Floors: (2 page)

On this particular day, Ms. Sparks’s ticker-tape list of things to do was four feet long. Before Mr. Fillmore could read the entire thing, Daisy was at it again, only this time the paper was pink and the red siren was spinning and howling in the basement.

Leo tore the ticker tape from the shark’s mouth and Mr. Fillmore flipped a switch on the call center, silencing the alarm.

Leo read the pink message:
The ducks are on the ledge!!

Leo stared at his father, hoping against all hope he would be sent to the roof of the Whippet Hotel.

“Did she use an exclamation point?” Clarence asked, sipping once again at his coffee and rubbing his temple.

“Two of them,” Leo replied, handing over the pink ticker tape. His dad examined the note carefully.

“The last thing we need is Betty wandering around the hotel, biting the guests. The sooner you get up there, the better.”

Leo grabbed one of the hotel walkie-talkies and headed for the door before his dad could change his mind.

“Hold on a second,” said Mr. Fillmore, and Leo thought for sure he would be told to work in the maintenance tunnel instead. He could already hear the order to fix the pipes on the third floor instead of walking the ducks.

But Mr. Fillmore had something else in mind, something he hoped would raise his son’s spirits, if only a little. He stared at a panel of colored knobs and pressed a red one with the meaty palm of his hand. Then he typed some letters on a keypad and a key card began to emerge from the call center wall. Words were being etched onto the card as it came out, but Leo couldn’t see what they were.

“This should do the trick,” Mr. Fillmore said, handing Leo the key card. “Just be careful. And buckle up this time. We don’t want any more bloody noses so early in the week. You know how Ms. Sparks overreacts.”

Leo had held many Whippet Hotel key cards, which were about the size and shape of a credit card. But each Whippet Hotel key card was special. For starters, no one but Merganzer D. Whippet knew how they were made or what they did. It was rumored they tracked the recipient’s every move, monitored vital signs, even read minds. If you had a long-stay room at the Whippet, you had a yellow key card. A short-stay card was green.

Clarence Fillmore and Ms. Sparks had blue key cards, which opened many doors. And then there were the red Whippet cards, like the one Leo held in his hand. These were one-time-use key cards. Once they were inserted into a wall or a door, they vanished.

There was one other card — the silver key card — that Mr. Whippet kept in his pocket on a matching silver chain. This card opened every single room in the hotel … even the secret rooms that almost no one had ever seen.

The edges of Leo’s red key card were lined with wispy shapes and lines, and in the center were the words
To the Roof, Pronto!
No finer words had ever been printed on a Monday morning.

“The Double Helix?” Leo whispered, excitement welling up in his voice.

“You know what
Pronto!
means — now get going before I change my mind,” said Mr. Fillmore.

A few seconds later, Leo was running up the basement stairs into the lobby of the Whippet Hotel, thinking what a perfect Monday morning it was turning out to be.

Usually, when it was time to walk the ducks, Leo used the duck elevator to make the long climb up to the roof. The duck elevator was a contraption very much like a
regular elevator, only shorter, narrower, slower, and bursting with the aroma of wet feathers. But this was an emergency — time was of the essence — and that meant he’d have to use a different, more secret way to the top of the Whippet Hotel.

Leo stood before Ms. Sparks and felt the shadow of her beehive hairdo as he held out the Whippet key.

“It’s a
Pronto!
key card,” Leo explained. “See, it says so, right there.”

Ms. Sparks’s pencil-thin eyebrows went up as she lurched forward over her desk, reading glasses dangling precariously on the very tip of her nose. Then, as was her custom, she delicately pinched the Whippet key card and tugged it out of the boy’s hand. She scratched the card with a fingernail to test its authenticity.

Once the key card had passed inspection, Ms. Sparks chided, “If Betty bites another guest, I’m blaming you.”

Betty was the head duck, a real troublemaker when she wanted to be, but Leo knew how to keep her calm and happy. Ms. Sparks hated ducks — Betty in particular — and she loathed the maintenance crew, otherwise known as Leo and Clarence Fillmore.

“Don’t worry about Betty,” Leo said. “I can handle her. I brought treats.”

Leo patted the front pocket of his overalls just to be sure he had what he needed. While he did, the new
summer bellboy began creeping ever so slowly away from the front door toward them. His mom was Pilar, the hotel maid. She’d been with the Whippet a long time, but this was the first summer her son had been allowed to work at the hotel.

The boy arrived at Leo’s shoulder, staring down at the key card.

“You have a
Pronto!
card,” said the boy. “Lucky.”

Leo nodded and tried not to smile with too much excitement at the shorter, darker-skinned kid in the spiffy red uniform. How did he even know about
Pronto!
cards?

“Remi, door, now!” barked Ms. Sparks, and the new boy hightailed it back to his post, where he stood staring morosely at the floor, glancing up now and again to see what was about to happen. Leo felt sorry for him, stuck as he was in the lobby with Ms. Sparks all day. The poor guy must be cursed.

Ms. Sparks turned to a bright green statue of a frog on her desk. It had a big belly, like a frog Buddha, and it was laughing. She placed the card in a slot right about where the frog’s belly button would be if it had one, and the card disappeared. This sent two orange marbles shooting out of the frog’s head toward the ceiling, landing perfectly on two metal tracks that swished and turned wildly overhead. Watching the marbles make
their way down the tracks gave Leo a chance to take in the entire lobby. The space was dominated by huge green plants carved into the shapes of animals, set against purple walls. There was an elevator with polished gold doors — strictly for guests — and a wide, ornate staircase with a red carpet and dark wood banisters.

