Tea Cups & Tiger Claws (17 page)

It didn’t take long before Ernest wondered if he’d have been better off back at the Boy’s Home with his pet bluebird. Better a fake bluebird than a fake mother. He’d never been the type to dream about getting adopted by the perfect family that sang songs around the piano and cranked ice cream on the front porch. At night he used to listen to the exciting stories some of the boys whispered back and forth about rich, childless couples who adopted kids and then took them sailing around the world or camping for months at a time in the Grand Canyon, where they lived on cornbread and rattlesnake chili, but those stories didn’t mean much to him. He’d never expected stuff like that. But he did expect some things, easy things, like a father, and a home, and a mother who acted like a mother at least one day a week.

Ernest didn’t get any of those things when
Miss Railer adopted him. She’d never been married, so that took care of the father business. She lived in a hotel instead of a house, on the top floor, and made him live in a room by himself on the floor below. And she told him to call her “Miss Railer.” What kind of a mother did that? He’d been adopted by a dud.

Some things weren’t so duddy, though.
Nobody told him to mop the floor or do the dishes or pull the weeds. At the Boy’s home he got a pink slip for not doing chores or for making a sloppy bed, and that meant two hard swats on the butt with a giant wooden paddle or eight hours’ work detail. At the hotel, Lizzie, the colored maid for the fourth floor, made his bed and cleaned his room. He watched TV when he wanted and ordered room service six times a day. He never got bad grades, or forgot to do his homework, but if he had, nobody would’ve cared.

And nobody cared less than Miss Railer—it took him about an hour to figure that out—but
she sure cared a whole lot about other things. Ernest learned that after the first day at his new school when Eurasimus Horrick, the scary old man who worked for Miss Railer, said, “The boss lady wants to see you.” Then he shoved Ernest into the elevator.

Horrick
got paid to be mean, at least that’s how Ernest saw it. When he delivered a message from “the boss lady,” the other employees never asked questions. They did what he said and if they didn’t understand, they kept their mouths shut. He didn’t have a regular job, like a bellboy or a cook, but just sat in the back office, behind the lobby counter, at a small desk in the corner of the room, where he studied notes he’d written on a notepad, and waited for Miss Railer to call with an errand. Lizzie, the maid, said he got mean on account of his ugly face, which had a big red scar cutting through the middle of his nose, down through both lips, to the bottom of his chin. Nobody had the guts to ask how he got it, and he never talked about it, or much of anything else either. And if he caught you staring at his face, which he kept mostly pointed toward the ground, he got mad.

Being
such a lucky child, this was the Gargoyle who drove Ernest to school every morning and picked him up every afternoon.

On the drive home from that first day of school, when
Horrick told him to go see Miss Railer, Ernest made the mistake of asking what she wanted. Horrick didn’t answer and Ernest didn’t think much about it. Then, after parking the car at the hotel, he reached over, grabbed Ernest by the shirt, and pulled him up close. Ernest saw wrinkles and wild gray sideburns and a devil-face that looked like it had been through a sawmill. “I don’t chew my cabbage twice,” he said, with breath that smelled worse than cabbage. “And next time I tell you to do something, you do it without asking questions. Do you hear?” That’s when Horrick threw him into the elevator and Ernest went up to see Miss Railer.

She lived on the f
ifth floor and also had an office next to where she lived, which is where Ernest found her, sitting behind a big desk. Instead of asking about the red scrapes on his cheek and nose, or his skinned elbows, she asked about the missing buttons on his shirt. When he tried to tell her about the fight with Jeremy Slanger, and how Cousin Sarah had stood up for him, she held up her hand and said that shirts were expensive and he needed to be more careful. Then she asked about Veronica Newfield, one question after another. “Who did she play with?” “What did she wear?” “Who is she mad at?” “Did she do her homework?” “Who drove her to school and who picked her up?” “Was she happy or sad or sleepy or grumpy?”

