EVERYBODY'S FAVORITE DUCK by Gahan Wilson

Author:Gahan Wilson [Wilson, Gahan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery & Crime
ISBN: 9781553102366
Publisher: Christopher Roden/Ash-Tree Press
Published: 2012-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

— 12 —

WITH FIVE RESTAURANTS in the Barton, you’d think they’d have managed to make at least one of them good, but the only impressive thing about their main room, La Salle d’Or, is the total on the check they hand you after you’ve worked your way through the meal. I’d wanted to take Athenee to a better place for lunch, since it had been so many years since our last one, and since she knows the difference between a good meal and what they serve at La Salle d’Or, but the president was going to see Bone and me ‘sometime’ that afternoon, so I was staying in the building in order to be within a lackey’s dash of his suite.

‘Bone says the flying blotch has got to be a production of the Professor,’ I said, leaning back as the waiter removed by hors d’oeuvre dishes and cutlery from the wrong side. ‘He says the Mandarin’s a brilliant scientist, all right, but his expertise leans to what Bone calls the “fiendish biological,” whereas this thing appears to be high physics. And your father, while no slouch at whipping up cute murder weapons and nifty burglar tools, is only a clever handyman compared to those other two.’

‘He is right,’ said Athenee. ‘Papa is no scientist, and, outside of breeding those winged monsters of his, the Mandarin has never been all that clever with flying things. Of course there was that ribbed cape with which he glided off the tip of a skyscraper when the police thought they had him cornered; but then his mechanical pterodactyl was a complete disaster.’

The captain brought the entrée then and I suppose I should tell you I recall clearly what it was since I’m supposed to be better than average at noticing things and filing them away, but the truth is the only thing I really remember about that lunch is how Athenee looked; how her jaws moved when she chewed, how her throat rippled when she swallowed, and I could recite you word for word everything she said.

A lot of it was brand new to me; for example, the fact that her father had taught her early how to steal, the same as you start to teach a ballet dancer when it’s still a little kid.

‘He began by having me sneak around his study while he worked, to see if I could find a bonbon which he’d concealed somewhere inside the room,’ she told me. ‘If I could locate it without his hearing me it was mine, but if he caught me making the slightest sound he would take the candy from its hiding place and drop it into a large tank of piranha which he kept by his desk. They particularly loved chocolate-covered coconut.

‘Of course I learned a lot from the books on thievery in his library, and more from working with the collection of safes and man traps in his workshop, but the heart of his teaching was practical experience. He would, for

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