Wicked Business

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Thursdays are usually quiet at the bakery. It was one o’clock and the lunch rush was done rushing. I had the dishwasher loaded and baking trays stacked in the sink for scrubbing. Clara had just put the day’s last loaves of bread into the oven. Glo was alone in the shop, reading Ripple’s Books of Spells, trying to find something that would reverse the charm she put on Hatchet.

We had the door to the kitchen open for air. It was sixty degrees out, with a brilliant blue sky and a hint of a breeze. I heard a car pull into the little back lot, two doors opened and closed, and Diesel ushered an old man into the work area.

The man was about 5′10″ and bony. He had pure white hair, beady eagle eyes, and huge old man ears.

“I don’t know why I’m getting dragged around like this,” he said. “You get to be an age where you should do what you want and not have someone telling you to do this and do that and don’t do this and don’t do that. You’re lucky I’m so easygoing, or I’d be complaining to somebody. I’ve got rights, you know. And I’m no slouch, either. I can do things. Did I ever tell you I could bend a spoon? Alls I have to do is think about it. How many people could do that one, eh? I could bend a fork, too, but a tire iron is a tough one. I gotta have a good night’s sleep before I could bend a tire iron.”

“This is Mortimer Sandman,” Diesel said. “I’m hanging with him until his son comes to pick him up tonight.”

“He’s babysitting me,” Mortimer said. “Won’t let me out of his sight. Like I’m decrepit or something. Thought he was going to offer to wipe my behind in the men’s room. Feed me my soup so I don’t dribble. How about if you chew my sandwich for me?”

“You tried to sneak away on me, twice,” Diesel said.

“Yeah, I’m a real threat for a hotshot like you with all your superpowers. Did I ever tell you about the time I bent three spoons at once? It was at a party, and I just concentrated, and all of a sudden all the ladies’ spoons up and bent. You could hear them gasp. I didn’t say anything, because that’s our code. We don’t mention nothing about what we do. I was hot that night. I could have bent anything. Boy, those were the days. I could still bend stuff, but I gotta be careful on account of I got high blood pressure. I don’t want to bust a blood vessel over some spoon. It was better back in the day when they were real silver. Softer, more bendable, if you know what I mean. Everything’s stainless now. I could get a hernia trying to bend some of them stainless pieces.”

“What’s the deal with him?” Glo asked Diesel.

“He puts people to sleep, and then he steals stuff,” Diesel said.

“So they should stay awake and guard their stuff if it’s so valuable,” Mortimer said. “How am I supposed to know they want it? You can’t even have a conversation with people today without them falling asleep. Sometimes they sleep with their eyes open. I don’t know why they don’t fall over. If it was me, I’d fall over, but I don’t have that problem. I stay awake. I pay attention. I’ve always been able to pay attention. You gotta concentrate to bend a spoon.” He looked over at Clara. “What about you? I bet you can’t bend a spoon.”

Clara didn’t say anything. Her eyes were glassy and her mouth was slack.

“Hey, girly,” Mortimer said to Clara. “I’m talking to you. Wake up.”

Clara made an effort to focus. “Sorry, I think I dozed off there for a minute.”

“How does he do it?” I asked Diesel. “Magic?”

“Boredom,” Diesel said. “He just keeps talking, and eventually, your mind turns to the consistency of grits. He lives with his son in Newton, but he ran away from home three weeks ago.”

“Why don’t you talk about me like I’m not even here,” Mortimer said. “What, do I look like I’m deaf? Do you know what it’s like to live with my son? It’s a mortuary. Why don’t I just shoot myself, or jump off a bridge, or drink rat poison. He never does anything. He watches television. What kind of life is that? I need action. I need some hot mamas.”

“I found you living in the park,” Diesel said.

“I like the park. Lots of fresh air. And people come around in a van and hand out baloney sandwiches twice a day. I like baloney sandwiches. When I was a kid, I always ate baloney sandwiches. I’d take one to school with me every day. My son never eats baloney. He says the stuff in baloney will kill you. I say when? I’ve got cataracts, high blood pressure, enlarged prostate, skin cancer, hemorrhoids, an artificial hip, false teeth, and gas. Every day I take eleven different pills and a stool softener. And now I’m supposed to worry about baloney.”

“I thought you were going to save mankind this afternoon,” I said to Diesel.

“That’s still the plan,” Diesel said. “We’ll have to take Morty with us.”

I had a new batch of rejected meat pies in a bag on my workstation. “Have you had lunch? Do you want a pie?” I asked him.

“I’m good,” Diesel said. “I had a baloney sandwich in the park.”

“I’ll be done in a few minutes,” I told him.

“What about me?” Glo asked. “You need me, right? You can’t save the world without me. Can you wait until three o’clock? That’s when I’m done.”

“I don’t know what we’re doing, but I think we should wait for her,” Morty said. “She’s a cutie. She makes me want to bend a spoon. Did I ever tell you about the time I bent three spoons at once? I was at this dinner party and…”

Clara groaned. “Don’t wait until three o’clock. Leave now. All of you. If he stays here any longer, I’ll go into a coma.”

