Leon and the Spitting Image (12 page)

“You can all come up, for all I care,” said Miss Hagmeyer irritably.

Within seconds Thomas, Lumpkin, and the rest of the class had circled Miss Hagmeyer’s desk. Only Antoinette stayed put, but that was because she already had a ringside seat.

As spectator sports go, sewing will never rival, say, baseball. Still, the showdown was pretty exciting for the fourth graders.

“Get going,” Miss Hagmeyer ordered. She handed him a threaded needle.

Which stitch to use? Leon asked himself. A hemming stitch? No. A running stitch? No. A satin stitch? Definitely not a satin stitch. Panic clouded his thinking.

“Snap to it,” said Miss Hagmeyer.

Leon continued to run through the options. Chain stitch? No. Overcast?

Overcast!
That was the one he needed to fix the seam. It was also the one he had the hardest time getting right.

Leon poked the panty hose back inside the unicorn, folded one edge of the material over the other, like the flap of an envelope, and began to sew. Five minutes later he was done. He handed the unicorn back to Miss Hagmeyer and watched her inspect the repair.

As she remeasured the seam, her forehead wrinkled and her pinched lips tightened until they all but disappeared. Leon noticed a long blue vein, not unlike a running stitch, pulsing down her neck. Apparently something still troubled her.

Lily-Matisse peered over Miss Hagmeyer’s shoulder as the teacher was pressing the tape against the redone seam.

“Four stitches per inch, Leon!” Lily-Matisse suddenly hollered.

It wasn’t the best performance in the class—not by a long shot. But it did disprove the cheating charge, and it met the minimum s.p.i. requirement.

“The unicorn passes,” said Miss Hagmeyer without apology or comment. “You may deposit it and the dinosaur in the finished bin. When you have, return to your seat. And that goes for the rest of you court jesters, too!”

As everyone dispersed, Miss Hagmeyer pulled Leon over to the countinghouse tally. “Don’t think you’re in the clear,” she said. “I admit your sewing shows
some
progress. But can you sustain it? That’s the question.” She slid the Sir Leon spool two spaces to the right. “Remember this—to say good-bye to me at the end of the year, you will have to reach the end of the yarn.”

Two weeks after the face-off with Miss Hagmeyer, Leon turned ten.

“The big one-oh,” said Emma Zeisel, beaming. “We may not be able to afford anything fancy, but we can still throw you a real humdinger of a party!” To that end, she dug up some old Trimore stationery and wrote out five invitations that said, “Leon Zeisel requests your presents … And you should come, too!” She put three of the invitations in her son’s back-pack—for P.W., Lily-Matisse, and Napoleon—and gave Frau Haffenreffer and Maria the others.

The party took place at the Trimore coffee shop. Leon and his guests crammed into a booth piled high with baked goods and gifts. Frau Haffenreffer started things off by presenting Leon a box tied with her trademark red string.

“Can you cut it open with your ring?” Leon asked.

Frau Haffenreffer shook her head and hid her hands.

Her rudeness surprised Leon until he got the box open. “You’re giving me your string ring?” he cried.

“Ja,”
said Frau Haffenreffer. “You’re old enough now.”

Leon slipped the hooked band onto his index finger and showed it off to his friends.

P.W. said, “I saw one of those in a kung fu film once. This guy used it to cut off another guy’s—”

“That’s quite all right, P.W.,” Emma Zeisel interrupted. “Cutting thread would be a more practical application.”

“Can we
not
talk about sewing?” said Leon.

“Sorry, sweetie. You’re absolutely right.”

Leon used Frau Haffenreffer’s present to slice open a large gift-wrapped box.

“That’s from me,” said P.W.

“A Lego castle!” Leon exclaimed.

“If you want, I can show you how to make the drawbridge yank off the heads of the prisoners!”

Lily-Matisse groaned and then handed Leon a less military gift—a purple pouch. “It’s for your travel book,” she said. “And see, I personalized it.”

“Thanks,” said Leon. He wasn’t sure about carrying his notebook around in a purple pouch that had LEON stitched across the front. But he didn’t want any hurt feelings. “It’s super.”

“And who knows?” said Emma Zeisel. “Maybe it’ll bring you luck with the taxi-driver collection.” She handed her son a small, heavy parcel.

Leon ran his ring through the wrapping. “A remote-control dune buggy!”

“I pretested a few other models. This is the only one that makes it through the hotel’s carpeting.”

“It’s great, Mom,” said Leon.

Emma Zeisel pushed the old wooden letter box at her son. “And here’s a little something extra.”

“Why are you giving me this?” said Leon, puzzled.

“Open it and find out.”

Leon undid the question-mark catch, lifted the lid, and peered inside. He noticed the change at once.

“Wow!” Leon exclaimed. “Upper- and lowercase Ws!”

“W-O-W is right,” said his mom, extracting an O and two of the spanking new Ws to spell out her son’s exclamation on the tabletop.

“You better save some of those wows, Leonito,” Maria said. She presented him with a huge basket covered in cellophane.

