The Metropolitans Read online

  “These look like they could be worn by soldiers today,” he said.

  “They will be,” Miss Lake said, bringing a tray laden with a brown glazed teapot and mismatched china cups. “Dr. Bean has been commissioned by the British Army to design a better helmet for the troops.”

  Walt whistled. “Keen! I told the fellows in the chess club that studying medieval armor would come in handy someday. Hey, Doc, did that page have something to do with the war? Was there a secret message written on it or something?”

  “Something like that,” Dr. Bean said. “But I really can’t say any more.”

  “Oh, Dash,” Miss Lake said, blowing on her tea. “Surely we can tell them a little. After all, they did keep Mr. January from taking the page.”

  “Mr. January?” Madge asked. “What kind of name is that? It sounds like a—”

  “Spy name!” Walt cried. “I knew there was something underhanded about him. Is he spying for the Nazis?”

  “Yes, Walt,” Dr. Bean said gravely. “I’m afraid so. So you can see that this is a very dangerous affair—no business for children.”

  Walt clenched his fists at the word children. He was afraid his voice would crack, so he spoke slowly and softly. “I saw children rounded up by the Nazis, and my parents had to send me away with hundreds of other children because it was the only way to keep us safe. Hitler’s already made this a business for children and if there’s a spy working for the Nazis here in New York, I deserve to know what I can do to help.”

  Walt gulped and looked around, shocked at himself. How had he gotten the nerve to talk to Dr. Bean like that? The doctor would probably throw him out on his ear now. But instead Dr. Bean had gone very pale and Miss Lake put her hand on Walt’s shoulder. “Well said, young man.” Then, turning to Dr. Bean, “They did answer the call, Dash.”

  “Yes, Viv, but it must be a mistake. They can’t be the ones.”

  “The book has never been wrong before,” she said, pointing at the pages on the table. Although most of them were blank, it was possible now to see that there were traces of ink and gold glitter on some of them, as if they had once contained writing and pictures that had been washed away.

  “I don’t see how this mess could tell anyone anything,” Madge said.

  “The Kelmsbury is not a mess,” Dr. Bean said indignantly. “At least it wasn’t until it was immersed in water and ruined. I was trying to dry out the pages when you came in earlier.”

  “The same thing happened when Frankie was reading Treasure Island in the bathtub,” Madge said. “Gee, Doc, you weren’t reading this in the tub, were you?”

  “I’m sure Dr. Bean wouldn’t read an important old book in the bath,” Walt said. “You wouldn’t, would you?”

  “I’d never . . . well—” He looked sheepishly at Miss Lake. “Not since the Caxton manuscript incident.”

  “Then how’d this book get in the drink, Doc?” Madge asked.

  Dr. Bean drew himself up to answer, and Walt saw that Madge was goading Dr. Bean into telling them more than he meant to. Which was pretty clever. He wished he’d thought of it. “I’ll have you know this volume was pulled out of the harbor down by Battery Park this morning by an associate of mine in the FBI. It was on the body of an Axis spy who drowned himself rather than be caught. We believe he was using the book as a cipher, that is—”

  “A key to a code,” Walt said. “I’ve read about them in spy novels.” Walt peered at a page Miss Lake had picked from the pile. The letters were clearer on this page. There were still traces of color and gold outlining a large capital A. “Hey, this looks like the page from the case upstairs. But that can’t be. The card on that case said it came from the only surviving copy of the Kelmsbury King Arthur.”

  Dr. Bean looked embarrassed. “I may not have been entirely truthful when I typed up that card. The truth is, we know of at least four copies of the Kelmsbury. Three of them are still in the hands of the enemy, but the museum has one copy. That’s where the page in the display case was from. The rest of that book was . . . lost two years ago.”

  “Lost?” Madge asked. “You ought to take better care of your books, Doc.”

  “Well, perhaps lost is not quite the right word—”

  “Hidden,” Miss Lake said. “The book was hidden in the museum by one of the board members, Sir Peter Bricklebank.”

  “Why would he hide a priceless manuscript?” Walt asked. “Was he crazy?”

  “Not at all!” Dr. Bean said at the same time that Miss Lake conceded, “Possibly.”

  “Sir Peter could be a bit of a prankster,” Dr. Bean explained. “But mostly he just wanted to make sure it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. He took the book apart, except for the epilogue, which was the page we put on display, and hid it in four pieces and left clues that only the right people could figure out.”

  “And apparently Dash and I aren’t the right people,” Miss Lake said.

  “Really?” Madge said. “But you two are so clever.”

  “Sometimes it’s not enough to be clever,” Miss Lake said, smiling sadly. “Sir Bricklebank didn’t want anyone to find the book except for the people who were meant to find it—not even me and Dash—and he was very good at hiding things. But now it’s imperative we find the book so we can break the code on the message that’s been intercepted. We believe it outlines the plans for a sabotage plot.”

  “Do we know what they plan to sabotage?” Joe asked.

