The moon shone down on the Hotel Splendide where the Pott family, Commander Caractacus Pott, Mimsie, and the twins, Jeremy and Jemima, lay fast asleep after their terrific adventures of the last twenty-four hours. In the hotel garage CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG was also dozing comfortably, as her engine and crankshaft and brake linings cooled off after her exciting dash across the Channel to France.
When Joe the Monster had seen the lights go out in the hotel and had noticed from the shadows on the blinds that Commander Pott and Mimsie were sleeping in one room, with Jeremy and Jemima in another room next door, he and his ruffians got swiftly to work.
From the boot of the car they took out a number of burglarious instruments — a telescopic aluminium ladder for climbing the wall of the hotel, a jemmy (this is a burglar’s tool for opening windows and doors that looks rather like a very powerful tin-opener) and some rope. Joe the Monster whispered a series of commands, and in a trice the gang had run the ladder up the hotel wall to the room where Jeremy and Jemima lay fast asleep. Then, while Man-Mountain Fink, who was as strong and as big as he sounds, held the foot of the ladder, Soapy Sam, who was a very tiny man but a very strong one, crept softly up the ladder and after some quick work with the jemmy slipped over the window-sill into the room where the twins lay sleeping.
He had had his orders. He went first to Jemima’s bed, whirled up the four corners of the sheet on which she was lying, and with her bundled up inside it, tied a knot out of the four corners so as to make her look like a bundle of washing. And almost before she could awake, he handed her softly out of the window and into the arms of Man-Mountain Fink.
Jeremy had stirred in his sleep, but here again it only needed a few quick movements and he too was on his way out of the window, and then their clothes and shoes were hurled pell-mell after them.
But of course the children were quickly awake, and even before they could be bundled into the back of the black car, they had started to struggle and squeak.
But, alas, not loud enough!
Mimsie woke up and said sleepily to Commander Pott, “Did you hear that squeaking? It sounded sort of muffled. I suppose it wasn’t the children.”
But Commander Pott only gave a sleepy grunt and said, “I expect it was bats or mice,” and went firmly off to sleep again. And neither of them paid any attention to the sound of the black car starting up and softly driving away.
Fortunately CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG had smelt trouble. Heaven knows how, but there it is. There was much about this magical car that even Commander Pott couldn’t understand. All I can say is that, as the gangsters’ low black roadster stole away down the moonlit streets, perhaps its movement jolted something or made some electrical connection in the mysterious insides of CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG, but anyway there was the tiny soft whirr of machinery, hardly louder than the buzz of a mosquito, and behind the ornament on the bonnet, a small antenna, like a wireless aerial, rose softly, and the small oval bit of wire mesh in miniature, rather like what you see on top of the big radar towers on airports, began to swivel until it was directly pointing after the gangsters’ car, which was now hurtling up the great main road towards Paris.
And all through the night, while Commander Pott and Mimsie were asleep and while the twins were being bumped about in the back of the gangsters’ car, CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG’s Radar Eye was following every twist and turn of Joe the Monster, hunched over the wheel of his black tourer.
Now Joe the Monster was in fact head of an international gang of robbers and ruffians and he was known in France as Joe le Monstre (I hope this isn’t the first French word you’ve learnt!). And when things got too hot for him in England, he moved his gang over to France and vice versa.
As soon as they got out of the town of Calais, he ordered the knots on top of the sheet bundles which contained Jeremy and Jemima to be undone by Soapy Sam and Blood-Money Banks, between whom the twins were wedged on the back seat. For although he was a monster in the eyes of the law, neither he nor his gang of crooks were so monstrous as to want Jeremy and Jemima to suffocate.
The two children were too startled to know really what was happening to them. They both knew it wasn’t something good, but being children of rather adventurous parents, they weren’t easily frightened.
Joe the Monster leant back from the wheel and said over his shoulder, in a voice that was meant to be sugary, “Now then, duckies, everything’s quite all right. Your dear pa and ma have asked us to take you for a little night drive to see something of the French countryside by moonlight.” He turned to Man-Mountain Fink, who sat beside him. “Ain’t that right, Man-Mountain?”
“Absolutely-one-hundred-per-cent-right-and-cross-my-heart-and-wish-to-die,” said the big man all in one breath.
“Hear that, my duckies?” called Joe the Monster above the rushing of the wind. “You’re in good hands, the very best. You just go off to bye-byes, and when you wakey-wakey, there’ll be a delicious brekky waiting for you.”
