The Disappearing Dwarf (25 page)

‘Very nice title,’ said Jonathan as he flipped to the frontispiece, a fine old etching of a ragged ship mired in an oily, weed-choked sea. Kelp tendrils and such curled up over the bowsprit and wound along the anchor. A half-dozen skeletons in tattered clothes bent over the rail, staring in horror at something surfacing toward them from the waters below. ‘Where can I get a copy of this?’ asked Jonathan, who knew his kind of book when he saw it.

‘You can have that copy, if you like,’ Dr Chan replied. ‘I have any number of them here, crates and crates of them as a matter of fact.’

‘I’ll buy one too,’ the Professor said. Jonathan knew that the Professor was buying it out of kindness, that he never read anything but scientific and historical texts. Dr Chan, clearly, could use the business.

The Professor thumbed through his copy of the book. ‘Sell herbs as a hobby, do you?’

‘Not actually,’ Dr Chan said. ‘But writing doesn’t pay, you know. There’s not enough income in it to keep me in soup bones. When my wife died ten years back, I was left with a bit of money. Not much, mind you, but enough to invest. So one day I ran into a gentleman who sold outfitted businesses, and he put me onto the herb shop. All stocked up and ready to go. Business wasn’t bad either, Landsend being a port town and all. But my clients, it turned out, didn’t have any money. All penniless. Gypsys and sorcerers and witches and such, not your moneyed types at all. But they were loaded with things to trade – shrunken heads and idols and all that crowd. That hippo cost me no end of dried newts, I can tell you. So one thing led to another and pretty soon I had enough stuff to open this curiosity shop.’

‘More money in curiosities is there?’ Jonathan asked.

‘Heaps,’ Dr Chan said. ‘I can sell a man a stuffed crocodile when he wouldn’t touch a dried newt. He wouldn’t know what to do with the newt, but he can always put the crocodile on his mantel or have it turned into a hat.’

‘That certainly seems reasonable,’ the Professor said. ‘How about those squid clocks you advertise – where do they come from?’

‘Oh, I haven’t any squid clocks. I thought I took that sign down.’

‘Were they made by a local clockmaker?’ the Professor continued.

‘Not at all. I buy them from an adventuring type who comes through now and again. He brings me deep ocean herbs. And fresh, mind you, not old dried weeds that have been sitting on a beach for six weeks. Most of those fish skeletons I got from him too. He has access to the sea.’

Jonathan immediately wished that
he
had access to the sea, whatever such a thing was. ‘This fellow with the squid clocks, he also brought the whale eyeball and the octopus?’

‘That’s right,’ Dr Chan replied.

‘His name isn’t Theophile Escargot by any chance, is it?’

‘That’s your man! You know him then?’

‘We’ve met,’ said the Professor.

‘Keep your hands on your wallets, gentlemen,’ Dr Chan remonstrated. ‘I’m not entirely sure where our friend Escargot finds his treasures, but I suspect that as often as not he lets others find them for him, then appropriates what he wants.’

The mention of the word treasure reminded Jonathan of the map from the cellar of Highcastle tower, which, in his happiness at finding the Professor and his enthusiasm for the city of Landsend, he’d thoroughly forgotten. All of a sudden he was itching to be out of the curiosity shop and to ask the Professor about it.

‘We’ve already been introduced to Escargot’s methods of doing business,’ the Professor said.

‘Yes, we have,’ Jonathan agreed. ‘And I’m afraid we’re late for our meeting with Miles.’

The Professor checked his pocketwatch. ‘You’re right. He’ll be wondering what happened to me. He’s been worried about this handbill business from the start. He wanted to lay low, but I thought that laying low wasn’t doing us too much good.’

‘No more incognito,’ Bufo put in.

‘Let me see that,’ Dr Chan said, pointing to the paper in the Professor’s hand. ‘I’ve seen this fellow.’

‘Have you?’ asked Jonathan.

‘Yes I have,’ the doctor said. ‘He was the one who paid for the hippo head. Said he’d be back for it. He said, in fact, that he’d send a man around. Those were his very words.’

‘How long ago was this?’ the Professor asked.

