The Eye of Midnight (7 page)

The sun was high in the sky as the train left Hendon and rattled north into the countryside. Maxine and William sat across from Grandpa, faces drawn as they stared out the window. The wheels on the tracks beneath them clattered and whined as a series of telephone poles whisked by endlessly, almost imperceptibly, so that the passing world seemed to dance on the glass like a shimmering projection.

The opening scenes were sleepy and rural. Scissor-tailed swallows swerved through impossible arcs in the warm, angular rays of early afternoon, Guernseys grazed contentedly on tufted green hills, hay barns freckled the fields, and an occasional horse cart rolled along beside a muddy canal. Gradually, farms gave way to houses, dirt tracks to streets; church steeples pierced the horizon, and bicyclists paused at intersections, watching the train rumble by. Neighborhoods blossomed, Main Streets swept past, and row houses stretched back from the tracks in long queues, dotted with women on stoops and children playing ball in the street.

“Grandpa,” said William, watching the scenery flit past, “what's going on? Why do you have to go into New York City?”

The colonel stirred as if he'd been called back from someplace far away. “I have an appointment to keep,” he said. “It's nothing you need worry about.”

“Does it have something to do with your old job in the British government?”

Grandpa sat up straighter, eyeing the other passengers on the train cautiously. “Trust me, my boy,” he said in a low voice, “the less you know about my affairs, the better. I'm bringing you along only because leaving you home alone was not an option. Indeed, it now appears that Battersea Manor is no longer safe.”

“What did those men want with Maxine?” William asked.

“It wasn't Maxine they were after,” replied Grandpa. “It's with me they have a score to settle. It seems they were rather keen to learn the contents of my telegram.”

“I don't understand,” said Maxine. “Why is that telegram so important?”

“Egads,” said Grandpa. “Is there no end to your questions?”

Maxine tried to mask a hurt look. “We were only curious,” she said.

“Yes, well, curiosity has a habit of killing the cat, the saying goes,” replied Grandpa. “Not to mention larger, two-legged animals from time to time.”

The cousins shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

“Perhaps I'm overstating my case,” said Grandpa with a conciliatory wave. “After all, you seem to have survived your expedition into the Adventurers' Club with no serious side effects.”

“The Adventurers' Club?” asked William tensely.

“Yes, yes, of course—the room you found in the basement.”

The cousins' cheeks flushed scarlet.

“Come now”—Grandpa chuckled—“you look as if I'd caught you with your hands in the biscuit tin. You didn't really think I was ignorant of your little escapade, did you?” He leaned in close and tapped his nose conspiratorially. “It was fortuitous, really. An opportunity for me to see what the two of you are made of.”

“So the whole thing
was
a test!” growled Maxine, folding her arms over her chest.

Grandpa frowned at her. “Don't be cross, my dear,” he said. “Life is full of tests. And in this particular case, you proved yourselves magnificently. Your discovery of the secret door and your efforts to animate the jinni were quite impressive.”

“But how did you know?”

“When I arrived home, the door to the basement was ajar. I may have heard a thing or two.”

“We couldn't wake it up,” William said. “The magic words didn't work.”

“No, of course not,” replied Grandpa. “Fortunately for you, my jinni speaks Arabic. It doesn't understand English, be it the Queen's or your tragic American variation.”

Maxine's brows lowered skeptically. “You mean it's all true? That stuff we read in the letter about bringing the jinni to life?”

“Ah, now that's a dodgy business, trying to rouse a jinni,” said Grandpa with a wink. He paused for a moment, and the twinkle in his eye dimmed, as if Maxine's question had called to mind some other, darker matter.

“Perhaps—perhaps I should tell you a story,” he said. “As I recall, your parents were rather partial to my bedtime stories.”

He cleared his throat and motioned for them to sit back in their seats.

“Long ago and far away,” he said, “there lived a crafty old jinni—”

“The same one you've got in your basement?” asked William.

