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.”
