Leon and the Spitting Image (2 page)

Obviously, animals weren’t the only guests staying
at the Trimore. The hotel also booked humans, most of whom attended meetings at the convention center across the street.

Leon liked that, too. The convention center attracted all kinds of intriguing people: detectives, stuntmen, contortionists, potato-chip tasters. And the best part was, they often left behind stuff that couldn’t fit into their suitcases.

That’s where Maria came in. If she found an interesting freebie while cleaning a room, she’d save it for Leon. She’d presented him with blinking refrigerator magnets, penlights, a juggling pin, and a policeman’s badge. Once Maria gave him a bag of potato chips the size of a pillowcase.

There were other matters Leon would have mentioned in his home report. For instance, how many places actually pay you to live there? And it wasn’t just his mom, the Trimore night manager, who got that deal. Leon was on the payroll, too.

Every week the hotel bookkeeper would make out a check to Mr. L. Zeisel for the sum of three dollars.

It was Leon’s job to maintain the lobby signboard. That meant fetching the daily VIP guest list from his mom, along with an old wooden letter box that had a sturdy brass latch shaped like a question mark. The box was divided into sixty-four compartments, ideal for separating the twenty-six letters of the alphabet—upper-and
lowercase—plus all the numbers from zero through nine. (Actually, that only adds up to sixty-two, but the weird thingamabobs—the &s, the $s, the #s, and the very useful !s—filled the two spare cubbies.)

Leon would use the letters, numbers, and thingamabobs to reproduce the VIP list on a signboard covered in black felt. Leon’s penmanship might have been “
significantly
below grade level,” but his signboard usually deserved an A+.

The day before the start of fourth grade, Leon had positioned the white plastic letters to read:

Leon loved exclamation marks. He felt they turned VIPs into
V
VIPs. Another benefit of exclamation marks was that they drew attention away from a major signboard problem—the missing Ws.

No one at the hotel knew how it had happened, but all the Ws (both upper- and lowercase) had disappeared. This forced Leon to substitute side-by-side Vs.
(He experimented for a while with upside-down Ms, but they kept falling off the felt.) After diligently straightening the letters and punctuation marks, Leon would latch the wooden box and inspect the work that earned him his weekly paycheck.

Still, not everything about life at the Trimore was great. Actually, there were some things that were downright lousy. The Ice Queen, for instance.

The Ice Queen was an ancient ice maker that occupied an alcove on the far side of his bedroom wall. The noise it made drove Leon bonkers.

Leon
hated
the Ice Queen. Just thinking about her turned his blood to, well, ice. She reminded him of the fairy-tale witch of the same name. In the storybooks, the Ice Queen cast an evil spell that forced the entire village to sleep for one hundred years. But his Ice Queen, the one rattling in the hotel hallway, did the exact opposite. She
prevented
sleep.

Her spell was always the same. It began with three harsh clicks, followed by a long, obnoxious buzz. Then she would tease her victims by falling silent. The silence could last one minute, it could last ten. Yet the Ice Queen always revived her hex, creating a bed-rattling hullabaloo as she spat ice cubes into a large metal bucket.

Click-click-click-buzzzz
…

The sound from the far side of the bedroom wall forced Leon deeper under his blanket.

Grind-groan-rumble-CRASH!

Leon reemerged from his dark, hot bunker and looked around the room. The ice maker’s thunderous finale had been so intense it had knocked loose some of the pushpin flags stuck into the map of the world above his bed. Leon squinched his eyes and clucked his tongue, hoping a counterhex would silence the Ice Queen.

No such luck. Within seconds, she started up once more.

Click-click-click-buzzzz
…

Leon couldn’t stand it. Still in pajamas, he fled the hotel apartment and rode the elevator down to the lobby. He marched over to the reception desk.

“Mom,” he moaned. “She’s doing it again.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” his mother said, knowing instantly who “she” was. “I did make some calls. But that machine is so darn old I can’t find anyone to quiet her down.”

Leon ducked under the counter and planted himself near the key rack. “She won’t shut up,” he complained.

His mom nodded sympathetically. “It’s the mimes, Leon. They’ve been whooping it up ever since they arrived. Maria just told me they’ve wiped out four minibars
and
the candy dispenser. Funny, I’d have expected the cowpunchers to be the rowdy ones, but they’ve turned out to be quiet as church mice.”

“Mom? Can I …” Leon hesitated.

Emma Zeisel looked at her son’s pale, anxious face. The dark circles under his eyes worried her. “Tell you what,” she said. “Go fetch me a sandwich, and I’ll fix up a bunk for you down here. How does that sound?”

“It’s a deal,” said Leon. He was already starting to feel better. “You want the usual, Mom?”

“I do,” said Emma Zeisel before she had to turn away and help a cowpuncher change rooms because of a backed-up toilet.

The Trimore’s coffee shop, like the hotel that housed it, was a small operation. Four booths, six stools of counter service, and one very plump woman who kept the whole place going.

“Hey there, Frau Haffenreffer,” said Leon to the woman in question.