  “No,” Dr. Bean said, “we don’t. We were able to confiscate the message from between the pages of the book.” Dr. Bean took down a page from the clothesline and laid it on the table. Unlike the other pages, this one hadn’t been washed clean of words.

  “This handwriting is modern,” Madge said, “but I can’t make out what it says.”

  “That’s because it’s in code,” Walt said, his voice breaking in his excitement. “Let me have a crack at it, Doc. I solve the code on the Little Orphan Annie show every week. . . .” He felt the blood rush to his face. Jeez! Had he just admitted in front of a girl that he listened to a kids’ show on the radio? How could he explain that listening to the radio was the way he’d learned English so fast? Since coming to America two years ago, he’d listened to the radio every night, repeating the words until every trace of his German accent was gone. “I mean, I used to when I was a kid. Now I just do it with my cousin Rachel because she likes the decoder badge.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Madge said, beaming at Walt. “Frankie and I used to go to all our neighbors collecting Ovaltine lids so we could get one. Do we need a decoder badge for this message?”

  “No, but we need the book,” Walt said, looking sadly at the water-damaged pages. Then he looked back at the message and saw that the spy had already started writing letters over the coded part. He could make out a word— “Holy smokes! It spells Camelot.” Walt looked up, his ears twitching with excitement.

  “Camelot is the seventh word on this page,” Joe said, holding up the one page that still had visible writing on it.

  “That would be an awfully big coincidence if the page we need is the same one that survived,” Madge said.

  “Maybe not,” Walt said. “If the spy slipped the message into the book at the page he was using, the extra paper could have protected that page, isn’t that right, Doc?”

  “Yes, Walt,” he agreed. “I think that’s exactly what happened.”

  “I’m surprised you could read that writing at all, Joe,” Madge said.

  “I can read,” Joe said.

  Everyone turned to stare at Joe.

  “No one doubted you could, young man,” Miss Lake said, putting her hand on Joe’s shoulder. “It’s just that this page is from an eleventh-century manuscript. The writing is quite antiquated and yet you had no trouble reading it.”

  Joe shrugged. “All writing looked like that to me at first. I go
t pretty good at making out new languages at the Mush Hole, because we weren’t allowed to use our own language.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair,” Walt said at the same time Madge asked, “What’s a Mush Hole?”

  “That’s what everyone calls the school I went to. If you want me to read that page for you, I can.”

  Dr. Bean held up his hand. “Just because Joe can read the writing doesn’t mean he should. This book is very dangerous.”

  “Whaddaya mean, Doc?” Madge asked. “You mean like the books Hitler burned?”

  “No! That’s not what I meant at all!” Dr. Bean grabbed the fringe of hair at the back of his head until it stood up. “Vivian, help me out here.”

  “What Dash means is that there’s a superstition attached to this book that it should only be read by the people meant to read it and even then it should never be read alone. But we’re not alone, Dash, and the children are the ones who answered the call. Why don’t we let them have a go? They won’t be reading very much of it.”

  “So,” said Joe, who had been flicking his eyes back and forth between the two adults, “what word do you need next?”

  Walt looked back down at the page. “You said it was the seventh word, and this page . . . Hey, there’s a symbol on the top of this page—a shield and the number seven. I bet the symbols are supposed to tell you which section of the book you need to decode each part of the message, and the number tells you which word to pick. . . . So I betcha the code is to pick every seventh word and write it over the letters in the message—leaving out any duplicate letters, of course, and then copying out the rest of the alphabet. . . .” Walt leaned over, his nose nearly touching the page, ears twitching, and worked out the code. He forgot to feel embarrassed. His uncle Sol said that he had a good head for numbers and he’d make a good accountant someday. Walt didn’t want to be an accountant. He wanted to be a knight—or maybe a spy.

  He finished trying to decode the message, but it didn’t make any sense.

  “It didn’t work,” he said glumly. “It’s gibberish.”

  “Try using the key word and then skipping every seventh letter after that,” Joe said.

  “How . . . ?”

  Joe shrugged. “I don’t know. I can just see that sort of thing. Like the letters move around. . . . I know that sounds crazy.”

  “You see,” Miss Lake whispered to Dr. Bean. “I think these children might really be the ones.”

  “But they’re too young!” Dr. Bean wailed. “We can’t allow it, Viv! You know what happens—”

  “I’m going to give it another try,” Walt said, determined to show Dr. Bean that they weren’t helpless children, that they were the ones—whatever the heck that meant! “If I skip every seventh letter and make out a grid—it’s called a Vigenère cipher, by the way,” he added, hoping to impress Madge, but she had turned toward Dr. Bean.

  “Doc, what did you mean about us not being the ones? Who are the ones and why are you so sure it isn’t us?”

