The Bronze King

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “What if he can’t do magic on your roof?” he said.

  “Just bring him, Joel. I have to be here, and he needs me to do Jagiello’s voice.” Well, I hoped he did. I was scared to death that Joel would find some way to finish the magic questioning of Jagiello without me.

  “Won’t your doorman tell your mom we came?”

  “You don’t come through my lobby,” I said, and I explained to him how our building had a service door, adjoining the big co-op next to us that had been a hotel before. Our building had been their annex or something, and if you knew where to find it, there was a door connecting the basements. All he had to do was get into Fudge Tower—that was what the kids in my building called the co-op because it was fudge-colored—take the elevator down into the basement, and come up from the laundry room in our basement on the service elevator, which didn’t get much use because, as my mother said, we didn’t get much service.

  Joel was really intrigued by all of this. I gave him the name of a dentist who had an office in the Fudge so he could tell the Fudge doorman that he and Paavo were going there.

  “Smart,” Joel said. “Do people get caught doing this?”

  8

  Rooftop Magic

  THEY DIDN’T GET CAUGHT.

  Which is how, the next afternoon, I was standing in the shadow of the elevator housing on our roof, waiting to hear Paavo’s music-questions and to bring him Jagiello’s answers.

  “This is good,” he’d said, when I came up to meet them both in the bright afternoon.

  I had almost forgotten how terrific our roof was, with a great view of the waves of other rooftops receding all around, and the Hudson River, and the dark outline of the Palisades to the west. I went up on the roof a lot when I was a kid, but then some people moved in who walked their dogs there and everybody got in the habit of not going up there anymore, for obvious reasons.

  The dog-people eventually moved out. Now mostly we got grown-ups sunbathing with their radios on as if they were at the beach, at least if the weather was good. The kids in the building only went up if they thought they might catch a glimpse of something interesting; you know.

  There were no sunbathers that afternoon. It was pretty chilly. Paavo should have been cold in his light jacket, but I guess he wasn’t because he hadn’t even bothered to button the collar of his shirt. He got Joel to stand on the elevator housing and drew on the roof surface the same way he’d drawn on the paving at the park. I stood in the outline and waited.

  Paavo said, “In a new place like this, I better call Jagiello first and get his attention turned this way. He was talking Shakespeare, you said?”

  He shut his eyes a minute, and then he recited, “Virtue he had, deserving to command; his brandished sword did blind men with his beams; his arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings.”

  That sounded like our old Jagiello, all right. Then Paavo began to play on the violin that Joel had brought.

  But this violin wouldn’t sing to me, not in words. What happened was not the dark voice at all, but a huge rush of grinding, roaring noise and shaking, as if the ground was rippling underfoot. Suddenly there was this sharp pain over my eye and next thing I knew I was lying on my back, staring at a lot of sky.

  Paavo hunkered down next to me and put his hand on my head and looked hard into my face with those odd-shaped gray eyes.

  “Hey,” I said. “I just remembered something.” I sat up, feeling dizzy but okay. “The explosion in the subway! That was just like the explosion in the subway.”

  “In the subway?” Paavo said. “What explosion?”

  We walked along beside the parapet of the roof and I told them about it.

  Paavo laughed. “Sure, the subway! What did Jagiello tell us? Darkness, quiet, and then noise, voices like from a crowd, vibration? There was no explosion. That was just the air being displaced when the statue was suddenly popped down there, boom. Well.” He stopped and braced his hands wide apart on the parapet and frowned down at the street way below. “We got real trouble now. The subway is the kraken’s territory. It’s hiding out down there while it gathers its strength to break out onto the surface here. You know that day I was on the train with you, Val? I was taking soundings to see how strong the kraken’s hold was down there.”

  “We still don’t know where Jagiello is, though,” Joel said. “The subway’s a huge system.”

  “We could start at the Eighty-first Street station,” I said. “That’s Where I was when it happened.”

