Star of Stone

by Pierdomenico Baccalario

  “We all could’ve seen worse,” Sheng points out.

  “You got that right.”

  The kids look for chairs so they can sit down and tell him about meeting the Indians and about the dance in Harvey’s honor at Inwood.

  “Where is he now?”

  “At home. He didn’t take it so well.”

  “What didn’t he take so well?”

  “This whole thing about his gift. It scares him. He doesn’t want to admit it, but I know it does,” Elettra confides in them. “He told me about it. He told me he could hear his brother’s voice….”

  Mistral shivers. “That can’t be pleasant….”

  “Man!” Sheng interjects. “I’d totally love to have a gift!”

  Then the kids tell him about the postcard addressed to Harvey.

  “It was given to Quilleran five years ago … when Harvey was eight.”

  “When all of us were eight.”

  “Let’s just say it took the mailman a while to deliver it to him,” Elettra jokes.

  Mistral stares at the liquids in the IVs. “The Indian told us he’d been waiting for Harvey. He said that Star of Stone is a name. His name. And before him, it was Professor Van Der Berger’s name.”

  “The professor’s?”

  “He had the same gift Harvey does.”

  Ermete doesn’t reply. He just stares at his three friends with his black eyes. “You’ve got to admit, the professor sure got you wrapped up in a big mess with that briefcase of his.”

  “Yes,” sighs Mistral.

  “But he didn’t leave us all alone,” Elettra adds. “It’s as if … as if he warned his friends. The gypsy woman in Rome, the Seneca Indians in New York …”

  The four begin to talk nonstop about Jacob Mahler, Egon Nose and his dancers. They discuss the fact that both of the bad guys actually seemed to be working for someone else.

  “Someone from my hometown,” Sheng adds.

  Then they try to imagine what might’ve happened in the subway after the crows attacked. And what dangers might still be in store for them.

  Ermete shifts in the bed, making his leg, in a cast, sway dangerously. “If only I could get out of here …”

  “But you can’t.”

  “Don’t worry about us. We’ll manage.”

  The kids leave a cell phone for Ermete on his bedside table. “Call if you need anything,” they say. Then they stand up, determined. “We think we might know how to decipher the cryptograms on the postcards.”

  “That is …?”

  “We’re going to start looking into Robert Peary, the explorer,” Mistral declares, pleased, “and the meteorite he gave to the American Museum of Natural History.”

  Once he’s alone, Ermete waits there in his bed. Then he waits some more. He turns his head to look out the window. A black crow is tapping rhythmically on the windowsill.

  From time to time, a massive Indian man wearing an RN’s uniform stops by to make sure everything’s okay. Each time, Ermete gives him a thumbs-up to let him know he’s fine, and the Indian walks off.

  Toward the end of the morning, Ermete leans over to pick up the cell phone from the table. He dials a long international number.

  He waits.

  Someone answers on the sixth ring.

  “Mom?” Ermete greets her. “Hi! How am I? Fine. Just great! Oh, yeah. It’s a wonderful city. I’m … I’m at a museum. Yeah, at the … the American Indian museum. Fantastic. You can learn all about … their traditions. Mmm-hmm. Their traditions. What? Oh, my voice is strange because I caught a cold. Yeah, it’s no big deal. So how are you?”

  Elettra is sitting in the backseat of the taxi, her chin resting in the hollow of her hand. The skyscrapers are whizzing by around her. Two days, she thinks. Then she’ll have to leave. And she won’t see him again.

  “Wait here, please,” she orders the taxi driver once they’ve arrived at Ermete’s place in Queens. She goes up to the second floor, opens the door and walks into the apartment.

  She steps over the clumps of foam rubber and the broken furniture, looks around for the bathroom, walks in and takes the mirror off the wall, covering it with a pillowcase first to avoid seeing her reflection.

  Resting on the seat of the cab, the mirror looks more solid, heavier.

  “Now I need to go to the Village, Grove Court,” the girl tells the cabbie through the partition.

