THE FLAMEL ENIGMA
PART 4
Next thing they knew, the boys sat packed together like sardines in a Ford Cortina they had broken into at a car park using a hair pin. Sirius was driving. Save for a couple of lessons with his cousin Bell at their family hunting lodge last summer he was more or less self-taught. He did not have a license.
"I feel safe..," said Remus, as they sped past another red light.
"Who want's to go over everybody's astrological sign?" Fletcher asked.
Nobody did.
"I'm Taurus!"
"It's fine, honestly!" said Sirius when the car was balancing on two wheels through a narrow alleyway. (Admittedly, that had to require a kind of skill.) "My cousin Bell tells me my driving is just as good as hers!"
"Great..," said Remus.
The Ford Cortina came out from the narrow alley and continued down the Diagon Alley Road to Diagon Alley with a speed that forced pedestrians back to the pavement whenceforth they came.
"Aren't you supposed to stop for the blind?" Fletcher asked.
Sirius turned back to look Fletcher straight in the eyes, his arms hanging over the back of his seat. James had to mind the wheel in the meantime. He brought the car back to the left side of the road. Sirius had learned to drive in France.
"Now you listen to me!" he now said very sternly. "Acceleration and braking increases fuel consumption! So everytime I have to stop, the ozone layer gets another hole! Now do you want to kill us all with natural disasters?"
Fletcher shrunk where he sat without a seat belt.
"No..."
Sirius returned to the wheel, and James to the mixed tapes.
"We should have escaped the aurors now," he said. "Where are we going?"
"No idea," Sirius replied, avoiding an escaped poodle the last minute, as well as a cat. "You just keep looking for symbols and stuff back there, yeah?"
Fletcher was already glued to the window. Remus sat next to him, in the middle. He whipped out a bit of paper and drew something.
"This is the ancient symbol of the Shirley Templars. It's an L with a curved top and a line across the middle, making it look like a mash-up of the letters E, L, F. Do you see it anywhere?"
"The pound sign? There's a bank over there," said Fletcher.
The car came to a screeching halt outside said bank.
"At least I assume it's a bank," said Fletcher when he regained consciousness after hitting the seat in front of him.
They had stopped right outside 12 Greedy Street, outside a door with a sign that said: Wizard Bank of Wizard Zurich.
"That's no ordinary bank," said Sirius.
"What's so not ordinary about it?"
"That bank is, like, super secret! You can essentially store a dead body in there and refuse the aurors the right to search the vaults, because it's a Swiss bank and they have their Swiss laws or something. They are very strict. The only way to access a particular account is to enter the code."
"What are we supposed to do here?" James asked.
"Look for the stone, I thought."
"You think it's here? We have no evidence of that, and we do not have a code."
"Or do we...?"
"No we don't."
"Or do we...?"
"No."
"Yes...?"
"Do we?"
"I don't know...?"
"Well, seeing as Fletcher is the one with the sixth sense or something, I say we should let him decide whether this is a good place to look. Fletch?"
"Wha'?" Fletcher replied.
"Are you hot?"
"Hot and tingly!"
So it was decided. They all stepped out of the car.
XXX
It was agreed that Fletcher was to pose as the grieving grandson of Professor Slughorn. Even if he wasn't dead, but had merely suffered a reaction to French nougat, the media was still treating it like a murder for money reasons.
The highly secretive bank they entered was small and had only two things about it worth noticing; one was a door that presumably led further into the bank to all those secret vaults, the other was the shiny counter behind which a witch in robes with the bank logo stood fingering an orb in the desk. She refused to take her eyes off the chaps. They would simply have to state their errand.
"Hello," said James. "I wonder if a Professor Slughorn had a vault here. I call him Professor, but he was also the granddad of my grieving, uhm, chum here."
"I can't give away that sort of information," the banker replied.
"Right, because is a Swiss bank. Thing is, I don't know if you've read the news today, but Professor Slughorn just died! Murdered! Since my chum is his only living relative, surely he will inherit it?"
"We can't do anything until the information has entered our orb-database."
"You mean, unless we have written permission, right?"
"If you want to access the account of a client, you will need to have the written permission and the code."
The banker was very final about that, unpredictably enough. James went back to the others, who had been waiting by the door.
"Now what?"
"There's this thing called 'thinking'," said Sirius.
"Did you learn about it from Charlie's Angels?"
"So Fletcher, genious finder, what's the code?"
"You Gryffindors can't even find a cardinal in the Vatican!" Fletcher retorted. "If only I hadn't been forced to escape the gallery in a rush."
"Is an escape ever not in a rush?"
"Maybe he left another message, and we missed it. Or maybe the code is in my name!"
"Or mabe," said James. "If now Slug is such a Flamel enthusiast, maybe he'd choose something really clever for his code! Something like the Vermicelli Sipher or something."