  “Start what, though?” Joel said. “And if we find it, how can we get it out? We’re talking about a bronze statue, you know? A couple of tons of metal.”

  Paavo put away the violin, which he handled as tenderly as he’d handled his own, I noticed. “That’s a nice fiddle,” he said. “With my own instrument, I could bring out something that was lost to me. But to bring this bronze horse-and-rider out of the kraken’s grip and back to its post in the park, now—I don’t know. Must be something we can do, though. Depends.”

  I was watching him, and I saw how his face got grave, and his eyes had a look as if he could see way past the Palisades and all of New Jersey and the farthest edge of the world. A cold feeling came into my chest, and I deliberately looked away because I was scared.

  The rooftop seemed suddenly very exposed and scary, and I had a wild fear that somebody—the Princes, or some friend of my mother’s—might be watching from a neighboring rooftop. But it was so chilly that nobody else was out, not even on the terraces where sometimes you see people watering their potted plants. You forget how cold it can be on the top of a sixteen-story building, without the deep canyons of the streets to cut the wind.

  We huddled in the shelter of the elevator housing and went over our escape plans again. The idea was for Paavo and Joel to get out the way they’d come in, without my doorman seeing them, as if they’d finished their dental appointment in the Fudge. I would slip out a little later and meet them on Central Park West where the explosion had happened.

  It was all ridiculously easy; that part, anyway.

  At the Eighty-first Street station, Joel paid for our tokens. We wandered along the uptown platform wondering what we were looking for.

  The only odd thing I noticed right away was a faint, funny smell in the air from the dark subway tunnel. Paavo noticed, too. He wrinkled his nose. He walked along, carrying the violin case and looking carefully at the tracks and the grates in the ceiling over the tracks, and the graffiti on the ads along the tiled walls.

  We headed down the stairs to the level of the uptown tracks. A train came in, a few people got out, a man sleeping on a bench turned over and slept some more, and the train pulled out. Joel kicked at the base of one of the steel pillars that holds up the subway ceiling, staring impatiently around.

  I turned and I saw the blue metal wall at the end of the platform, and my heart gave this boom in my ribs.

  See, most platforms end with a plain tiled wall like all the rest of the subway walls. The only place I knew of with an L-shaped blue metal wall, a partition that closed off one whole end of the platform into some kind of storage room, I guess, was up in the Ninety-sixth Street station on Central Park West. I knew because I used to get off there to visit Granny Gran, when she was still living in her own apartment on Ninety-fifth.

  The blue wall was made of painted steel with sort of raised stripes up and down it and had a blue steel door set in it with a knob and a plain flat lock, and what was it doing here at Eighty-first Street?

  Joel said, “They must have put one up here too, and you just never noticed. Or else it’s new.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s the same one. It’s got the same stuff scratched into the paint.” Kids had put their names on it, of course.

  “Don’t touch it,” Paavo said. “Go upstairs, ask questions.”

  Joel and I went. The lady in the change booth looked bored. No, she said, that wall had always been there. Was there one up at Ninety-sixth too? Sure. What was it for?
Equipment, she said, and would we please get out of the way so people could buy their tokens?

  What equipment? She didn’t know.

  Who had the key? She didn’t know and if we didn’t get going she was going to call a transit cop.

  “Okay,” Paavo said, when we reported back to him. “We wait.”

  We waited for the next train to come and take away the six people on the platform. Nobody else came down. Paavo took his bow out of the violin case. He stepped up to the steel wall and rapped on it with the bow tip.

  From inside came a loud clanging in answer.

  In the tunnel behind us, where the next train should come from, I heard a kind of whispering, grumbling, shifting, shuffling noise, far off but getting closer. With it came a stronger smell, a nasty sour bite in the air.

  “What’s going on?” Joel said nervously.