  Keeping one hand on the ancient object they found in the mitreo below the church of San Clemente, Elettra tries to imagine what Harvey’s feeling right now. She thinks she knows perfectly well what it is: a mix of anger, amazement and fear. The same things she felt when she started to realize she was releasing energy through her hands, that she could short-circuit electrical devices and make mirrors go dull. The feeling of being different, a feeling that tormented her. And the overwhelming desire to be all alone, to discover herself. Accept herself.

  Elettra knows it’ll take time. Harvey won’t answer his phone. He needs to be alone. But she’s only got two days left….

  Around twenty minutes later, she gets out in front of the Grove Court gates. Quilleran’s right, she thinks, looking at the garden. Lush grass, flowerbeds in bloom, trees covered with leaves, the first white flower buds ready to spring to life … “The person who lives here has the gift of earth,” she whispers to herself. She looks for the name Miller on the buzzers, but she suddenly realizes it isn’t necessary. Harvey’s standing there in the middle of the lawn. He’s barefoot. His sleeves are rolled up, his hands black with dirt, his jeans streaked with grass stains. He’s staring at her.

  “I can feel it,” he says through the bars of the gate. “I can really feel it.”

  New York’s American Museum of Natural History is a majestic building with a broad, white marble facade that looks out over the western side of Central Park. Rising up in front of it, at the foot of the stairway, is a bronze statue of President Theodore Roosevelt on horseback.

  Once inside, Mistral and Sheng cast only a quick glance at the enormous dinosaur that towers overhead in the lobby, and ignoring all the wonders that the museum contains, they head straight for the Hall of Meteorites. They’ve brought with them the four postcards, Mistral’s notebook, a calculator and a handful of pens and pencils.

  “Hao!” Sheng exclaims as he walks around the meteorite Ahnighito. It’s an enormous, boxy mass twice as tall as they are. “Imagine the hole it must’ve made when it fell!”

  “It’s called a crater,” Mistral corrects him.

  “Can we touch it?”

  “I think so.”

  “But what’s it made of? I mean, if it came from outer space … man, can you imagine?”

  Mistral stops to read an explanatory panel. “It’s made of iron,” she tells him, “and many other metals.”

  Sheng looks rather disappointed. “No unknown or alien substances?”

  “Hmm … it doesn’t look like it.”

  The boy rests the palm of his hand against the stone that came from space. It’s warm and porous.

  Mistral continues her walk around the room, discovering other curious facts. “The biggest meteorite crater is found in a desert in the United States,” she says. “Then there’s Wolfe Creek, in the Australian desert….”

  “Do they always fall in deserts?”

  “Maybe the deserts were formed after they’d fallen,” Mistral guesses. “A meteorite impact can raise up enough dust to block out the sun for hundreds of years.”

  “I read somewhere that the dinosaurs went extinct because of a meteorite,” Sheng remembers.

  “If a meteorite is big enough, it can change the Earth’s climate, start an ice age, or …”

  Sheng walks over to his French friend. “Do you think the text to solve the cryptogram might be one of these?”

  Mistral reads the numbers on the first postcard and compares it to the words on the panel. “W-R-M-G-E,” she reads aloud. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  Sheng shakes his head.r />
  The hours fly by in the useless search for a text that could help them decipher the numbers on the postcards.

  “We’re getting nowhere, if you ask me,” Mistral is forced to admit in the early afternoon. “Maybe the meteorite Robert Peary discovered doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

  They’re sitting on the steps outside the museum. On the other side of the street is the green expanse of Central Park.

  “What do we do, then? Should we try Paul Manship’s projects?”

  Sheng and Mistral look over the postcards again: work on the subway, the inauguration of the Bethesda Fountain, Rockefeller Center and the obelisk in Central Park.

  “If I were the professor,” Sheng says, reading the incomprehensible numbers for the hundredth time, “I’d have looked for a text that nobody could ever change again.”

  Mistral nods. “Something written that can’t be altered.”

  “Something really old,” adds Sheng.

  “Here in New York there are millions of historical texts….” Mistral sighs. “The public library has lots of really precious documents. There’s a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and—”

  Sheng cuts her off immediately. “The truth is, we’re missing something….”