‘About a week. No, less than that. Four days ago, in the evening.’

‘Was he alone?’

‘No. No, he wasn’t. Look, is this fellow a friend of yours? Is he wanted for some crime?’

‘Not at all,’ the Professor said. Then, after a moment of hesitation he added: ‘He’s off on a walking tour and something’s come up at home. We came along to Landsend to find him.’

Dr Chan gave them a look that seemed to question the likelihood of the Squire’s being out on a walking tour – as if the Squire wasn’t the walking-tour type. ‘Since you ask, then, he was accompanied by a customer of mine. Another man I do business with. Deals in human bones, actually, and in certain potions and conjurations. Arcana, mostly, that I know nothing about. There’s some demand for it though. His name is Sikorsky.’ And Dr Chan seemed to give them a careful appraisal right then, as if to see how they’d be affected by the revelation.

‘Sikorsky!’ Gump shouted.

‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire,’ the Professor said.

It made Jonathan mad to think that this Sikorsky seemed intent on pushing in everywhere. There was simply no denying him: he tormented innkeepers and madmen, extorted magical coffee, blew up riverboats, sold human bones and magical potions, and somehow, for some astonishingly mysterious purpose, befriended poor, homeless Squire Myrkle. There seemed to be no sense to any of it.

Dr Chan didn’t appear to be much in the mood for talk after that, so the four of them followed Ahab into the dusky street and set off for the inn where Miles waited.

Gump shoved his hands into his pockets and looked depressed. ‘I knew we hadn’t seen the last of Sikorsky.’

‘We actually haven’t seen him at all yet,’ Bufo said.

‘I know. But he keeps popping up anyhow. And now he’s got the poor Squire. What does he want with the Squire?’

But no one offered an answer to Gump’s question. None of it made much sense.

‘Professor,’ Jonathan said, changing the subject, ‘I don’t mean to seem mercenary at a time like this, but what happened to the map when the steamship blew up?’

‘It was in the cabin. And if I understand your concern, I’ll ease your mind by saying that it’s now at the inn, safe as an oyster. And if you ask me, we’d better be after the treasure tomorrow. Things seem to be hotting up.’

‘That’s certainly so,’ Jonathan agreed. ‘If someone answers the ad, we’ll have to be ready to go.’

‘Let’s get an early start on it,’ Gump said.

‘Sunrise,’ Bufo suggested.

‘Fancy a treasure hunt.’ Gump sounded eager. ‘What sort of stuff do we expect to find?’

‘Pirate treasure, mostly,’ the Professor explained. ‘It’s almost certainly a pirate map. Maybe elf pirates, but I can’t say for sure. There were elf runes on the map, but that doesn’t mean much. Pirates loved to dabble in mysteries – all that skull and crossbones and black spot stuff. We’ll know tomorrow, one way or another. There’s our inn on the corner.’ The Professor pointed toward a cheerful-looking, half-timbered building of whitewashed stucco and old black wood. Trellises of blooming bougainvillaea covered most of the walls on the lower half. On the second floor, sets of french doors looked out over the street. One pair was pushed open, and in the doorway, sitting in a rattan chair and smoking a long pipe, was Miles the Magician.

That evening, there were any number of stories to tell. Jonathan had heard Bufo and Gump’s, and they, of course, had heard his, but all of them had to work through it again for the benefit of Miles and the Professor. Jonathan was anxious to hear how the treasure map had come to be saved and how the magician had cast floating spells while standing on the wall of the galley in the upturned
Jamoca Queen
. Either the spells worked or the ship simply didn’t feel like sinking, it was impossible to know for sure, but she’d been swept along down river into the night, adrift in the channel. At a point somewhere beyond the Strawberry Baron’s lands, the fog had lifted and they’d signaled a salmon fisherman bound for Landsend. The hulk followed them down and finally ran aground on the delta where it would stay until winter storms broke it up and swept it out to sea. The Professor said that by the time Cap’n Binky arrived it would be picked clean by scavengers. But Jonathan pointed out that Cap’n Binky had saved his coffee and manuscript and anyway had probably resigned himself to the loss of the boat, having assumed that it went down in midriver.

