Jim Morgan and the King of Thieves (15 page)

“Up we go!” Peter shouted, and Jim watched in amazement as the two Ratts scampered up the ivy as nimbly as squirrels. Jim, on the other hand, was not nearly so dexterous. He clumsily put one hand over the other and refused to move his feet until they found an overly sure toehold. While safer, this technique was not nearly fast enough. The deputy, who was now hot, red-faced, and highly agitated, rounded the corner, skidding to a halt at the ivy.

“Oy!” the exhausted deputy cried up at Jim. “I’ve had just about enough of you lot today! Now c’mon, school’s not so bad, or church, or work even. Why not just come down and make it easy on me, eh?”

“Sorry,” Jim said. “But I have other things I need to get done! I —” Jim was about to say something smart when he made the dreadful mistake many before have made of looking down while in the middle of a climb. The effect, as it always is, was rather dizzying. Jim was about two thirds the way up the building (which is a fairly long drop for an 11-year-old boy) when he looked down, fear suddenly telling him that two-thirds was as far as he was going to go.

“Come on, Jim!” Peter urged from the ledge of the roof.

“You’re almost there, mate!” Paul added.

“I’m stuck,” Jim said, but what he really meant was that his frightened hands and feet no longer possessed the power to move.

“You’re not stuck!”

“You can make it!” Jim’s friends tried to encourage him, but it was no use, he wasn’t climbing another inch.

“Fine then!” the deputy called up. “I was going to go easy on you with Butterstreet, but not if you’re going to make me come up there after you!” The deputy leaned his staff up against the wall, took a deep breath, and then grabbed onto the ivy and started to make his way up the wall.

“COME ON, JIM!” Peter and Paul were desperate now. They couldn’t wait much longer before they would have to run and leave their friend behind, or risk being caught themselves. But even though
Jim felt the dreadful tug of the deputy climbing up beneath him, he was frozen in place.

Fortunately though, luck chose a good time to side with Jim. There was a reason this deputy was the slower of the two, and that reason was the extra twenty pounds he carried in a belly that hung over his belt. The ivy that easily held the weight of 11-year-old boys was not so reliable under the strain of a full-grown man.

The ivy trembled. Then it groaned. Strands pulled away from the wall. The poor deputy, who was right at Jim’s feet, looked up and winced.

“Oh, dear,” he said as the vines in his hands tore away just below Jim’s shoes.

Jim looked back down. The deputy lay in a giant pile of green leaves and tendrils. The Ratts, thanks to the fact that the ivy was no longer stuck to the wall as much, pulled Jim up by the vines.

“That was close,” Peter said as he and Paul strained to pull Jim onto the roof.

Jim’s heart beat like a hammer, and he sat down gasping for air. “That was horrible!” Jim took steady, deep breaths, trying to calm himself down.

Paul peered back over the ledge, smiling at the flustered deputy, who had had quite enough sport for the day.

“Madness! That’s what this is! Madness!” The miserable man stood and, in a daze from his fall, swayed back and forth as he ripped and pulled at the vines that covered him. “I should have been a tailor, or an innkeeper, or even a blacksmith! These kids are animals! Animals! I quit!” he shouted to himself and, still decorated in leafy green, staggered out of the alley and down the street.

“How many is that this year, Peter?” Paul asked. “Five?”

“Six, if you count the one on New Year’s,” Peter corrected his brother and they slapped their knees and laughed out loud at their own private joke. “Now, come on Jim, we’re not home yet.”

“How are we going to get down?” Jim asked. “The vines are broken.”

“Down? We don’t go down yet.” Paul said with a laugh, pointing. “We still have to go
over
!”

“Over?” Jim’s face fell as he followed the direction of Paul’s pointing finger. There was a path of rooftops leading all the way back to the lightless and drab section of town that was their home. “Are you daft? You can’t be serious!” Jim gaped.

“It’s easy Jim,” Peter assured him. “It’s like flying!” And then, without hesitation, he leapt over the small space between the two roofs. It was only a few feet, (though to Jim it might as well have been a mile) and, under normal circumstances, a very bad idea. But Jim knew he had no choice.

“It really is no problem, chum,” Paul added as he too sailed over the space between the buildings and landed safely on the other side. “Just don’t look down and you’ll be right on target!”

Paul meant the advice well, but Jim took it just a bit too literally. Looking straight ahead (or even a little bit up) Jim stiffly stood and took a running start. However, by not looking down at all, he failed to notice that his feet were still tangled in the long vines of ivy used to pull him to safety. Just as Jim was about to make his jump, he felt a small tug at his ankles.

“Bloody hell!” Jim exclaimed, and down he went. Now Jim wasn’t only looking down, he was also flying that way, dropping straight through the air toward the cobblestones beneath him, screaming the entire way. But once more the sticky ivy saved his life. Just as Jim thought he was going to finish his dive face-first into the alley, he came to a jolting stop, suspended in the air by the long vine wrapped around his ankle.

“Why does this keep happening to me?” Jim asked the fates as he hung upside-down for the second time in only a week. Now, there’s not much one can do while hanging upside-down by the ankle, save spin around in a circle and try to keep the blood from rushing to the head by looking up and around. So that’s what Jim did, and as he slowly drifted around, gazing anywhere but at the ground, his eyes passed the dingy pawnshop window, and there inside Jim found himself staring at the long-nosed face of the King of Thieves.

