Star of Stone

by Pierdomenico Baccalario

  “Schools … schools …,” Elettra is reading just as frenetically. “This list is a total mess.”

  “Patience and fortitude,” Mistral says over the phone. “We must find patience and fortitude….”

  “How’s Sheng doing with the third postcard?”

  “He looks like a raving lunatic. If anyone tries to get near the obelisk, he might tear them limb from limb!”

  Elettra giggles. “There are three gazillion schools, but no Pythagorean school.”

  “Magic numbers … the number seven … the seven planets …,” Harvey says, still reading. “Pythagoras introduced the seven musical notes … and the correspondence between numbers and the universe. Number rules the universe … He founded his school in Magna Graecia.”

  “Magna Graecia school!” Mistral cries when she hears him.

  “Magna Graecia is in Italy!” Elettra explains. “It was the southern part of Italy.”

  “In Crotone,” Harvey specifies.

  “Crotone school!” Elettra looks it up, but it’s yet another dead end.

  “His disciples,” Harvey continues, “had to spend one year in silence before they could begin learning from him.”

  “Patience and fortitude,” Mistral repeats again. “That’s what’s the second message says.”

  “It’s not like we’ve got years,” Elettra snaps. “We haven’t even got weeks. Read the message again, Mistral.”

  “Go to the ancient school of the master of numbers. Three times three. Three times five.”

  “That means we need to go to … where, to Crotone?”

  “But that’s on the other side of the ocean!” Harvey protests. “So why would the message be here in New York?”

  “Crotone …”

  “Crotone? Crotone? That name rings a bell….”

  The three kids fall silent for a long time.

  “Oh, no!” Mistral wails.

  “What is it?”

  “It just started pouring down rain.”

  “Pouring down!” Elettra shouts. “That’s where I’ve heard it before … from Vladimir! Wasn’t Croton the name of the old aqueduct in New York? The Angel of the Waters?”

  “The Croton Aqueduct!” Harvey remembers. “The fountain one!”

  “Where’s it based? Where’s the reservoir?” Elettra asks him.

  “I … I don’t know. I mean, it’s gone now.”

  “Well, where did it used to be?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Call Vladimir!”

  “How can I? You’re on the phone!”

  Elettra tosses him her cell phone. “We might be on to something,” she tells Mistral.

  Harvey dials the number of the antiques shop. “Hello, Vladimir? It’s Harvey. Sorry … I’m kind of in a hurry. Do you know where the Croton Aqueduct reservoir is, or where it used to be? I can barely hear you … Vladimir? You there? Croton. The aqueduct, the first freshwater system in New York. Yeah, exactly …”

  A moment of perfect silence follows.

  “There? Yeah, I understand. But how far north? Near the public library? Of course! Patience and Fortitude!” Harvey exclaims. “Aren’t those the names of the two lions guarding the entrance to the library?”

  Elettra says into the phone, “It’s the New York Public Library! We’ll see you there, at the entrance!” Both phone calls are ended, and the two race out of Harvey’s house.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t go there alone,” Elettra says as they’re running to the subway. She dials a number. Quilleran’s cell phone.

  * * *

  On the other side of the city, the moment Vladimir Askenazy hangs up the phone, Egon Nose hisses, “What was that about the public library, Mr. Askenazy?”

  Vladimir groans, pinned down in his chair by two young women. “Someone wanted to know where they could find a book.”

  Dr. Nose leans in toward him, his face covered with a maze of bandages. “This isn’t the best time to be kidding around,” he hisses.

  “I love stories with happy endings,” the elderly antiques dealer replies.

  “Make him understand the situation,” Egon orders, stepping back abruptly. One of the two women grabs Vladimir’s right hand.

  He instantly shouts, “No! Stop!”

  Dr. Nose stares distractedly at an antique statuette. He whirls his cane around and knocks it down, shattering it into a thousand pieces. “Let’s try to be reasonable, Mr. Askenazy. Was it Miller?”

