The next morning, the streets were almost deserted. Unlike the toilet-roll shortage, when people scoured the city looking for paper, most people were too embarrassed or uncomfortable to go out. In fact, at seven-thirty that morning, seventy-six-point-three per cent of the population were standing in their showers trying to wash the sticky pasta off their bodies and discovering that spaghetti has a strange knack of wriggling its way into all sorts of nooks and crannies anywhere it can on the human body. There were tears before breakfast and over seven thousand billion swearwords shouted in very loud voices.
The telephone lines, on the other hand, were so congested with people trying to buy knickers that the whole system crashed. This had a catastrophic effect on the Stock Exchange, where most of the business involved using telephones and faxes. The few screens that were working showed share prices plummeting, so for Aubergine Wealth and Winchflat it was not so much catastrophic as totally brilliant. They bought everything they could lay their hands on for pennies and by lunchtime the pennies had grown into dollars and by the end of the day, the dollars had grown into Huge Piles of Millions of Money. They did particularly well with shares in companies that made products for cleaning drains blocked up with soggy pasta.
All the people who had lost the millions were forced to sell everything they had and it seemed the only one who had any money to buy their stuff was a very small company which, until then, no one had heard of. Le Inondazioni33 Olive Oil Import and Export Company was located in a very small shop in a poor part of New York. None of their neighbours knew anything about them, which was hardly surprising as they hadn’t been there the day before. At the same time Winchflat had created the very small shop by shuffling all the other buildings in the street up a little bit to create a space for it, he had also implanted false memories in everyone’s brains that told them the shop had been there as long as they could remember and the brothers who ran the business – Morboso e Silenzioso Inondazione – were two of the nicest young men you could ever meet. They helped old ladies across the street and fed sardines to abandoned kittens.
‘Or maybe,’ said a neighbour who hadn’t quite caught the full force of Winchflat’s Memory-Implanting-Machine, ‘they helped kittens across the street and fed sardines to abandoned old ladies.’
By the end of the week, Le Inondazioni Olive Oil Import and Export Company owned more property in New York than anyone else. Just to show what lovely caring people the owners were, they began giving away free knickers to anyone who asked for them – which, in a city of nineteen million people, was a lot of underwear.
‘It is my belief,’ said a local councillor, ‘that one of the Inondazione brothers should run for Mayor of our great city.’
‘Absolutely,’ said hundreds of other people, ‘and the other one should be Deputy Mayor.’
By an amazing coincidence – which Winchflat created with his newest and probably greatest invention, The Amazing Coincidence Engine34 – the closing date for nominations to be Mayor was the very next day, with the elections to take place a week later.
‘I think if we handle this properly,’ said the Headmaster, ‘the success of our Summer School could exceed everyone’s wildest and most optimistic dreams.’
‘Indeed, Headmaster,’ said Aubergine Wealth. ‘There is an old story that says the original settlers bought the land New York stands on from the Native Americans for a bag of toffees and some corn or something like that.’
‘What flavour?’ said Merlinmary.
‘What?’
‘What flavour were the toffees?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Aubergine. ‘That’s not the point. The point I’m trying to make is that although everyone thinks it is really funny that they conned the land out of the Native Americans for almost nothing, I think they paid too much. If we handle this correctly, we could end up owning New York without paying a cent for it.’
‘So does that mean we get to keep the toffees?’ said Merlinmary.
‘Forget the toffees,’ said Aubergine Wealth.
‘That’s easy for you to say, but I happen to like toffees,’ said Merlinmary.
‘Well, listen,’ said Winchflat, ‘if our plan comes off, you will be able to have all the toffees you could ever want.’
‘Could I be the Minister for Toffees?’
‘With special powers over treacle toffee?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Merlinmary.
‘Yes, yes, you go off and do that while we take over the city,’ said Aubergine Wealth.
‘I don’t suppose there’s going to be a government department for rubber balls, is there?’ said Satanella.
With the dream of owning the whole of New York making him feel giddy with desire and happiness, these minor distractions were beginning to make Aubergine Wealth a little short-tempered. Luckily his wizard powers were nowhere nearly as strong as any of the Floods’ powers. The most his limited powers could achieve was to turn all the coins in everyone’s pockets into chocolate money. Some people thought this was a brilliant talent, but most people got rather annoyed when he did it. He had been able to turn chocolate money into real money, but had that spell removed when several small children nearly choked to death.