When Ernest didn’t know the answers to the questions
Miss Railer got mad. She said every child has to do chores, to earn their keep, and that Ernest’s chore was to keep an eye on Veronica Newfield and report everything he learned—unless he preferred scrubbing pots and pans, or cleaning toilets. Then she gave him five dollars and told him to do better next time.

~~~

Ernest liked being a spy. Besides Veronica Newfield, he spied on families who stayed at the hotel. He had a secret spot behind the soda machine, just outside the swimming pool gate. He couldn’t help it. Normal families interested him. The boys bragged, wrestled, and got scolded by their parents. The girls told secrets, teased, and smiled when their brothers got scolded. When they had lunch together, laughing and talking, he tried real hard to listen.

A good spy needs to be able to
see out of the corner of his eye. Ernest got good at that. When he didn’t have any kids to spy on, he secretly watched the employees and wrote down what he saw. Clifford, the night cook, ran into the walk-in freezer every time the chopped onions made him cry. Lizzie, the maid, had twisted toes. She put small sponges between them so they didn’t get tangled.

He knew everything, except one thing
: what Horrick did when he went down into the basement. He went down there all the time and stayed for hours. And sometimes he told lies too. He’d say to the clerk behind the counter, “If Miss Railer calls, tell her I’m in the basement, working on the furnace.” Then he’d go down and come back up three hours later without a speck of dirt on his clothes or hands. A good spy has to be able to spot things like that. And something else bothered Ernest too. Miss Railer didn’t have a lot of rules. She didn’t care if he jumped off the roof with a parachute made of bed sheets—as long as he didn’t damage any property. But she kept on telling him to stay out of the basement. And she looked serious like a guard dog when she said it.

About
a year after getting adopted, on a summer day when Miss Railer went away on business, Ernest decided that a spy worth his salt had to do more than hide behind soda machines watching kids play. He had to do the scary things too. So he grabbed his sketch book and pencils and went down to the lobby, where he sat in one of the big leather chairs and pretended to draw. After a while, just as he’d figured, Horrick pushed his way through the swinging door that separated the back office from the lobby counter and told the clerk that he’d be in the basement taking inventory, if the boss lady happened to call. Horrick then pushed back through the swinging door and disappeared into the back office. A few seconds later he came out the other door, and into the lobby. He walked across the room and disappeared behind the partition that separated the lobby from the phone booths, the men’s and women’s bathrooms, and the basement door. Without raising his head an inch, Ernest tracked his every step. He also listened and soon heard the jingling of keys and the notching sound of a key going into a lock. Then he heard the door open and close.

Ernest put down his drawing and
walked toward the partition, trying to look like he had to go to the bathroom, in case the clerk behind the counter got suspicious. Once behind the partition and out of view, he cautiously approached the basement door, wrapped his hand around the doorknob, and slowly turned. Unlocked, just as he’d hoped…or maybe hadn’t hoped. His heart pounded like a war drum. He opened the door a crack but then changed his mind. Better to wait and make sure Horrick got to the bottom before going in himself. He counted to thirty while looking up at the letters on the door which spelled out the words “KEEP OUT.”

Then he
opened it, peeked in, and saw a narrow stairway lit by a dirty light bulb. He liked it. That’s the way it should look. He wasn’t going to an ice cream social, but down into a dark basement to look for dead bodies and buried treasure.

One giant
concrete step at a time, he descended into the basement. When his shadow got big on the right hand side wall, he slid to the left and it fell to the floor. Good spies have to be smart like that.

At the bottom he hugged the wall and listened.
He heard Horrick’s squeaking shoes. He crouched down and peeked around the corner. The basement looked big, like a gymnasium, but he didn’t know how big because most of it rested in darkness. In the area with the light he saw rows of shelves neatly stacked with Christmas decorations and dinner plates and opened cases of wine. Hanging curtains blocked off this area from the other, dark area.

A cork popped. Looking up through