  “I’ve already said too much,” Dr. Bean replied. “If you don’t believe me about what Miss Lake has called the ‘superstition’ about the Kelmsbury, listen to what’s written on the last page.” He leaned over Walt and read aloud:

  At long last Arthur returned to Camelot with his companions, and they resumed their lives there, never telling anyone of the strange adventure they had shared in the Hewan Wood and the Maiden Castle or the grave portents told to them by the Lady of the Lake. They kept their secret through the terrible years that followed—through war, betrayal, exile, and death—for they knew that in the end, whatever they lost would be restored to them when they were reunited on the Isle of Avalon, and whenever great evil arose in the world, four brave knights would arise in their names to vanquish it.

  Walt shivered. It was what he wanted most of all—to vanquish—what a wonderful word!—evil, which definitely meant fighting the Nazis and getting his parents out of France, where they’d gone after Walt was evacuated from Germany as part of the Kindertransport. At least that’s where they’d been when he’d heard from them three months ago.

  Dr. Bean straightened up and took off his glasses because the lenses had fogged up while he was reading. Then he put them back on and looked at the three of them as if he hoped they might have been replaced by grown-ups.

  “There is no doubt that evil has arisen in the world. When I put the only surviving page from the book on display today, I thought it would call four knights to vanquish the evil, but something must have gone terribly wrong. No matter how brave and clever you three are, you are too young to battle the evil that has arisen now. I simply won’t allow it.”

  Walt was opening his mouth to tell Dr. Bean that the book hadn’t been wrong, but Joe spoke first.

  “You’re right, Doc, we’re not the ones. I know I’m no hero.”

  Walt stared at Joe, surprised. The other boy was so tall and strong. He hadn’t hesitated to run after Mr. January, and he’d been the first to tackle him when Walt opened the door. He sure looked like a hero to Walt.

  “Honestly,” Madge said, “the whole thing sounds like a bunch of malarkey to me. I mean, why would Nazi spies bother with using an old book to encode their messages?”

  “It is believed,” Dr. Bean said rather formally, as if he was offended at Madge calling his book a bunch of malarkey, “that a message encrypted using the Kelmsbury can never be broken.”

  “Well, that’s not true,” Walt said, his voice rising with excitement. “I’ve broken it. I’ve decoded your spy’s message—at least this first part.”

  “Wow!” Madge said, slapping Walt on the back. “Good going, sport!”

  The shivery feeling awoken by Dr. Bean’s words swelled in Walt’s chest.

  “I suppose there’s no harm in your reading it aloud with the rest of us here. Go ahead, young man,” Dashwood Bean said, looking at Walt as if he might have been wrong about him.

  Walt bent his head to the page and read, praying his voice wouldn’t choose now to crack and that his English, which he’d worked so hard to remove any accent from, would sound right.

  Your loyalty has been rewarded. Project Excalibur has begun. Decode each message below to receive your instructions. If you doubt our power, the events of today will put an end to those doubts. Remember that Project Excalibur will make today seem like nothing. . . .

  His voice faltered. “I don’t like to say the last part.” He passed the page to Miss Lake.

  “It says Heil Hitler,” she said, taking out her handkerchief to wipe her eyes.

  “Do you know what Project Excalibur is?” Joe asked.

  “No,” Miss Lake replied. “This was the first intercept.”

  “Do you know what it means about the ‘events of today’?” Madge asked. “We’ve had the radio on for the last half hour, and the only news has been that Canada’s been at war for two years, which everyone and their uncle knew already.”

  “Wait,” Joe said, getting up from the table and walking toward the radio. “They’re interrupting the broadcast.”

  He turned up the volume. A man’s voice filled the workroom, which had suddenly become so quiet it seemed as if the wooden heads on the hat forms were listening as well as the five breathing occupants of the room.

  “. . . have attacked the Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from the air. I’ll repeat that: President Roosevelt says that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, from the air.”

  “Hawaii!” Madge gasped. “But that’s part of our country!”

  “Yes,” Dr. Bean said, looking at Miss Lake. “You see what I mean about the great evil. This is not something that children should be involved in.”

  Walt shook his head. He knew what the radio announcement and the coded message meant. He was looking at the suits of armor glinting in the watery light from the high windows but seeing instead an army of knights
arrayed on a battlefield. “You’re wrong, Doc,” he said, not caring now if his voice cracked. “We’ve all got to do our part—we’re at war.”

  Then a scream came from the floor above them.

  5

  PAPER AIRPLANES

  KIKU LOOKED UP from her father’s unconscious body and saw a crowd of people rushing from the basement stairs across the gallery floor. She recognized Dr. Bean and Miss Lake and that freckled boy who came to the museum every Sunday, but the other two kids—a redheaded girl and a dark-haired boy—were strangers. She felt ashamed that they should see her father, Curator of Far Eastern Art, lying on the floor, his suit jacket, which was always so neatly pressed, rumpled from his fall.

  “What happened?” Miss Lake asked, kneeling beside her.

  “We were listening to the radio,” Kiku said, scanning the faces above her, “and then we heard about this terrible attack. It’s what my father has always feared—a war between Japan and the United States. Just this morning he was angry at me. . . .” Her voice broke as she remembered the fight they had been having before the awful radio announcement.