“No, no, of course not,” said Grandpa impatiently. “Now sit quietly and listen.

“On a rocky crag in the middle of the desert, the jinni built a mighty fortress, and there inside the soaring parapets he sat and nursed a lust for power and conquest. He could not accomplish his ambitions alone, he realized, so he gathered about him a host of servants—a veritable army, raised from the desert sands.

“The jinni was full of dodges and deceptions and diabolical tricks of every sort, but he had one trick in particular that trumped all others. Within his secret chambers he kept a mirror. This mirror was believed to have certain magical properties. It was said that in it the jinni could see all things—things past, things yet to come, and things that were far away. And by the glamour and sway of the magic mirror, he compelled his servants to carry out his every command.

“With the help of the mirror, the old jinni's power swelled, and in time it came to pass that all the desert lands around him fell under his hand. Yet even this was not enough, and his aims grew bolder still, and in the end he set his mind to conquering the whole world.

“His grand scheme met with an obstacle along the way, however. While his attention was focused on the far reaches of his empire, an unexpected threat found him—a threat much closer to home. One day while his back was turned, a desert fox crept into the jinni's fortress, and she stole the magic mirror.

“He cursed and raved, the old jinni, and his power was shaken. He did his best to conceal the loss of his prize from his servants, but all the while he was searching, hunting far and wide for the fox, hoping to recover what was stolen and to take his revenge.”

Grandpa produced a silver pocket watch from inside his gray suit coat. He opened it and stared at something on the inside of the case, lost in thought.

“He never found her,” he said at last. “And he never found the magic mirror.”

The cousins squinted at him expectantly.

“Is that it?” asked Maxine. “Is that how the story ends?”

But Grandpa didn't answer. He closed his watch again, and he suddenly looked old and tired.

“So I thought,” he murmured. “Perhaps I was wrong.”

The old colonel fell silent and turned toward the window, and presently his narrative was eclipsed by the drama outside as the row houses along the tracks shouldered skyward. Snug bungalows were replaced by tall storefronts and then again by still taller tenement buildings draped with laundry that waved as they passed. In the streets below, automobiles honked at traffic lights, streetcars squealed on their winding rails, and young men idled under streetlamps, until at last the train plunged into the North River Tunnel and emerged with a great rush on the east banks of the Hudson in a thunderous finale of steel spires and mighty stone towers.

The train rolled on through the long gray canyons and pulled into Penn Station with a slow, grinding stop. The passengers collected their parcels, a sleeping sailor across the aisle yawned and rubbed his forearms, and the doors opened onto the rumbling city.

“Here you are,” said Grandpa, slipping William a dollar bill. “Some folding money in case the two of you get hungry later. Don't flash it around.”

They stepped down from the train into the crush of passengers that trudged along the platform. The cousins paused and turned in place two or three times in an attempt to get their bearings, but they would have had better luck trying to hold their ground in the middle of a swift river—a far less hostile place, in truth, than where they stood now.

“Swell view, eh, kid?” said a barrel-chested man, shouldering William aside with a passing glare.

Lingering was obviously impossible, and they fell in step behind Grandpa, who pressed ahead with fixed purpose.

“Where are we headed?” William called out.

“The Algonquin Hotel,” said Grandpa over his shoulder. “We'll check in and get you situated for the evening. Once the two of you are both asleep, I must leave the hotel for an hour or two.”

“In the middle of the night?” said Maxine.

Grandpa nodded. “My rendezvous is at midnight,” he said, “under the Hare Moon.”

“The Hare Moon?”

“You've heard of the Harvest Moon? It's the name given to Luna in the month of October. But other months have different names. Now we are in the moon of May—the month the Indians called the Milk Moon. In China it is known as the Moon of the Dragon. But back in England my grandfather always called it by its old European name—the Hare. It was almost full last night, and tonight it will be in all its glory.”

