Nanny X Returns (7 page)

He unlocked his office door and made a gasping sound. The room was as neat as Mr. Huffleberger himself. But the desk looked like someone had emptied a recycling bin on top of it. There were papers everywhere, with bite-sized chunks taken out of them.

“What's this?” said Mr. Huffleberger. “Picasso? Picasso, where are you?” I thought maybe Mr. Huffleberger had a Picasso painting hanging on his wall, which would count as a national treasure, and that someone—The Angler, for instance—had stolen it. But he rushed behind his desk and bear-hugged the world's largest cat, who was puffed up like a balloon at the Thanksgiving parade. Mr. Huffleberger looked through the door at us. “Who did you say you were?”

“Investigators,” said Boris.

“Then investigate!”

I tied Yeti's leash around the lamppost and Stinky and I followed Boris into Mr. Huffleberger's office. Aside from the desk, everything was in its place. There was a lamp with a green shade and a coatrack with no coats. On the wall there was only one painting, and it wasn't by Picasso. The picture was of a moose. In the corner it said “Huffleberger.”

“You paint?” Boris asked, as Mr. Huffleberger inspected the cat to make sure he hadn't been injured.

Mr. Huffleberger smiled a thin-lipped smile. “I used to,” he said. “But I learned that my true calling is words.”

I wondered what my true calling was. I didn't think it was math, even if I did get problem No. 7 right. Art was still a possibility. And special-agent work, as long as we didn't mess up this case.

Boris pulled up an antenna on the side of his iPod and used it to measure the bites on Mr. Huffleberger's papers. He was about to measure the bite of Mr. Huffleberger's cat, too, but Picasso let out a vampire hiss.

“I'll estimate,” Boris said.

Mr. Huffleberger put his fingers on his neck, as if he was checking his pulse. “Who would do this to me?” he said. Something told me that a lot of people wanted to harm Mr. Huffleberger, including Ursula.

“About those photos . . .” I said, getting back to the original subject. A good special agent has to stay on task.

“If we must,” he said. He put down the cat and opened the desk drawer to reveal a bunch of yellow folders. But under U, the only files he had were for “Umbrellas,” “University” and “Untitled.” The file for the artist named Ursula was missing.

Nanny X changed from her bunny slippers to her regular shoes before we went into the White House. Then she led us past the people who were waiting in line for the one o'clock tour.

“May I help you?” asked the guard.

“Nanny X,” said Nanny X. “We're with NAP.” She waved her hands around to show that “we” meant me, too.

I expected the man to send us back to the end of the line. I expected him to say “Come back later.” Instead he said, “We've been expecting you.” He spoke into his walkie-talkie: “It's NAP.”

“I'll be right out,” a voice crackled back. A few minutes later someone came to meet us. She was not the president. She had short hair and wore a green dress and she walked almost as fast as Nanny X. She shined a blue light on Nanny X's badge. Then Nanny X pulled out IDs for me and Eliza and Howard. The woman looked at Howard's ID and then
lifted back his bonnet so she could make sure his face matched his picture.

“Last week we had a visit from a sloth,” said the woman, whose name tag said Camila Lopez. “This way.” She led us away from the tourists to a private metal detector and sent us through, one by one.
Beeeeeeeeep
. The fishhooks on Nanny X's hat set off the metal detector. Ms. Lopez put the hat on a conveyor belt with Eliza's stroller and the diaper bag.

“NAP agent or not,” she said, lifting the diaper bag and the stroller off the belt again, “these things stay here.” Nanny X got to keep her hat, though.

Ms. Lopez opened a heavy wooden door, and we followed her into the main building. “Welcome to the White House,” she said. “The president receives an abundance of mail, all of which is sorted off-site. The letter from The Angler is still there for further inspection. But they released the statue and delivered it here this morning.”

We walked down a long corridor, past a bunch of fancy rooms that were named after colors and dead presidents. Then Ms. Lopez led us down some stairs and into . . . a bowling alley? It only had one lane, but still. I wondered if the White House had a game room, too. If I ever become president, I'm putting in a baseball field.

Besides the bowling lane, the room had a rack-thingy with a bunch of bowling balls on it, plus two chairs. Between the chairs was a giant sculpture of a fish. He was balancing on his tail, and it looked like he was guarding the place. Someone had tied a red scarf around his neck. Someone else had given him a purple and green bowling shirt.

“The guys in the mail room have been calling him Moby Dick, after the whale,” Ms. Lopez said.

“Actually,” said Nanny X, “I believe this is a wolf fish.”

The fish didn't look like a wolf or a whale. He looked like Jabba the Hutt, only sadder. And fishier. “Look at that attention to detail,” Nanny X said. “He's magnificent.”

She plucked a fishing lure off her hat—the blue minnow, not the purple one. “Extra camera,” she explained. I put up two fingers and gave the sculpture bunny ears, as Nanny X pressed down on a fin and clicked. I wasn't tall enough to reach his head, though; instead they came out of his right fin. Nanny X pressed down on the camera's fin and clicked. “I'm sending this straight to our crime database,” she said. My bunny-ear fingers were going to be famous. I hoped NAP had a sense of humor. Because if they didn't, my sister was going to kill me.

