Sheng glances at him and whispers into the phone, “Mistral! We’ve got to … I’ll call you in a bit. Really, otherwise they’ll get away. I don’t know! Oh, man! Why’d they beat him up?” Without taking the phone away from his ear, he dashes after Harvey, who’s following the women from Lucifer. “Okay! See you. Where? I don’t know! So who is it that beat up Ermete? Okay. Half an hour and we’re there … wherever ‘there’ is. I’ve got to go now or I might get lost forever!”
Sheng tosses his phone into his backpack and starts pushing his way through the crowd, trying not to lose sight of his friend’s messy head of hair. When Harvey stops, Sheng is panting, feeling like he’s just spent hours struggling to chop open a path through the jungle. “I want to learn boxing, too!” he grumbles, almost clinging to his friend.
Harvey has a serious look on his face. Sheng tries to figure out what he’s looking at, but the crowd is blocking his view. “What’s up?”
“They’re handing out something …,” Harvey says, keeping his voice down.
“That is …?”
“Flyers.”
“Flyers?”
“Looks like it.” Harvey takes a few steps forward and picks up one that a man just dropped to the ground.
“What’s it for?” Sheng asks him.
“A party,” he replies. “A rave, in fact.”
“One of those wild parties that last all night long?”
“At the City Hall subway station,” Harvey continues. “But look at the drawing….” Written on the flyer is:
THE UNDERGROUND SPIN
AROUND THE OLD CITY HALL STATION
MARCH 19TH, AFTER MIDNIGHT
“This might come in handy,” Harvey says, worried.
The two quickly walk off. A tall, brawny Indian picks up another one of the flyers from the ground and slips it into his pocket.
“The R stops at City Hall,” Harvey points out, reading over a map of the subway hanging near the train door.
“The flyer calls it the old City Hall station….”
“Well, I don’t know where that is,” Harvey admits.
Having gotten off at the second stop, they reach the street level when the sun is practically only a memory. They walk into the Time Warner Center and head toward the café inside Whole Foods, the enormous supermarket at Columbus Circle. Once they’re off the escalators, Sheng spots Mistral sitting at a table off to the side.
“You alone?” he asks her the moment he’s beside her.
“Yes,” she answers, “and you have no idea how happy I am that you’re here!”
“Ermete?” Harvey asks, sitting down next to her.
“He went to buy a sweat suit and a ski jacket. It was incredible! You can’t even imagine….” Mistral rests a brown wooden box on the table and slides it over to Sheng.
“Where’d this come from?”
“It was being watched over by the guard dog.”
“What is it?”
“Go ahead. Take a look.”
Sheng clicks open the lock and the box opens up. Inside of it are two golden objects: a key with the number thirty-two written on it and a little statue of an angel with its wings unfurled, its right hand stretched out, as if it were pointing at something.
“Hao! So what are they?”
“Pick up the angel,” Mistral says encouragingly.
Sheng does what she says. The statue is really heavy. On its base is the artist’s signature: Paul Manship.
“I don’t get it.”
Mistral is so excited, she’s almost babbling. “I went to an Internet café and discovered that Paul Manship is the sculptor who made the Prometheus at Rockefeller Center!”
“So what?”
Mistral takes a deep breath and gives them a recap of their day. “The ring around Prometheus had a sort of niche in it, and the Ring of Fire we found in Rome fit perfectly into that niche … opening up a secret compartment.”
“No way!” Harvey exclaims.
Mistral continues. “While the guards were busy yelling at Ermete, I went over to the secret compartment, looked inside and found this box.”
“You stole it?” Harvey gasps.
Mistral’s angelic face turns bright red.
Sheng slaps her on the shoulder. “Way to go! You’re fantastic!”
“What about our mirror? The Ring of Fire?” Harvey asks.
Mistral shrugs. “No problem there. Luckily, after roughing him up a bit, the guards at Rockefeller Center told Ermete to take it with him, so he went back into the fountain and got it. With everyone around him laughing the whole time.”
