Fifty-six people attended the zucchini crayon auction, including the two federal agents who were there to arrest Edward Disin. Freak and Fiona and I were kept hopping, serving everybody drinks and hors d’oeuvres. I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting to see a dangerous man with a small army come bursting through the door.
“That’s not the way it’s supposed to happen,” Freak reminded me, nervously watching a tall man in a tuxedo we both thought looked like a possible villain. “He’s supposed to be here in disguise.”
“Any one of these people could be Disin,” Fiona whispered, using the shiny surface of her DNA tray as a rearview mirror to study a large woman standing behind her. “But most of them look so normal!”
“That’s the scary part.” I shivered. We had already met Edward Disin once. I was in no rush to meet him again, especially if I wasn’t wearing a hazmat suit.
“Yeah,” agreed Freak. “I’ve never trusted normal.”
Alf circulated through the ballroom disguised with a beard and a wig and a reasonably convincing false nose. His own father wouldn’t have recognized him. I assumed that was the point.
The federal agents didn’t want to be there. I could tell. They shook our hands without enthusiasm when Alf introduced us. Ms. Beauceron was a tall blond woman in a stiff-looking gray suit, and she spent most of the time on her cell phone. Mr. North was a beefy-looking, square-jawed guy who kept his mirrored sunglasses on and had hair deliberately moussed to appear windblown. He was chewing a piece of gum, giving it one deliberate chew per minute. I thought maybe he was trying to quit.
Neither one of the agents smiled as they sat down near the back on either side of the aisle. Alf shrugged. “I have a friend in the Treasury Department. If she hadn’t owed me a favor, I probably would not have been able to convince them to send anybody.”
“What?” said Freak. “They didn’t believe your story about a crazy billionaire risking his freedom to buy a crayon?”
“Sarcasm is not your best trait,” Alf replied, and pointed at a guest who was looking around for a place to discard a toothpick. Fiona glided over and presented her DNA tray. The toothpick was not a winner.
“Check out the guy in the overalls,” Freak whispered.
Alf told us the guy in the overalls was an artist named Avram Belize who wanted to win the zucchini crayon and then film a documentary of himself drawing a picture with it. He was bent over the glass case of the preview table, intently studying Jackson Pollock’s coloring book.
“You think he might be Disin?” I asked Freak.
“I think he might be an escaped lunatic,” said Freak. “Half the people here might be. They want to pay us thousands of dollars for a crayon.”
I wasn’t sure about thousands of dollars. Some people seemed like they had just come for fun. WaxLips was there. Lips turned out to be a middle-aged woman whose real name was Martha Ellinger. I overheard her saying she knew she didn’t have a chance at winning the crayon, but she was absolutely thrilled to be in a room with so many other crayon collectors.
There was a tall black woman who stood ramrod straight and never smiled and didn’t look like she had ever been interested in crayons, even when she was a kid. I overheard her give her name as Cicely Shillingham, but Alf whispered, “Alecto,” in my ear when he saw me watching her.
The guests were divided pretty evenly between museum representatives and well-to-do toy collectors. The museum people, I noticed, ate more.
By far the most interesting person there was Sheik Geisel al-Rashid, a black-bearded man in full Arabian burnoose and headdress. He had arrived in an armored Hummer with diplomatic plates, which Alf insisted he park on Breeland Road along with the rest of the guests’ cars. The sheik and his driver had walked up the hill to the house just like everybody else.
Sheik Geisel looked at us sternly as he entered and shook his head when I offered to take his hat. His driver wore a black uniform and kept his chauffeur’s cap on and pulled down in front.
“Either of these guys could be a werewolf,” Freak said to me out of the corner of his mouth.
We escorted the sheik to the ballroom. He gathered his robes together and went to the display of auction items, lingering over a sketch by an artist named René Magritte showing a man who had crayons for teeth. He then continued on to the zucchini crayon, moving all around the display case to see it from every possible angle.
“I say, if he breaks the glass, we tackle him.” Freak looked to me for agreement. I nodded. The sheik slipped something that might have been a glass cutter out of one of his sleeves.
“We need DNA proof!” Fiona hissed.
“Then we’ll hit him so hard, we’ll knock the snot out of him!” Freak was getting psyched. He tensed like he was listening for the starter’s pistol.
The crayon was cradled in gray foam rubber in the center of a thin wooden box. The sheik flicked the object in his hand and a magnifying lens popped out of it. He asked Alf if he could see the crayon more closely. Alf hesitated, then slowly unlocked the display case and passed him the wooden box with the crayon inside.
I fully expected him to take the box and run. I got ready to give chase. Freak, I could tell, was about to spring. But the sheik merely looked the crayon up and down with his magnifier and then handed the box back. Freak stumbled forward as the tension broke.
I didn’t waste any time before I approached the sheik with a tray full of pigs in a blanket. He looked at the tray, looked at me, and said, “We do not eat pork.”
