Normally, Nipper was not the first person Samantha would want anywhere near her as she flew through a giant pneumatic tube. Yet there they were, sailing on a blast of pressurized air from France to Italy. Every now and then they bumped into each other.
“Watch out,” said Samantha when his elbow glanced off her ear. But she knew there really wasn’t much Nipper could do about it.
There also wasn’t much to see inside the long tunnel, but it sure zoomed by fast!
Samantha wondered if Uncle Paul traveled by pneumatic tube. It didn’t seem like a smart way to go, tumbling from place to place. And did he get chased from place to place, too?
The tube suddenly banked left and then right, and Samantha could feel herself slowing down. Then the tube curved up and over in a big loop-de-loop.
“Crazy straw!” shouted Nipper.
They did two more loops, and they slowed down a bit more each time. As the last of the pressurized air swirled around them, they tumbled out onto the floor of a small chamber, landing in a pile.
“Not as smooth as the magtrain,” Samantha muttered as she untangled herself from her brother and got up off the floor. She spotted the umbrella and picked it up quickly.
Nipper hopped to his feet beside her and they looked around. They stood in the center of a narrow space, lit by torches on three of the four walls. The flickering light illuminated a checkerboard pattern in the large, square floor tiles.
“Here we go again,” said Nipper. “Check the Plans and see how many steps or stomps or skips we have to do to unlock the secret exit.”
Samantha walked to the large wooden door in front of them and turned the handle. She pushed the door open slowly and light flooded the room.
“That works, too,” said Nipper, and he followed her outside.
They stepped out into a wide plaza surrounded by ornate buildings and towers. A cathedral with a gigantic eight-sided dome loomed over them.
Samantha recognized their location immediately. Night after night, Uncle Paul had talked about the Italian Renaissance, a time of great artists and architects. The huge terra-cotta-tiled dome was the top of the Duomo, the great Florence cathedral. They were standing in the historic center of Florence, Italy.
Samantha gazed up at a high structure next to the cathedral. It was a slender, square tower covered in white, green, and red marble and decorated with row upon row of arches, pillars, sculptures, and colorful shapes. She remembered her uncle looking upward and waving his hands happily as he described the bell tower.
Then she looked around the plaza. There were statues and fountains and, of course, visitors from around the world. Everyone was excited and looking up and down and sideways. Samantha could tell that many of them were having trouble deciding what to see first.
Nipper tapped her on the shoulder and held out the ninja throwing star.
“Get us home before more of these start flying at us,” he said, and handed it to her.
Of the many places she’d heard about from Uncle Paul, Florence was high on the list of cities she’d hoped to visit one day. Now she was there—and she already had to leave!
“How long do you think we have until the ninjas get here?” asked Nipper.
“I don’t know if they followed us,” said Samantha. “And I’m not even sure how they found us in the first place.”
She took the star from him and adjusted the umbrella on her shoulder. Then she led him into the narrow alley that ran between the Duomo and the bell tower. If there were ninjas around, she didn’t want to draw their attention. She knelt down, opened the umbrella, took the magnifying glass from Nipper, and began to look for a way home.
She couldn’t find any lines pointing to the mailbox in Seattle, but next to the little boot shape of Italy, she saw a letter U with the number 16 in its center.
A wavy line from the U led across the lining, back to the France shape, and connected with the dotted magtrain line.
“What could that possibly mean?” asked Nipper, kneeling and peering over her shoulder.
“Well, what starts with U?” she asked him.
“Underwear,” said Nipper quickly. Then he rubbed his chin and continued slowly. “Unusual uncle…unexplained umbrella…uptown umpires, unfortunately unseen unless…”
Samantha took a closer look at the letter U and noticed that there were four tiny white dots on each side.
“Hold on,” she said. “It’s a horseshoe.”
“Okay,” said Nipper, rising to his feet. “Let’s go find a horse and kick it sixteen times, and—”
“Nipper!” she cut him off. “First, that’s awful. And second, that’s a horse’s shoe, so maybe you get kicked sixteen times.”
She stood up, closed the umbrella, and led him back onto the plaza.
They walked around the outside of the cathedral looking for a horse statue, or a horse painting, or even a real live horse.
They noticed a tall man standing on the steps of the Duomo, watching them closely.
“Leave this to me,” said Nipper. He walked up to the man.
“Hay!” he shouted. He looked back at Samantha and winked. Then he started waving at the man and began to speak very loudly and slowly. “Is…there…a…horse…here?”
Expressionless, the man stared at him.
“Horsey? Yes?” Nipper continued. “Giddyap?” He held up his fists as if they were hooves. Then he began to prance around the man, stomping his feet in rhythm.
“Ne-heh-heh-hey! Ne-heh-heh-hey!” he whinnied, and shook his head from side to side while blowing loudly through his flapping lips.
Samantha grabbed her brother by the shoulder and stopped him.