“Hao!” Sheng exclaims. “I wish I’d been there.”
“You could’ve taken a nice snapshot of him, too.”
The angel statue is handed to Harvey, who turns it over with a suspicious look on his face. “I’m not sure why, but this looks familiar….”
“You’re the only one it might mean anything to.”
After a long while of thought, the boy shakes his head. “Vladimir Askenazy,” he concludes.
“What does Vladimir have to do with it?”
“We’ve got three old things now: a postcard, a key and a statue. On top of that, Sheng and I discovered the place where the two robbers hang out,” Harvey explains, then tells her about their trip to Hell’s Kitchen and shows her the flyer.
“Maybe an antiques dealer can explain how an object that’s supposed to be thousands of years old, like the Ring of Fire, could fit into a statue from …”
“Nineteen thirty-four,” says Mistral, finishing his sentence.
“That’s really strange, don’t you think?” Harvey’s cell phone lets out a series of high-pitched beeps. It’s Elettra. Harvey jumps up and walks off, leaving Sheng and Mistral all alone.
“I know who that is,” the Chinese boy says. “Wanna bet?”
The phone call only lasts a few minutes. Then Harvey comes back to the table, clearly troubled. He doesn’t even sit down. He hides his cell phone in his pocket, but he can’t hide the fact that he’s a little shaken. “Elettra’s on her way back from Ellis Island,” he says. “She … she met someone in the museum … someone who showed her the immigration registers. She says she found an Alfred Van Der Berger who came to the United States from Amsterdam.”
“Great!” Sheng exclaims. Then he hesitates. “How’s that going to help us?”
“Well, a little extra information can’t hurt,” says Mistral. Noticing that Harvey isn’t showing any signs of sitting down, she asks him, “Are you leaving?”
“Yeah. I’m going to pick her up at the ferryboat terminal. What are you guys going to do?” His question makes it clear that they aren’t invited.
“I could use a bite to eat,” Sheng says, looking at the mountains of food surrounding them.
“Okay.” Harvey raps on the table and sheepishly waves goodbye.
“What’s wrong, Harvey?” Mistral asks him.
“It’s nothing.”
“You sure?”
Harvey rolls his eyes and dumps his gym bag on the floor. “Listen,” he starts out, resting his hands on the table. “Something dawned on me, but I’m warning you, it’s actually impossible….”
“Shoot.”
“If I’m right, we’d have another little problem to solve. A problem that doesn’t seem to have any logical explanation.”
“Which would be …?”
“The photograph at Agatha’s house. The three men. The names written on the back.”
Mistral reads from her notes. “Paul, Alfred and Robert.”
Harvey points at the signature on the base of the angel statue. “Paul Manship.”
“No way!” Mistral exclaims. “He was alive a hundred years ago!”
“Exactly,” Harvey insists, unusually grim. “That’s exactly the problem.”
20
THE REGISTER
EVENING HAS FALLEN IN BATTERY PARK. ELETTRA AND HARVEY are walking along the seaside at the southernmost tip of Manhattan. T
he sun has slid down behind the horizon, now a prisoner of the long winter night.
“I thought it was just my imagination,” Elettra explains, dragging her feet on the path’s fine gravel. “I looked everywhere, but the guy wasn’t there. He’d vanished, like he’d never even existed. So I retraced my steps. I was burning up like a furnace. Then, suddenly, I heard someone’s voice asking me if they could help me somehow. I whirled around and there he was. The Indian man who’d been staring at me before. I wasn’t wrong. He really was wearing old-fashioned clothes. But he had a name tag on his coat.”
“What was his name?”
“Washington.” Elettra smiles. “The moment I saw the name tag, I calmed down and realized that Washington worked at the museum’s help desk. His outfit was a kind of uniform. I asked him a few questions about the history of the city and he told me about the first settlements, the street fights and the skyscrapers, which according to one legend were built entirely by the Indians. In any case,” Elettra continues, “while I was talking to him, I kept feeling … charged. So I asked him some other questions about immigration and Ellis Island, until he took me to see the computers that have the names of all the immigrants to the United States over the last two hundred years. He asked me if I wanted to try looking someone up … and I got the idea of checking for Alfred Van Der Berger.”