  Paavo took hold of the metal handle of the door and pulled,

  The door didn’t budge, but there came another tremendous, shivering clang from behind it, and the noises in the tunnel got louder and thicker with a high, edgy tone threading through them like a question asked in a scream. I was about to scream myself.

  “Go!” Paavo said, grabbing up the violin case, and we tore out of there and into the open air. “Don’t stop here,” he panted, “keep going!”

  We dodged across Central Park West against the light and flopped down on a bench next to the park wall.

  For a few minutes nobody said anything. Paavo put his bow back in Joel’s case. Then he said, “Anyplace around here for a cup of coffee?”

  The three of us ended up at a corner table in Lox Populi, where Paavo demolished two cream pastries and all the pickles in the little tub on the table. He must have had a metabolism wilder than mine, because even the way he ate, he wasn’t at all fat, just solid and sinewy. He sat hunched over the table with his hands wrapped around his coffee mug.

  He said, “Well, you got a good sniff of the kraken down there. Not so nice, eh?”

  “Was that what it was?” Joel shifted around uncomfortably, looking over his shoulder at the door. “It stunk. Well, what are we going to do?”

  “We know where Jagiello is,” Paavo said.

  “That was him?” Joel said. “Making all that clanging noise?”

  “That was him, but he’s stuck in there,” Paavo said.

  “Now that you know exactly where he is, can you play him out?” I said.

  “Not without my own fiddle,” Paavo said. “And I don’t have time to build up another one. So that’s out.”

  “Can we get some help?” I said. I didn’t want to mention Sorcery Hall again in front of Joel. He was already horning in on my business more than I liked, though I was glad he’d been around when the Princes showed up.

  Paavo said, “I don’t think so. It’s up to us to get that damn blue door open for Jagiello.”

  It was funny hearing him swear just like any regular person, only more delicate, somehow. A lot of grown-ups have really foul mouths these days, even about little things.

  “How do we do that?” Joel said. “The kraken was coming for us, right? It knew we were there?”

  “Yah,” Paavo said. He stretched. “Okay, look. I got to go get some rest. We’re running out of time, though, and now that you’ve got the kraken’s scent and it’s got yours—well, be careful, you two. Tomorrow you come find me at Grant’s Tomb, all right? I want to do some patching there. The Princes wrote some bad words on it. They got it almost down to no power, and one way or another we’re going to need all the power we can get hold of.”

  “Where are you going now?” I said.

  “Downtown. They got some places you can sleep.”

  Joel got red in the face. “You mean those flophouses for bums? That’s not—you don’t belong—I think you should come home with me. My folks would be pleased to put you up. I’ll explain—”

  “Explain what?” said Paavo, rubbing at the side of his neck and looking at Joel patiently. He rubbed that same place often, and I’d noticed a sort of darkish mark like a bruise there.

  “Well, I don’t have to say anything about the kraken or any of that,” Joel said. “See, my dad takes in—extends his hospitality to all kinds of musical people. He’d be honored to have you stay over, honest.”

  Paavo thought about it, looking unfocused and tired. He shook his head. “Thanks, but I better not. Things could get to be a problem.”

  He downed the last of his coffee and dug around in his pockets, and then he turned to me and he said, “Val, you got something for a tip?”

  Without a word Joel and I emptied our pockets and shoved this pathetic pile of change over to him.

  “Thanks,” he said. He took the money, left a tip, and stood up. “Tomorrow,” he said. “After school. Grant’s Tomb.”

  I said, “What if something comes up in the meantime? How can we find you?”

  “You know how to get in touch,” he said. “It’s a little clumsy, but it’s the best we can do.”

  I drew a panicky blank. Then I remembered: Water. Silver. I nodded.

  He left.

  “He should have come home with me,” Joel muttered.

  “Don’t you know anything?” I said. “He’s worried that the kraken or the Princes might get after him, and he didn’t want to take a chance on your parents getting caught in the middle. Or you.”

