The Nine Lives of Alexander Baddenfield Read online

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2013

  Text copyright © John Bemelmans Marciano, 2013

  Illustrations copyright © Sophie Blackall, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Marciano, John Bemelmans.

  The 9 lives of Alexander Baddenfield / by John Bemelmans Marciano.

  pages cm

  Summary: Twelve-year-old Alexander Baddenfield, the last in a long line of evil men who die young, has his cat’s extra eight lives transplanted into his own body, while his caretaker, Winterbottom, strives to keep him safe.

  ISBN 978-1-101-62158-5

  [1. Conduct of life—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction. 3. Reincarnation—Fiction. 4. Wealth—Fiction. 5. Orphans—Fiction. 6. Cats—Fiction. 7. Humorous stories.] I. Title. II. Title: Nine lives of Alexander Baddenfield.

  PZ7.M328556Aah 2013

  [Fic]—dc23

  2012048448

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Grave of ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD

  The Lives of BADDENFIELDS

  Baddenfield Family REUNION

  The First Life of ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD

  Warning to ALL READERS

  The Second Life of ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD

  The Third Life of ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD

  The Fourth Life of ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD

  The Third Life of ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD, CONT’D

  The Fourth Life of ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD (For Real This Time)

  The Fifth Life of ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD

  The Sixth Life of ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD

  The Seventh Life of ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD

  The Eighth Life of ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD

  The Ninth Life of ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD

  THE END

  The Grave

  of

  ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD

  A grave should be a sad thing, and the grave of a child the saddest thing of all. The tombstone reads:

  Here Lies Alexander Baddenfield,

  Who Departed This Mortal Coil after a Dozen Years.

  He Was the Last of the Baddenfields—Thank God!!!

  That last part isn’t chiseled into the granite. Instead, it’s scrawled across the headstone in spray paint.

  A man has come to visit the grave. Winterbottom is his name. In one hand he carries a tulip plant, in the other a black bag. Winterbottom places the flowerpot on the grave, then reaches into his bag, takes out a rag and a can of paint remover, and carefully wipes off the graffiti. “Only one scrawl on the headstone today. That’s pretty good,” he tells himself.

  This is all that remains in the world for this young man to do, as Winterbottoms have served Baddenfields since time immemorial. Why they have done so is a question every Winterbottom must have asked himself every day of his life. Or perhaps never. Maybe that’s the only way they could stand to work for that horrid family.

  Other than graffiti artists, Winterbottom is the only person ever to have come to pay respects to Alexander, his funeral included. How is it possible, you ask, that only ONE person could show up to the funeral of a twelve-year-old boy? Could anyone really have been so bad in so few years?

  The short answer is yes.

  But now you say to yourself, “Aha! I know: The twist is that the boy is not really dead. It says it right there in the title—Alexander has nine lives. He will be reborn, again and again, so that by his ninth life this awful child will have learned his lesson. His heart will fill with love for his fellow man, and he will become a Not-So-Baddenfield, or even a Goodenfield, and he will turn all his money over to the poor and dedicate his final life to charitable good works.”

  If this were a Hollywood movie, or a fairy tale, or a run-of-the-mill chapter book, this would undoubtedly be the case. But in the real world such things rarely happen. The truth of the matter is that Alexander Baddenfield used up all nine of his lives without the least bit of remorse or redemption, because Alexander Baddenfield only ever cared about one thing: himself. And that, dear friends, is the most Baddenfield trait of them all.

  But who were these Baddenfields? If you care to know the story of the boy, you must first know the story of his family, for Alexander belonged to the most curious, the most singular, the most dastardly clan ever to sully this blue and green earth.

  The Lives

  of

  BADDENFIELDS

  To say that the Baddenfield family had a checkered past is to insult innocent board games everywhere. It is also inaccurate. The lives of the Baddenfields were not checkered. If their family tree were a chessboard, the squares would all be black.

  The Baddenfields were Dutch. This might surprise you, as you probably think of the Dutch as a smiley, round-faced folk responsible mainly for windmills, waffles, and wooden clogs, but in fact the people of the Netherlands are a far more crafty lot than that, especially when it comes to making money. In fact, they created capitalism, on or about the date of March 31, 1624. Among the first people to take to the new idea was one Nikolas Boddenveld.

  Like most of the Dutch people, Nikolas Boddenveld emerged out of the lowland swamps, although out of which precise swamp no one can tell. He did this alongside his servant Winderboddem, or rather a few steps behind Winderboddem, who was scouting ahead for any dangerous holes Nikolas might fall into. Their two families had already cohabited for countless generations, and a peculiar sort of evolution had occurred between them, as with that kind of little fish that evolved to pick the food out of the teeth of a much bigger species of fish that would have died of cavities without the little fish. The Winderboddems, you see, had evolved into the most careful and care-giving people ever known, enabling the Boddenvelds to become the most careless and uncaring.

