They had an elephant! Did they also, I wondered, have lions?

Tim had seen it, too. “They’ve got an elephant!” he exclaimed.

“I’ve seen it, Tim!”

“Is it African or Indian?”

“What?”

“I can never remember which is which!”

“What does it matter?” I almost screamed the words. “It won’t make any difference when it stomps on us!”

The circus performers were closing in on us from all sides. There was a rattle from the machine gun and bullets tore into the ground, ripping up the grass. The dwarf I had seen in the trailer had woken up. It turned out he was a fire-eating dwarf . . . at least, that might explain the flamethrower he had strapped to his back. We had the elephant, the motorcycle, and the unicycles on one side. The dwarf and the stilt man were on the other. The tightrope walker was still somewhere overhead. The human cannonball was disentangling himself from the tree.

Things weren’t looking good.

But then a car suddenly appeared, speeding across the grass. It raced past one of the unicyclists, knocking her out of the way, then curved around, snapping the stilt man’s stilts in half. The stilt man yelled and dove headfirst into a bank of prickers. The elephant fell back, rearing up. Tina Trotsky somersaulted backward, feathers fluttering all around her. The car skidded to a halt next to us and a door swung open.

“Get in!” someone said, and already I recognized the voice.

“Are you a taxi?” Tim asked. I think he was worrying about the fare.

“It doesn’t matter what it is, Tim,” I said. “Just get in!”

I pushed Tim ahead of me and dove onto the backseat. There was another rattle of machine-gun fire, a burst of flame, and a loud thud as a second knife slammed into the side of the door. But then the car was moving, bouncing up and down along the grass. I saw a bush blocking the way, right in front of us. The driver went straight through it. There was a road on the other side. A van swerved to avoid us as our tires hit concrete, and a bus swerved to avoid the van. I heard the screech of tires and the even louder screech of the drivers. There was the sound of crumpling metal. A horn blared.

But then we were away, leaving Battersea Park far behind us.

It’s like I said. I’d never liked the circus. And the events of the night had done nothing to change my mind.

THE REAL LENNY SMILE

“Well, well, well. This is a very nasty surprise. The Diamond brothers! Having a night at the circus?”