The Iron Key

Tom contemplated the crumpled five-dollar bill in his hand, weighing its true Saturday-afternoon value carefully. It wasn’t much to make his trip to the Westsider used-bookstore a great one, but he figured that an hour looking through the shelves should get him something worth reading. With the school holidays not yet over, and the New York weather managing to be not too hot, it was a perfect day for sitting in Central Park with a good adventure novel, or maybe a travel-book. Either way it was going to be fun finding out, and the five-dollar limit seemed more of an interesting challenge than a limitation.

Inside the bookstore shelves reached up to the impossibly high ceiling, books precariously balanced on every surface in an odd but semi-logical fashion. To Tom they always looked like they were about to fall over catastrophically. ‘Maybe,’ he thought, ‘they are actually falling over, but just doing it incredibly slowly.’ It was that kind of store, one where time didn’t really seem to be passing.

After half an hour of browsing Tom had narrowed his choice of book to two. ‘The Ring of Fire’ by Dan Drown, which looked pacey if a bit silly; and ‘Moonlight in Patagonia’ by I.P. Evans, which looked a bit like heavy-going but had some nice pictures. He was undecided, and with the park calling him he decided that five more minutes searching would be enough.

Climbing the stairs, Tom looked again at the travel books, thinking that maybe Patagonia was not as interesting as he’d thought and that something more European might be more the ticket. Scanning the shelves his eye picked out a small black book, much smaller that the rest and with nothing written on the spine. His curiosity piqued, he extracted it from the shelf and was surprised to find that it wasn’t a printed book at all but a pocket Moleskine. Leafing through it he found that it was filled entirely with neat hand-writing, finely detailed maps and complicated diagrams. But, it was all in a foreign language. Tom sighed, wishing that he’d paid more attention in the Languages classes.

Tom closed the notebook and was about to put it back into the shelf when he hesitated. It did seem interesting, even if he wasn’t able to read the language. He decided that it was crazy, but he’d take the odd notebook rather than the silly novel or the boring travel book. He looked inside the front cover for the price, but there wasn’t one marked. ‘Strange,’ he thought ‘they always have a price pencilled into them’.

At the counter Mr. Thornley looked at the Moleskine with a similarly perplexed expression. ‘It’s unusual, that’s for sure, and I don’t know why there isn’t a price in it,’ he told Tom, ‘But as it’s you, Tom, I’ll let you have it for that five dollars you’ve been carrying around for half an hour.’

With the notebook safely wrapped up in a paper bag Tom left the bookstore, bumping into a tall man wearing a grey hat on his way out. He started to apologise, but realised that the odd-looking man hadn’t even registered their collision, so he carried on out of the store and made a beeline for Central Park. If he had looked behind him, he would have seen the man in the grey hat slowly close the shop’s door and flip its hanging sign to say ‘Sorry. We are Closed’.

Sitting comfortably on a sunny bench in the park, Tom took his purchase out of the bag and examined it in detail. It was definitely a Moleskine, it was the right size and shape and had the elastic band, but it looked old. It looked like it had been around the world at least once, maybe twice. The pages were worn and yellowed at the edges, and every inch of space was filled with the neat writing, drawings of unfamiliar places and maps of places with strange symbols on them. It was all very interesting, Tom thought, but made absolutely no sense to him.

As he put the notebook down on the bench beside him it fell open to the last page. The writing there was no more comprehensible than the rest, but what caught Tom’s eye was a piece of bright white paper peeking out of the pocket inside the back cover of the book. It looked much newer than the notebook itself and Tom quickly extracted it. To his surprise it was not written in the strange language, and was actually very familiar to him. It was a cloakroom-check for the Guggenheim Museum, something he had often had when leaving his backpack in store while visiting the museum.

With the museum only a fifteen-minute walk away, Tom decided that there was no reason why he wouldn’t go and retrieve whatever was there under the ticket. It would, he figured, just stay there forever now if he didn’t. Slipping the Moleskine into his pocket he set off across the park towards the museum, not noticing the man in the grey hat coming round the bend behind him with a questing look in his shaded grey eyes.

At the museum, Tom presented the stub to the attendant in the cloakroom slightly nervously, wondering if somehow she’d know that it didn’t belong to him, but with a quick glance she disappeared into the shelves and started searching. Tom didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved that she wasn’t finding anything, but soon the attendant had located the item and yanked it out of a corner. It was much smaller than she had obviously been expecting. ‘Hardly seems worth your while to have checked it,’ she said to Tom, handing it across the counter.