“Still up?” said Frau Haffenreffer with a look of concern. She knew he was starting school the next day.

“Can’t sleep, and Mom needs a sandwich.”

“The usual?”

“Yup.”

“Ordering!” Frau Haffenreffer said to herself. “One tongue on rye! Extra hots! Extra mustard!” She then walked over to the sandwich station.

While she prepared the food, Leon kept himself busy by inspecting the pastry in the glass case near the cash register. There was a lot to inspect. Frau
Haffenreffer took baking
very
seriously. And even with fingers as fat as Twinkies, she had absolutely no trouble whipping up elegant pastries, cookies, and cakes.

“So, Leon,” she said, returning with the tongue sandwich neatly wrapped in wax paper. “How should we top this off?”

“I’ll have a sugar-dusted chocolate-chip cookie, and Mom will take one of those messy custardy things.” Leon pointed to a pastry in the case.

“And a napoleon for your mother,” Frau Haffenreffer confirmed.

Leon watched as she arranged the sandwich, cookie, and napoleon inside a cardboard box. After determining that everything was neat and tidy, she closed the lid and yanked some red string from a spool chained above the counter.

With a series of lightning-fast motions worthy of a ninja warrior, Frau Haffenreffer tied up the box. She completed her attack with a single effortless slice that severed the string from the spool.

For the longest time, Leon had wondered how she made that final cut look so easy. Eventually he had figured out the trick: Frau Haffenreffer wore a special ring fitted with a tiny hooked blade that looked like the horn on a horn beetle.

Leon took the food to the back office behind the reception desk.

“What do you think, sweetie?” said his mom, taking a bite of her sandwich. “Is the tongue tasting me while I’m tasting the tongue?”

Leon squelched a smile. Though he’d never admit it, he liked when his mom said goofy things. She pointed to a pair of battered leather armchairs she had pushed together to form a makeshift bed. “As soon as you’ve finished your cookie, I want you to get some sleep. You have a big day tomorrow. Got it?”

“Got it,” said Leon. He curled up under a hotel blanket. It was scratchier than the ones upstairs, but he didn’t care. He was happy to be far away from the Ice Queen and the confidential home reports—and happier still to be close to his mom.

Leon woke feeling exhausted and, because of the home reports, sad. He looked for his mom, only to discover that a hotel crisis involving a drunken mime had called her away from Reception. After getting dressed (in the school clothes thoughtfully laid out on top of a nearby file cabinet), Leon made his way into the lobby, where the signboard caught his eye.

Hotel guests were forever rearranging the plastic letters, sending private messages to one another, spelling out nasty words. And sure enough, the sign no longer welcomed mimes and cowpunchers. It now said:

The announcement made Leon stop in his tracks. It didn’t matter that his mom had used only capital letters and that she had messed up the spacing. And it didn’t matter that she’d been chintzy with the exclamation marks. For just a moment, while he stared at the sign, Leon Zeisel felt a little better, ready to face fourth grade.

I
t was raining heavily when Emma and Leon Zeisel pushed through the revolving door of the Trimore and walked to the curb.

“Did you remember your travel book, sweetie?”

Leon patted his backpack. “Right here, Mom.”

“How about your milk and taxi money?”

“Check and double check,” he said reassuringly.

“Oh, I almost forgot.” Emma Zeisel handed her son a string-tied box.

“What’s inside?”

“Dough balls. Frau Haffenreffer baked an extra batch just for you.” Emma Zeisel gave Leon a quick motherly inspection. “Your laces, sweetie.”

“They’re fine,” he answered, mildly annoyed. He craned his neck toward the street and looked for an available taxi.

Since the middle of third grade, Leon had been taking taxis by himself. He had no choice. The school bus didn’t stop near the hotel, and his mom almost never finished work early enough to make the trip with him. After accompanying her son to school on a few trial runs, Emma Zeisel had handed Leon a blank notebook.

“What’s this for?” he had asked suspiciously. He disliked anything that involved writing.

“It’s to register the drivers’ names,” said Emma Zeisel. “You can get them off the hack license.”

“Hack license?”

“The driver’s picture ID,” she explained. “It’s always posted. It’s the law. And if you start getting goosey, just ask the cabby where he comes from and add that to your notes.”

Leon took the assignment seriously. He returned from his maiden voyage proudly announcing, “I got a guy named Cesar Viana. And you know what? He’s from the Philippines!” A few seconds later Leon said, “Where exactly
are
the Philippines, Mom?” Almost before Leon finished asking the question, Emma Zeisel whipped out the atlas she stashed behind the reception desk and showed him.

On his second taxi trip, Leon flagged down Juan-Pablo Zapata from Mexico. And on his third, he hailed Push Singh from India. Each name and nationality went straight into the travel book.

And so began the taxi-driver collection.

For Leon’s ninth birthday, Emma Zeisel bought her son a huge foam-backed map of the world and a box of pushpins tipped with colorful plastic banners. From then on, Leon recorded every country he “visited” on the map that hung above his bed as well as in his travel book. By the time fourth grade rolled around, he had
collected thirty-seven nations and nineteen states.