“ ‘When the hare grows fat…,' ”
muttered William, repeating the lines from the telegram.

“What's that, my boy?” Grandpa called back.

“Oh, nothing,” said William, and he trotted to catch up.

They had just reached the end of the platform, where the plodding procession slowed at the foot of the cast-iron staircase that led to the overlooking concourse, when the man in front of them dropped his traveling bag. The case burst open, spilling out a heap of papers at his feet. The man sank to one knee and fumbled for the loose leaves, bringing Grandpa and the children to a standstill, along with everyone behind them. William bent to help, but the colonel pulled his grandson firmly to his feet. His eyes darted warily from side to side, and his hand groped inside his coat.

Behind them, a square-jawed stranger in a dark suit caught Colonel Battersea's arm, pinning it to his side. In the same instant the bumbling man at their feet abandoned his scattered papers and rounded on them. Grandpa aimed a kick at the man's head, but the attacker arched like an eel, and the boot only grazed his temple. With a furious rush he took the colonel by the lapels and drove him backward into the crowd, bowling William and Maxine to the ground as he went. Grandpa shouted something to them as the two men carted him off, but the words were swallowed up by the whistle of a locomotive on the next track that shuddered to life with a thudding jolt and a heavy squeal.

A blast of steam engulfed the platform, and the cousins struggled to their feet, whirling frantically, squinting for a glimpse of Grandpa's silver hair or his battered leather suitcase. The engine churned out of the station, the seething vapor dissolved, and William and Maxine found themselves alone amid a spreading drift of trampled papers. They dashed up and down the platform in a panic, but it was in vain.

Colonel Battersea had vanished.

The cousins staggered up the stairs toward the concourse in a daze. A railroad policeman stood at the railing above them. Spotting his navy-blue uniform and gold badge from a distance, Maxine and William snapped to life and barreled up to him.

“Officer, come quick!” said William, tugging at his sleeve. “It's an emergency!”

“Beat it, you two,” he said with irritation.

“Honest, sir!” cried Maxine. “Somebody just kidnapped our granddad!”

“I've been standing here for an hour, kid. I never saw a thing.”

“But he was right down there! I'm telling you, Officer, you couldn't miss it!”

“And I'm telling
you
it never happened,” said the cop, swinging his billy club indifferently on a loop around his finger. He bent over them and scowled.

The cousins slumped in bewilderment, realizing that any slim hope of rescuing Grandpa was slipping away by the minute. They launched into another round of appeals, but the officer waved his hand.

“Listen, you got a problem, go file a report. Stationmaster's office is by the central entrance.”

Pelting away, they traversed the main concourse, a monumental cathedral of glass and steel that vibrated like a great beehive, swirling with shopping bags and felt fedoras and steel-toed boots. They wormed their way through the crush, invisible beneath the sea of adults that surrounded them, and managed to reach a small window on the far side of the great hall with a sign above it that indicated they had found the stationmaster's office.

“We just lost our grandfather,” panted Maxine through a round hole in the window.

“Somebody grabbed him,” William added.

A whiskered woman in brown flannel stared at them through thick spectacles.

“End of the line,” she said.

They stared at her with confusion.

“There's a line here. You'll have to wait your turn.”

The cousins glanced behind them and saw a long queue. Deflated, they circled to the back and waited helplessly as the line inched forward at a snail's pace.

They reached the window at last, and the woman in brown looked up at them, her jaw slack and her glasses reflecting a vacant light.

“We lost someone,” William said.

“Lost and found is at the other end of the station,” droned the woman, turning her attention to the next person in line.

“Not something…
someone.
”

“You're lost?”

“No, we're not lost, but our granddad is.”

“Your grandfather is lost?” said the woman impatiently.

“Sort of. I mean, somebody kidnapped him.”

The woman's eyes narrowed, and she peered at William.

“Well, I don't know if you'd call it kidnapping exactly,” he said. “He's a grown man. But two fellas grabbed him.”

