Evil Genius (23 page)

The more he did to himself, the more ridiculous he looked.

"This isn't a disguise," he muttered. "It's a carnival costume."

His assignment was simple: to come along to the Wednesday morning disguise class as somebody else. Alias intended to grade and comment on every student's effort. Cadel could just imagine what Alias would say about
this
attempt. "Pathetic," he would sneer. Or perhaps: "I'm in no mood for jokes, Mr. Darkkon."

With a sigh, Cadel removed the Tack 'n' Stick, which was hurting his ears. Slowly he unrolled the scarves and wiped off the tan. He didn't know what to do. Alias had talked a lot about posture, presence, and focal points, but Cadel couldn't see how any of it would work without expensive wigs and makeup and colored contact lenses. Not in
his
case, anyway. Even when his distinctive blue eyes were shielded by sunglasses and his hair was slicked back like an otter's pelt, he still looked like Cadel Piggott pretending to be cool.

"Cadel!" It was Mrs. Piggott. "Where are you?"

"I'm in here!" Cadel cried. The sunglasses belonged to Lanna. He took them off quickly, then stuck them in a drawer.

"What are you doing?" Lanna demanded.

"Uh—just having a shower!" Cadel knew that he would have to remove all the rubbish in his hair or face a barrage of questions. So he turned on the shower and began to pull off his clothes.

"Phone for you, Cadel!"

"Tell them I'll call back!"

The hot water pelted down, filling the room with steam. When Cadel stepped into the torrent, he watched the water that was swirling around his feet turn black with hair color. So much for his first attempt at disguise.

He racked his brain for a solution. "Keep it simple," Alias had said. "Don't go Hollywood on me. Like I told you—half the secret is
attitude.
"

Attitude. Confidence. But could a swagger in your step really add a few inches to your height?

He was still stumped when he emerged from the bathroom and approached Mrs. Piggott. She was sitting at the dining-room table with about five hundred fabric samples strewn all around her.

"Who called?" Cadel wanted to know.

"Hmmm?"

"Who was on the phone? You said someone called me."

"Oh." Lanna dragged her gaze from the swatch of silk in her hand. "Oh, yes. They didn't leave a number."

"Who was it, though?"

"They didn't leave a name."

"Did they say they'd call back?"

But Lanna's attention had wandered. She was staring at a price list and didn't bother to reply. Cadel trudged into his bedroom, where he banged out a message for Kay-Lee.
Sometimes I wish I looked different,
he wrote.
Do you ever wish that? Sometimes it's like my outside doesn't match my inside.
In Cadel's opinion, his outside had
never
matched his inside. If he had been tall and elderly like Thaddeus, he might have been getting the kind of respect that he deserved all these years. As it was, people took one look at him and dismissed him. They thought he was of no consequence.

It occurred to Cadel that, if he ever
did
learn to disguise himself, his life might improve dramatically.

"
Cadel!
"

He groaned. Lanna must have snapped out of her trancelike state.

"What?" he yelled.

"Come here, please!"

"Why?"

"
I'm in my bathroom!
"

Cadel winced. He knew what was coming. When he slouched into the Piggotts' bathroom, he found it still damp from his recent shower. He also found Lanna standing on the rumpled bath mat, her hands on her hips.

"Cadel," she said, "you know I don't mind your using this bathroom. I realize you like the Jacuzzi in here. But I've told you before to
clean up after yourself
I don't want to find your dirty clothes on the floor, young man. I don't want to find the lid of the shampoo open."

"Sorry," Cadel muttered.

"And what's this?" Lanna pointed to a smear of fake tan that Cadel had missed. He hadn't wiped it off the marble counter. "What have you been doing?"

"Nothing."

"Is that my
foundation,
Cadel?"

"No." Cadel put on his innocent look. "What's foundation?"

The lines on Lanna's brow deepened. "Have you been using my makeup?" she pressed.

"No!" Cadel tried to sound insulted. "Makeup's for girls!"

And then the phone rang.

They heard it quite clearly, because there was a wall-mounted phone in every bathroom. Lanna only had to stretch out her arm to reach the one nearest them.

"Yes?" she said. "Oh yes. Hang on." She presented the cordless receiver to Cadel. "It's for you."

Cadel wondered who would be calling him on the household number. He had his own cell phone, after all.

