Читать книгу Freddy the Magician - Walter Rollin Brooks - Страница 4

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When they left Mr. Boomschmidt, Freddy and Mrs. Wiggins joined one of the gangs that were cleaning up the circus grounds. After they had worked a while, the cooks who prepared the meals for the circus people came out carrying big freezers and a lot of plates and spoons, and everybody knocked off and had ice cream.

This was an idea of Mr. Boomschmidt’s, and it was one of the reasons why people liked to work for him—he was always giving them little surprises.

Freddy licked his plate clean and lay back in the grass. “I wonder why that magician started to come back when he found out we were detectives?” he said.

“Maybe he’s committed some crime,” said the cow. “Maybe he thinks we’re after him.”

They puzzled over Signor Zingo’s strange behavior for a while, but could find no explanation for it, and were just thinking about going back to work again when a rabbit came hopping up to them. He wasn’t anybody Freddy knew. All the rabbits on the Bean farm were sort of light tan color, but this one was pure white. He said: “Good morning, sir. Are you Frederick of Frederick and Wiggins, the famous detectives?”

“I am,” said the pig, “and this is my associate, Mrs. Wiggins.” He looked sharply at the rabbit. “I’ve seen you before somewhere. Wait a minute,” he said. “I know who you are. You’re the rabbit that Signor Zingo took out of a silk hat during his performance Tuesday.”

“I see, sir,” said the rabbit, “that you are indeed as clever as people say you are. A brilliant piece of deduction, if I may say so, sir.”

Freddy liked praise as well as most people but he thought the rabbit was laying it on pretty thick. “Nonsense,” he said gruffly; “there’s nothing very brilliant about recognizing someone you’ve seen before. I looked carefully at that hat trick. And by the way, how does he do it? Do you really disappear?”

“Oh yes, sir. Absolutely invisible. I’d gladly show you how it’s done if we only had the hat. But it blew away. It’s lost. And that is why I came over here—to see if you wouldn’t help me find it.”

“I wouldn’t help that boss of yours find his hat if he offered me a thousand dollars. I wouldn’t help him find it if he crawled up to me on his knees and knocked his forehead on the ground three times and rubbed ashes in his hair. I wouldn’t ...”

“You mean you won’t help me?” said the rabbit. “Oh, dear!” And his ears, which had stuck up straight in the regular rabbit position, began to droop. They began at the tips and went slowly down, like little window shades, until they hung straight down beside his head, making him look terribly forlorn.

“My land,” said Mrs. Wiggins, “that’s quite a trick!”

“It’s not a trick!” said the rabbit sharply. “My ears always do that when I’m unhappy.”

“That’s interesting,” Freddy said. “Now when I’m unhappy, the curl always comes out of my tail. But of course,” he said kindly, “you haven’t much in the way of a tail.”

“I have too,” the rabbit retorted, “and it isn’t all twisted up like a pretzel, either! But forgive me,” he said, “I didn’t want to start an argument. I—well, I was sure you’d take my case; first, because it’s an extremely difficult one, and second, because it’s extremely unusual. And everyone tells me that as a solver of really difficult cases, there is no one to equal you. I am sure that with your brilliant deductive powers and your wide knowledge of animal nature ...”

“Skip the flattery,” said Freddy. “We do like difficult cases, but we don’t like Signor Zingo, or his hat, or his rabbit, or anything that belongs to him. And so—”

“But I don’t like Zingo either,” the rabbit interrupted. “He fired me. He said I was no good to him without the hat. And when I asked him how I was going to live, he just laughed and said: ‘Go fend for yourself. Rabbits can always live off the country.’”

“Well, can’t they?” Mrs. Wiggins asked.

“I suppose so, if they’re brought up to it. But I’m a magician’s rabbit. I don’t know how.”

“That was pretty mean—kicking you out after you’d worked for him a long time,” said the cow.

“Can’t he get another hat?” Freddy asked.

“He said such hats were too expensive—he couldn’t afford it. And that’s the reason I came to you: he said if I could find the hat he’d take me on again.”

Freddy shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we don’t take out-of-town cases any more—just do local detective work for our friends, and that keeps us busy. Besides, I intend to take up magic and conjuring this summer, and I won’t have any extra time.”

“Magic!” said the rabbit. “Well, if you want magic, there’s nobody who can teach you more about it than I can. Can’t we make a deal: you take my case and I’ll teach you magic?”

“Could you show us how Signor Zingo saws that girl in two?” Mrs. Wiggins asked eagerly.

“Sure. Nothing to it. I can teach you all those tricks.”

Freddy said: “H’m,” and the rabbit’s ears went halfway up. “But on the other hand ...” said Freddy, and the ears went down again.

“Let’s hear his case anyway, Freddy,” said the cow.

Freddy said: “I’m not specially interested in sawing anybody in two. I wouldn’t care to try it on anybody I liked, and on anybody I didn’t like it would be sort of a waste of time, since apparently they don’t stay sawed. But we can hear your story.”

The rabbit’s name was Presto. He was called that because when Signor Zingo made him appear out of a hat, he always said: “Presto, change-o!” He came of a long line of disappearing rabbits: his grandfather had worked for Houdini, and both he and his father had worked for Zingo.

This hat trick was one of the most difficult in all magic, Presto said, because it was real magic, not like making a girl disappear from a cabinet, which was done by having her climb down through a concealed trap door in the floor. “When I get into the hat and then disappear,” Presto said, “I really disappear, you understand.”

“Good land,” said Mrs. Wiggins, but Freddy said: “Yeah. Sure. Well, go on.”

Well, it seemed that when the hurricane struck the circus, Signor Zingo was just packing up his magic apparatus. The trick silk hat was on the table beside him. And the wind came in under the tent and scooped up the hat, along with some papers that were on the table too, and took it out of the door, and the last that was seen of it, it was flying through the air above the treetops in a northwesterly direction, and the papers were flying around it like a lot of white pigeons following a big black crow.

“Well, the hat ought to be easy to find,” Freddy said. “Now, wait a minute,” he said as Presto’s ears went quickly all the way up; “I’m not saying we’ll take your case: I’m only suggesting how to go about finding the hat yourself.”

“I could never find it,” said Presto. “Oh dear, if you’d only ... I’ll teach you everything—all the tricks there are. Please, sir!”

And so after some more argument, Freddy agreed.

Mrs. Wiggins was pretty impatient with Freddy for hesitating so long, and when they had sent the rabbit away, with a promise to pick him up when they left and take him back to the farm with them, she said: “I don’t see why you told him we had so much to do; we haven’t had any detective work in two months. Didn’t you really want his case?”

“I intended to take it all the time,” Freddy said. “Only, if I’d let him see that we wanted it, he wouldn’t have thought we were very good detectives.”

“My goodness,” said the cow, “we’re in the detective business, aren’t we? We advertise for cases in the Bean Home News, don’t we? It seems sort of silly when someone comes to offer us a job to pretend we don’t want it.”

“Well, that’s the way you have to do business,” said Freddy. “If somebody comes to buy something you have to sell, you don’t just give it to him right away. You pretend you don’t know whether you want to sell it to him or not. And the more you put him off, the more determined he is to buy. It’s like being in love.”

Mrs. Wiggins said: “I’ve never been in love.”

“Well, neither have I,” said Freddy. “But the principle’s the same.”

“What principle?” said Mrs. Wiggins, looking puzzled. Then she said: “Oh, never mind. I just think it’s a very funny way of doing business. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It may not make sense, but it makes sales,” said the pig.