“If there's been a kidnapping, why, that's something for the railroad police.”

“But it was the police who sent us here!” protested Maxine.

The woman let out a martyred sigh and handed them a clipboard and a pencil. “You'll need to fill out this report before we can make any calls. Take a seat.”

The cousins sank down against the base of one of the soaring steel pylons that supported the concourse ceiling. William licked the tip of his pencil and did his best to make sense of the endless rows of blanks. A thousand faces swept past, checking watches, toting packages, tramping through the station without offering them so much as a glance.

Maxine's thoughts slipped back to her last glimpse of Grandpa, and she put her hand on her cousin's arm.

“Do you think he's all right?” she murmured.

“Grandpa? Sure he's all right,” William said unconvincingly. “I guess he probably pinned those fellas' ears back and tied them up with their own shoelaces.”

Maxine tried to smile, but she couldn't wink at the memory of the two men.

“Say, were those the same two who stole the telegram?” asked William.

She shook her head. “I'm not sure. I don't think so.”

“They looked like city types,” he said. “Tough guys, you know?”

He realized Maxine was watching him closely, and he pushed down his own lingering doubts.

“Don't be such a worrywart,” he said, knuckling her in the ribs. “We'll hand in this report if it will make you feel any better, but Grandpa will turn up before you know it. Just you wait and see.”

But Grandpa did not. Afternoon drifted into evening with all the urgency of a thistledown on a sultry summer day, and in the meantime the cousins sat in glum silence, waiting for the stationmaster's office to bring some word of Colonel Battersea.

“Maybe we should try to find Grandpa ourselves,” said William at last.

“Are you kidding?” replied Maxine. “In New York City? It'd be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

William grunted and rose to stretch his legs. He wandered along the edge of the concourse, pausing to look at a row of travel posters along the wall.
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE…TIMES SQUARE…CARNEGIE HALL…

All at once he felt Maxine behind him.

“Look at that one,” she said, pointing at the last poster in the row.

The picture showed a tall stone obelisk atop a grassy hill. Their gaze dropped to the lettering at the bottom:

CLEOPATRA'S NEEDLE—CENTRAL PARK

“What about it?” William asked.

“I think maybe we just sat on the needle in the haystack, that's what,” she replied. “The telegram—it mentioned a needle, remember?”

“ ‘Seek the Needle, find the Eye…,' ”
he murmured, and suddenly his eyes widened. “M, you're a genius!”

“Is this what the telegram was talking about?” she asked.

“It has to be! We already know the when, right? Grandpa said the meeting would happen at midnight tonight—when the Hare Moon grows fat. This poster must be the where. How far is Central Park anyways?”

“I'm not sure,” said Maxine, grabbing a map of the city from a nearby tourist kiosk. She unfolded it and studied the contents for a moment. “Two or three miles, I guess.”

“It's time for us to go,” William said.

Maxine's eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“Sitting around here is for the birds,” he said, glancing at a clock above the office window. “We're wasting our time. We've only got a few hours until midnight. If we don't go now, we'll miss Grandpa's appointment.”

“Grandpa's appointment—without Grandpa?” she said. “You can't be serious!”

William stared up at the cat's cradle of steel trusses and arched glass high above, trying to form the currents inside of him into words.

“Remember yesterday at Battersea Manor,” he said, “when you told me you were tired of your classmates and all their silly games—that you wanted to do something grown- up? Well, here's our chance.”

“Not now,” Maxine insisted. “Grandpa could be here any minute.”

“We can do this, M. Meeting the courier was the whole reason Grandpa came here. If it was important enough for him to risk bringing us along, then it's important enough for us to go on without him.”

Maxine sighed, too tired to argue. “Okay, so we're going out in the dark, to find a stranger and collect a package in the middle of Central Park.” She looked hard at William, measuring his confidence, wondering if it was enough for both of them.

“Sure,” he replied. “If you can get us there.”