Just to be on the safe side, Winchflat had engaged the I’m-Slightly-Stressed-But-Not-Enough-To-Hurt-Anyone-Drive on his Memory-Implanting-Machine. This was a safety feature he had incorporated in case anyone got annoyed when they discovered that the big expensive property they had paid a fortune for a few years earlier now belonged to a strange crowd of junior wizards and witches who were telling them they either had to move out of the city or start paying rent.
‘Humans can be quite touchy sometimes,’ he explained.
A week later the election drew the highest turnout in any election of any sort in America ever. The night before, thousands of people had gone to bed thinking, Vote? I don’t think I’ll bother. I mean, it won’t make any difference who gets in. Everyone knows all politicians are corrupt.
However, during the night Winchflat put his Wonderful-Memory-Implanting-Machine into turbo mode and the next morning every single person in New York who was old enough to vote woke up thinking, Wow, I wonder what time the voting stations open. I can’t wait to go and vote for those wonderful Inondazione brothers. They really seem the type of guys to get the city moving again. I mean, how could you not love and trust people who help stray kittens across the street and feed old ladies sardines?
People who thought in many different languages, people who had never had a single thought before, and even the other election candidates all had the same idea etched into their brains. Winchflat’s wonderful machine, which shall be forever known as Winchflat’s Wonderful Machine, had worked its magic on everyone. So that when Morbid and Silent got one hundred per cent of the vote with not one single vote going to any of the eighty-seven other candidates, no one was at all suspicious. Far from it, they were delighted.
So Morbid Flood became the Mayor of New York and Silent the Deputy Mayor. The first thing they did was make every single Monday a public holiday. When, a week later, they made every Saturday a working day so the weekends were still only two days long, no one seemed to notice.
‘There is no doubt,’ said Morbid, ‘it’s exactly as the famous old wizard philosopher Aristhrottle said all those centuries ago: “Humans are stupid.”’
‘Indeed,’ said Silent. ‘In fact, they are so thick that not one of them batted an eyelid when Satanella set up the Department of Rubber Balls.’35 36
‘And no one complained about the Department of Toffees,’ said Merlinmary. ‘The Toffee Police have been collecting thousands of them.’
Of course, it wasn’t just Winchflat’s amazing memory machine that made them win. It was also the fact that every pair of free knickers the twins had handed out were printed with Inondazioni For Mayor in bright yellow letters all over them.
Not all of the money that went into the Floods’ Enormous Treasure Chests was just to make them the richest wizards in the whole history of history. Greed on that scale would have been despicable. No, the Mayor and his government officers made sure that everyone knew that part of their taxes was being given to those less fortunate than themselves.
An emergency charity was set up to deliver red rubber balls to all the dogs in New York City. As the new Mayor said in a television interview, ‘No dog shall go to bed cold or hungry or without a red rubber ball to call its own.’ Because of Winchflat’s Wonderful Machine, the entire population of New York totally loved dogs and were only too happy to know their money had helped fix a serious Red-Rubber-Ball-Shortage situation.
This meant that all the cats in New York were forced to move to another country. When the draw was held to decide which country all the cats should go to, Satanella picked the winning country and incredibly, it was Belgium.37 The next morning Belgians woke up to find thousands of New York cats inside their houses meowing in American, which of course none of them could understand.38
33 By the way, Inondazioni is Italian for Floods.
34 See the back of the book for more information, including proof that Winchflat may have had other lifetimes before this one, or not.
35 The purpose of the Department of Rubber Balls was to charge everyone who had a rubber ball that wasn’t red a tax of two dollars a week because of the unnecessary suffering it caused to dogs. In six weeks the tax raised $114,000, but as everyone gradually changed over to exclusively red-coloured balls the income dwindled until the only people paying the tax were colour-blind.
36 My editor has told me that dogs are red-green colourblind. Now, I know I am and so is my daughter Hannah, but I am going to pretend dogs are not. Anyway, it doesn’t matter because ALL dogs know that Red Rubber Balls give off a magical aura that no other coloured ball does.
37 Actually it wasn’t incredible because every one of the three-hundred-and-fifteen pieces of paper in the lottery hat had ‘Belgium’ written on them, and of course, sending all of the city’s cats to Belgium was a win-win situation for everyone except the cats, cat lovers and Belgium, but that’s OK because they don’t count. Small defenceless birds everywhere were delighted.
38 This was probably a good thing because apart from ‘Where’s my breakfast?’, the rest of the meowing involved a lot of very strong swearwords.
