In a room lit by a lukewarm overhead light, two detectives stalked their prey: an Indian sat on a chair with his elbows slumped on the table before him. He held his head in his hands and moaned, ‘I don’t know what you want me to tell you.’
The larger of the two detectives, a fat man with ginger hair and moustache, winked at his colleague, a thin, nervous type with the look of a rat. ‘OK, pal,’ he said. ‘Let’s start with some basics. You come from India, right? So what do you do for a living there?’
‘I’m a clown,’ Buntee sighed.
‘Don’t make me laugh,’ the ratty detective snapped, advancing aggressively. ‘We’re not here to fool around.’
‘Easy, Joe,’ the ginger detective intervened. ‘He’s a clown. Making people laugh is what he’s supposed to do – right, Mister Funny Man?’
Buntee looked up and his earnest face broke into a grin. ‘Oh, right. I saw this in the movies. This is where you play good cop, bad cop, yes?’
The ginger-haired detective sighed and leaned his considerable weight forward on to the table in a menacing posture: ‘Look, you fleabag. I don’t think you understand the trouble you’re in. We’re going to charge you with kidnapping, theft of flight tickets and documents, forgery, flouting of immigration laws and – who knows? – maybe the murder of Amir and Prakash Vishal.’
He pulled himself upright and sauntered towards the door that the ratfaced detective already held open. ‘You’d better have a good think about that, Mister Clown, ’cause unless you got a whole lot of gold buried somewhere to pay for a hotshot lawyer, you’re looking at 20 years in the clink at least.’
The door closed and Buntee was left in the interrogation room feeling more alone than ever before in his life. Here he was, a stranger in a strange land, and already they were trying to bury him in a prison cell.
And what had he done wrong? Encouraged a young runaway to join the circus? Put his trust in his wise old great-uncle who insisted on this crazy plan? He didn’t even know what they were doing here. He couldn’t bring himself to feel angry at Theo – he was just a boy – but he felt a touch of resentment at Jadooji for having landed them in this mess.
The entire situation left Buntee feeling jumpy. He stood up and began to pace around the room like a caged animal. There was no window, but a long mirror ran along the side of the room. He walked towards it to check his reflection. He had never seen a clown look so sad.
‘Run out of smiles?’ he asked himself in the mirror, and he pulled his lips back to form a toothy grin. He wiggled his nose and stuck out his tongue as far as it would go in an attempt to cheer himself up. It was also part of a special form of face yoga for clowns.
‘I’ll be damned if that wise guy isn’t making faces at us,’ Joe, the ratty detective snarled as he stared at Buntee from the other side of the oneway mirror. ‘For a dollar, I’d walk in there and wipe that stupid grin off his face.’
‘Relax, Joe. These ain’t the old days. Gotta do it by the book now. Let’s make him sweat by playing the waiting game. The poor fool ain’t even got enough sense to ask for a lawyer. Sit down and drink your coffee. Maria just brought in some doughnuts.’
Buntee was left alone in the stuffy interrogation room for more than an hour. He felt like he was going insane. It was as if the air was running out and the walls were closing in on him. Each time he glanced round, they seemed to have got a few inches closer, but they stopped moving the moment he looked. He was about to scream for help when the door opened. The fat, ginger-haired detective walked in with a cup of coffee and a doughnut. ‘The ball’s in your court, chief,’ he said. ‘Just give us a sign when you’re ready to talk.’
He walked out again. Buntee stared at the polystyrene cup of instant coffee and the pasty doughnut with a knotted feeling in his stomach. How he longed to be eating samosas at a chai stand in Bombay, perhaps with a Hindi pop song playing on an old crackly radio while he argued with someone about cricket.
Instead he was in a cell thousands of miles from home surrounded by people who hated him. He would have told the detectives anything but he was scared to implicate Theo in any way. For all he knew, the boy might be in an even worse situation than him. Besides, what chance was there that these hardnosed New York cops would believe such an outlandish tale of circuses and shipwrecks?
The silence and suffocation of this closed room began to play on his nerves once more. He twitched nervously. His breathing became erratic and a sweat broke out all over his body. He had the terrible feeling that people were looking at him. Every time he stood up he was overcome with dizziness. So it was only natural that he assumed he was becoming delirious when he heard the sounds of screaming and a revving engine.
‘Come on, Buntee. Don’t crack up now,’ he told himself as he heard the echoes of nearby gunshots. ‘This is a police station. What could possibly happen?’
The next moment his eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.