“They’re not really pigs,” I explained. “And they’re not really blankets, before you tell me you don’t eat wool. The caterer says they’re all-beef franks.”
He held up a hand.
“Nevertheless.”
I moved away. A minute or two later I returned, having switched trays with Freak.
“Pizza roll?”
He looked at the tray and frowned.
“We are watching our cholesterol.”
“The ones on this end are low-fat.”
“Nevertheless.”
I returned a minute or two later, having exchanged trays with Fiona.
“Champagne?”
He looked at me and sighed.
“We do not drink.”
“You don’t? Don’t you get awfully thirsty out there in the desert?”
He studied me with a pained expression.
“Oh. Well. Can I get you a juice box?”
“Young man,” said the sheik, “upon completing your education, is it your intention to pursue a career in the hospitality industry?”
I thought about it for a moment. “No,” I said.
“Good.”
The sheik held his hand out to his driver. The driver reached into the interior of his jacket, the way I had seen people on TV do when they were going for a gun, and pulled out a little yellow ball on a stick. The sheik stuck it in his mouth and began sucking on it. His driver held out his arm, indicating I should leave. I did.
Martha Ellinger—WaxLips—plucked a glass from my tray as I passed her, and I started to worry about what might happen to all the innocent people in the room if things got out of hand once we found Disin. Clusters of people were everywhere, chatting, laughing, totally oblivious to the possibility of a power-mad lunatic in their midst. I wanted to lean into their conversations and suggest they practice ducking.
Fiona and Freak were just as nervous as I was. It was getting late and we still hadn’t found Disin.
“So far,” said Fiona, “there are only three people I haven’t been able to get DNA samples from. They’ve refused everything I’ve offered them. The woman from the Tate Gallery says she’s on a diet. The sheik’s driver won’t even look at me when I come around with a tray. And the tall guy from the toy museum says he has something called irritable bowel syndrome and if he eats anything, it could seriously disrupt the auction.”
“I don’t even want to think about what that might mean,” said Freak. “Why does Alf have us testing the women? Does he think Edward Disin is that good of an actor?”
“Who knows what he’s capable of?” I said. “He made a pretty passable werewolf the last time we saw him.”
Freak nodded and moved off to offer a woman from the Museum of Modern Art some cocktail shrimp.
“Sheik Geisel is sucking on a lollipop,” I whispered to Fiona. “We have to watch and see when he’s ready to throw away the stick.”
I left Fiona watching the sheik and went outside to check on the balloons. Alf had instructed us to give them a blast of hot air every half hour. The State Fair Omaha was upright and straining at its tethers. The Dear John was listing slightly to one side. I climbed up into the basket and fired the burner the way Alf had shown me. After a couple of minutes, the toilet righted itself.
I looked around for circling helicopters and nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw a pair of eyes staring hungrily at me from a nearby tree. I blasted the burner again and the flame revealed an owl, who hooted angrily and darted away. I scurried back to the ballroom.
With only five minutes remaining until the start of the auction, we had yet to find Disin. What if he hadn’t come? Or what if he was outside, waiting to pounce on whoever won the crayon? Or worse, what if he was there in the room, but he had figured out the DNA trays, and he was somehow using somebody else’s spit?
“He can’t be using somebody else’s spit!” said Fiona, nearly spitting herself.
“It happens in movies all the time,” I argued. “The bad guy needs certain fingerprints to unlock a door, so he cuts off somebody’s hand to get them.”
“What kind of movies do you watch?” muttered Fiona.
“How do you cut off somebody’s saliva?” asked Freak.
“By showing them something unappetizing,” said Alf, coming up behind us. “I assure you, he’s not using anybody else’s spit. If he’s here, the DNA trays will find him. Now, get back to work! I’m about to start the auction—you have to find him soon! We’re running out of time!”
While I had been checking the balloons, the guy from the toy museum had stepped out on the lawn and smoked a cigarette. Freak had retrieved the butt and placed it on his DNA tray. Negative.
Fiona had seen the dieting woman from the Tate put her auction program between her teeth as she used both hands to rummage through her purse. Fiona sneakily managed to snatch the saliva-laced program, replacing it with another so we could test the first. Again, negative.
The sheik was still working on his lollipop.
I saw the sheik’s driver take a small bottle of spring water from his coat pocket. The bottle was only partially full. He tilted it back and finished it, then screwed the cap on and slipped the bottle back in his coat.
River Man made it his mission to steal the bottle.
“If you could all find a seat,” said Alf, leaning forward on his auctioneer’s lectern, “we’re ready to begin.”
The sheik’s driver remained standing as everybody else settled in. I used Cicely Shillingham to block the driver’s view of me as she made her way to her seat, and I wound up standing just a few feet behind him. Cicely—Alecto—sat in the back row like a tiger ready to spring.
I was really glad to see her there. Alecto had been GORLAB’s biggest competitor during the online auction, and if Fiona and Freak and I were going to get whatever the crayon sold for, it was important to us that Edward Disin didn’t win it too cheaply.
