Floors #2: 3 Below (10 page)

“Yes! Ms. Sparks! And not to be too harsh, but I think maybe your dad, too. I mean, he’s really into money, right? He might want to sell Loopa if he finds out.”

“
Sell
my monkey?” Jane Yancey said. Her heart was starting to melt for the little monkey in Remi’s pocket. “But he
can’t
sell my monkey!”

“Exactly!” Leo said. He heard someone in the lobby, around the corner where he couldn’t see, and brought down his voice. “Which is why you need to keep the monkey in the Flying Farm Room. No one goes in there, so it’ll be safe, right?”

“Right,” she said. Jane Yancey smiled at Leo and made her best yucky face at Remi, both in the space of a second. She was lightning fast with facial expressions.

Leo and Remi piled into the duck elevator next to Jane. It was a tight fit, and as they climbed the floors up to the Flying Farm Room, Remi reluctantly took Loopa out of his pocket.

“Her name is Loopa,” Remi said. “Be nice to her, okay?”

“I’m the nicest person I know, fatso!”

Remi grabbed the bottle of Flart’s Fizz and wanted to open it, guzzle it, and mega-burp in Jane Yancey’s face. He was barely overweight to begin with, like twenty pounds. And he’d actually lost a few since he’d last seen this little jerk sitting in front of him.

But he could see that Leo had been right. Jane Yancey melted into a gross puddle of girly sweetness the second Loopa landed in her lap. There was no way Jane Yancey would let anyone near Loopa. Loopa tried to squirm free, but Jane held the little monkey close and cooed at it, which calmed Loopa down.

“Remember, only the Flying Farm Room,” Leo said. “It’s not safe anywhere else.”

“No problem,” Jane said. Loopa curled up in her lap and made soft monkey sounds, which sent Jane into a tizzy fit of giggles.

When they arrived at the floor of the Flying Farm Room, Leo and Remi walked her to the door and unlocked it.

“I’ll let you keep the key card, but only if you promise not to let her out. And you have to feed her, you know, monkey food.”

Leo looked at Remi, who shrugged. Neither of them knew what to feed a monkey.

“I’ll figure it out,” Jane Yancey said, and just like that, she snatched up the key card, passed through the door, and slammed it in their faces.

“You do have another key card for that room, right?” Remi asked. “Because eventually we’ll need to rescue my monkey from the clutches of that evil princess.”

As if on cue, both boys heard Jane Yancey yell from the other side of the door: “Rip-off! This monkey has no tail!”

“Come on, let’s get out of here fast,” Leo said.

They’d picked up Blop and dropped off a hyper monkey, but there was still work to be done before their fateful encounter with Dr. Flart.

They had to find out where to put the zip rope, otherwise known as Loopa’s tail.

And they’d need to do it while avoiding Mr. Carp and Ms. Sparks and finding six million, three hundred thousand dollars.

L
eo and Remi stood in the Whippet Library. It was on the hidden thirteenth floor, and there was only one way of getting there: the silver key card. Leo kept this card, which unlocked every door in the hotel, on a chain around his neck. It was the only silver card in existence, so he was sure Ms. Sparks would have loved to get her hands on it.

“Quite a ride,” Remi said. His hair was standing on end and his stomach didn’t feel so good.

“It’s the only way in,” Leo said.

The silver key card unlocked a panel in the duck elevator, which revealed four buttons that had to be pushed in just the right order. Doing it right sent the
duck elevator on a wild journey back and forth and up and down, ending at the thirteenth floor. Leo left the one and only fuse they had in their possession in the duck elevator for safekeeping. He knew things might get wacky in the library and didn’t want to risk breaking it.

“What did he say again?” Remi asked. “Penguin twisting desert island, or something like that?”

“Your brain works in mysterious ways,” Leo said, and it was true. Remi wasn’t right, but he was kind of close. Leo corrected him. “An isle of Penguins, a boy named Twist, and Robinson Crusoe.”

“That’s what I said,” Remi concluded seriously. And he had, only in not so many words.

“You’re right about one thing:
Robinson Crusoe
is about a guy stranded on a desert island. Twist must be
Oliver Twist
. The Penguin has me stumped.”

They spent the next few minutes looking through Merganzer’s vast collection of books. The volumes ran floor to ceiling on twenty-feet-tall shelves, snaking in every direction, and Remi insisted on being the one to ride the ladder while Leo pushed it.

“To the left, another few feet,” Remi said as they searched for the Charles Dickens section. Leo pushed the ladder, which rolled on wheels connected to the floor and ceiling, until Remi told him to stop.

“Got it!” Remi said, pulling out the book. He stood on the ladder waiting for something to happen, but nothing did.

“As I suspected,” Leo said. “That’s the second book we’re supposed to find, not the first.”

They didn’t know what the Penguin book was, so they searched for
Robinson Crusoe
, even though it wasn’t the first book, either.

“Got it!” Remi yelled.

Leo thought he heard a familiar sound behind him, but he wasn’t sure.

“Was that —”

“Coming down!” Remi yelled before Leo could finish. Remi liked the idea of sliding down a ladder like it was a fire-station pole. He let his feet flop to the sides and slid down with only his hands. It turned out that actually using a ladder like a sliding pole was not as fun as the idea of doing it. Within the first five feet, his hands were on fire, the friction burning hot against his skin like a supercharged rug burn. He tried to get his feet back on the rungs, which sent his legs flying wildly in every direction, like hail ricocheting against pavement.

He landed hard, barely missing Leo, but somehow managed only a few scrapes and bruises.

“Let’s hope the Penguin is closer to the ground,” Leo said. “And also, I’m going up this time. You’re scaring me.”

Leo started climbing the narrow ladder for a look around and quickly found himself twenty rungs up.