Now, if there is one thing the twins, and most other children of their age, hate, it is being talked to in baby language. Certainly as far as Jeremy was concerned, he would prefer Joe to be monstrous rather than niminy-piminy. At least you know where you are with grown-ups who behave like grown-ups, but no child likes a grown-up to talk like a baby.
But truth to tell, both Jeremy and Jemima were too sleepy from the previous day’s adventures to care very much what was happening to them, so they snuggled up together and Jemima was soon fast asleep. But before Jeremy dozed off, he heard snatches of conversation between Joe the Monster and Man-Mountain Fink drifting back from the front seat.
And the snatches of conversation were something like this:
“Just what we want for the Bon-Bon job . . . innocent pair of monkeys . . . shove ’em in just before closing . . . five thousand francs . . . keys of the safe are in the till . . . when the old geezer goes for the change . . . then Soapy can use the jelly.”
Trying to make head or tail out of these mysterious sentences, Jeremy snuggled up alongside Jemima, and lulled by the speed of the car and the rush of wind, and knowing, as children always do know, that their father and mother would soon rescue them, he too went fast asleep.
It had been three o’clock in the morning when the children had been kidnapped from the Hotel Splendide, and it was eight o’clock when the gangsters’ car drew up outside a deserted warehouse owned by Joe the Monster in the suburbs of Paris, over 150 miles away from Calais.
And it was precisely at this moment, when the gangsters were carrying the bundled-up children into the building, that the miniature radar on the bonnet of CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG held steady, as if she knew that this was the end of their journey. Then, perhaps because of a short circuit or perhaps for some other reason quite beyond my understanding, CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG’s powerful klaxon began to go “GA-GOO-GA, GA-GOO-GA, GA-GOO-GA” and just went on doing it, making the most horrendous din you could imagine.
Commander Pott and Mimsie were instantly awake, and with, I am sorry to say, a very powerful swear word (it was “Dash my wig and whiskers,” if you want to know), Commander Pott leapt out of his bed, pulled on some clothes, and dashed downstairs and round to the garage to find what the electrical fault was and stop it before they had the whole population of Calais, led by the police and the fire-brigade, charging round to find out who was responsible for the horrendous din. You can imagine his astonishment when directly he tore open the garage doors and stood face to face with CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG, there was one last “GOO-GA” and then dead silence.
“Now, what the devil’s the matter with you?” said Commander Pott. And as if in reply, the giant headlamps suddenly blazed on and off in one gigantic wink of warning.
Commander Pott was even more puzzled. “There must be something terribly wrong with your electrical system,” he said sympathetically. “Let’s see what the matter is,” and he went to open the bonnet. But then, for the first time, he caught sight of the thin little radar antenna sticking up in front of the wind-shield, and he stopped in his tracks. “What in heaven’s name . . .” he had just begun, when Mimsie came dashing across from the hotel.
“The children,” she cried desperately, “they’re gone! And their clothes too! There are the marks of a ladder on the window-sill and somebody’s been at the window breaking in! They’ve been kidnapped, I know it, by those awful men we ran into yesterday! For heaven’s sake, Jack,” (which she always used as short for Caractacus) “what are we to do?”
Commander Pott didn’t argue, or say “Are you sure?” or “How do you know?” or even go to see the evidence for himself. He knew that Jeremy and Jemima would never have left the hotel of their own accord — and certainly not, he added realistically to himself, without having had any breakfast. He looked from the tearful Mimsie to CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG, and suddenly he knew, he knew absolutely for sure, that that was the meaning of the radar device, and that the magical car had sounded her own horn both to wake them up and because she knew where the twins had gone.
“Here, darling,” he said urgently. “Here’s some money. Be a good girl and run over and get the rest of my clothes and pay the bill. CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG knows where they’ve gone. Don’t ask me how, but I know it for sure, and we’ll get after them.”
As Mimsie ran off, glad to have something to take her mind away from her fears, Commander Pott jumped into the driving-seat and pressed the self-starter, and at once the great car, with her usual “CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG,” leapt into life, and Commander Pott steered her out and across the street just as Mimsie came running out of the hotel.
She jumped in beside him and they were off, slowly at first so that Commander Pott could watch the movement of the little radar scanner on the bonnet just in front of him. At first it pointed left down the main street and then corrected itself just like a compass when it had got on the right course, and then at the big turning towards Paris it swivelled to the right, and Commander Pott obediently whirled the wheel and they were off on the huge main road which said TO PARIS.
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