  Along with creating capitalism, the Dutch also created the first great capitalist disaster. Or rather, Nikolas Boddenveld did.

  The Great Tulip Bubble of 1637 is the most studied financial panic of all time. Basically, a few tulip bulbs from Turkey showed up in Holland one day and everybody went wild for them. If you wanted to be one of the well-to-do, you had to have tulips; if you didn’t have tulips, you weren’t any better than the dirt they were planted in. Perfectly normal people began buying up tulip bulbs at any price, and the more people bought them, the more expensive they became, because there were only so many bulbs to go around. The bulbs eventually got to costing more than what most folks made in a year. One poor sailor, fresh off the boat from the New World and never having seen one before, mistook a tulip bulb in his boss’s
office for an onion and ate it. Unable to pay for it, the sailor was thrown in jail and locked away.*

  Hearing the tale of the unlucky sailor, Nikolas Boddenveld had a great idea. He went around to markets buying up onions to resell as tulip bulbs, at a slightly lower price than anyone else was selling them for. Pretty soon, there were more tulip bulbs than anyone knew what to do with, and they became worthless. People who had spent their life’s savings on the promise of a flower were put into the poorhouse. “Which is precisely where they belong for being so stupid,” said an amused Nikolas Boddenveld to his man Winderboddem. Winderboddem, however, thought that the promise of a flower sounded like a perfectly fine thing to spend a life’s savings on.

  The badness of the Boddenvelds could scarcely be boxed into so small a country as Holland, and so the six sons of Nikolas took to the seven seas, with the six sons of Winderboddem by their sides. They first became privateers (a legal kind of pirate) and then colonialists (which is the same thing, but on land). Dutch seamen, you see, settled the world, establishing colonies in South Africa and South America, as well as the island archipelagos of the East and West Indies. The branch of Baddenfields that most interests us, however, settled in the upper eastern stretches of North America.

  Did you know New York was once called New Amsterdam? You probably have heard that the island of Manhattan was bought for $24 in beads and such, but did you know who did the buying? Pieter Boddenveld.

  Chopping up his purchase into parcels, Pieter resold the island piece by tiny piece—at a massive profit—to his arriving countrymen, who went about digging canals and constructing windmills and in general making the place look as much like Holland as possible. The descendents of the settlers of New Amsterdam were called Knickerbockers, the most famous of whom was Rip Van Winkle. Rip slept for twenty years after his cider got spiked with a massive dose of knockout drops by Pieter Boddenveld’s son, Pieter Jr. (Or rather, by Winderboddem Jr., at little Pieter’s behest.) He did it for no other reason than to play a mean trick, but it was so mean no one else could even conceive of it, and everybody assumed that Rip had taken a twenty-year nap just because he was lazy, including Rip himself.

  These were awful things, but then the Boddenvelds always did awful things, and for the same motives as the two Pieters: money and meanness. But it was when

  Boddenvelds became Baddenfields that the family really began their baddest behavior.

  Rolf Baddenfield went to the Virginia Colony, planted tobacco, and invented the cigarette. His descendant Weems Baddenfield cut down a cherry tree on the nearby Washington plantation and blackmailed his little playmate Georgie into taking the fall for it.

  At the Boston Tea Party, the patriots made sure it was Baddenfield Tea they dumped into the harbor, after which wily Quincy Baddenfield drained the harbor, bottled the water, and invented iced tea, which he sold at two bits a pop.

  Every Baddenfield alive voted against Abraham Lincoln, and some dead ones too. Twice.

  The Baddenfields were slave owners and strikebreakers, strip miners and sweatshop operators, and they referred to the Great Depression as the Great Happiness.

  There was only one good thing about the Baddenfields: They didn’t live very long. They also tended to die in particularly grisly and poetically justified ways.

  This manner of dying went back at least as far as Nikolas Boddenveld, who confused his flowers with his onions and wound up chopping a tulip bulb into some tuna salad and having a massive allergic reaction. He blew up into a red, bloated ball, rolled away into a nearby canal, and floated out to sea, never to be heard from again.

  Pieter Boddenveld was shot to death by a much savvier and angrier tribe of Indians from whom he tried to buy Canada for a buck fifty’s worth of purple ribbon and a jar of sauerkraut, while Pieter Jr. passed away from a cracked skull after tripping over Rip Van Winkle’s beard.

  The only reason the generations continued at all was on account of the carefulness of the Winterbottoms. But even a whole gaggle of Winterbottoms couldn’t save the Baddenfields from themselves when they all got together, as you will shortly discover.

  Baddenfield

  Family

  REUNION

  This group photo is the sole memento of the ill-fated holiday that all but wiped the Baddenfields off the face of the earth. It also marks the first and only time that all the different branches of the family got together in one place. If you take out a magnifying glass, you will notice a baby carriage in the back left corner of the picture. The two tiny hands reaching out of it belong to Alexander, and the gawky older boy standing next to him is the Winterbottom you met at the opening of our book.