a gap in the first row of shelves, he saw part of Horrick’s face and one of his furry sideburns on the next aisle over. He put a bottle to his wrinkled mouth and took a drink. Then he lowered the bottle and Ernest heard the sound of pouring liquid, like something being poured from one container into another. Then, without warning, Horrick spun around and started walking down the aisle where, when he rounded the corner, he’d see Ernest sitting by the stairway like a dead duck. Ernest quickly crawled down the first aisle and hid behind a stack of boxes. He held his breath and listened to squeaky footsteps as they first went one way and then another, sometimes coming closer, sometimes farther. Finally the light switch clicked, the light went out, and Horrick grunted as he climbed the stairs. With another click the stairway light went out, the door opened and closed, and the bang of the deadbolt echoed through the basement. Ernest was safe.

So the gargoyle
drank alcohol. Big deal. There had to be more to it than that. For one thing it didn’t explain all the hours he spent down there. This time it just happened to be a few minutes but many times he spent most of the day. And what about Miss Railer? Why did she get all riled up about the basement? Not because Horrick kept a bottle of booze down there. Ernest knew that much for sure. He stood up, pulled a flashlight from his baggy black polyester pants, and shined it on the shelf next to where he’d hidden. He saw wine bottles stacked on their sides. He pulled one of them out and saw French writing. He poked around the rest of the first aisle, then the second, where Horrick had his bottle. It said Smirnoff Vodka and was almost empty.

Clank! Ernest jumped. It sounded like a steel beam had hit the concrete floor.
He froze in place. Then a high pitched whiz pierced his ears and shook the walls, but he knew that sound, heard it a hundred times a day: the elevator. He pointed the flashlight forward and walked to the end of the aisle until coming to the curtain that blocked his path. He got down onto his hands and knees, lifted the curtain overhead, and shined the flashlight toward the sound. He saw nothing but darkness, the kind of darkness where all sorts of neato things might happen. After getting back to his feet, on the dark side of the curtain, he slowly followed the flashlight’s little pool of light, trying his best to ignore the screeching elevator and the shaking walls. Soon he beheld a giant cavern filled with cables and motors and steel beams. He raised the flashlight and caught just a glimpse of the elevator car flying up through the shaft. Then, after another loud “clank,” the noise stopped and the basement turned back into a silent tomb.

He poked around,
shining his flashlight every which way, but always being careful not to go inside the shaft; good spies didn’t get squished by elevators. Everything ran upward: the cables, the steel frame, the hollow shaft. Even the motors and pulleys mounted to the floor reached more upward than outward. Everything, that is, except for one cable that ran out of the shaft and into the basement. The other cables, which ran upward into the shaft, clearly belonged to the elevator. This one ran alone, parallel to the ground, away from the shaft, and looked like it had nothing to do with the elevator. He shined the light along the cable but only saw that it disappeared into the darkness. Strange.

A muffled explosion from another part of the room ruffled papers by the stairway.
Ernest stopped moving and felt a wave of heat wash over his face. The noise grew loud and the room became filled with an eerie orange light. He slowly turned to face the light, which turned out to be the blazing furnace, and realized that the basement was scary and treacherous, and no place for inexperienced spies.

With the roaring furnace now providing more than enough light, Ernest saw a chance to take in the whole scene. He s
lowly turned a three-sixty and searched the entire room. And it was, except for the area by the stairs, completely empty. As tidy as a church. Not even a dusty footlocker or an interesting cobweb. He turned again, slower, and unleashed super-spy concentration. Nothing.

Dripping sweat, disappointed, he turned his attention back to the strange cable that didn’t want to play with the other cables.
He followed it along until it reached a block wall. But it didn’t stop there. It ran through a hole in the wall! He grabbed the cable with his free hand and pulled with all his strength, but it didn’t budge. He wiped the black grease from the cable onto his pants. 

That’s where it ended, on the other side of the wall, but where exactly did it begin?
He followed it back to the elevator shaft and stopped, afraid to enter. Good spies had smarts, and knew how to look out the corner of their eye, but did they put their seventy-three pound bodies underneath one ton elevators? The light from the furnace didn’t reach into the shaft, so he shined the flashlight at the cable and followed it with his eyes into the heart of the monster. Past steel posts, cross beams, wires, pulleys, cables, his eyes crawled to where it began: wrapped around a metal wheel, attached to a motor.