  Nose’s girl is clutching one of Vladimir’s fingers in a viselike grip. He wishes he could summon the courage to make up a phony story, but he can’t. “It was him,” he admits.

  “What did he want?”

  “A copy of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh,” he hisses.

  The woman instantly tightens her grip. The antiques dealer howls and slumps down over the desk.

  “Very amusing, Vladimir, really,” Egon Nose remarks, crushing the already shattered statuette beneath his foot. “But useless. If Miller leaves his house, my girls know about it. If he makes a phone call, my girls know about it. If your Italian friend calls his mama, my girls know about it.”

  Vladimir’s mouth is wide open, but he can’t speak. The stabbing pain in his hand is so intense that all he wants to do is pass out. Still, deep down in his heart he finds another little glimmer of courage. Or madness. Which are both crumbs from the same loaf of bread.

  “There’s … just one thing, then … that your girls don’t know….”

  “And what would that be, Mr. Askenazy?”

  “Why on earth they keep working … for a monstrous-looking man like you.”

  His words seem to deeply injure Dr. Nose’s vain, unstable soul. The lord of New York nightlife explodes. “Is that what you think? Is it? That I’m monstrous?” His scratched face twisting with rage, Egon begins to kick and thrash his cane all around him, shattering everything he sets his sights on. “Well, it just so happens, antiques man, that this face—this monstrous face—has made it all the way to the top of this city.”

  Aching and tired, Vladimir half-closes his eyes. A slight smile, a crazy smirk of superiority, ripples across his lips. “Not to the top, Nose. To the bottom. To the very dregs …”

  Dr. Nose stops tearing apart the shop. Slowly, he slips on an eighteenth-century glove trimmed with lace and strikes the antiques dealer, sending him tumbling down to the ground. He massages his hand, pulls off the glove and lets it fall to the floor.

  “Set fire to the place,” he orders his girls, “and leave him inside.”

  30

  THE LIONS

  PATIENCE AND FORTITUDE ARE WHITE. THEY’RE SITTING THERE, guarding the stairs of the public library, motionlessly watching the city that never sleeps. Guardian sphinxes marking the boundary between man’s constant movement and the still, unchanging words written in books. An annoying drizzle has left the street gray and glistening. Sleek cars zoom along beneath the hazy facades of the skyscrapers.

  Elettra and Harvey reach the majestic library first. A few minutes later, the Indian mail carrier, Quilleran, appears on the other side of the street and joins them. It’s almost evening. The streetlights are about to switch on.

  Harvey casts a sidelong glance at Quilleran and explains, “We’re not exactly sure why we came here.” Then he tells him about the hieroglyphics in Central Park and about Croton.

  The man just stands there, smiling. “It’s a good thing you called me.” A crow with a cloudy eye perches on the head of the lion Patience, peering at them with its good eye.

  Sheng and Mistral show up not long afterward. They make their way through the umbrellas that are swarming the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue like stampeding mushrooms.

  “We deciphered the others, too!” Sheng cheers, climbing the steps two at a time. “The second postcard says, Knowledge is a labyrinth. Only the indivisible will lead the way.”

  “Breathe,” Elettra says.

  “And on the last one,” the Chinese boy goes on, ignoring her, “
it says, The door isn’t a magic rectangle. It is a grid of nine. Oh, hi!” he adds when he notices Quilleran. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” the Indian answers.

  They walk into the library, where silence reigns. Millions of printed pages lying on wooden tables. A multitude of file folders. Rooms, stairways, landings and hallways.

  “What now?” asks Elettra.

  “ ‘Knowledge is a labyrinth,’ ” Harvey recites. “ ‘Only the indivisible will lead the way.’ ”

  “What did we come here to do, anyway?” whispers Mistral.

  “We’re not sure,” Harvey replies. “We need to look for … for something.”

  “Something or someone that will lead the way …”

  “We need a guide.”