  The reason for the gathering was a safari organized by Smuts Baddenveld, last of the Afrikaner branch of the family. A famed poacher, Smuts had gathered on his game preserve the most endangered animals in the world for one great hunting expedition. The prizes would not be trophies but the honor of making a species go extinct. However, it was the Baddenfields themselves who were about to go extinct, or nearly.

  First to go was Smuts himself, who contracted a lethal form of spotted fever from a rare Beringo giraffe he had kidnapped from the Pretoria Zoo. Things only got worse from there.

  Juan Baddenvaldez of the Suriname branch of the clan had a clear shot at the last three black pygmy rhinoceroses in the world, a mama rhino and her two calves, but he got so excited he shot himself in the foot while taking out his gun. The rhino mama charged him, and though he hobbled away as fast as he could, Juan couldn’t escape getting gored to death on her horn. His faithful servant, Wintergomez, tried to save him, but alas, he too was gored, not once but twice, by each of the rhino babies.

  Why did the other Baddenfields not rush in to help their relative? They were too busy laughing. Budi Baddenfeltro of the Indonesian side of the family perhaps regretted this behavior in the final moments of his own life. Tracking the rarest of bok, the bontebok, Budi ventured far into the bush, assuming the deerlike animals posed no threat to him. What he didn’t reckon on, however, was that a pride of lions that had been stalking the herd all day would decide that Budi and his Winterbottomtro would make a far tenderer meal than any bok.

  Fat Oskar von Baddenveld of the German branch of the family watched the whole thing through a pair of binoculars and snickered at his cousin’s dismemberment while eating little links of sausages like popcorn. Shortly thereafter, the last living herd of African forest elephants stampeded and stomped him to death, as his greasy fingers kept slipping off the trigger of his rifle.

  The giggles and laughter that attended Oskar’s demise were somewhat quieter, on account of how few Baddenfields remained. Still, Jimbo Badden-day-o of the Caribbean side of the clan wasn’t about to let the misfortunes of his distant relatives get in the way of his killing the last surviving mouse-faced chimpanzee, which he had cornered. What he failed to appreciate was the intelligence of this particular primate, which had recovered Oskar von Baddenveld’s rifle and wiped off the grease, and now used it to shoot Jimbo.

  At this point, you might begin to feel sorry for Alexander’s father, the last of the hunting party and thus, along with his son, the last of the Baddenfields. Alexander Sr. had created the Urban Tankmobile, a vehicle that took up three lanes of highway, averaged fourteen feet per gallon, and went on to become the bestselling car in America in the opening years of the twenty-first century. He was the richest Baddenfield who had ever lived, and also the meanest. His idea of fun was to sit around the breakfast table reading the obituaries and cackling with laughter. But he wasn’t laughing now. This far out in the bush, his and his son’s only hopes for survival were Winterbottom Sr. and his twelve-year-old son, Winterbottom Jr., themselves now the last of their line.

  It had gotten dark. And cold. Shivering, starving, and scared, the little group hiked their way back to base camp by moonlight. Arriving as dawn broke, they had just begun to relax when, suddenly, a hungry
beast poked its head out of the mess tent. It was the rarest animal in the history of rare animals: the king African snow cheetah. A gleam came into Alexander Sr.’s eye as he raised his rifle. “The pelt of that animal will look positively capital in my study!”

  “Don’t do it, sir,” Winterbottom Sr. whispered. “Don’t you see? Fate is punishing you Baddenfields for trying to kill these animals. Pulling that trigger would be suicide!”

  Winterbottom Sr. was right, although the shot itself went off without a hitch. It missed, however, due to the lousy aim of Alexander’s father, and succeeded only in alerting the cheetah to their presence. Terrified, Alexander’s father leapt into his Tankmobile and sped off. Winterbottom Sr. turned to his son and said, “Save the baby!” and ran after the vehicle.

  A Winterbottom to the core, the prudent young man draped himself over Alexander’s carriage and pretended to be dead. The confused cheetah sniffed the limp twelve-year-old, tapped him with his paw, and, getting no reaction, moved on.

  Winterbottom wheeled his young charge along in the tracks of their fathers, both of which abruptly ended in the same place, a few hundred feet past a run-over, broken sign that read, WARNING! QUICKSAND!

  Floating on top of a quicksand bog was a pocket watch and a license plate: BADD1. Alexander’s father had loved that vanity plate, even if he couldn’t read it, never having learned how. Too much work. Winterbottom could well imagine the elder Baddenfield barreling over the sign and sinking, and his own father jumping in to try to save him. Crying, the boy fished his father’s pocket watch out of the bog and swore that he would be the first Winterbottom to keep a Baddenfield from the curse of dying young.

  He would fail nine times.

  The First Life

  of

  ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD