf’s mysterious package. Had the Fat Man been responsible for the destruction of the apartment? It seemed likely, and yet at the same time I doubted it. You don’t tear someone’s place apart and then casually invite them to meet you in Trafalgar Square. One or the other—but not both. On the other hand, if he hadn’t done it, who had?
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
“Do?” Herbert looked at me as though I were mad. “We’re going! When the Fat Man invites you to jump in front of a subway train, you don’t argue. You just do it. And you’re grateful he wasn’t in a bad mood!”
So later that morning we took the number 14 bus into the West End. This time I left the package—carefully hidden—back at the flat. It had been ransacked once and I figured that nobody would think of looking for it there a second time.
“How will we recognize the Fat Man?” I asked.
“I’ve seen mug shots,” Herbert said.
“You mean—you even had pictures of him on your mugs?”
Herbert didn’t laugh. You could have tickled the soles of his feet with an ostrich feather and he wouldn’t have laughed. He was so scared, he could barely talk. And he ate the bus tickets.
The bus dropped us in Piccadilly Circus and we walked across to Trafalgar Square. It was another cold day with a bite in the air that bit all the way through. The tourist season had ended weeks before, but there were still a few of them around, taking photographs of one another against the gray December sky. The Christmas decorations had gone up in Regent Street—it seemed that they’d been up since July—and the stores were wrapped in tinsel and holly. Somewhere, a Salvation Army band was playing “Away in a Manger.” I felt a funeral march would have been more appropriate.
Trafalgar Square is a big place and the Fat Man hadn’t been too specific about the meeting point, so we positioned ourselves right in the middle, under Nelson’s Column. There were a few tourists feeding the pigeons. I felt sorry for them. Who’d be a pigeon in London . . . or for that matter a tourist? I had a candy bar, so I pulled out a couple of peanuts and fed them myself. I ate the rest of it. It was already ten minutes to one and in all the excitement I’d missed out on breakfast. Taxis, buses, cars, and trucks rumbled all around us, streaming down to the Houses of Parliament and across to Buck ingham Palace. I leaned against a lion, looking out for anyone with a fifty-inch waist. A pigeon landed on my shoulder and I gave it another peanut.