An hour later, we were standing in front of Old North Church.

“I’ll go in first,” Diesel said. “Give me five minutes to look around, and then all three of you can come in. When you see me go downstairs, make sure no one follows me.”

“Oh boy,” Morty said. “We’re pulling off a caper, aren’t we? Now, this is more like it. Don’t you worry. No one’s gonna get past me and go down those stairs. You can count on me.”

“Keep your eye on him,” Diesel said to me. “He’s sneaky.”

“You bet I am,” Morty said. “I’m a slippery old bugger. You turn your back on me, and-whoosh-I’m gone. Unless I’m with two hot chicks, like you girls, then I might hang around. I’m as old as dirt, but I still got it. One day last month, I almost had a boner.”

“The golden years,” Diesel said. “I’d like to hear more, but I have to rob a grave. Give me a head start and then come in and cover me.”

I watched him walk to the church and go through the red door. I timed five minutes and turned to Glo. “Morty and I will stand close to the stairs that lead down to the crypt. You position yourself more toward the middle of the church. If we see someone who looks official, we talk to them, ask questions, so they don’t go near the stairs.”

“Gotcha,” Glo said. “Let’s do it.”

A family of tourists stood in the center aisle, staring up at the pipe organ in the balcony. Someone who appeared to be a docent was talking to them and gesturing toward the organ. The docent was a pleasant-looking woman in her fifties. She was wearing sensible shoes, a brown skirt, and a tan sweater set. She had a name tag pinned to her cardigan sweater, but I couldn’t see it from this distance.

Morty and I moved toward the stairs, so we screened Diesel while he stepped over the rope that prohibited entry. In seconds, Diesel was out of sight and Morty and I were standing guard.

“What’s he after down there?” Morty asked. “It’s gotta be something real valuable. Like jewels or a bag of money or a treasure map.”

“He’s looking for a bell.”

“Does it have jewels on it?”

“No, but we’re hoping it has a secret message.”

“I like the sound of that. This is like Indiana Jones, where he goes into a tomb and he’s looking for a clue to something. I don’t remember all the details, but there’s spiders and a big boulder that could have crushed him, but it didn’t. It might not have happened in that order, but it was pretty darn exciting. I’ve seen all the Indiana Jones movies. And I’ve seen all the James Bond movies, too. That Bond was a cool cucumber. He knew what to do with the ladies.”

A man and a woman came into the church and joined the family listening to the docent. Morty and I pretended to be reading a plaque on the wall. Glo was still hanging in the middle. A couple minutes passed, and two women walked in and went to the docent.

Glo meandered over to me and studied the plaque Morty and I had been pretending to read. “We might have a problem,” Glo said. “I’ve been eavesdropping. There’s a crypt tour scheduled. They’re waiting for one more person to arrive.”

I glanced at the entrance to the stairs. No Diesel. Even with Diesel’s skills, it probably wasn’t easy to get into Charles Duane’s hidey-hole. I saw an older man enter the church and my heart skipped a beat. The tour group was complete. The nine people gathered around the guide, she gave a short speech, and she motioned for them to follow her.

Still no Diesel.

Glo shot me a panicked grimace and pantomimed hanging herself.

“They’re going to walk in on Diesel,” I said to Morty. “We need to do something to distract them.”

“What?”

“You need to have a heart attack.”

“I had one of them last year, but I had a stent put in, and now I’m good as new.”

“Fake it!”

“Arghh,” Morty yelled, staggering forward, lunging at the tour group. “Can’t breathe. Got pain.” He clawed at the air with one hand, and he had the other clamped to his chest. “I’m having a heart attack,” he said, eyes rolling in their sockets, tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth. “It’s a big one.”

Everyone’s first reaction was stunned silence, and then it was utter mayhem.

“Call 911!”

“Who knows CPR?”

“Get him an aspirin.”

“Do something!”

Morty crashed into a pew and went down to his knees. “Heart attack!” he said, crawling to the middle of the church. “I’m dying. Somebody help me. I see the tunnel with the light at the end.”

Everyone, including Glo, was crouched around Morty.

“Loosen his clothes,” someone said.

“Let the cutie do it,” Morty said.

I was staring, open-mouthed, at the scene in the middle of the church, and Diesel slung an arm around me.

“He isn’t really having a heart attack, is he?” Diesel asked.

“No. They were about to take a tour group into the crypt. This was the best we could come up with on short notice.”

Diesel had his bulging backpack hung on one shoulder. “I have the bell. You need to rescue Morty before the paramedics show up and take him for a ride.”

I inserted myself into the crowd and stared down at Morty. “You look a lot better now,” I said to him. “You’ve got good color back in your face. I think the heart attack must have passed. I’ve got Dr. Diesel waiting to check you out.”

“Dr. Diesel’s here?” Morty asked.

“Yep.”

Morty got to his feet. “I don’t see the tunnel no more. I must be all healed. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I might have had gas.”

“Appreciate your concern,” I said to the tour group, grabbing Morty by the arm. “Thanks so much for your help. I’ll take it from here.”

