Broomstick - The Inspector Wolfe Tales, #1 - Part Five

The ballroom was crowded, and some musty old muskrat was up at the podium, giving a toast. I noticed a group of pigs at a table next to me, wearing waistcoats, top hats, and monocles. They were playing cards, and I quickly turned my gaze elsewhere, turning my amazing ears to the task of skimming through hundreds of data streams of chatter, sifting through conversations, eliminating irrelevant ones, and filtering everything that remained through my existing clues. What remained was something along these lines, coming from a pair of dwarves at the other end of the room:

“Did you hear the news?”

“Of course.”

“He’s dead.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“Same as tomorrow.”

“Of course. With Aleck out of the way, all that’s left is Old Man Shipton, and then Alice.”

“Yeah. When are we leaving?”

I heard one of the dwarves check his watch, zoomed in on the clicking sound, and judged by the micro-details of my hearing, or maybe by looking at my own watch (I forget which), that it was ten ‘till eleven in the morning.

“We leave in ten. You got the tools?”

“Yeah, up in my room.”

The conversation ended, and I broadened my hearing spectrum once more. I glanced at the door and saw Peter Rabbit entering the ballroom, looking around earnestly, and so I swiped a man’s top hat (I am quite the pickpocket when I focus) and put it on, grabbing a large platter of prawns to conceal my face, and beelined it for the leaving dwarves.

I tailed them out the opposite door of the room, handing the platter of prawns to a waiter outside the door and quietly creeping down the hall after the two dwarves.

They turned down several corridors, not speaking, and headed up a stairwell. I kept stealthily after them, and I reached the top of the stairs—to be whacked with a frying pan.

****

“Who do you work for?”

“What?” I opened my eyes blearily. There was a person with a black mask over his head, a bushy beard poking out from underneath it.

“I said, who do you work for?!”

“You know full well,” I replied wittily. Another masked bearded fellow stepped into my frame of vision, and I realized I was in a hotel room, tied to a chair, and there were six short bearded people with masks, in total, all watching eagerly. One even had a bag of popcorn and was munching noisily.

“Them?”

“Yeah, them,” I said, trying to sell this. I had no idea who them were.

“The three?”

“Yeah, the three. Who else, man?”

“Dwarf,” said the interrogator. “Who else, dwarf. We’re very proud of our heritage.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I replied. “Let me go.”

“O’ course, dude. Sorry about whacking you with the frying pan. You coming to check on our progress?”

I assumed that the “three” were the ones calling the shots, so I answered, “Yeah. How is it?”

“It’s good. The heist is about to go down, and then we’ll have it. We’re still getting paid, right?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “One last thing. The bosses said I had to tag along for the job.” This was the best way to get answers, to blend in with the criminal party. It was highly dangerous, of course, but I didn’t have anything else to go on, and the dwarves had discovered me.

One of them yawned and unbound me from the chair, and the interrogator asked, “What? We specified we go in as a team. No tourists.”

“Well, yeah, but I’m no tourist,” I said, and lightning fast I dead-legged the dwarf and swung him around, wrapping my arm around his neck. The dwarves stirred and tensed, readying to pounce. I released the dwarf and said, “I’m for real. Professional.”

The dwarf coughed. “All right, fine. Name’s Grumpy.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, quickly surmising that these were the infamous seven dwarves. But then I realized there were only six. “Hey, where’s number seven?” I asked.

“He’s already at the place, doing surveillance,” answered Grumpy, then turned to his pals and said, “All right, load up! We’re late.”