  A man with bleached hair and an effeminate gait accompanies them to the first underground level of the library. “They usually don’t let anyone come down here,” he explains for the millionth time, straightening his glasses with lilac-colored frames on the tip of his nose. “But from what your uncle told me,” he says, waving his hand toward Quilleran, whose emotionless face looks like a statue eroded by the wind, “this is a really special occasion.”

  Sheng smiles. “It sure is.” Then he whispers to Harvey, “Why does he keep looking at me like that?”

  “Guess who Uncle Quilleran’s nephew is.”

  Sheng nods, understanding. Then he turns to Mistral. “What special occasion is he talking about, anyway?”

  “It’s that he’ll get fifty dollars if he helps us find what we’re looking for.”

  “So what is it we’re looking for?”

  Mistral shrugs. “The water pipes?”

  As if to impress them, the guide rattles off a slew of information. “Our library is home to sixty million books. Thanks to our cataloging system and our high-speed carts, we’re capable of tracking down any publication in under ten minutes.”

  The little group makes its way down a long, long corridor with a low ceiling. They’re surrounded by bookshelves.

  “The building that was here before the library—is there anything left of it?” Harvey asks as the corridor branches out into two aisles.

  The guide shakes his head. “Well … Hmm … the building that was here before …”

  “The Croton Aqueduct reservoir,” Sheng interjects.

  “Hmm … let me think … Croton …” The man looks around to gain his bearings and then seems to randomly choose one of the other aisles. “Follow me.”

  After a few detours, a few consultations and thousands of paces, the guide leads them up to an old, ordinary-looking white wall. “This should be it,” he says with a little smile as he checks, for the millionth time, a photocopy he had made for them three floors above. “Yes, precisely. This is what’s left of the building that was here before the library: the last surviving wall of the Croton Aqueduct reservoir.”

  It’s a perfectly normal white wall, of which not more than one square meter has been left uncovered by bookcases. To the left and right are books. The bookcases go all the way up to Harvey’s head and end only a foot and a half below the ceiling. The aisle from which they’ve arrived is illuminated by a line of neon lights that switched on automatically as they passed by.

  “Happy?” the guide asks.

  “Actually … no,” Harvey answers.

  “There’s nothing out of the ordinary here, on this wall,” Mistral points out.

  The guide rubs his hands together nervously. “In any case, this is it.”

  “This isn’t the place we need to get to,” Harvey says thoughtfully. “It’s just a starting point. Go to the ancient school of the master of numbers.” He leans back against the wall and looks around.

  “Well, we’ve found that.” Sheng stands next to him. “And around us we’ve got a labyrinth. Only the indivisible will lead the way,” he repeats aloud.

  The guide looks at Quilleran inquisitively. “Can we go now?”

  “Just a moment,” the Indian man replies.

  “Only the indivisible … Only the indivisible …”

  “Indivisible, like we need to stick together?”

  “Indivisible, as in solid?”

  “Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all?”

  Harvey looks at the numbers marking the aisles around Croton’s old wall and reads aloud, “Eighty-nine, eighty-eight, eighty-one …”

  “Nine times nine,” Sheng blurts out.

  “What’d you say?”

  “Eighty-one. Nine times nine. The times table for the number nine.”

  “And eighty-eight?”

  “That isn’t in any times table,” Sheng says, thinking. “Wait, of course it is. It’s a multiple of eight. Eleven times eight.”

  “Eighty-nine?”

  “A multiple of seven? Seventy-seven, eighty-four … no,” Sheng says, trying to concentrate.

  “It’s a prime number,” says Mistral. Harvey and Sheng turn toward the French girl. “A prime number. You know, the ones that can’t be divided except by themselves or the number one,” she explains.

  A smile crosses Harvey’s face. “Can’t be divided … indivisible … only the indivisible will lead the way!” With this, he slips into aisle number eighty-nine.

  “Hey!” the guide exclaims. “You can’t go down there!”