I had thought that once Disin was arrested and there was no longer any threat of him taking over the world, it might be nice if my friends and I had a little spending cash. It might be nice to go a little crazy in Max Schimmelhorn’s junk shop, where there was a ten-speed bike that I liked; and a really cool chess set carved, Max assured me, from the wood of a Boojum tree; and a piano that could replace the one my aunt Bernie had sold when our roof had to be fixed. But then the business between Freak and his father at the woodpile had happened, and I realized bikes and games and even pianos weren’t all that important. I decided I wanted to give my portion of the money to Freak. He thought paying off some of his father’s bills might somehow make his father a better person. If there were any chance of that, I would happily let him have my third. Or most of it, anyway. I planned to talk to Fiona about doing the same.
“I would like to welcome you this evening,” declared Alf, “to an auction dedicated to all of us cerophiles. And by cerophiles, of course, I mean crayon lovers. And by crayon lovers, of course, I mean loonies.”
Everybody laughed heartily, as if Alf had made a joke, although I wasn’t so sure he had. I got up on River Man’s tiptoes and snuck closer to the sheik’s driver. The driver glanced my way and I bent down and pretended to tie my shoe. Alf finished his introduction and started the bidding.
“Auction lot number one,” announced Alf. “An important box of Victory Garden crayons, containing fifteen of the original sixteen colors. There are two rutabaga crayons and, while there is no zucchini, the box does have a leek.” Alf held up the box. Two crayons fell out of the bottom, which he deftly caught. “Do I hear one hundred?”
A crayon collector from Topeka scratched the side of his nose.
“Thank you, sir!” said Alf. “Do I hear two?”
Each bidder had his or her own way of making a bid. After a series of head nods, hand gestures, and harrumphs, plus a burp that turned out to be a real burp and not a bid, the Victory Garden box went to the Rochester Toy Museum for $700.
I took two baby steps and put River Man close enough to the driver to pick his pocket.
Alf had accumulated a number of items of interest to crayon collectors. When the bidding on a red crayon once used by the Surgeon General to draw blood reached $500, the sheik took the lollipop out of his mouth and raised it in the air. I was pleased to see the candy was almost gone.
“Six hundred from the sheik,” said Alf. “Any advance on six? Any? Going once—”
The crowd was hushed. The sheik’s driver leaned forward. I put my thumb and forefinger on the cap of the water bottle.
“Going twice—”
I eased the bottle out of the driver’s pocket. River Man, in my head, clenched his fists and said, YES!
“Sold to Sheik Geisel al-Rashid for six hundred dollars!” said Alf, and banged his auction gavel. I scooted away from the driver and made my way over to my friends. Fiona held out her DNA tray and I placed the mouth of the bottle on the tray’s surface.
The tray did not light up. The driver was not Edward Disin.
My palms started to sweat.
“We’ve tested fifty-three of the fifty-four auction guests,” said Freak, sounding as worried as I felt. “The only one we haven’t been able to test is the sheik. By process of elimination, he has to be Disin.”
“What if he’s not?” asked Fiona. “We have to be absolutely sure. The Feds won’t arrest him if there’s any doubt.”
“You’d think Alf would know his own father,” I said.
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Freak. “There are days when I hardly know mine.”
“Knowing and positively identifying are two different things,” said Fiona.
“We have to get hold of that lollipop stick!” I declared.
“He’s finished the candy,” observed Freak, “but he’s still sucking on the stick.”
“Yeah,” agreed Fiona. “My little brother does that.”
We watched the sheik. He showed no signs of throwing away his lollipop stick.
“A coloring book attributed to Johannes Gutenberg just before he invented moveable type,” said Alf, holding up a leather-bound book with some of the pages falling out. Dust billowed from the book’s cover and Alf sneezed violently enough that his nose flew off and ricocheted off the forehead of the lady from the Museum of Modern Art.
“Pardon!” said Alf, slapping a handkerchief to his face and looking panic-stricken.
I froze, wondering if this would make Alf look like a fraud and bring the auction to a crashing halt. All of our work would be down the drain. How many people had actually seen it happen?
Freak fielded the rubber nose, snatching it up from the floor at the museum lady’s feet.
“Is this performance art?” inquired the lady.
“It’s latex, I think,” muttered Freak, racing back to Alf with the nose. Alf turned his back briefly and restored it to his face. It became obvious no one other than the museum lady had really noticed. I began breathing again.
The Uffizi Gallery got the Gutenberg for a quarter of a million dollars. Jackson Pollock’s coloring book went to a private collector for an equal amount.
With each lot, the excitement in the room grew. Everybody knew we were getting closer to the night’s highlight. There was a louder and louder buzz among the bidders. Fiona, Freak, and I felt more and more panicky.
I glanced over at the two federal agents. They were looking at each other like they might be getting ready to leave.
Then, after forty-five minutes and eighteen auctions, only one auction item remained.
Alf had saved the zucchini crayon for last.