The Order of Odd-Fish (26 page)

“Ah, Snicky, Snicky.” Oona Looch sighed. “You let me down, Snicky. But what’s worse, you let yourself down. What happened to you, Snicky? I remember when you were young, God you were handsome, you were going to set the world on fire, weren’t you, Snicky? I looked up to you, Snicky, I was just a little girl then! Why did it have to come to this?…Oh well.”

Snicky’s skull popped like a grape.

“Yep, life’s funny,” said Oona Looch, wiping Snicky’s brains off her hand. “Now take me home, girls, I think I’ve had enough excitement for tonight. And I think I can trust the rest of you to behave yourselves?”

Jo looked around the room. The gangsters mumbled, “Yes, Oona Looch. Sorry,” like shy schoolchildren.

“Good then. God bless ya, I know you’re all good kids, deep down. Well, I’ve gotta go home and do my needlepoint, maybe get some loving from Fipnit. Come along, Fipnit!” Oona Looch’s daughters picked up her throne and carried her out; Fipnit scampered alongside like a dog. But just before she left the Dome of Doom, Oona Looch turned to Ian and said, “Remember, Barrows! I owe you one!” It almost sounded like a threat.

As soon as Oona Looch was gone, Jo and Audrey flew to Ian’s side. He was still wiping Oona Looch’s slobber off his face, looking winded.

“Are you all right?” said Jo.

“Yes. No. I think so,” said Ian. “I never thought…”

“What?”

“I thought my first kiss would be different from that.”

“She’s taken a shine to you, Ian,” said Audrey. “I’d be careful.”

Jo said, “Unless you want Oona Looch to be your girlfriend.”

“She’s
not my girlfriend
!” protested Ian.

The all-night party at the Dome of Doom was just beginning, but Jo, Ian, and Audrey were ready to go home. Jo noticed, though, that they were treated with more respect now that Oona Looch had favored Ian.

But when they went to the elevator, a hostile voice came out of the darkness.

“I heard you disapproved of my fighting style.”

Jo turned and saw Fumo, the Sleeping Bee, still in full costume, flanked by her seconds. Jo couldn’t see Fumo’s face, but she was no longer speaking through the buzzing voice box. The voice was familiar.

“Yes I did,
Fiona,
” said Jo. “If I was your ostrich, I’d turn around and bite your head off.”

Fiona Fuorlini’s face poked out of her Fumo costume. “What do you know about dueling, Odd-Fish?”

“At least I know how to take care of my ostrich. You didn’t deserve to win.”

Fiona said, “If you dueled me, I’d smear you all over the arena.”

“What are you saying?” said Jo hotly.

“What do you
think
I’m saying?” said Fiona.

“What, you don’t have the guts to come out and say it?” said Jo, hopping around on one foot as she wrenched off her shoe.

“Jo, don’t!” exclaimed Audrey.

It was too late. Jo hurled her shoe at Fiona. The shoe struck Fiona in the face.

“Consider yourself challenged!” said Jo.

Everyone in the area stopped talking. All eyes turned to the little space where Jo and Fiona stood across from each other.

Jo glanced over to Audrey. “Isn’t that how it’s done?”

“I was kidding about the shoe,” said Audrey.

K
EN
Kiang was quite pleased with himself.

He had been in Eldritch City for only two months, but his project—to outwit the Belgian Prankster, to disrupt his plans, to overthrow his infernal machinations—was unexpectedly succeeding.

It had not always been so. At first his situation had been desperate. Ken Kiang had followed the Belgian Prankster’s lengthy, seemingly senseless instructions on how to find Eldritch City, and after weeks of exhaustion and frustration, he finally arrived—but he had nothing. No money. No friends. Nowhere to live.

All he had was the Belgian Prankster’s packet, and a strategy.

Ken Kiang’s first goal was to find a job, to support himself while he schemed against the Belgian Prankster. He answered an ad in the
Eldritch Snitch
and got a position as a clerk at the Municipal Squires Authority, working for Commissioner Olvershaw.

It was a tedious job. It took a small army of clerks to manage the paperwork for receiving quest submissions, approving quests, and assigning quests to squires. Ken Kiang settled into the drudgery of his new career, filing documents nobody would look for, making copies nobody wanted, and writing reports nobody would read.

He was disgusted by the other clerks, who shamelessly groveled to Commissioner Olvershaw at every opportunity. The sound of Olvershaw’s wheelchair creaking down the hall made all the clerks work ever more furiously, panicked that Olvershaw would catch them in a moment of idleness. But after Olvershaw passed, the clerks nearly swooned with joy, and then quarreled over who was Olvershaw’s favorite, for they idolized the commissioner as much as they feared him.

Ken Kiang scorned the clerks’ craven ways and made it a point to slack off, even yawn ostentatiously, whenever Olvershaw rolled by his office. He had hoped his devil-may-care attitude might broaden the other clerks’ worldview, but the clerks just shook their heads at Ken Kiang, wringing their hands and murmuring, “Olvershaw…but Olvershaw…oh, oh, Olvershaw!”