“Let’s check the card catalog; maybe it will help,” Remi yelled with a snap of his fingers.

Merganzer D. Whippet wasn’t exactly antitechnology, but he did like to have everything written down in case whatever computer he was using went on the fritz. With the Whippet Library, he always kept the entire collection in a card catalog system organized in various ways. There were at least three cards for every book, because he found that sometimes he was searching for a writer, sometimes a title, and sometimes a subject.

Searching through authors was no help at all, so Remi knew pretty quickly that the writer’s name was not Penguin. Searching through the subject revealed a healthy selection of titles having to do with penguin life, but he came up empty-handed after searching through them all for something about an “isle of Penguins.”

“This is taking a long time,” Leo yelled down, frustrated and hungry. They hadn’t eaten all day. “Maybe we should take a break and get some animal crackers.”

Normally, this would have been an immediately agreeable idea for Remi, but he’d started searching through the title card catalog and finally hit pay dirt.

“
Penguin Island
!” Remi shouted, holding up the card and waving it around like he’d won the lottery. “I found it!”

Leo started climbing down, but halfway to the bottom Remi began pushing the ladder so fast, Leo lost his grip with one hand and spiraled out into the air.

“It’s by a French guy named France,” Remi said, lurching to a stop where he thought the book might be. Remi had discovered that the writer named France was French because Merganzer D. Whippet had noted this fact on the card — a very Merganzer thing to do.

Leo spun back around and banged his knees on a ladder rung, but at least he had both hands attached again. He was safe, for the moment.

“Did you not hear me screaming up here?” Leo yelled.

“I know, right? I’m excited, too!” Remi called up.

“Let me know when you’re going to push the ladder that hard next time, will you?” Leo asked. He was going to tell Remi about nearly falling to his death, but Remi spooked easily. Better to just let it pass.

“By the looks of this number,
Penguin Island
is way up there, near the ceiling,” Remi said. “Should be right here, straight up.”

Leo looked up. It was the tallest section of the library, right next to the pond on the roof, which had
the most amazing glass bottom. He could see the ducks swimming around in the mottled late afternoon sunlight.

“Are you sure?” Leo asked. He didn’t really want to go all the way up there with Remi holding the ladder.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Like, seventy percent sure.”

“Tell me if you’re going to move the ladder, okay?” Leo pleaded.

“Check!” Remi said, and gave a salute.

“I can verify the information,” Blop said. He’d gotten a look at the card, which Remi had shoved in his jacket pocket. “Mr. Whippet and I spent many hours creating the card system. Very complicated business, lots of logic involved. You see, the way it works is you start with the writer and cross-reference the subject with the title. . . .”

Leo completely tuned out Blop’s small mechanical voice as it echoed through the grand library space. He climbed, fast and with purpose, until his head was nearly touching the ceiling. He could tell by looking back and forth that he was very near the center of the room. When he looked at Remi, he realized how high up he was, and it took his breath away.

“Grab the book,” Remi said. “The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get back in the elevator.”

Leo found the spine for
Penguin Island
. The author was on the spine, too:
France
. Pulling out the book, Leo
hoped there wouldn’t be some sort of explosion that would knock him off the ladder, but he didn’t need to worry. Absolutely nothing happened.

“This is ridiculous,” Leo said, irritated with Merganzer’s crazy way of hiding things. But peering into the space where the book had been, Leo saw another book hidden in the shadows. He pulled out four or five books on each side and dropped them to the floor. It rained books, and Leo felt bad. Not for Remi, who was unsuccessfully dodging about half of them, but because the books were being damaged on the way down.

“Try to catch them!” Leo yelled, but he wasn’t really paying attention to what was happening down below. He was laser-focused on the copy of
Oliver Twist
that was standing alone between two slabs of marble. It was a hardback edition, thick and old.

“I think I’m figuring it out,” Leo called to Remi.

“Great. Maybe warn me if you’re going to keep throwing books. A guy wants to be prepared.”

But there were no more books to throw. Leo pulled out the copy of
Oliver Twist
and set it gently in the space he’d created by removing other, less important books.

And there it was.

All alone, deep in the dark shadow of the library, a single book stood hidden.

“I think I found it!” Leo said.

Leo took a deep breath and reached back into the darkness. It crossed his mind that there might be spiders or mice or rats in the darkest part of an old library, and he hadn’t actually seen what the book was. It was too dark for that. Still, he gathered his courage, reached all the way in up to his shoulder, and took the spine in his hand.

And then he pulled.

“I got it! It is the right book,” Leo yelled down. “It’s
Robinson Crusoe
!”

Leo waited for something to happen, but nothing did. He began to think maybe he was supposed to do something with the book and started flipping through its pages.

“Um, Leo?” Remi said.

“Ah, you’ve set things in motion. Very exciting,” Blop said, and then he went on about the mechanics of how the shelves were moving. Unfortunately for Leo, he wasn’t really listening to Blop, and Remi was nearly speechless.

“This book is past due,” Leo said, shaking his head and wondering why it was hidden in a secret place. He had one arm hooked through the ladder as he came to the last page. “It’s not even Merganzer’s book. He checked it out from the Brooklyn Public Library twenty-three years ago and never returned it.”

“Leo,” Remi said, finally getting his voice back. “Hold on!”

Leo closed the book and looked down, wondering what the problem was. But before he could get a good look, Remi shoved the ladder as hard as he could. This time, Leo couldn’t hold on.

He was falling, and the only thing that was going to save him were the shelves of books that were flying past. Leo dropped the copy of
Robinson Crusoe
and reached out, grabbing the ledge of a shelf full of books about polar bears, whales, and sea creatures. The impact stretched Leo’s arms to the breaking point, then he let go and caught the next ledge down. He was going slower the second time, and held firm.