I reached down and squeezed the Malteser between my finger and thumb. I was angry. I wanted to see it shatter. But it wouldn’t. There was something hard in the center.
“Herbert . . .” I said.
He looked. The chocolate had squashed. It wasn’t a Malteser at all. There was something sparkling inside. “What is it?” he asked.
“What does it look like?” I said.
The last of the chocolate had crumbled away. I was left holding a diamond the size of a peanut. What would it be worth? Ten thousand dollars? Twenty thousand? Certainly not peanuts.
So we would go skiing after all. And Herbert would break his leg as he got onto the plane and we’d blow all the money we got from the diamond before we’d even gotten around to paying the gas bill. But what did I care? It was the New Year and we’d come out of it all alive, and although diamonds may be forever, you’ve got to grab every good minute and enjoy it while it’s there.
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Public Enemy Number Two a Diamond Brothers Mystery
FRENCH DICTATION
I didn’t like Peregrine Palis from the start. It’s a strange thing about French teachers. From my experience they all have either dandruff, bad breath, or silly names. Well, Mr. Palis had all three, and when you add to that the fact that he was on the short side, with a potbelly, a hearing aid, and hair on his neck, you’ll agree that he’d never win a Mr. Universe contest . . . or a Combat Monsieur Univers as he might say.
He’d only been teaching at the school for three months—if you can call his brand of bullying and sarcasm teaching. Personally I’ve learned more from a stick of French bread. I remember the first day he strutted into the classroom. He never walked. He moved his legs like he’d forgotten they were attached to his waist. His feet came first, with the rest of his body trying to catch up. Anyway, he wrote his name on the blackboard—just the last bit.
“My name is Palis,” he said. “Pronounced ‘pallee.’ P-A-L-I-S.”
We all knew at once that we’d gotten a bad one. He hadn’t been in the place thirty seconds and already he’d written his name, pronounced it, and spelled it out. The next thing he’d be having it embroidered on our uniforms. From that moment on, things got steadily worse. He’d treat the smallest mistake like a personal insult. If you spelled something wrong, he’d make you write it out fifty times. If you mispronounced a word, he’d say you were torturing the language. Then he’d torture you. Twisted ears were his specialty. What can I say? French genders were a nightmare. French tenses have never been more tense. After a few months of Mr. Palis, I couldn’t even look at French doors without breaking into tears.
Things came to a head as far as I was concerned one Tuesday afternoon in the summer term. We were being given dictation and I leaned over and whispered something to a friend. It wasn’t anything very witty. I just wanted to know if to give a French dictation you really had to be a French dictator. The trouble was, the friend laughed. Worse still, Mr. Palis heard him. His head snapped around so fast that his hearing aid nearly fell out. And somehow his eyes fell on me.
“Yes, Simple?” he said.
“I’m sorry, sir?” I asked with an innocent smile.
“Is there something I should know about? Something to give us all a good laugh?” By now he had strutted forward and my left ear was firmly wedged between his thumb and finger. “And what is the French for ‘to laugh’?”
“I don’t know, sir.” I winced.
“It is rire. An irregular verb. Je ris, tu ris, il rit . . . I think you had better stay behind after school, Simple. And since you seem to like to laugh so much, you can write out for me the infinitive, participles, present indicative, past historic, future, and present subjunctive tenses of rire. Is that understood?”
“But, sir . . .”
“Are you arguing?”
“No, sir.”
Nobody argued with Mr. Palis. Not unless you wanted to spend the rest of the day writing out the infinitive, participles, and all the restiples of the French verb argumenter.
So that was how I found myself on a sunny afternoon sitting in an empty classroom in an empty school struggling with the complexities of the last verb I felt like using. There was a clock ticking above the door. By four-fifteen I’d only gotten as far as the future. It looked as if my own future wasn’t going to be that great. Then the door opened and Boyle and Snape walked in.
They were the last two people I’d expected to see. They were the last two people I wanted to see: Chief Inspector Snape of Scotland Yard and his very unlovely assistant Boyle. Snape was a great lump of a man who always looked as if he was going to burst out of his clothes, like the Incredible Hulk. He had pink skin and narrow eyes. Put a pig in a suit and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference until one of them went oink. Boyle was just like I remembered him: black hair—permed on his head, growing wild on his chest. Built like a boxer and I’m not sure if I mean the fighter or the dog. Boyle loved violence. And he hated me. I was only thirteen years old and he seemed to have made it his ambition to make sure that I wouldn’t reach fourteen.
“Well, well, well,” Snape muttered. “It seems we meet again.”
“Pinch me,” I said. “I must be dreaming.”
Boyle’s eyes lit up. “I’ll pinch you!” He started toward me.
“Not now, Boyle!” Snape snapped.
“But he said—”
“It was a figure of speech.”
Boyle scratched his head as he tried to figure it out. Snape sat on a desk and picked up an exercise book. “What’s this?” he asked.
“It’s French,” I said.
“Yeah? Well, it’s all Greek to me.” He threw it aside and lit a cigarette. “So how are you keeping?” he asked.
“What are you doing here?” I replied. I had a feeling that they hadn’t come to inquire about my health. The only inquiries those two ever made were the sort that people were helping them with.
“We came to see you,” Snape said.
“Okay. Well, you’ve seen me now. So if you don’t mind . . .” I reached for my book bag.
“Not so fast, laddie. Not so fast.” Snape flicked ash into an inkwell. “The fact is, Boyle and me, we were wondering . . . we need your help.”
“My help?”
Snape bit his lip. I could see he didn’t like asking me. And I could understand it. I was just a kid and he was a big shot in Scotland Yard. It hurt his professional pride. Boyle leaned against the wall and scowled. He would rather be hurting me.
“Have you heard of Johnny Powers?” Snape asked.
I shook my head. “Should I have?”
“He was in the papers last April. The front page. He’d just been sent down. He got fifteen years.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Sure, especially as he was only fifteen years old.” Snape blew out smoke. “The press called him Public Enemy Number One—and for once they were right. Johnny Powers started young . . .”
“How young?”
“He burned down his kindergarten. He committed his first armed robbery when he was eight years old. Got away with four crates of Mars bars and a barrel of Gatorade. By the time he was thirteen he was the leader of one of the most dangerous gangs in London. They were called the Slingshot Kids . . . which was quite a joke as they were using sawed-off shot-guns. Johnny Powers was so crooked he even stole the saw.”
There was a long silence.
“What’s this got to do with me?” I asked.