Ken Kiang’s meager salary obliged him to live in one of the subsidized boardinghouses set aside for city clerks, a dingy dormitory in the unfashionable neighborhood of Bimblebridge run by Eleanor Olvershaw, the commissioner’s spinster sister. The dormitory was already full of boarders, but Ms. Olvershaw let Ken Kiang sleep in the kitchen, behind a partition, in the corner where a garbage can used to sit.

And yet the tiny space suited him. “Some might say I’ve ‘come down’ in the world,” he reflected. “But actually I’ve simplified my life. I’ve stripped away all distractions. Now I can really concentrate on defeating the Belgian Prankster. I’m on top of the world!” Ken Kiang huddled in his moth-eaten blanket and quietly giggled.

“No giggling after ten o’clock,” snapped Ms. Olvershaw.

All the lodgers at Ms. Olvershaw’s boardinghouse also worked at the Municipal Squires Authority. Ken Kiang loathed them all. The worst time was Friday nights, when the other clerks came shouting boisterously into the kitchen, dressed in their “good” suits, the smell of pomade and cheap cologne wafting offensively from them. They pounded on Ken Kiang’s partition, trying to get him to join them for a “big night on the town.”

“Come on, Ken! We know you’re in there!” The flimsy partition rattled under their knocking. “We’re going to paint the town red. What do you say?”

No! Ken Kiang’s mind was on loftier matters! Every night he opened the Belgian Prankster’s packet and laid the hundreds of papers out on his mattress. The papers specified his role in the Belgian Prankster’s grand plan to destroy Eldritch City. He was directed to perform countless small acts of sabotage, all around the city: a bolt loosened, a wire cut, a key stolen, a file destroyed. Each action was nothing in itself, but taken together, they would make the seemingly solid metropolis into a house of cards, which one push in the right spot would send into collapse.

Ken Kiang admired the Belgian Prankster’s elegant plan. It was genius, and it would work. But he had no wish to destroy Eldritch City—and he had every desire to defy the Belgian Prankster.

So Ken Kiang subverted the plan at every opportunity. He tightened the bolts, replaced the wires, duplicated the keys, backed up the files. But the Belgian Prankster was not so easily beaten. Later Ken Kiang would find his own countermoves themselves inexplicably countered. Ken Kiang knew he was but one cog in an unthinkably complex scheme; perhaps the Belgian Prankster’s agents were monitoring him; perhaps the plan was so perfectly conceived that the sheer force of circumstance frustrated his attempts to disrupt it. Ken Kiang countered the countermove of his countermove, and the battle was joined.

Eldritch City became for Ken Kiang a vast, complex chessboard, the stage for an exhilaratingly complex game between him and the Belgian Prankster. He analyzed the Belgian Prankster’s master plan, and for each of its objectives he devised a strategy to thwart it. But soon Ken Kiang found he was both cat and mouse in a bewildering showdown with the Belgian Prankster, in which strategies of ever greater sophistication were deployed, canceled, reversed, appropriated, adapted, and foiled; pawns sacrificed, attacks repulsed, fortresses stormed and captured, treaties signed and betrayed, retreats faked and traps sprung, territory gained, lost, besieged, divided, despoiled, and exchanged—it was a shadow world, of infinite levels of deceit and disguise, of decoys that were Trojan horses full of more decoys that were red herrings in non-mysteries that had neither a solution nor a problem, concerning people that didn’t exist in a place that was nowhere in a situation that was impossible! It was a five-dimensional smorgasbord of invisible meals, and he was both chef and guest at a dinner party for which the guest list was both infinite and zero! Ken Kiang’s mind reeled. The battleground was the ordinary streets and buildings of Eldritch City, and yet the battle itself was undetectable to the untrained eye, for the smallest detail—a broken lightbulb, a misplaced book, an intercepted letter—made all the difference in a war no less savage for its almost excruciating subtlety.

Many of Ken Kiang’s plans were executed at night, so he usually slept at work. And sometimes, as he dozed at his desk, he wondered how Hoagland Shanks was getting on. Just before he left for Eldritch City, Ken Kiang had given Shanks a credit card with an unlimited account—a credit card valid only for buying pies or traveling to the pie capitals of the world.

Ken Kiang hadn’t told Hoagland Shanks that the credit card would be automatically canceled in five months. But by then it would be too late for Hoagland Shanks! Yes, he would already be addicted, already well down the road to pie damnation…Ken Kiang nodded at his desk, his mind becoming fuzzier, fantasizing about Hoagland Shanks’s desperate plight.

By now, Hoagland Shanks would have become jaded in his tastes. Apple, cherry, blueberry—Shanks would scorn such pies now. Now Shanks would prefer only the most sophisticated pies: toad pie, pickled squid pie, pies made of the sweet dung of a rare African bat—pies filled with certain Arabian beetles that keep their sumptuous tang only when eaten
alive
!