“Potato chips!” he exclaimed. “One, two, three, four, five …
six
big bags. And all different!”

“And you’ll be getting more,” said Maria. “I signed you up for the Worldwide Chip of the Month Club.”

P.W. inspected a bag of Golden Queen “crisps” from England. “These are wild!” he said.

“What about these?” said Lily-Matisse. “Fandangos. From Haiti!”

All eyes turned toward Napoleon, who gave Leon a sheepish look.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I have come empty-handed. I will deliver my gift tomorrow, on the way to school.”

N
apoleon never arrived the next morning. Leon waited and waited, pacing back and forth inside the lobby. Finally he had no choice but to give up and hail a cab to school. As luck would have it, one was idling right in front of the hotel.

“Where are you desiring to go?” the driver inquired.

“The Classical School,” Leon said sadly. He provided the address and glanced at the driver’s hack license. The photo ID pictured a scruffy man with a nasty scar that ran from cheek to chin.

Thwuck!

The lock buttons on the back doors suddenly dropped out of reach. Leon noticed moments later that the cabby was staring at him in the rearview mirror. That made him nervous.

When the taxi stopped at a traffic light, Leon tested a door handle. It didn’t work.

Trapped!
Leon immediately switched into defense mode. Pulling his travel book from its brand-new purple pouch, he wrote down the full name and complete ID number of the driver:
RAVI RAMPERTAB
G63L.

He figured that if Scarface turned out to be a homicidal nutcase, the travel book might be the only way to link the driver to his body—after it washed onto a riverbank, riddled with bullets.

Wait a minute! Leon told himself. My travel book won’t help…. Supposing Scarface
does
dump my body in the river, the ink will run…. Too bad Lily-Matisse didn’t make the pouch out of waterproof plastic…. Maybe I could use my string ring on the driver, like that guy in the kung fu movie P.W. was talking about.

Leon’s backseat terror lasted a full ten minutes until—
thwuck!
—the doors on the taxicab unlocked.

“Here we are,” said the driver. “I am believing this is where you are needing to arrive.”

Leon looked out the window. The sight of school made his whole body relax. As he was paying the fare, he asked the question that the kidnapping scare had almost made him forget.

“Excuse me, Mr. Rampertab? Could you tell me where you’re from?”

“Why are you desiring to know?” the driver asked.

Leon told him about his collection.

“That is most interesting,” said the driver without answering the question.

So Leon asked again, this time waving his travel book. “Could I know where you were born, Mr. Rampertab?”

The driver took his time responding. “South America,” he said eventually.

“Where
in South America?”

The driver turned around to look at Leon through the partition of the cab. “The north part of South America,” he said.

Leon pressed further. “But where
exactly?
What
country
in the north part of South America?”

“You are wanting to know precisely what country in South America I am coming from?”

“Yes,” Leon said impatiently.

Finally, as Leon was reaching for the door handle, Ravi Rampertab responded.

“Suriname,” he said very softly.

“SURINAME?” Leon shouted. “Are you sure?”

The driver laughed. “Oh, most definitely. I was born in Paramaribo, and Paramaribo is most certainly the capital of Suriname. You may check in any atlas at all if you are not wanting to believe me.”

Leon’s whole body started shaking with joy.

“Are you feeling okay?” asked the driver.

“I’m feeling better than okay!”

“On a scale of one to ten, how might you be feeling?” asked the driver.

“Huh?” Leon gave Ravi Rampertab a funny look.
What were the chances
two
taxi drivers judged feelings numerically?

The driver said, “Would news of my birthplace perhaps allow you to be having a nine-and-three-quarters day?”

A lightbulb went on inside Leon’s head. “Napoleon!” he cried.

“Indeed,” said Ravi Rampertab.

Napoleon explained the whole glorious plot that same afternoon, on the drive back to the hotel.

“Mon
Dieu
. It is not a simple thing finding a Surinamese taxi driver in this city, Monsieur Leon. Not easy at all.”

“How did you do it?”

“Ah, well,” Napoleon said, grinning broadly. “I started with my dispatcher. He checked his list and said he could find me a driver from Senegal or Sri Lanka or Sierra Leone.”

“But I’ve already got all those.”

“I know, Monsieur Leon. I told him it was Suriname I required, and that no other country would do. So he gave me names of rival taxi companies. I called and called. Eventually I tracked down our Monsieur Rampertab. He lives thirty miles away, yet he did not hesitate to do me this kindness. He knows the importance of birthdays.”

Later that evening, Leon triumphantly jabbed a
pushpin into the capital of Suriname and told everyone in the hotel about how Napoleon had helped him conquer South America.

“Sweetie, I believe the conquistadors got there before you,” said Emma Zeisel.

“And some of
my
people were there before them,” noted Maria.

The next morning Leon left the house lugging a gigantic box of pastries.

“Here,” he told Napoleon as he shoved the box through the partition separating the front and back of the taxi. “This is for you.”

“For me?” said Napoleon.

“Frau Haffenreffer baked you some napoleons for getting me Suriname.”