Harvey stops and stares at her.
“The computer found one,” Elettra continues after a long pause. “Then I jammed the system. I short-circuited the entire computer network.”
“How do you know it was you?”
“My keyboard caught fire,” the girl explains. “It was me. I could feel it.”
Harvey and Elettra start walking among the long shadows of the trees. A woman wearing a sweat suit and white earphones passes them, a poodle in tow.
“Among those millions of names, signatures and registered documents, there was only one Alfred Van Der Berger.” Elettra stops a short distance from the light-colored trunk of a cedar. An icy breeze is coming in from the sea. The trees are skeletal and perfectly still, as though lifeless. “In 1905, Harvey,” whispers Elettra. “In 1905.”
“That’s impossible.”
“It was him, Harvey,” the girl insists.
He laughs nervously. “The man we met in Rome wasn’t over a hundred years old, Elettra!”
“I know, but I’m telling you, it was him!”
Still skeptical, Harvey doesn’t answer her. “You know that’s crazy!” Then he stares at her with all the intensity he can summon up. “How can you be so sure it was him? If the computer hadn’t short-circuited, maybe you would’ve found thousands of other Alfred Van Der Bergers.”
“The computer short-circuited because I short-circuited it,” Elettra objects. “And I short-circuited it because I could tell that it … that it was him.”
Harvey shakes his head. “It’s totally impossible! The average life span for men is eighty years.”
“Maybe Alfred Van Der Berger isn’t simply … a man.”
“Then what is he?” No voice, inside or outside Harvey’s head, whispers the answer.
Elettra wraps her arms around him gently. “I don’t know, Harvey. We’ve always just called them … ‘them.’ ”
Harvey raises his hands and rests them on Elettra’s back, drawing her closer protectively.
“If they’re our enemies, Harvey … maybe Alfred and the other men who were with him in that picture … his friends …” Elettra’s next words are drowned out by the wind, which is making the lowest tree branches groan and their bark grow brittle.
“Friends?” Harvey repeats.
Elettra’s eyes are as dark as ink. Full of words to be written. “Isn’t there anyone who can help us, Harvey? Can’t you hear a voice, one that’s telling us what to do?”
“No,” he answers with a shudder.
“I’m getting scared.”
Harvey’s heart is beating stronger and stronger. Elettra’s shoulders are tiny and delicate. Her neck long and slender. Her glimmering eyes troubled.
“There’s no need for you to be scared,” he replies, kissing her.
21
THE TOWER
DRESSED aS A VAGRANT, ERMETE ARRIVES AT THE CORNER OF EAST Sixth Street and Avenue B. The East Village is a clump of dirty, narrow streets lined with chaotic homes with peeling facades, much different from the Upper East Side.
Ermete wraps his crumpled coat around himself more tightly. His woolen hat is doing nothing to keep the cold away from his brain. It’s early morning, and Ermete hates early mornings and everything that happens before eleven o’clock. The sky is a gray mountain that the sun is struggling to scale.
The kids got there before him. They’re waiting for him now on the other side of the street.
“No luck,” he says, greeting them. His breath freezes in a puff in front of his lips. “I spent all night trying, but I couldn’t understand a thing.”
Harvey, Mistral, Elettra and Sheng look over the sheets of paper covered with Ermete’s handwriting. Numbers and letters. Numbers and letters.
“There isn’t a simple alphabetic code on that postcard,” the engineer continues. “No alphanumeric substitutions. Not even a variation of the Caesar cipher.”
“Oh, now I get it….” Sheng groans, handing the pages back to him.