But those days are no more, Hoagland Shanks! Ken Kiang imagined Hoagland Shanks after the credit card was canceled…. Yes! Hoagland Shanks penniless on the streets of Ankara; spiritually broken in Tokyo; floundering in a ditch near Berlin; selling his blood in London; tearfully trying to make a pie out of things he found in the gutter in New York…Did the man who once ate twenty avant-garde pies a day now scavenge in an alley, trying to make a “pie” out of cigarette butts and government cheese? Yes! Ken Kiang chuckled in his dream as Hoagland Shanks shook his fist at the sky, sobbing, “Why? How? Oh, woe! How did I become such a man? Ken Kiang! You master of evil, you have destroyed my soul! Ken Kiang! Ken Kiang…!”

Ken Kiang woke up. A cringing clerk stood at his office door, sweating and fiddling with his hat. “Ken Kiang? Commissioner Olvershaw wants to see you. He…I don’t know, Ken! He seems…Oh!…Trouble…Olvershaw…ahhh…you better get to his office on the double, Kenny!”

Ken Kiang glanced leisurely at the clock. “I might get around to it,” he yawned.

An hour later, Ken Kiang slouched into Olvershaw’s office, quite as if he had wandered in by accident. Ignoring Olvershaw, he slumped into a chair and started picking his teeth.

He barely listened as Commissioner Olvershaw sternly lectured him. Ken Kiang’s shoddy work, his sleeping on the job, his coming in late—and sometimes not at all!—he knew all the accusations in advance. He sighed loudly, infuriating Olvershaw even more, causing the old man to vibrate with rage. Ken Kiang saw the clerks cowering in the hall, wringing their hands and sucking their breaths nervously. When Olvershaw finally fired him, Ken Kiang barely noticed, for he was staring out the window with a distant smile on his lips.

He had the most wonderful idea.

It was this. Ken Kiang felt he was winning the war against the Belgian Prankster. Ken Kiang believed that the Belgian Prankster had several times actually attempted to return to Eldritch City—only to be blocked by his brilliant strategies. He knew the advantage was his; but how to press it? He felt he was on the verge of striking the blow that would finally crush the Belgian Prankster’s grand plan, perhaps even destroy the Belgian Prankster himself.

But—the eternal problem—how to do it with style? For Ken Kiang, it was never enough to win. It was the verve, the showmanship, above all the
arrogant stunt
that mattered—the crucial cherry on top that said, “Not only have I won, but I won with enough leisure to toss in this final, outrageous flourish.”

But
what
?

A musical!

The inspiration had come to him while Olvershaw was firing him. It occurred to Ken Kiang that nobody in Eldritch City properly appreciated him. Here he was, Ken Kiang, saving the city from the Belgian Prankster on practically a daily basis, and nobody knew! So why not write, direct, and star in a
musical
about his adventures in Eldritch City, and his audacious victory over the Belgian Prankster? He imagined a grand spectacle, a cast of hundreds, glittering costumes, gorgeous scenery…was this too ambitious? No, Ken Kiang scorned the thought! He had once thought it was too ambitious to take on the Belgian Prankster—and now the Belgian Prankster was wriggling in the palm of his hand! He calculated he need only toy with the Belgian Prankster a few weeks more, while he wrote and rehearsed his musical. Then he could both premiere his musical and crush the Belgian Prankster in one fell swoop—and thus the demands of both duty and style would be satisfied!

Upon returning to the boardinghouse, Ken Kiang learned that he was evicted.

“These rooms are for city clerks only, Kiang,” said Ms. Olvershaw. “I expect you out by supper.”

Dazed but strangely unruffled, Ken Kiang gathered his belongings. Clutching them to his chest, he stumbled down the hallway of the boardinghouse as the other clerks peered fearfully out of their rooms. Ken Kiang heard them sigh with relief as he passed. He couldn’t hold on to all his stuff at once; crusty socks and scribbled-on paper fell from his bundle; he didn’t bother to pick them up.

The clerks gathered on the front porch as Ken Kiang trudged into the street. Ms. Olvershaw’s face glared from an upstairs window, but the clerks seemed genuinely sad to see him go. He heard their farewells: “Hey, Kenny! Hope it works out for yuh!” “Keep pluggin’ away!” “Just remember the good times we had at the old boardinghouse!”

Ken Kiang turned around, incredulous. Were they mocking him? Were they sincere? He honestly couldn’t tell. Rainy season was starting; droplets of water splattered around him, faster and faster. But it didn’t matter what happened to him, he didn’t care,
he knew
he had the Belgian Prankster on the ropes; and once he finished his musical,
everyone
would know his true worth!

“Endgame, Belgian Prankster!” roared Ken Kiang triumphantly. “You played well, but the advantage is mine! Endgame! Check
and
mate, old fellow.
Endgame!
”

Ken Kiang jumped up and down on the street corner, squawking and waving his arms. People discreetly crossed the street to avoid him.