The door to the room flew open and in rode a Yamaha motorbike with no one at the wheel. Clouds of smoke rolled in behind it, and a terrible burning in his throat and eyes left him crying and coughing. Helpless as he was, he felt a hand pull him off his chair and on to the back of the motorbike. Buntee obliged as if in a dream. The next minute they were roaring down the main corridor at top speed, through dense, noxious smoke, sending bodies flying to either side.
The entire station was awash with tear gas. Cops of every rank crawled on the floor, clutching at their mouths and eyes. Buntee could no longer see anything, but he felt the bike take several sharp turns before it sped through the main foyer and smashed through the glass doors and out into the public square in front. Crowds of shoppers screamed and leapt out of the way as the motorbike revved so hard it did a violent wheelie and burnt rubber towards the main road. The two detectives who had questioned Buntee ran out of the police station with handkerchiefs to their noses and guns drawn. They fired five shots, but with eyes full of tear gas they succeeded in hitting only a bunch of Christmas lights in front of a store and setting thousands of Eleckytrons free.
The Bloons cheered and whooped riotously as Bozo and Buntee made their getaway in a cloud of smoke and gunshots. They danced jigs and performed impromptu and disastrous group acrobatics in celebration, chanting all the while: ‘Bozo! Bozo! Bozo!’
It was a full three minutes before they settled down enough to hear the rest of the Story. In fact, they were so excited that they failed to notice the Story was going on for much longer than usual that night. The first moon had already set and the second was beginning its descent. It would be only a matter of hours before the first sun rose.
No one had any thoughts of sleep, however, and the Storyteller waited patiently for them to calm down. Tonight his shoulders were slouched and his head drooped forwards as though it had become a terrible weight for his neck. But it was his voice that said it all: his words rolled out like a resigned sigh, the life seeping out of him with each breath, and his inhalations seemed sharp and painful.
His eyes resembled candle flames burning the last of their wax, yet there was a flicker of excitement as he related the Story this night. For though it had not occurred to any of the Bloons, tonight the Storyteller told the Story live as it happened. Only he understood how much hung in the balance.
He summoned all his strength and continued:
The clown shivered as he doused his head in a public fountain. It felt as though the water was turning to ice in his hair. The effects of the tear gas diminished a little, but now Buntee’s head was frozen stiff. He staggered over to sit on a wall, and trembled with cold and astonishment while his invisible rescuer chomped through the doughnut he’d swiped from the interrogation room.
‘Mister Bozo, I presume?’ Buntee finally asked the thin air. Bozo laughed and teased the clown:
‘Who else did you think was going to save the day?’ Bozo laughed. Then he remembered that the clown could neither see nor hear him. This troubled Bozo greatly – not because of the difficulties in communication that now faced them, but because he wanted to boast about how well his rescue plan had gone. He was dying to tell the clown about how he had stolen the Yamaha and had the bright idea to pickpocket cans of tear gas from cops on the beat. It was his wildest caper yet and there was no one to relate it to. The injustice of the situation was unbearable. Then he remembered a planet full of Bloons followed his every step. He cleared his throat and gave a deep bow.
That still left the problem of how he was going to reply to the clown who was watching the doughnut disappear. Licking his lips, Bozo jumped up in the air and landed on Buntee’s sandalled left foot that already ached with the cold.
‘Ow!’ Buntee yelled. ‘Are you trying to cripple me now?’
In reply, Bozo jumped on to his other foot.
‘Ow! I suppose you think that’s funny?’
Bozo had to admit that the sight of the clown hopping up and down with
water dripping off his head was quite amusing. So he jumped on Buntee’s left foot again.
When the pain had passed the clown suddenly understood. ‘Wait a minute. When I asked if you were Bozo, you jumped on my left foot to say yes. And of course you weren’t really trying to hurt me, so you jumped on my right foot to say no – right?’
A squashed left foot confirmed that. Buntee winced: ‘You don’t need to jump on my toes quite so hard, I suppose?’
The answer came with a reluctant pressure on his right foot. The clown heaved a sigh of relief. ‘Thank goodness. Now, how are we going to find Theo?’
But that wasn’t a yes or a no question, so Bozo couldn’t reply. However, in the same moment a newspaper came tumbling across the park. It wrapped itself around the clown’s face. ‘Damned litterbugs,’ he complained, but as he snatched the newspaper away something caught his eye. A look of wonder came over his face.
‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘ “Extra: Child fugitive found at last. Indian kidnapper apprehended”. Humph. And …look. Theo and his doctor to star in televised welcome home party at 7 p.m. in Carnegie Hall.’ He put down the newspaper with his first real smile of the day.
‘Mister Bozo, are you thinking what I’m thinking?’
A crushed left big toe and a scream from the clown confirmed that the Bloon was definitely in the mood to party.