The orange marbles followed the tracks to a green giraffe, twisting around its neck until they hit a long straightaway and disappeared into two holes above a little orange door. The door creaked open ever so slightly and Ms. Sparks leaned over the desk, once more giving Leo a look of death. The new bellboy stole a longing glance at the orange door, but didn’t have the courage to come closer.

“Do NOT, under any circumstances, put a duck in there,” Ms. Sparks commanded sternly. “If you have a duck on your person, use the duck elevator.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Leo. “No ducks where ducks don’t belong. I wouldn’t think of it.”

Captain Rickenbacker, who had shown up two years ago and hadn’t left the building since, entered the lobby with his red cape flapping behind him. He was a technology millionaire many times over, but he’d grown weary of the stress and the computer screens. Ms. Sparks liked to say he’d gone a little off his rocker, but
Leo wasn’t so sure. Captain Rickenbacker had fallen head over heels for the hotel from the moment he’d stepped foot into the lobby. He loved the Whippet Hotel. It made him happy. It made him content. And so he had stayed — two years running — on the third floor, in one of the oddest rooms in the hotel.

Leo knew better than to get into a conversation with Captain Rickenbacker — it could take a long time — so he quickly opened the small orange door and went inside. He looked back at the bellboy, who gave him a thumbs-up. Leo returned the gesture and closed the orange door behind him.

Once the door was shut, Leo knew what to do. He’d been inside several times before, always with Mr. Whippet. Being alone now made him miss Merganzer Whippet even more.

Leo put these thoughts aside and walked the few short steps in the near darkness to a seat next to a set of twisting poles that seemed to rise endlessly into the dark above. Sitting on the seat made the poles glow dimly — one orange, the other red — and suddenly the tunnel leading up was full of white dots, like stars in the sky.

This is going to be good,
Leo thought, first buckling himself in with the seat belt, then pulling the shoulder bar down. It felt like being on a roller coaster, only
better, because Leo knew what came next. No sooner was he strapped in than the Double Helix, which is what Mr. Whippet called it, sent Leo twisting up the center of the Whippet Hotel like a wound-up bolt of lightning. His face felt like it was melting as the Double Helix flew up and up, rounding the glowing poles as it went, arriving at the roof in five seconds flat. Stopping was almost as fun as taking off, and it was the main reason wearing the seat belt was a good idea.

I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that, even when I’m a hundred years old,
Leo thought. He’d arrived on the roof right next to the pond, from where three ducks observed him curiously. They all had the same iridescent green heads, bright orange beaks, and black and white feathers.

“Step away from the ledge, Betty,” Leo said as he got out of the Double Helix and walked slowly toward the other side of the pond. The roof was open-air, and Betty, the largest duck of the six and the only one with all black feathers, had convinced two other ducks to join her on the ledge.

“I have treats,” said Leo, digging into his front pocket and pulling out three slices of pumpernickel bread. Betty was off the ledge in a flash, followed by the other two, and then by three more swimming out of the pond.
Now Leo was surrounded by all six ducks, each of them quacking for some pumpernickel.

“What you really need is a good long walk on the grounds,” said Leo, tearing off bits of dark bread as he inched his way toward the duck elevator. Betty and the other ducks were like dogs, really — if they had a good long walk every day and they got fed, they were happy on the roof. But if they were left alone for too long, they grew restless and irritable. They’d fly down to the lobby and start biting people.

Leo threw open the wooden door to the duck elevator and a poof of feathers filled the air. He turned to watch the line of ducks follow after Betty as they crowded inside, filling nearly the entire space before Leo could cram himself inside and shut the door, trapped with six noisy quackers. He pulled the DOWN lever, knowing it would be a long, slow journey to the lobby, nothing like the Double Helix. But soon enough, he’d be walking the ducks, something he and Merganzer D. Whippet had done together before the maker of the hotel had vanished so unexpectedly.

Leo sighed deeply and stared at his feet. There wasn’t much light in the duck elevator, and it felt even more cramped than usual.

“You guys are eating too much pumpernickel. I can barely fit in here anymore.”

He would have done well to pay closer attention to the inside of the little elevator, for something new was hidden inside.

Leo’s life was about to change forever.

On the fifteenth floor of a New York hotel, two men stared out a window. One wore an expensive-looking gray fedora with a soft black band around the middle. In fact, every thing Bernard Frescobaldi wore looked expensive: a three-piece suit, shiny cuff links, a silky gold tie — appropriate attire for an Italian land baron on the hunt for a bargain.

“Let me see our most recent report once more,” Bernard demanded, squinting through a pair of high-power binoculars, trying with all his might to get a better look at the Whippet Hotel.

“As you wish, sir.”

Bernard Frescobaldi’s assistant, Milton, clicked open a silver metal briefcase and removed a manila envelope marked
Private: Keep out!

Inside were research documents, surveillance reports, dozens of photographs of the Whippet Hotel, and a collection of private papers. Milton removed the top sheet and handed it to Bernard for his inspection.

Bernard reviewed the document before him for the hundredth time.