  “Wait! There’s still somewhere one of the tops showed us that we haven’t checked out yet,” Mistral recalls, opening up her notebook. “The smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island.”

  “The tower, the safe place …,” murmurs Sheng.

  “Maybe there’s a text there. An old, long text. Maybe the hospital’s an important place.”

  “Let’s try it out,” Sheng agrees, pulling himself up to his feet. Then he exclaims, “Man! This is like looking for a needle in a haystack! We’re overlooking something,” he repeats, discouraged.

  The door to Mr. Miller’s study opens slightly.

  “Wow! This place is spotless!” Elettra exclaims, peeking inside.

  “Maniacal, isn’t it?” replies Harvey, still covered with dirt.

  “Look at the walls! All his books … his awards …” Elettra admires the book collection and the numerous photographs. Beneath her feet is soft, soft carpeting.

  “That’s Dwaine,” Harvey says in a hushed voice, pointing at a photo.

  “He looked a lot like you.”

  “I’m the one who’s like him. But only in my appearance, unfortunately.”

  “Cut it out,” Elettra says reproachfully. “What are all these maps?”

  “Charts of ocean currents, air currents …,” Harvey replies distractedly. “My dad deals with the climate. Acid rain, tornadoes, pollution, temperature increases, melting ice caps, tsunamis … He has something new to complain about every night. Listening to him, you’d think these are mankind’s last days. He’s been that way ever since Dwaine…. Well, he thinks being optimistic means being stupid. He’s so cold, precise, rational!”

  “Which makes you feel stupid.”

  “Exactly,” Harvey replies. “And it hurts. It’s like there’s no way I can get through to him.”

  “I understand you.”

  “My dad adored Dwaine. So did my mom. He could do anything. He was … a genius.”

  Elettra kisses him on the forehead. “You’re a genius, too, Harvey.”

  “Maybe I should study geology.”

  “And become Lord of the Earthquakes?” Elettra jokes. Just then, the Miller family’s home phone rings.

  29

  THE NEEDLES

  SHENG AND MISTRAL WALK DOWN THE MUSEUM STEPS AND INTO Central Park. Sheng starts chasing squirrels. Mistral smiles as she watches him before making her way around the bushes. The park looks like it was designed especially so people could forget about the city. There are paths, seemingly wild areas, ponds, giant fields … and an ancient Egyptian obelisk.

  It’s on a little knoll behind the Metropolitan Museum and it looks like a stone sunbeam standing on a pedestal with four large bronze crabs.

  “Sheng, look!” Mistral calls.

  Sheng hurries over.

  “It was donated to the city to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal, and it was nicknamed ‘Cleopatra’s Needle.’ …” Mistral reads from a guidebook she purchased from a tourist stand. “Actually, it has nothing to do with Cleopatra. It was a part of the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis, in ancient Egypt … along with two other obelisks.”

  Sheng walks around it. Each of its four sides is decorated with hieroglyphics, mysterious figures, faded with time, that look like paw prints left by ancient creatures. On its base are four metal plaques with the translation. “ ‘The Horus, strong Bull, beloved of Ra, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt,’ ” Sheng reads aloud.

  “Today, the other two obelisks,” Mistral continues, “are found in London and Paris.”

  “ ‘In the house of his father, the Lord of the Two Lands … The son of Ra, Ramesses, beloved of Amun …’ ”

  Mistral’s head suddenly snaps up. “Oh, man!” she exclaims. “Needles! Of course! That’s why he left us the needles!”

  Sheng instantly stops reading.

  Mistral takes a step back and points at the obelisk. “Cleopatra’s Needle was part of a group of three obelisks…. Three obelisks. Three needles. One in New York, one in London and one in Paris. New York needle, London needle, Paris needle!”

  Sheng gives a start. “Hao, you’re right!”

  The girl steps over to the plaque that Sheng was reading. “The obelisk has four sides and four translations. Four texts that will never change.”

  “And we’ve got four postcards….”

  “Read the first number!”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “The first letter of the twenty-fifth word is … G.”

  “Six.”

  “O.”

  “Eighty-five.”

  “Wait a minute … T.”

  “Forty-two.”

  “Another O.”