  “I can take care of myself,” he said. “I did okay with the Princes, didn’t I? You’d have been in real hot water if I hadn’t been along.”

  “Listen, Joel,” I said, “let’s just remember whose business this all is, all right? Paavo is here because I got in touch, because of what my grandmother told me.”

  “Oh boy,” he said, “we’re trying to save the world here, and you’re getting possessive.”

  “You’re the one who’s acting possessive,” I said.

  Joel stared at the door after Paavo. “God, if only I could get him to play for my father!”

  I walked out and went home.

  9

  Grounded

  THERE WAS LOTS AND LOTS of homework to do. I hadn’t exactly been keeping up with my assignments. The weekend was only one day away, finally, so I hoped I’d have time to get to everything then.

  If there was a weekend. If the kraken didn’t gobble everything up first.

  Mom called from her office downtown, checking up on me: where had I been, when she’d expressly told me to come home and stay there? Fight, yell, hang up, trouble later, but she didn’t know anything new. There was no way she could find out I’d been with Joel and Paavo unless her spy network caught me again. I figured the odds on that one were in my favor for a change.

  I sat home and read the paper (we got our deliveries again after that disastrous Times-less Sunday). It had stories about a subway train that had derailed itself somehow and injured a lot of passengers, and about the collapse of a new section of the West Side Highway. Could these things be due to the kraken flexing its muscles? I sat and shivered with the paper jiggling in my hands, because I knew they were. The kraken was getting ready to come out. In the meantime it was making these forays in the subway and the sewer passages and the conduits for power and water and all that stuff.

  This was my first experience with a secret so huge and incredible that it was hardly a secret at all. I mean, you could scream it from the housetops and it wouldn’t make any difference because nobody would believe you. They’d only lock you up for observation.

  I couldn’t watch TV. I couldn’t read. Finally, I called up Granny Gran in New Jersey.

  She recognized my voice—that was a good start—and started complaining to me about the new person next door to her who played the radio too loud.

  “Granny Gran,” I said, “somebody’s here from Sorcery Hall. He says we’ve got real trouble. He says there’s a kraken.”

  She said, “What did you say, Vee?” She always called me that, Vee for Valentine. “I don’t understand you.”

  Well
, it went on like that for a while: “Is this one of those books you read all the time, about talking unicorns and so on? Are you telling me a story? You’re not getting all involved in those Dungeons and Dragons games, are you?” She sounded very compos mentis, but just out of it.

  I had this sinking feeling that Paavo was right about not bothering her, that it had been a mistake. Before I talked to her I could always tell myself that she might be able to help. But now I couldn’t kid myself about that anymore. She didn’t have a clue, and that was that.

  “When are you coming to visit me, Vee?” she said.

  “Soon as I can, Gran,” I said, feeling very depressed.

  “You could take the subway,” she said.

  I sat up straight. You couldn’t, actually, take the subway out there or anywhere near there. “Gran,” I said, “what about the subway?”

  “Even underground,” she said, “the way you open a door is with a key.”

  “What?” I said.

  “A key,” she said. “You use a key. Good night now, lovie, come and see me soon.”

  And she hung up, bam.

  I sat there on the bed itching to call her back. But this was the thing about Granny Gran: when she said goodbye and hung up, bam like that, that was it. It always meant she was unplugging the phone and wouldn’t be answering for a while because she had other things to do.

  A key? You open a door with a key? Even in the subway. Well, we’d asked about the key to the blue door. No dice. The token lady didn’t even know who might have a key, or if she did know she wouldn’t say.

  I lay back on my bed, thinking about the blue door and the scars in the paint and the brass plate over the keyhole, and how the wall clanged after Paavo tapped it with his bow . . .

  Then I figured that since Mom was after me anyway about having gone out today when she’d told me not to, I might as well finish the job. I went downstairs and walked out of my lobby past the afternoon doorman—who’d already done his informing for the day—and up to the Ninety-sixth Street and Central Park West subway station.