Fakiren fra Bilbao (2004)

The twins Emma and Tom move with their widowed mother into an old, spooky house. It was arranged for them by Moony, an undertaker who is also a real estate agent. In the house’s basement, Emma finds a ballpoint pen with a Spaniard trapped inside it. Lombardo proves to be hardly grateful that Emma freed him from the pen. But he gave her his promise in writing that, in gratitude, he would grant her three wishes. So Lombardo has to fulfill three rather everyday wishes, since he is only a simple variety-show magician who performed with his late twin brother fifty years ago. The dim-witted Lombardo annoys the siblings in other ways at first, too—most of all with his beastly stench. Tom thinks Lombardo “smells like rotten eggs”; to Emma, he smells “like a stale sewer.” The two try all sorts of things to get rid of Lombardo’s stench, but nothing works. Later, their mother notices the smell too, but she does not know where it is coming from, since Lombardo can always hide from her relatively successfully. Even when she first runs into him in the cemetery near the house, she immediately notices the stench (“like a mixture of sewer and rotting rat”), but does not realize it is coming from him. Instead, at a later point she suspects the smell is coming from a drain in the basement (where Lombardo happens to be hiding at the time) and pours a cleaning product into it (“the strongest there is”), whereupon the stench disappears. This makes Lombardo considerably more likable to the children, too. However, when the Schmidts arrive, a couple who are determined to buy the house, Lombardo also has to take a more active part in the treasure hunt. For this “couple” are the Lambert brothers, who have escaped from prison. The pair of crooks have hidden a diamond ring in the house. A moose head, which also gave the house its name, plays an important role in the search for the diamond. The children eventually manage to find the Koo-Loon diamond, but Lombardo simply disappears with the jewel. On Christmas Day, he turns up again as the celebration’s guest of honor and proposes to their mother. The engagement ring is the ring with Koo-Loon.