"Hello?" he said with a wary glance at Mrs. Piggott.

No one answered. But he could hear breathing at the other end of the line.

"
Hello,
"he repeated.

"I know it was you."

The voice was raspy. Cadel couldn't even tell if it was male or female. But he thought he heard a sob.

"Who is this?" he demanded.

"You bastard! How
could
you?"

There was a click, followed by the dial tone.

Cadel stared at the receiver.

"What's wrong?" Lanna asked.

"Oh, nothing."

"Who was it?"

Cadel shrugged.

"One of your friends?"

"I don't think so." Cadel was reviewing all the possibilities. He assumed that the call had had something to do with the Axis Institute, and he wondered uneasily if one of the crazier students had decided that he was responsible for a bad mark, or a successful piece of sabotage.

He hoped not.

"So you haven't been playing with my makeup? Cadel? Do you know how much cosmetics
cost,
by any chance?" Mrs. Piggott was saying. "If you've touched my lip gloss, there'll be hell to pay."

It couldn't have been a dissatisfied customer from Partner Post, Cadel decided. Not one of his clients even knew that he existed, thanks to the way he'd shuttled his messages through a series of re-mailers. Could it have been some sort of test? Something that Luther had set up, or Maestro Max? Hmm.

"Cadel? Are you listening to me?"

"I didn't touch your stupid stuff!" he cried, suddenly irritated beyond endurance. "Why should I?"

"Because you can't keep your nose out of anything, that's why!" Lanna snapped. She had pulled the bottle of fake tan out of the cosmetics drawer. "Look at this! Look! It's almost empty!"

"Buy yourself a new one, then!" Cadel retorted. "I'll pay for it, just get off my back!"

"Cadel, what on earth—"

"I was trying to cover up my pimples, all right? Are you satisfied?"

As Cadel had expected, this excuse completely threw Mrs. Piggott. She seemed to deflate, like a balloon.

"Oh," she said faintly.

"Can I go now?"

"Yes, of course. But—there are creams, Cadel. Did you realize that? Special things you can get—"

"I know," he said, and made his escape. Lanna didn't follow him. She was good at nagging, but not so good at comforting. It embarrassed her.

He'd counted on that.

Upon reaching his bedroom, he checked his e-mail, to see if it contained any eerie or threatening messages. It didn't. So he spent the next few hours trying to trace the source of the mysterious call, hacking into phone company networks and databases.

When at last he came up with a name, it merely puzzled him.

Parsons. Matthew Eric Parsons. Who on earth was that? Nobody Cadel knew.

Unless he was somehow connected to that girl at Crampton—what was her name?—Heather Parsons? The location was certainly right.

If Heather Parsons was Cadel's nuisance caller, then she had to be calling about her graduation exams. She had failed these exams like everyone else in Cadel's year. Surely she couldn't have worked out that he was responsible? Possibly she was acting on instinct; there couldn't have been a proper
investigation.

Still, it was a worry.

Fretting over this unforeseen development, Cadel checked his Partner Post e-mail. He found a note from Kay-Lee.
Dear Stormer,
she had written,
don't get me started on appearances. Just don't get me started. As far as I'm concerned, we'll be a lot better off when we've evolved into disembodied brains floating in tanks. Have you seen that movie,
The Man with Two Brains?
I'd like to be one of the brains in that movie. Bodies are just a waste of space. You have to feed them and clean them and take them to the dentist, and for what? So that they '11 let you down, again and again.

What I feel is this: Heaven, when we get there, will be Heavenly because we '11 all have left our bodies behind. But you're not a girl, Stormer, so maybe you don't really understand what I'm talking about.

There was more. A lot more. But Cadel didn't read it until some time later, because as his eye alighted on the word
girl,
he was suddenly visited by the most brilliant idea.

Girls. Makeup. Lip gloss.

Of course!

"Cadel? Is that you?"

It was Abraham who first recognized Cadel. Having decided to disguise himself as a Buddhist monk, Abraham had shaved off what remained of his hair, got rid of his goatee, and somehow located a set of orange and purple robes. Cadel was very impressed by Abraham's effort. Kunio, too, had done a pretty good job. He wore a beard, a mustache, horn-rimmed spectacles, a dark suit, and a bowler hat; he carried a briefcase in his right hand and a rolled umbrella in his left. He looked like a business executive.