Just then a man walked into the room and held a whispered conference with Ms. Lopez. He left her with a plastic bag that contained a note.

“From The Angler,” she said. “And this one didn't go through our sorting center. Somehow it landed here.”

Ms. Lopez handed the bag to Nanny X, who read out loud, right through the plastic:

It has begun
.

I've taken one
.

(Plus Montauban's thumb.)

Install my fish

Or you will wish

You had
.

It was signed
The Angler
.

Howard loped over to the bowling balls. He rolled a red one down the lane, using two hands instead of one. The pins blasted to the sides. Strike!

Howard clapped for himself and nodded his head.
“Eeeeee,” he said. I was pretty sure that was Howard's way of saying that The Angler had struck again.

“I must find out how this got through,” Ms. Lopez said.

“And we must contact our other operatives,” said Nanny X. I was pretty sure “operatives” meant my sister, Boris and Stinky. And Yeti, of course.

We grabbed Nanny X's diaper bag and Eliza's stroller and exited through the North Portico, which is a reading-connection word for a porch-y thing with columns.

We called Boris right away, with the diaper phone on speaker so I could hear, too.

“We received your photo of the sculpture,” he said. “Mr. Huffleberger sees a definite similarity between The Angler's fish and the fish he saw at the Georgetown gallery. It wasn't the same fish, mind, so there are doubts. But they could have been created by the same artist.”

“That's progress,” said Nanny X.

“There's more,” Boris said. “That painting that disappeared from the National Gallery? The museum is bringing in something to replace it this afternoon. I don't know what it is, but they're calling it a national treasure.”

“We'd better get over there,” Nanny X said. “Whatever it is, it's vulnerable.”

Nanny X must not have skated to the gallery, because we beat her by a mile. Yeti thumped his tail outside the museum door and sat down beneath a sign that said Only Service Animals Allowed Inside.

“Can't we bring him in?” I asked.

“Not this time,” Boris said. “There are delicate pieces inside. Yeti does not look so delicate. Let's wait for your nanny, and we will figure things out together.”

I didn't want to figure things out together. I wanted to figure things out
first
. The last case had been ours until Jake got caught and Nanny X had to give herself up to save him. Then Boris had to come and help. NAP knew all about that. Maybe that was why they gave this case to Boris and Stinky first. Maybe that was why they waited so long to call us in, leaving me to focus on math instead of stopping The Angler from slicing the thumb off of
The Great Warrior of Montauban
.

I put my hands in my pockets to keep from biting the nails off of my own thumbs. That's when we saw a van on Constitution Avenue with its blinkers on.

“Looks like we had excellent timing,” said Boris.

The van's back doors were open. The driver was in front, examining a flat tire.

“I can fix that,” Boris said.

“Who are you? Triple A?”

Boris reached into one of his pockets and pulled out a pen.

Stinky, who is always willing to help people, grabbed it from him and stuck it in the tire, pressing on the cap with his thumb.
Click. Click
. It sounded sort of like our squirrel. Slowly the tire began to fill with air.

While Stinky was working on the tire, a man from the museum came out with a pile of paperwork and two assistants.

“Quite a welcoming committee,” said the driver.

“For a work by Paul Revere?” said the museum man. “It's art and history combined. We should have fireworks.” He followed the driver to the back of the van. I followed them, too. Inside was a giant crate, which was filled with bubble wrap and packing peanuts. The crate was open, and the packing peanuts spilled across the floor of the van like snow. Inside was what I guess was a pitcher, except that the top part was chewed up, as if it had been through the garbage disposal.

“How can you pour it without a handle?” I asked. But when I looked closer, I could see where the handle
used
to be. It was missing, like the Warrior of Montauban's thumb.

The museum man and his assistants went pale. So did the driver.

“
Security!
” they yelled.

“Twice in one day,” moaned the museum man. “I'm not going to have a job tomorrow. I'm not.”

A security guard reached us just as Nanny X showed up with my sister and brother and Howard. I may have mentioned that my brother loves initials. So does Nanny X. The security guard used so many, it was like he was speaking another language.

“I'm the ASO,” he said. He didn't seem upset like everyone else. He seemed kind of happy. “Looks like we have a CODA. We'll need to put out an APB for whoever damaged our AOI.” He looked at his watch. “ETA 1400. AAR, I'm calling in the FBI. It's been one HOAD.”

Jake translated ASO, which stood for assistant security officer, and APB, which meant all-points bulletin. The security officer told us CODA stood for Case of Damaged Art, and AOI stood for Artwork of Interest. If you ask me, he made both of those up. HOAD, apparently, stood for Heck of a Day.

“Alphabet soup,” Stinky said, shaking his head. The only acronym he knew was EPA, for Environmental Protection Agency. And NAP, of course. He smiled, a slow, real smile. I wanted to smile back, but instead I got down to business.

“How can you put out an APB on a person when you don't know what he or she looks like?” I said. The only thing Mr. Huffleberger told us about Ursula, who was our main suspect, was that she had brown hair. Do you know how many people in Washington, D.C., have brown hair?

“Eeeee, eeee,” said Howard, who had brown hair. So did Boris and Stinky.

“I suppose we should check for prints,” the officer said. “But I'm betting we won't find any.”