Act Two, Part Four

"Hey, where we goin', Elmer?"

"To the train yards, you nitwit! I already done told you: we're goin' to that train the boss had us search while them Federal guys were locked up in the pokey last night."

"Yeah, but… but don't you think we oughta go to that other place instead?"

"Other place? What other place?"

"The other place the boss had us search, bonehead! And don't tell me you don't remember it, 'cause he had us search it three times. An' that means it's gotta be more important than that there train, since he only had us search it once."

"Nope," said his companion with a shake of his head. "We are goin' to the train."

"Oh yeah? Why?"

"'Cause I'm the smart Elmer and I said so!"

"Yeah? Well… well, I'm the stubborn Elmer and I say we go to that other place!"

"Train!"

"Other place!"

"Train!"

"Other…!"

At this point anyone looking out at the street would have seen two men coming to blows. But as it happened, the only witness of the altercation was the fat disk of the moon sailing far overhead to the west.

"See anyone followin' us, Mr Gordon?"

Artie scowled as he glanced around. "Artemus! It's Artemus, I keep telling you! And I might add that you've been asking me that very same question every five minutes since we had to abandon that bakery, Villar, and my answer to you is still going to be the very same one as well: if I spot anyone, I'll let you know. Now, let me ask you my very same question for the eleventy-fifth time: where are we going?"

Villar snickered. "North."

"Yeah, and that's what you always say!" Artie grumbled. He shifted his grip on the wounded ventriloquist and added, "Look, it's getting so late it's early already, and you're getting heavy, and I still need to sew up that hole in your leg, and…" He gave a sigh. "And then I've got Jim to worry about as well. No telling what's going on back there at that infernal lecture hall!"

"Aw, who cares?" said Villar and brandished the whiskey bottle. "'Long as we got away from ol' Manzebbi… uh, Mazzerup… no, Marzipan… aw, whatever! We got away from that big ol' bat fastard, an' thash as mush as I care!" He took a swig.

Artie frowned and cast a sidelong look at the man he was all but carrying down the street. "Say, is it my imagination, or are you drunk as a skunk?" he demanded.

For reply Villar gave a giggle, then launched into song:

"Rally round the flag, boys, we'll rally once again,
Shoutin' the battle cry of freedom,
We'll shing the Union lyrics, an' not the Rebel lines,
Shoutin' the battle cry of free…!"

At this point Artie slammed a hand over Villar's mouth and hissed, "You hush before you wake up half the town!" He then made a grab for the whiskey bottle as well, only to find himself in a fight with what amounted to a tipsy octopus: Villar's hands were everywhere, trying to keep hold of the booze.

At length, though, Villar lost his balance and sprawled on the edge of the board sidewalk, leaving Artie as the victor. In triumph he held the bottle up out of the reach of his routed foe so as to take a look at the contents. "Barely any left!" Artie exclaimed. "Oh, I've heard of feeling no pain, but this is ridiculous! I oughta have my head examined for letting you be in charge of your own medication!"

"Aw, c'mon, Mishter Guh-guh-gordon! Givit back!" Villar whined. And not in his normal tone of voice either. For suddenly, and much to Artie's horror, the erstwhile ventriloquist had switched into the gratingly shrill voice of his long-abandoned dummy Julio: "Don' be a meanie, Mishter Gordon! Villar ain't got no apples to munch on while I talk, sho he's gotta have shomethin' to drink instead. Riiiight?" He drew out that last word to an excruciating length.

Artie flinched at that speech; he'd forgotten how much he loathed Julio! What he hadn't forgotten, however, was how much even more so Villar himself loathed the creepy hunk of wood. So why was he talking like that? Could it be because…

Artie glanced again at the depleted bottle of booze, then tossed it into the gutter. "Remind me never to get a ventriloquist drunk!" he muttered to himself, then set about hauling Villar back to his unsteady feet and steering him along the street once more.

A block farther on, Villar stumbled and collapsed with a disturbingly puerile giggle against the side of a small delivery wagon moving slowly along the road. "Whoopie!" he squeaked at the driver in that atrocious Julio voice. "Olly olly oxen free! Y'mama wearsh army boots!"

"Excuse us, sir," Artie murmured in apology, tugging Villar back upright. "He doesn't mean anything by it; he needs to get on home so he can sleep it off, and…"

But the driver, a mild-looking man with wildly frizzing hair, pulled up on the reins to stop the wagon, then tipped his head to one side, giving his attention to the pair not by means of his eyes but with one of his ears. "Julio?" he said in cautious amazement.

"Well no, actually this is Vil…" Artie began, then dropped both his jaw and his patient. "Wait a minute: you know Julio?"

The frizzy-haired man shook his head sadly as he set the wagon's brake. "Aw, Frank, you promised me you'd lay off the booze! You know every time you get drunk, you turn into Julio!"

"Ah… wait… What?" said Artie.

But no one was taking any notice of him anymore. The driver swung down from his seat, then out from under it he produced a white cane. Sliding his hand along the side of the wagon, he tapped the cane back and forth as he moved carefully towards the drunk flopped in the middle of the road. "Come along now, Frank. I'll drive you home. You know, I was beginning to wonder what had become of you; you've been missing these past two months!"

As for Villar, he smiled up at the cane-carrying driver and squeaked out, "Jerome! Hey, thish's great; jusht the guy we were comin' to see! Jerome, ol' pal, meet Mishter Gordon!"

His head was throbbing, his eyelids like lead. Still, Jim West forced them to blink open anyway, only to have to squint against the light.

Light. Well, considering the last thing he remembered was fighting in the dark, this had to be an improvemen…

"Ariadne!" The name flew from his lips as he sat suddenly upright, only to bounce his already-bruised noggin off the heavy bars of the giant birdcage of which he now found himself to be the unwilling occupant.