  Quilleran bars his way and rests a hand on his shoulder. A very heavy hand. “Just a moment,” he says. The other three kids follow Harvey.

  The aisles intersect each other like strands in a spiderweb. At each intersection, the kids find a prime number showing them the way. At times it leads them to stairs going down, so they go downstairs.

  The guide with bleached hair follows them, panting, protesting and looking around nervously, but he isn’t actually brave enough to stop them. “If they catch you down here,” he repeats at every turn, “they’ll fire me.”

  “They won’t catch us,” Quilleran replies calmly.

  Then they stop.

  They heard a noise coming from a few floors above them. It sounded like a gunshot. They stand there, motionless. The guard is very alarmed. “Did you hear that, too?”

  “Maybe a stack of books fell to the floor, or a lightbulb exploded.”

  Quilleran answers for all of them. “I didn’t hear anything.” He pushes the man forward, nodding at Harvey to keep going.

  Whatever caused that noise, their descent into the maze of books continues at an even brisker pace. Soon, the gunshot is forgotten, along with all the other noises. All that’s left is the rhythmic sound of their breathing and their shoes squeaking on the floor. The lights in the aisles switch on automatically when they pass by and switch off a moment after that.

  There’s another gunshot. This time there’s no doubt about it. It’s followed by a scream.

  The guide stops a second time. “Did you hear it now? Somebody’s shooting!”

  “Yes,” Quilleran says, not stopping.

  The underground level around them is a dark, complex labyrinth of aisles. The Native American man gestures to them to wait. Behind them, the aisle’s lights switch off bulb by bulb, until only the one directly over their heads is still on.

  They wait. Everything’s dark, except their tiny light. Quilleran slips off one of his shoes and, with a well-aimed swing, shatters it.

  “Hey!” the guide protests. “You can’t do that! That’s public property!”

  “Shhh,” the Indian shushes him. They’re in the dark. The six of them lean back against the bookcases and stand there, listening. The darkness is suffocating.

  The library worker tries to insist. “Would you mind telling me—”

  “I said, be quiet,” Quilleran repeats with a tone that no one would dare talk back to. He looks behind him, toward the aisle they just came from. “They’re coming downstairs,” he whispers.

  Now the kids can also hear the sound of heels coming from far, far away.

  “Who’s coming downstairs?” the guide whispe
rs nervously.

  “Egon’s women,” Harvey answers, stepping around him.

  “Who?” the man asks. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “They’re the ones who were shooting,” Mistral adds.

  The man’s face grows pale. “Oh, no!” he exclaims. “Tell me you’re kidding!”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  In the distance, a door opens and shuts. Over the bookcases, they can see the ceiling lights go on in a distant aisle.

  “Is there any way to seal off the floor?” Sheng asks the guide.

  “To seal off the floor? What do you mean?”

  Elettra waves her hands. “To put out the lights.” She shows the man the distant string of neon lights switching on. “Those women are looking for us. See? Over there, where the lights are going on. As long as we’re in the dark, they won’t know where we are. But the moment we move …”

  “We’re trapped,” says Sheng.

  “We’ve got to go back,” says Mistral.

  “I’m not going back now,” Sheng objects.

  “Or …”

  “We split up,” Quilleran suggests.

  “How?”

  The Indian man studies the kids’ faces in the darkness and asks Harvey, “Will it take you much longer to get where you need to go?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Some will keep going, others will turn back,” Quilleran insists.

  “I’m going back!” the guard cries hysterically.

  Harvey studies the aisle lights in the distance. One by one, they’re turning on slowly, as if the girls are unsure which way to go.

  “If we split up, they’ll have to split up, too,” the boy whispers. “Then we might be able to lose them.”

  “What on earth are you babbling about?” the guide groans.

  “Would you shut up?” Sheng snaps. His tone is so harsh that he instantly gets the result he wanted.

  “I’m going back,” Mistral repeats.