FIFTEEN

he King of Thieves hunkered his spindly frame over a desk in the pawnshop office, squinting one eye around a rather complicated bronze monocle. The King constantly fiddled with the device at his eye, rotating a small gear with his long fingers to shift a number of multicolored lenses through the eyepiece. Through these lenses the King intently analyzed a golden charm dangling at the end of a fine chain, all the while comparing the charm to a peculiar drawing in a book on the desk. After a few moments of study the King tossed the necklace over his shoulder with a disgusted snarl and slammed the book shut with a grunt. Jim watched the necklace sail through the air in a glittering arc until it landed on the floor in an astounding pile of hundreds of such treasures, tossed aside as if they were trash.

“You look for a needle in a haystack,” Jim heard a voice say from the back of the office. It was the short, dumpy man who had hidden in the shadows in the court, looking none too pleased with the situation.

“Yes, but this particular needle is the key to untold treasures, my dear Wyzcark,” the King said. “Treasures that will make us as powerful as the kings of both of our countries!”

“So you say,” Wyzcark replied with a grunt, and Jim noted that the squat man’s accent sounded similar to the gypsy’s who had hexed his box, though not nearly as thick. “You also say that it is magical and can unlock many great secrets. But in this age of reason, such things are disappearing and have become nearly impossible to believe in, much less find, in spite of the texts you’ve shown me.”

“Doubting me already, Wyzcark? You’ve read the ancient manuscript. The details are too rich to be fabricated. But arcane texts or no, I’ve seen the Amulet with my own eyes. I’ve seen what it can do.” The King took the monocle away from his face, his dark eyes glaring fiercely at his counterpart. “Besides Wyzcark, can we really stop now? In the face of this incredible stroke of luck we’ve just had?” The King set the monocle down on his workbench – right beside Jim’s box.

Jim’s heart skipped a beat. There, just beside the King’s elbow, sat his box! There was also a crowbar, a chisel, a hammer, and a saw. All of these tools were broken or bent, but the box remained whole, nary a chip on it’s stained lid. The gypsy magic held stronger than the King of Thieves thought, Jim realized with some satisfaction.

“Luck is for amateurs,” Wyczark said with a sniff. “I grow impatient, and if your little thieves continue to fail us, I will bring in experts from my country. I will have this done properly.”

“The moment your ‘experts’ step foot on English shores, the authorities will catch wind of our venture, and King’s Men will pour in like rain from the heavens to take our prize!” the King of Thieves exclaimed, throwing his hands into the air only to quickly calm himself and make his case. “Wyzcark, my portly friend, trust me. My ways are the best ways - the slow ways, the patient ways, yes, but the quiet ways, the shadow and whisper ways. Soon the amulet will be ours, and
perhaps, just perhaps, even more than what we had first hoped.” The King kept his eyes on Wyzcark, but his spidery fingers lightly crawled across the box’s lid.

“I thought you said that the amulet is our great prize?” Wyzcark asked, arching one eyebrow as he followed the King’s hand to the box. “What could you possibly want with the boy’s stupid box?”

“The Amulet is a key to a great many treasures, Wyczark,” the King said with the noticeably forced patience that all adults are so poor at faking. “But we aren’t looking for just
any
treasure are we? We’re looking for
vast
treasures – great and immeasurable treasures men have sought through the ages.”

“What could this boy’s box possibly have to do with such treasure?”

“Oh, dear Wyzcark,” the King said, dryly, drumming his spidery fingers on Jim’s box. “Would that you gave yourself over to study every once in a while. I have examined the old legends, the arcane and ancient tales and texts. In such texts are many symbols, and this symbol, the simple image engraved on the box’s lid is a pirate symbol, the pirate symbol of a legendary treasure thought lost beneath the waves long ago.”

Jim’s beat-skipping heart began to hammer in his chest. So the symbol of the scepter had a meaning after all! Hudson had told him that the secret to his father’s treasure had been
in
the box. Was it written
on
the box as well? Could his father have possibly found this legendary treasure on his last, mysterious voyage?

Jim strained his ears to hear more of the muffled conversation when the sound of another familiar voice chimed in behind him, and unfortunately there was no wall between Jim and this speaker.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the la’est, grea’est member of the Ratt clan, or does he think he’s a monkey swingin’ from a vine?” Jim closed his eyes and sighed as a rough hand spun him away from the window and back toward the alley. Big Red stood in the alley, upside down in Jim’s view, the widest and wickedest smile Jim could imagine splayed across his face. Red’s lunks were there too, laughing dumbly beside their chief.

“A monkey! Brilliant!”

“That’s what he is all right, a lil’ monkey, you said it, Red! Spot on! Spot on!”

“A monkey — a monkey that smells like cabbage!”

All three of the lunks pranced around, hooting like organ grinder’s monkeys themselves until Red snapped his fingers (although he did have to snap twice, for the third lunk continued hooting and laughing at his own ridiculousness after the first time.)

“So does the monkey want somethin’ to eat?” Red taunted. “An apple perhaps? A nice green one?” Red laughed and his three lunks laughed with him. Jim wished with all his heart that he could just disappear. Apparently word traveled fast amongst the clans, and his embarrassing failure in the market was already juicy gossip. “We all know about it, my good fell-ow,” Red continued mercilessly. “That was the worst nickin’ I’ve ever heard of! I mean seriously, it was pathetic!”

“Yeah, pathetic!” his lunks chimed in, guffawing loudly. There was nothing Jim could do but hang by his ankle and grow madder and more humiliated with each barb.

“So what are you doing here, besides just…hanging around?” Red and his lunks burst out laughing at his cleverness.