“I’ll help get him to Dr. Diesel,” Glo said, on Morty’s other arm. “Thanks a bunch,” she called over her shoulder. “Have fun on your tour.”

Diesel was already on the sidewalk when we whisked Morty out the door. A Boston Police car turned onto the street, lights flashing, and we put our heads down and marched off in the opposite direction.

“I should get an Academy Award for that,” Morty said. “It’s a shame we didn’t get to record it. I should be on one of them doctor shows where people die every week. I was an accountant for forty-five years. What was I thinking? I should have been a movie star.”

We walked down Salem Street, turned onto a side street, and happened upon a small deserted park. We sat on a bench and looked around. No police. No one paying any attention to us.

“What was it like down there?” I asked Diesel.

“Cramped. Nothing fancy. Mostly brick walls with burial chambers sealed behind cement and small metal doors. Cement floor freshly painted. Fortunately, Duane’s tomb wasn’t completely cemented over, and the bell was right up front behind the door.”

“Was there anything written on the bell?”

“I didn’t see anything when I grabbed it.”

Diesel pulled the bell out of his pack and held it out for us to see.

“Are you sure you want to bring the bell out in the open like this?” I asked him.

“There’s no reason why anyone would suspect this bell came from the church. I put the door back in place, and it should be okay unless someone knocks up against it. With the exception of a little dust on the floor, there’s no reason to suspect anything weird happened.”

We all studied the bell inside and out, but we didn’t see any message. Diesel swished the bell back and forth. Clang, clang, clang. No message.

“Touch it,” Diesel said to me. “See if it’s holding energy.”

I put my hand to the bell. “It’s warm,” I said. “And it vibrates under my touch. I can’t say if it’s imprinted with a message, but I can tell you it has abnormal energy.”

“Maybe you have to play all nine of the bells for the message to surface,” Glo said.

Glo was totally into this. Morty was along for the ride. And it was hard to tell what Diesel was thinking. On the one hand, I was having a hard time believing that ringing nine bells would produce a magical message. But then on the other hand, it didn’t seem so far removed from television, the Internet, and microwave cooking. Technology and magic were closely aligned in my brain.

“Okay,” Diesel said. “Let’s go back to the church. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around a message magically appearing on this bell, but I haven’t anything better to contribute.”

We went back to Salem Street and walked several blocks to the church. I went in first and looked around. The church seemed to be empty. No tour group. No docent. I motioned for everyone else to come in.

“Now what?” I said.

“There’s a bell-ringing room,” Glo said. “Upstairs somewhere.”

“I’m game,” Morty said. “Let’s ring some bells.”

I looked up at the balcony and beyond. “I hate to be the voice of reason, but I’m sure the bell-ringing room is in the bell tower. There’s going to be a long staircase up, and once we ring the bells, that staircase will be crawling with people coming to investigate.”

“I know you can bend a spoon,” Diesel said to Morty. “How are you with heavy metal? Can you get the bells to ring?”

“Not my gig,” Morty said. “I’m strictly a bender. You need someone who could throw a Volkswagen.”

The sounds of footsteps and conversation drifted out from the side of the church and the tour group emerged. The docent spotted Morty and gave a gasp of surprise. She left the group and walked over to us.

“Is he all right?” she asked.

“He’s fine,” I said. “He just needed his medication.”

“That was a fright,” she said. “I’m surprised to see you back here.”

“The truth is, we’re fascinated by the bells,” I said. “We were hoping there was a way we could hear them ring.”

“They rang during practice yesterday,” she said, “but they won’t ring again until Sunday.”

“We’ll be gone by then,” I told her. “Isn’t there some way we could hear them today?”

“You can hear them electronically. We have an interactive display in the gift shop, and you can also hear them online if you go to the bellringers’ website.”

“Thanks,” I said. “We’ll try the gift shop.”

“So happy to hear you’re feeling better,” she said to Morty. And she returned to her group.

We left the church and walked next door to the gift shop. The interactive display was next to shelves of miniature bells, books about the bells, and CDs. The display on the touch screen showed eight bells and gave a description of each one. I touched bell number one and it played a bell tone. The tone for number two was slightly different. There were several people browsing in the store. No one looked our way.

Diesel took the bell out of his pack and held it in front of the display. “Play all eight of the bells,” he said to me.

I played the bells on the screen, and we watched Duane’s bell.

“Anybody see anything?” I asked.

Everyone shook their heads no.

Diesel made the bell clang. Still nothing.

I had Glo’s drawing with me. I pulled it out of my pocket and looked at it. “The bells aren’t numbered consecutively,” I said. “The number three bell gets played first.”

I played the bells according to the napkin, Diesel clanged Duane’s bell, and we all held our breath as words appeared on the bell. The silence often of pure innocence persuades when speaking fails. The history often of Tichy persuades when pure innocence prevails.

Glo pulled a pen out of her tote bag, copied the message onto the back of a gift shop brochure, and gave it to me.

“That was weird,” Morty said.

Not so much, I thought. Weird was my new normal.