Nanny X changed from her bunny slippers to her regular shoes before we went into the White House. Then she led us past the people who were waiting in line for the one o’clock tour.
“May I help you?” asked the guard.
“Nanny X,” said Nanny X. “We’re with NAP.” She waved her hands around to show that “we” meant me, too.
I expected the man to send us back to the end of the line. I expected him to say “Come back later.” Instead he said, “We’ve been expecting you.” He spoke into his walkie-talkie: “It’s NAP.”
“I’ll be right out,” a voice crackled back. A few minutes later someone came to meet us. She was not the president. She had short hair and wore a green dress and she walked almost as fast as Nanny X. She shined a blue light on Nanny X’s badge. Then Nanny X pulled out IDs for me and Eliza and Howard. The woman looked at Howard’s ID and then lifted back his bonnet so she could make sure his face matched his picture.
“Last week we had a visit from a sloth,” said the woman, whose name tag said Camila Lopez. “This way.” She led us away from the tourists to a private metal detector and sent us through, one by one. Beeeeeeeeep. The fishhooks on Nanny X’s hat set off the metal detector. Ms. Lopez put the hat on a conveyor belt with Eliza’s stroller and the diaper bag.
“NAP agent or not,” she said, lifting the diaper bag and the stroller off the belt again, “these things stay here.” Nanny X got to keep her hat, though.
Ms. Lopez opened a heavy wooden door, and we followed her into the main building. “Welcome to the White House,” she said. “The president receives an abundance of mail, all of which is sorted off-site. The letter from The Angler is still there for further inspection. But they released the statue and delivered it here this morning.”
We walked down a long corridor, past a bunch of fancy rooms that were named after colors and dead presidents. Then Ms. Lopez led us down some stairs and into . . . a bowling alley? It only had one lane, but still. I wondered if the White House had a game room, too. If I ever become president, I’m putting in a baseball field.
Besides the bowling lane, the room had a rack-thingy with a bunch of bowling balls on it, plus two chairs. Between the chairs was a giant sculpture of a fish. He was balancing on his tail, and it looked like he was guarding the place. Someone had tied a red scarf around his neck. Someone else had given him a purple and green bowling shirt.
“The guys in the mail room have been calling him Moby Dick, after the whale,” Ms. Lopez said.
“Actually,” said Nanny X, “I believe this is a wolf fish.”
The fish didn’t look like a wolf or a whale. He looked like Jabba the Hutt, only sadder. And fishier. “Look at that attention to detail,” Nanny X said. “He’s magnificent.”
She plucked a fishing lure off her hat—the blue minnow, not the purple one. “Extra camera,” she explained. I put up two fingers and gave the sculpture bunny ears, as Nanny X pressed down on a fin and clicked. I wasn’t tall enough to reach his head, though; instead they came out of his right fin. Nanny X pressed down on the camera’s fin and clicked. “I’m sending this straight to our crime database,” she said. My bunny-ear fingers were going to be famous. I hoped NAP had a sense of humor. Because if they didn’t, my sister was going to kill me.
Just then a man walked into the room and held a whispered conference with Ms. Lopez. He left her with a plastic bag that contained a note.
“From The Angler,” she said. “And this one didn’t go through our sorting center. Somehow it landed here.”
Ms. Lopez handed the bag to Nanny X, who read out loud, right through the plastic:
It has begun.
I’ve taken one.
(Plus Montauban’s thumb.)
Install my fish
Or you will wish
You had.
It was signed The Angler.
Howard loped over to the bowling balls. He rolled a red one down the lane, using two hands instead of one. The pins blasted to the sides. Strike!
Howard clapped for himself and nodded his head. “Eeeeee,” he said. I was pretty sure that was Howard’s way of saying that The Angler had struck again.
“I must find out how this got through,” Ms. Lopez said.
“And we must contact our other operatives,” said Nanny X. I was pretty sure “operatives” meant my sister, Boris and Stinky. And Yeti, of course.
We grabbed Nanny X’s diaper bag and Eliza’s stroller and exited through the North Portico, which is a reading-connection word for a porch-y thing with columns.
We called Boris right away, with the diaper phone on speaker so I could hear, too.
“We received your photo of the sculpture,” he said. “Mr. Huffleberger sees a definite similarity between The Angler’s fish and the fish he saw at the Georgetown gallery. It wasn’t the same fish, mind, so there are doubts. But they could have been created by the same artist.”
“That’s progress,” said Nanny X.
“There’s more,” Boris said. “That painting that disappeared from the National Gallery? The museum is bringing in something to replace it this afternoon. I don’t know what it is, but they’re calling it a national treasure.”
“We’d better get over there,” Nanny X said. “Whatever it is, it’s vulnerable.”