Poor Gazo, of course, hadn't been able to do much with his suit. Behind the fogged mask of his headpiece, his skin was a curious, unconvincing chestnut color. (Cadel suspected that he was trying to impersonate someone from India or Pakistan.) As for Doris, she was a pathetic sight. She had plastered her face with makeup, donned a corncolored wig, and squeezed herself into some very tight, very revealing clothes. Anywhere else, her appearance would have been greeted by howls of laughter.

No one waiting by the door of lecture-room one, however, dared to comment on Doris's outfit. They were far too intimidated. Abraham was also rather ill. And Kunio, for his part, was so fascinated by Cadel's disguise that he didn't appear to notice Doris at all. He kept walking round and round Cadel like a tourist inspecting a famous statue.

Gazo, too, was impressed. "You look great, Cadel," he gasped. "Wow! You look
just
like a girl!"

"But would you have recognized me?" Cadel asked. "That's the important thing."

"I dunno." Gazo cocked his head to one side. "You look the same but not the same."

"Like your own twin sister," said Abraham hoarsely, and he began to cough. Doris snorted.

"He does
not
look like a girl," she sneered. "He's wearing great big hiking boots!"

"Yes, that's the whole point." Abraham shot Doris a weary, contemptuous look. His eyes were bloodshot. "He's not trying too hard. Teetering around on silly stiletto heels doesn't make a person more female."

Doris, who was teetering around on stiletto heels herself, flushed and scowled. Cadel tried to change the subject.

"You look good, Abraham," he said. "You had
me
convinced, for a moment."

Abraham grunted. Then Gazo said, "There's Alias. He's dressed up as Kunio."

Everyone turned to watch a figure in a military uniform stride briskly toward them. As it drew nearer, Cadel was astonished at the brilliance of the disguise that Alias had achieved. He looked
exactly
like Kunio, right down to the shape of his nose. It was astonishing.

Suddenly the advancing figure stopped and pointed. A babble of frantic Japanese filled the air.

"Wow," said Gazo, in reverent tones. "He even knows the lingo."

But as the bowler-hatted Kunio began to laugh, Cadel realized what was going on. The real Kunio had only just arrived. The other Kunio was, in fact, their instructor.

Behind the suit, glasses, wig, beard, mustache and makeup, he didn't really resemble Kunio much at all.

"Dear me," he said, with a big, toothy grin, "when are you people going to learn? Rule number one: Don't just ignore the foreign guy who can't speak the language and didn't understand what he was supposed to do today. Otherwise you might get caught out." He patted Kunio's gold-braided shoulder, confusing the Japanese student even more. "Okay, everyone, let me look at you. Properly."

Cadel didn't know if his disguise would pass inspection. He had applied some of Mrs. Piggott's makeup (lip gloss, mascara, and eye shadow), tied his curly hair up with a ribbon, bought an old Indian-cotton skirt and a pair of snap-on earrings from a thrift shop, and donned one of Mrs. Piggott's knitted jackets over an old black T-shirt. The bust concealed by this T-shirt had been achieved by stuffing a bra with sports socks.

As Abraham had said, Cadel now looked just like his own twin sister. But would such a transformation be good enough for Alias?

"Hmm," said Alias, stopping in front of Abraham. "Not bad. Not bad at all. I like to see a student getting serious about his assignments, Mr. Coggins: Shaving your head shows a lot of commitment. And a costume like this is like a uniform—people look at it, rather than at you. But remember, for that very reason, you're not going to slip in quietly when you're dressed as a Buddhist monk—not unless you're trying to crash the Dalai Lama's birthday party. Understand?"

Abraham nodded.

"Good. Okay. Now—Mr. Kovacs..." Alias confronted Gazo. "You're an unusual case, Mr. Kovacs, but you do have certain advantages. For instance, there's only about thirty square inches of your body that you have to worry about. My advice is: Listen and learn. Because today we'll be having a lesson on makeup." Moving sideways, Alias reached Doris. "Ye-e-es. You know, I like this one. A brave attempt. It would only work in a very small number of places, though. Might I recommend, Ms. Deauville, that you try something on the other end of the gender spectrum? You might find that you're highly successful when impersonating a
man.
"