“That’s my brother,” she said, rolling her eyes. “He wants to know if there is a horse nearby. Or maybe a statue of a horse.”
“I know, young lady,” the man said in English. “But that was hilarious!”
He chuckled, and pointed past them to a corner of the plaza.
“The Piazza della Signoria is that way,” he said. “Very famous place, with very famous sculptures.”
They gazed across the plaza. Many people were entering and exiting.
Samantha turned back toward the man.
“Grazie,” she said.
“Prego,” he replied, and nodded warmly.
Samantha and Nipper walked to the edge of the plaza and followed the throng. Couples holding hands, parents with kids, and tour groups in matching T-shirts all funneled into the street beyond.
“How did you know that guy spoke English?” Nipper asked as they moved with the crowd down the cobblestoned street.
“He was wearing a badge that said ‘Museum Security,’ ” she answered. “He probably talks to visitors from around the world all day long.”
Samantha thought about Olivia Turtle, the guard at the museum in Seattle. She could probably name all the statues in Florence. Just like Uncle Paul.
Five blocks later, the street opened onto a vast L-shaped plaza. Statues, vendors, and even more visitors filled the expanse. Samantha and Nipper stopped and gazed up at a stone fortress. It was a square, eight-story castle with a tall clock tower perched on top. Then they looked down again to the street and the entrance to the massive stone building.
Just to the left of the fortress door, they saw a huge white statue, almost twenty feet high. It was a young man, completely nude. He held a sling over his shoulder and looked off into the distance with a wary expression on his face.
“I know that one,” said Nipper proudly. “That’s David.”
“Michelangelo’s David,” Samantha added.
Last year, Uncle Paul had given the Spinner family a magnet set. It included a magnet depicting the famous statue of the biblical king David by the artist Michelangelo, plus shirts, boxer shorts, hats, and a lot of other funny clothes to stick on it and dress it up. It was on their refrigerator right now. Everyone still took turns switching the clothes around.
Samantha looked farther to the left, over to the corner of the fortress, where a fountain bubbled. A giant stone man wearing a crown—and nothing else—stood on a pedestal in the center of a wide octagonal pool.
“The Fountain of Neptune,” said Samantha.
Whenever Uncle Paul talked about Florence, he talked about Michelangelo’s David, and he always mentioned the Fountain of Neptune, too.
Samantha looked down at the feet of Neptune, the god of the sea. Four enormous marble horses appeared to splash in the water.
“Sixteen horseshoes,” said Samantha, nodding confidently.
She led Nipper to the edge of the fountain. Stone walls three feet high formed an octagon. At the corners were bronze statues of men, women, fish, and what she guessed were Roman gods. The statue in the center was enormous, even taller than Michelangelo’s David. Neptune stood on a pedestal with circles on two sides, so it looked as if the horses were pulling him along in an underwater chariot.
Samantha took a closer look at the horses. From the edge of the pool, they seemed to be splashing and straining as they hauled Neptune through the water. Their mouths were open, as if gasping for air. Each horse pointed its face in a different direction.
She looked even closer, and noticed something odd. As she leaned forward over the fountain wall and stared at the bright marble faces, she saw a blue dot in one horse’s nostril.
“There’s something up with that horse,” she told her brother, pointing. “Follow me into the fountain.”
“I’m in,” he said, and climbed up onto the wall ahead of her. Then he hopped into the water and waited.
Samantha wasn’t as eager to go into the pool. She pulled herself up onto the stone wall and stopped to look back. She had been in this amazing historic city for less than an hour and had spent the entire time looking for a way to leave. Now the umbrella had led her to a mysterious dot in the middle of a horse’s nose in the middle of a fountain.
In the many times she had thought about visiting the beautiful city of Florence, this was not what she’d had in mind. There were museums and cathedrals and historic palaces…and she was jumping into a fountain to find the quickest way home.
It wasn’t fair.
She clutched the umbrella tightly as she hopped into the water and waded past Nipper toward the statues.
Water bubbled gently around them.
“Hey,” said Nipper, gazing down at the floor of the pool. “There’s money everywhere.”
He knelt down and began to scoop up a handful of shiny coins. Samantha turned back and grabbed his arm.
“It’s not yours,” she said. “Those coins get collected for charity. And we’re in the fountain to get out of here, remember?”
Nipper frowned for a minute. Then he nodded and stood back up, leaving the money where it was.
They splashed through the waist-deep water toward the center of the pool.
Samantha looked around. No one in the plaza had noticed them yet. She wasn’t sure how long it would take before somebody did.
“Do you think this is where Uncle Paul’s money came from?” Nipper asked, splashing behind her. “His letter mentioned underwater treasure. There are a lot of fountains around the world.”
“I don’t think so,” said Samantha. “Didn’t he say something about gold bars? Who throws gold bars into a fountain?”
Samantha abruptly stopped walking and Nipper ran into her. They’d come face to face with the four bright white marble stallions. She looked back at Nipper as she pointed to the face of the horse second from the right.