"Ah!" came that all too familiar high-flown voice. "So our Mr West has already progressed beyond nodding acquaintance with the exquisite sylph, and is now on a first-name basis with her! Mark that well, Melville oh, and do get up and stop cringing there upon the floor, you poltroon! She's not even in here!"

Jim looked about, taking in the here which he was apparently not sharing with the insane girl. His first impression of the surroundings, in one corner of which his personal accommodation was suspended upon a wheeled frame, was that this was a young lady's boudoir and the second impression, that it consisted of entirely too much pink: pink mirrored vanity here, pink four-poster bed there, pink frills and laces everywhere, even one life-sized pink-clad rag doll propped up on a delicate pink chair in the far corner.

And front and center within this bastion of femininity stood the imposing bulk of Jim's gracious host, with the chagrined and mustacheless Melville just scrambling to his feet at the great man's side.

"Well, well, Mr West, fancy meeting you here!" purred the professor, his pale eyes glittering behind his pince-nez. "Enjoying your visit?"

"Where's Pearl?" said Jim.

The professor nodded towards the door. "Across the hall in her own room, napping. She's had an exhausting day."

"And Ariadne?"

A chuckle rumbled from the great man's chest as he reached out a hand and gripped his minion's arm, preventing the horrified Melville from flinging himself to the floor once more. "Oh, she's in there too. The adorable twins, having a quiet tête-à-tête for the nonce. It's not often they get to spend any time together."

"So I've been told," said Jim dryly. "Then this is Ariadne's room?"

"Professor! That's three times now!" Melville hissed, but his boss only waved him to silence, then gestured at the room's stunning decor. "Ah, yes! Every little tchotchke a demure young lady could possibly desire, wouldn't you say?"

"Including a cage big enough to house a roc, yes."

Again his host chuckled. "True, true. Nothing but the best for the poor dear girl! I presume Pearl informed you of her sister's, ah, affliction?"

"She did. After which Ariadne gave me a live demonstration. Since when have you been taking in homeless waifs, Count Manzeppi?"

The pale eyes behind the glasses blinked. "I… I beg your pardon, Mr West. What was the name by which you denoted me? Count Man… er, Mandolin?"

Jim gave a tight sigh. "You know precisely the name I called you. And to put it in full, whatever else you may 'denote' yourself, you are Count Carlos Mario Vincenzo Robespierre Manzeppi. The thirteenth, for all I know."

The professor's jaw gaped for a moment. Then he snapped it shut and drew himself up tall, chins elevated, making ready to pour forth in a flood of invective a philippic against Mr West's invocation of that preposterous name. Except that before he could commence, a rough voice spoke up by his elbow:

"No, he ain't."

McWilliams smiled. "There, you see? Even Melville resents the aspersions you endeavor to cast against me, sir! He…"

"You got one of the names wrong," Melville went on, recklessly interrupting the professor. "It ain't Mario, it's Maria! Count Carlos Maria Vincenzo Robespierre Manzeppi! I mean, the two names don't even sound alike. Right? Mario has the, whaddaya call it oh right, the accent! on the first sylla-thingy, but with Maria, the accent's in the middle. See? Nothing alike. Can't possibly mistake one for the other, not if you're listening, so you see…"

"Enough!" bellowed the flabbergasted professor. Once again he drew himself up tall before hissing out a string of syllables that somehow caused all the gas lamps to grow dim. This was followed by a wave of his hand, upon which the musical sound of zhing! filled the air…

And a moment later when the lamps recovered themselves, there on the floor crouched something that strongly resembled Melville, yet also looked suspiciously like nothing more than a man-sized toad.

The professor glared down at the toad. "Finished?" he rumbled.

"Urk! Uh, yeah, Boss," croaked the toad sheepishly.

"Excellent," the professor nodded, then turned back to the man in the birdcage with a sigh. "As the great Byzantine Emperor Herodotus once informed us, 'O quid solutis est lingua modicum quidem membrum est, sed facit eam succendam ignem!' Or, to put it in the vulgar, 'Ah, what a little member is the tongue, but what a great fire doth it kindle!'"

"That's not Herodotus; it's the Bible," Jim corrected. "New Testament, James' famous discourse on the tongue inaccurately quoted, I might add. And besides that, there never was an Emperor Herodotus ruling over Byzantium, or for that matter, over anywhere else. The only famous Herodotus in history at all was a historian, not a king. Of course, you might possibly be confusing him with the well-known dynasty of the Herods who were kings of Judea back in the days of Christ Je…"

At this point the professor, his eyes blazing with fury, lifted his hand, lowered it again to wave it at the toad at his side, then lifted the hand once more. "Mr West! Are you now finished?"

Jim grinned. "For the moment. And while I can't say it's exactly good to see you again, Count Manzeppi, I will say that I'm glad to see you drop the charade. I was getting a little tired of Prof McWilliams."

"As was I, dear boy, as was I," said that eminent maestro of thaumaturgy. He removed his pince-nez and with a flip of his wrist, somehow transformed the glasses into a boutonniere which he promptly slipped into his lapel. His hand then stretched forth to pluck from thin air a top hat, followed by a cigar. At a flourish of his fingers flames sprang up from within the hat, providing him the means by which to light the cigar. He then placed the hat over his heart and bowed regally to his pent-up guest at which point, from out of nowhere, a voluminous red velvet cape lined with purple silk unfurled, draping itself about his shoulders and sweeping toward the floor. He straightened up again and settled the chapeau, no longer aflame, at a rakish angle upon his brow. "It is good," he said, smiling broadly, "to be back!"

End of Act Two