The Professor told Miles of their meeting with Dr Chan and about the Squire having been seen around town with Sikorsky. Miles didn’t appear to be half as surprised as the rest of them had been, although it was clear he didn’t like the news a bit. When they all wandered off to bed that night, they left Miles alone, smoking his pipe and squinting shrewdly off into space, deep in thought.

In the morning, Jonathan found a note nailed to the door of his room. Miles, having little interest in treasures, had gone off for the day to do a bit of detective work of his own and to visit the post office to see whether anyone had answered the ads. ‘Don’t wait up for me,’ the note concluded. So it was quite likely Miles was onto something – something that had been suggested by the Dr Chan episode.

Jonathan had hoped that Miles would go along with them on the treasure hunt. Wizards, it seemed to him, must have some sort of affinity to treasures and to wonderful things in general. Surely Miles had no end of door-opening spells and such which could quite possibly come in handy. But at six-thirty they left the inn without either Miles or breakfast. They were back at eight.

‘Who would draw up a treasure map and leave out half the details?’ Jonathan asked, poking morosely with a spoon at a sad bowl of gooey oatmeal. ‘That makes no sense at all to me.’

‘Maybe they wanted to throw someone off the scent. Confuse him,’ Bufo said. ‘Maybe it was a joke map.’

The Professor shook his head. ‘Then why draw a map at all? If there hadn’t been any map, we’d never have come looking for treasure. Spurious maps don’t make sense, not in this case. I’m convinced there’s a treasure out there anyway, hidden away down one of the streets that doesn’t appear on our map. In one of those old deserted canneries, perhaps, near the wharves, or in the cellar of one of the houses in the alleys behind Royal Street. Some of those slate-roofed, turreted mansions have to be two or three hundred years old. Anything at all might be hidden there.’

‘If we had six months we could dig through them one by one.’ Bufo slumped in his chair with his chin in his hands.

‘If there are three north-south streets between Royal and Oak that aren’t on the map, and six east-west cross streets …’

‘And no end of alleys,’ Gump interrupted.

‘And, as you say, no end of alleys, then how many blocks do we have to explore in that one section?’

The Professor ticked off streets on his fingers. ‘Let’s see, that’s … eighteen square blocks altogether.’

‘Multiplied by no end of alleys,’ Jonathan said.

‘How do you multiply something by no end?’ Gump asked.

Jonathan shrugged. ‘You’d have to have a lot of zeros.’

‘More than we have time for,’ the Professor put in. ‘It all has to do with the study of infinitudes. Very complex affair.’

‘We studied those in school,’ Gump said. ‘It was fascinating. You take a line and divide it in half. Then you cut it in half again …’

‘What do you cut in half?’ asked Bufo. ‘Both halves, or just one? Seems pretty sloppy just to cut one half in half and leave the other half alone. What does it do with itself?’

Gump looked exasperated. ‘You only need halves of halves for this experiment. So don’t interrupt. Then you cut the line in half again, and again and again. Very fascinating study. Fascinating.’

Bufo wasn’t impressed. ‘That’s all? Sounds like mumble-typeg to me. I knew all about that by the time I was four. The same thing happens when a pie is being sliced up and you don’t want to take the last piece. You just keep sawing off little threads of pie until there’s only enough left to feed a bird. And by that time the pie is so stale you might as well pitch it out anyway. I know all about that. You say you had to learn that stuff in school?’

‘What Gump was referring to,’ the Professor said helpfully, ‘was the theory that there would never be an end to the number of times the line could be cut in half. It would become smaller and smaller and smaller, but there would always be half a line left to cut. The mathematicians tell us, of course, that there’s precious little difference between half a line and a whole line. A line is a line, in other words.’

‘And a pie is a pie, I suppose,’ Bufo said. ‘There’s something tolerably wrong with the whole idea if you ask me. Pretty soon you get down to a piece that isn’t worth having.’

‘It’s entirely theoretical,’ the Professor explained. ‘All anybody does is talk about it.’

Now it was Bufo’s turn to look exasperated. ‘Talk about it! What on earth for? That means, I guess, that this theory won’t help us find the treasure. Is that, or is that not, the case?’