  “ ‘G-O-T-O,’ ” Mistral concludes. Then she says, “Go to … I can’t believe it! It’s telling us to go somewhere!”

  “What comes next?” Sheng asks, almost shouting, ready to read the next numbers.

  The needle is threaded with a suture. Panther handles it confidently, stitching up Dr. Nose’s wounds as he lies facedown on the couch. “Oooh … Ow!” he moans each time the needle pierces his back. “Be careful! Be careful! Oooh! My poor, old skin!”

  The woman passes the thread between her teeth, snaps it in two and walks away. “Are you done?” Egon Nose groans. “Good. Or, actually, terrible.” He slowly rises to his feet, buttons up his silk shirt and turns to look in the mirror. What he sees in his reflection is a monster covered with cuts. Countless white adhesive bandages are plastered onto his face, cheeks, neck, hands.

  “I’m hideous,” he snarls, looking at himself. “I’m absolutely hideous. Even for a man who’s accustomed to seeing himself uglier morning after morning, this is a revolting sight. Absolutely revolting.”

  He runs his fingers over his stinging face. For each cut, he remembers the claw or beak of the crow that inflicted it on him. His face is a mask of gashes. “But now I’m furious. I’m very, very angry. How can I cover up this disaster? How can I go out without being noticed? What do you think, Panther? Maybe I should pretend nothing happened, not give a damn….” Dr. Nose starts looking for his cane. He grabs it and thumps it on the ground three times. “Enough! Call the others. Let’s make a few phone calls and then we’ll go visit our friend the antiques dealer.”

  * * *

  “What do you mean you solved it?” Harvey asks on the phone, waving Elettra over. “But how’d you do it? The obelisk? Of course! Cleopatra’s Needle! Why didn’t I think of that? You’re right!”

  Elettra runs over to him and rests her ear on the other side of the receiver. She, too, can hear the excitement in Mistral’s voice. “The message on the first postcard, the one addressed to you, reads Go to the ancient school of the master of numbers. Three times three. Three times five. So �
� do you know what that might mean?”

  “School of the master of numbers? No, never heard of anything like that.”

  “Isn’t there anything like that in New York? A math school? Three times three … Three times five …”

  “Multiplication tables!” exclaims Elettra.

  “Multiplication tables!” Harvey repeats.

  “We thought of that, too,” Mistral says on the other end of the line. “But what does it mean, then?”

  “Multiplication … multiplication …,” Harvey murmurs. He hands the phone to Elettra and starts looking through the books in his father’s study. “Multiplication tables …”

  “We translated the second one, too, although we’ve got our doubts about one of the letters!” Mistral continues in the meantime.

  “What does it say?” asks Elettra.

  “The way is guarded. It takes patience and fortitude to enter.”

  “Patience?” Elettra grumbles. “How can we be patient? We’ve only got two days left!”

  “The history of mathematics!” Harvey cheers, climbing up the bookshelf ladder to grab a big black volume.

  “We might’ve found something,” Elettra says. Mistral’s voice is partially covered by the sound of the wind. It’s as if time has started to run at a furious pace all around the kids.

  Harvey nervously thumbs through the book on the history of mathematics. He checks the index. “Multiplication tables … nothing. Pythagorean theorem … Pythagoras … Pythagoras, the master of numbers!” he cries.

  “It’s Pythagoras!”

  “Look up a Pythagorean school!” Mistral says excitedly after a moment.

  “I’ll try!” Elettra replies. “Harvey, do you have a phone book for businesses? The yellow pages, or whatever you call it here in the States?”

  “Let’s use the Internet instead,” Harvey replies, a little surprised.

  “Okay!” The girl turns to the computer and opens a browser window. “Schools … ‘Pythagorean school,’ ‘ancient school’ or something like that.”

  Meanwhile, Harvey is quickly reading over the chapter about Pythagoras. He runs his finger over the lines like a computer scanner. “The hidden meaning of numbers … numerology … school of numbers in the Orient … studies in Egypt … travels to the Orient … wisdom of the ancient Magi!” Harvey’s voice goes up in pitch. “I think this is it!”