was not a dark and forgotten tongue, but it scared the hell out of Myron nevertheless. She pulled a key ring out of her breast pocket, carefully sliding one key off it; she went to hand it to Oliver, and then, with a sideways glance at the lemur on her shoulder, changed her mind. “Myron, I’ll take my time on the introductory remarks,” she said, handing him the key. “For God’s sake, don’t tarry, and don’t mess up your speech. There is a lot riding on this for both of us. For both of us.” And Myron was off at a run. He stopped when applause told him that Mignon Emanuel had stepped onto the ballroom floor. Turning around, he caught Oliver’s eye and gestured at the tube. Give it to me. Oliver smiled and shook his head. With his free hand he described a shape in the air. Myron nodded and, leaving Oliver behind, began to run again.
He ran down the hall, past burly men stacking hors d’oeuvres and loosening champagne corks. Around the corner with the Heppelwhite serpentine chest, and down the long green carpet, and there before him was the office door. He fumbled with and dropped the key before he managed to shoot the bolt. He practically fell into the room. It was dark, but motion detectors activated the small reading light on the desk. There on the floor in front of him were the pages of his speech. Myron realized that it shouldn’t have been so dark, since it was still dusk, and looked up at the skylight, but the skylight was covered with an opaque screen. He wasted a few precious seconds looking for a switch to retract the screen, for better lighting, and then gave up and opened the top drawer of the desk. Inside was a small key. He used it to open the large drawer, and from inside that, under some juggling clubs, a dismantled Bunsen burner, a signed baseball (signed, I have reason to believe, by the 1919 Chicago White Sox), a railroad lantern, and a jade elephant with a clock on its back, he pulled a ring of six ancient keys. He didn’t really know whether the keys would open the door; he didn’t really know what kind of doomsday device would be behind the door. But he had seen the look on Mignon Emanuel’s face when he mentioned the room, and he knew that his studies, his messiahship, his comfortable life here in the big house—it was worth throwing all of these away for one look in Pandora’s box.
There were other plans competing for a place on his agenda—perhaps he should look for the promised sliding bookshelf, perhaps he should go through the locked cabinet in the wall, perhaps he should be rummaging through the desk or even just picking up a juggling club in case he had to brain Oliver to get the tube back—but they all got tabled, and Myron was sprinting for the door. He felt his neck prickle just as he saw something cat-size jump down across the doorway, and there, standing up from a crouch on the ground, was Florence.
“You forgot the speech,” she said, stepping forward over the pages.
Myron felt, along with everything else, extremely uncomfortable because she was naked. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, perhaps wishing he had taken the club after all.
“You won’t.”
I have hitherto failed to belabor the unfortunate truth, which the perspicacious reader will already have appertained: that Myron was in fact shorter than Florence. She outweighed him, as well, and had a superior reach. She was unconstricted by a Fauntleroy three-piece suit. There was every reason to assume she was the stronger, too. Myron, in desperation, tried—if it had been a punch, it would have been a pretty sissy punch, but really it was a just a one-handed push. Florence quickly shifted her weight, and Myron went right past her. He thought for a moment he was home free, but then she kicked him in the back of the knee and he went down. She jumped on his back and pinned his shoulders with her hands. He was lying half on, half off the tiger-skin rug.
“Emanuel will be here soon,” she said. “Just relax and wait it out.”
Myron gasped something out—“Tapeworm,” it sounded like. He flailed his arms backwards, trying desperately to claw at Florence. She easily avoided the clumsy attempt, of course, but then Myron gave a particularly mighty heave, straining the arm