“A Caesar cipher with a shift of three, for example, would mean that instead of each letter, you write the one that comes three letters later in the alphabet. You can make a variation of a Caesar cipher using alphanumeric substitution, but … no dice. I tried all the possible combinations. None of the recurring numbers let me clearly identify a vowel. There isn’t even any kind of logical numeric relationship. I tried with multiplication tables, I applied a few matrices I’m familiar with … but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.” Ermete sighs. There’s an early-morning winter chill, and the city seems shrouded in gloomy sadness.
“So, what now?” Elettra asks.
“There are only two possibilities,” the engineer continues. “The first is that the numbers on the postcard don’t mean anything. Who knows? It could be an expense report or numbers to play in the lottery….”
“And the second possibility?” Mistral asks encouragingly.
“It could be a cryptogram.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Sheng remarks, rubbing his arms, trying to warm himself. “Mind telling us what a cryptogram is?”
“The most famous ones are the Beale cryptograms. They contain instructions for finding a treasure, and now, over a hundred years later, not all of them have been solved yet.”
“Then it’s bound to be a cryptogram,” Harvey remarks pessimistically.
“We’ve only got five days to solve it. After that, we’re leaving,” Mistral reminds them. “If this cryptogram can be solved, that is.”
“A cryptogram is both perfectly simple and perfectly impossible to solve,” Ermete explains. “The only way to decipher it is to discover what text it’s based on. The only one of Beale’s cryptograms that’s been solved, for example, was based on the Declaration of Independence. Each word in the Declaration was assigned a progressive number: one, two, three … all the way to the end. Then, Beale had simply written down the numbers of the various words whose first letters, one after the other, spelled out the message. That’s it.”
“So in order to crack the cryptogram on this postcard, we’ve got to find the writing it’s based on?”
“Exactly.”
“But couldn’t that be anything?”
“Once again, exactly. It could even be a Coca-Cola label.” Ermete holds up both hands in front of him. “Just kidding! I already tried that.”
“So how are we supposed to find out what it is?” Mistral asks rather skeptically. “The Star of Stone … any idea if that’s a book?”
“We can look it up. For now, our only clue is that it must be a text that was around five years ago,” says Ermete. “A text that’s always valid, that can’t be changed.
Otherwise … goodbye, cryptogram!”
The kids look at each other dismally. Every once in a while a car zooms by noisily.
“It’s a lousy day for lousy news, if you ask me,” Elettra grumbles.
“What are we looking for here, anyway?” Ermete asks, yawning.
“Some strange detail that the top was pointing out to us.”
“Something like the cat in Rome.”
“Actually, I might have an idea,” Harvey says. “Now that I think about it, there is something strange nearby. Over there, in the garden …”
It’s a wooden tower standing on a little patch of grass beside the paved road.
“Hao!” gasps Sheng, pushing open the green gate leading into the garden. “What is it? The world’s biggest toy?”
The tower rises up like bizarre scaffolding, with beams and wooden structures piled one atop the other chaotically. Peeking out from the empty spaces, looking like an odd race of creatures from a fairy tale, are all sorts of random objects: giant stuffed animals, fiberglass mannequins, rocking horses, parts from old merry-go-rounds, table legs and lampshades, forgotten dolls and plastic toys.
“It’s a monument to consumerism, I think,” Harvey explains, stopping with the others at the base of the tower of forgotten things. “It’s full of lost, useless stuff that erodes in the rain.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it …,” Elettra whispers, fascinated by the mass of decomposing objects.
“It’s an eyesore,” says Mistral decisively. Still, she can’t help staring at the hundreds of curious items crammed into the tower.
“It’s definitely strange,” Ermete agrees, scratching his head.
“Well, now we need to discover what it is we need to discover. Who knows? Maybe there’s a top somewhere in all that junk,” Sheng jokes. He pulls out his camera and zooms in on one detail after the other.
Then Elettra points out something on the side opposite the garden entrance. It’s a mannequin that seems to have been stuck onto the bottom part of a rocking horse. “Am I wrong, or is there something beneath that mannequin?”
Sheng looks for it through his lens. “There it is!” he cries after a moment. “Yeah, you’re right. It’s some sort of toy train….”
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