"What's that?"
"I don't know."
"Flamel was Fench. Wouldn't Slughorn therefore choose a French sipher, like the Fete Galante Sequence?"
"What's that?"
"I don't know."
Sirius shook his head at both suggestions.
"Slughorn isn't clever. He couldn't pick something clever for his code. The code is probabl 1."
" 2," Remus considered.
"Even better. He probably couldn't count past two."
"How did you know my account number?" Fletcher asked.
"That's your account number?" Sirius whipped out a notebook.
"12 12 12 12 12 is, actually. 12 is said to be the luckiest number, so imagine how lucky many twelves must be! I wan't to try it!"
"Hold your horses," said James. "How many tries do we get here?"
"One," said Sirius.
"So we should think about it a little bit more, and not just go with the luckiest number, just because it's the luckiest number!"
"It's lucky, so can we go wrong, really?"
"But we know that Professor Slughorn likes the number 12," said Remus. "For a start, how many minutes is double potions class?"
"120 minutes. And that's including a 12 minute break."
"Each quiz consisting of two pages, with 12 questions on each."
"He has twelve brown ties."
"He always takes twelve sugars."
"In his coffee or tea?"
"Sometimes."
"Hang on," said Sirius, taking something out of his pocket. "I also found this. He is going to bet on a horse. Number 12, Stud By Your Mane."
There was no denying that Slughorn liked the number 12. Fletcher was very keen to try it now.
"If anybody is still uncertain," said Remus. "Remember that Jesus had twelve apostles, and that Saint John had twelve toes."
The only problem now as they saw it was that they lacked the written permission to be allowed anywhere near the vaults. They had no choice but to whing it from here. Or merely continue to whing it. James and Fletcher returned to the witch.
"Funny story. My chum just remembered he had the code the whole time."
"And does he have a written copy of the permission the granddad must have sent to us ten days in advance prior to this visit?"
"...Yes..."
"Jolly good. Now, I'm going on a smoking break now. My 19 year old daughter Mary will take over."
The banker put on her over-robe while her daughter Mary removed hers. The banker left through the entrance. Mary nodded and smiled and opened the page she had bookmarked in Fifty White Lies- Grey Areas.
"Oh, do you have the ring?" she asked.
James and Fletcher needed to confer with the others a second time.
"It's no use getting past their rules!" said James. "What we need is a diversion."
"I don't understand one thing," said Peter. "How come the Holy Grail suddenly isn't the cup Jesus drank from at the last supper?"
"No idea."
"If the Holy Grail is in fact a royal bloodline, what does that make of the cup? They must have had cups in those days, wouldn't they?"
"Forget that stupid book! There are stupid idiots in the world who got nothing better to do than rile people up and cause trouble! Can't stand those guys!"
Then James remembered that Peter was with them.
"When did you get here?"
"I've been here the whole time."
"Were you in the car?"
"Yes."
"Were you in the gallery?"
"I was."
James couldn't understand why he didn't remember any of that. Neither could anybody else, as it happened. That was the thing about Peter. He was so unnoticable. It was almost a skill.
"I have an idea," said Sirius. "Go stand next to Moira."
"Who's Moira?"
"The banker's daughter."
Peter went to stand next to the banker's daughter, shyly because she was a girl. But she didn't notice him at all. She tightened he scarf for a draft nobody else could feel, but when Peter accidentally knocked down her mug of tea, she just attributed it to poltergeists and made herself another one. She only had her eyes in the book.
"Do you trust me?" Sirius asked Remus.
"No," Remus replied.
"Just follow my lead anyway. Don't ask questions. Just play along."
Together the two went up to Mary. She put away the book and gave them her full professional attention. The three just kind of nodded and smiled amongs themselves. Then Sirius grabbed Remus by the shoulders.
"I don't care what you are, man! They are the monsters, not you!"
Mary raised her eyebrows.
Remus laughed nervously. "I don't know what he's talking about..."
Then he glared at Sirius. "What are you talking about?"
Seeing no real point in putting it off, Sirius just went straight ahead and smooched him.
Mary dropped her tic tac in her tea and knocked the book of the desk in a bin. Peter pressed a button that looked like it would open the door to the vaults, and lo, it did. James and Fletcher sneaked through it and the door closed after them.
"What was that?" Mary asked when Sirius and Remus needed to refill their lungs.
"Stereotyping and generalising, so, so, sorry," they replied.
"Well just don't do it again. The stereotyping, I mean. Making assumptions about me because I'm a teenage girl reading Fifty White Lies. Could be ironic for all you know."
"We'll try. Not to."
"Good. So, want to sign a contract?"
Well they had no choice, if they were to make up for that stereotyping. It didn't matter what the contract said!