“Ah!
Mr. Bellamy! So nice to have you back!” His face beamed. I could detect a
slight French accent in his voice. “And how was your mission?”
Pa
shook his head.
“Bit
of a dud, I’m afraid, sir,” he said wistfully, but stating a plain fact. “I got
the beastie out of the place, but I think it just moved on. More trouble to
come down the line.”
The
man tutted.
“You
cannot win them all, eh?” Then he brightened, consoling. “Still, future trade
for the Bureau!”
They
both laughed at that; I found out later that this was an old joke in the
Department. As they laughed, the clerk turned to a sliding board on one side of
the desk that displayed about twenty-five names. He slipped the shutter with
BELLAMY on it from ‘Out’ to ‘In’. He turned to me, smoothly taking up a pen and
a form from under the desk.
“And
who is your guest?”
“Not
a guest after today,” Pa said. He clapped his hand onto my shoulder. “Mr.
DeMullins, may I present my son, Bob Bellamy, come to join us as an apprentice!
Bob, Mr. DeMullins, our department manager. He knows where it is, who to see,
where they are, or where they’ve gone.”
“But
not always when they’ll be back, eh, Mr. Bellamy?”
No comments:
Post a Comment