Tom took the small, zippered leather pouch that the attendant had given him and moved to the window away from the milling crowd of tourists. Unzipping the pouch, he looked inside, his mind reeling slightly at what he was seeing. The pouch was full of hundred-dollar bills, neatly banded together with paper tape. Tom had never seen so much cash before and furtively did a quick count, concluding that there had to be at least twenty thousand dollars there. Blinking his eyes hard to unlock them from the unimaginable sum of cash, Tom noticed that there was another object in the pouch, a large and ornately decorated iron key. Extracting it from the pouch Tom examined it closely. It looked very old and was covered in swirling decorations but had no writing on it that might indicate what it opened.

Tom dropped the key back into the pouch and quickly zipped it shut. This was turning out to be a very odd day, he thought. Deciding that there was likely not much more to be learned in the museum he turned to go back out onto 5th Avenue, his thoughts having turned to the best way to start spending twenty thousand dollars. As he set off towards the door he could see a girl heading towards him at an angle, her pretty, freckled face framed by a swirl of luxuriant chestnut-colored hair.

There was barely time for Tom to register that the girl was not just heading towards him, but at him, before she was by his side. Grabbing his arm with a fierceness that belied her small stature she yanked him around and propelled them both towards the spiral ramp.

‘Keep walking and don’t look around you,’ she hissed at Tom. He couldn’t place her accent, but she definitely wasn’t an American.

With surprising strength, the girl continued to propel the slightly taller Tom up the ramp towards the first gallery, saying nothing until they reached the top. Dragging him into a quiet corner she pushed him roughly against the wall and turned to face him. She was very, very pretty but also just more than a bit scary. Tom swallowed nervously.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

The girl ignored his question. With a quick and determined glance around the gallery she held out her hand towards Tom. ‘The pouch,’ she said ‘give it to me. And the Moleskine too’

The thought of handing over twenty thousand dollars didn’t really appeal to Tom, but the fact that the girl knew about it, and the Moleskine too, suggested that it might just possibly be hers. Besides, she looked pretty mean too, and he wasn’t entirely sure he could stop her if she decided to take them anyway. So, with as much cool as he could muster, Tom handed her the requested items.

The girl quickly zipped open the pouch and checked through the contents, putting the Moleskine in and quickly zipping it shut. Tom noticed that she barely glanced at the money, but seemed relieved to see that they iron key was still there. The smile that started to form on her lips froze as she looked up and over Tom’s shoulder.

‘They’re here,’ she said ominously, ‘We have to get out of here, fast.’

Tom looked behind him and saw three men in grey hats standing in the middle of the museum lobby. Just as he recognised the central figure as being the man he’d bumped into while leaving the Westsider bookstore, the shorter man to his right raised a hand and pointed directly at them. The three men hurried towards the start of the ramp.

‘Come on,’ said the girl, tugging sharply on Tom’s arm once more. She started running up the ramp, leaving him behind. Faced with the choice of following her or waiting for the three men in grey hats to catch-up, Tom decided he’d follow the girl. As he caught up with her a few seconds later he saw that she was wrestling with a ventilation grille, and had prised it off the wall. The gap looked just large enough for them to fit through.

‘Get in,’ she hissed, ‘quickly!’

With some serious misgivings Tom squeezed through the gap into the ventilation duct. It was narrow and steep and after a few steps he was sliding down uncontrollably. After a terrifying few seconds he came to rest against another grille, this one looking out onto a street. Before he had time to begin thinking what to do the mysterious girl slid down the duct too and hit the same grille. Her face was very close to his and he could see little specks of green in her hazel eyes.

‘Are you going to tell me your name now?’ asked Tom.

The girl grinned impishly at Tom. ‘It’s Fleurette,’ she said. ‘Yours?’

‘Tom,’ he replied.

With a strong kick, Fleurette dislodged the grille and sent it clattering into the street below. Dropping swiftly out of the duct her sneakered feet made a solid thump as they hit the pavement, her eyes already scanning the street for men in grey hats.

With another impish grin at Tom she held up her hand in an invitation for him to join her on the pavement.

‘Well, come on then Tom,’ she said, ‘those guys in hats won’t be far behind, you know, and we’ve got a lot of ground to cover today’.

--oOo--

Who is Fleurette, and who are the men in grey hats pursuing her and Tom? Who filled the Moleskine with mysterious writing and what lock does the iron key open?

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Images licensed with CC BY 2.0:

"Upper West Side" by tinto

"Central Park Benches" by Phil Roeder

"Guggenheim Museum- New York City" by Arch_Sam

Images licensed with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.:

"leather pouch" by breton stripe

"NYC - Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum" by wallyg