In the atrium of the hospital is an old, boarded-up door. The wood is rotten and it soon gives way beneath the boys’ kicks. They dive out through the hole they’ve opened. Rolling to the ground, they feel refreshing raindrops splashing onto their faces.
“We did it!” Sheng cheers, looking up at the sky. He throws his arms wide open, enjoying the sensation. “Yes!”
Harvey gets to his feet and starts walking through the mud, just as happy. The rain washes away the cobwebs and drowns out the buzz of whispering voices he’s been hearing in his head. He clutches the red stone to his chest. He doesn’t know what it is, why it was there or why he took it with him.
Sheng’s laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
The Chinese boy points at the building they just came out of. “The tower, remember?” he asks. “The safe place!”
Harvey looks up, shields his eyes with the palm of his hand and reads the peeling sign over the door. “Smallpox hospital …” He holds the stone tighter. He can’t hear any voices. The rain drums down on his head.
The two friends stagger into the garden, which is overrun by brushwood, in search of lights, some glimmer of civilization.
“We came out on the opposite side of New York,” Harvey says when he sees the Manhattan skyline rise up from behind the corner of the hospital. It’s a series of dark shadows with tiny points of light. A vast city of glass and light reflected in the river.
Harvey looks at Sheng, who stumbles on the lumpy ground, and laughs.
Stumbling, falling and getting back up again, the two finally reach the edge of the garden. Then, exhausted, they sit down on the ground and stare across the river at the city that never sleeps. Harvey slips a hand into his pocket, takes one of the four seeds he brought with him and lets it fall to the ground.
The two friends hug in the rain, laughing.
34
THE SEED
THE RAIN FADES AWAY IN THE MORNING. AS NEW YORK IS DRYING off, Quilleran walks down the street at a slow pace. He has a gunshot wound in his side. It hurts, but he’s happy.
He has a paper tucked under his arm. News of the attack on the library is on the front page. Three women spread panic through the underground levels of the building and have been arrested, but the reason behind what they did isn’t known. They were looking for someone. For some kids …
It seems the girls were following the orders of a man by the name of Egon Nose, a shady nightclub owner. He’s also been arrested, caught on the top floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel after threatening an Italian woman.
For those who don’t know the background behind these two events, there’s no clear connection between them. It’s simply a day of unusually crazy news.
Quilleran goes down the steps to the subway. A quarter of an hour later, he comes out again on Roosevelt Island. He walks south, heading toward the abandoned smallpox hospital. A black crow, blind in one eye, perches on his shoulder.
“Hello, Edgar,” the Indian greets him, feeding him a pistachio. Then he takes out a mint-flavored candy for himself.
Edgar flies off. The smallpox hospital is a black skeleton surrounded by an untended garden. Quilleran climbs over a low wall and makes his way through the weeds, trampling debris and other abandoned items that the grass has swallowed up. He reaches the bank of the river, which is flowing by peacefully. At the very edge of the garden is a recently upturned clump of earth. Rising up from the middle of it is a tiny tree shoot.
“The first tree has sprouted again,” the Indian man whispers the moment he sees it. He peers around at the footprints that Harvey and Sheng left behind and then goes to caress the tiny sapling. It has only a single tiny white leaf, but it holds within it inestimable power. “This is truly magical,” Quilleran says softly. “Nature’s magic is both incredible and simple.”
Out there, somewhere on the other side of the river, behind one of the thousands of windows, are Harvey and his friends. “Keep searching, kids,” the Indian says. “Keep searching, Star of Stone.”
At 11 Grove Court, Harvey Miller finds an old brass key in his brother’s desk drawer. He goes out into the hallway, heads to the kitchen, grabs a chair, drags it over to the grandfather clock, climbs onto it and opens the glass clock face.
He slides the key in and, without hesitating, turns it. The old mechanism seems to think it over a moment, after which the whole clock begins to tremble as the cogwheels make their tiny revolutions. Harvey sets the clock’s hands to the right time, gets down from the chair and nudges the pendulum in the chamber below, definitively starting up the mechanism. He looks up at the clock his brother rebuilt, full of admiration. “Welcome back, Dwaine …,” he says softly.
Antiques dealer Vladimir Askenazy walks along, hunched over more than usual and smiling feebly. He’s just come out of the Mandarin Oriental, where he went to say goodbye to the kids and make sure everything was all right. As for himself, he hid his concern and tried to reassure them.
Maybe …, he thinks, maybe we can do it.
Mistral managed to get back the map and tops from the hotel room, and the scoundrel Egon Nose was arrested. He’ll probably be released with a slap on the wrist, but if everything goes as planned, the tops will already have left New York by then.
Harvey and Sheng returned from their journey belowground, bringing a red marble stone and three seeds with them. They still have time to discover their true meaning and their relationship with the Ring of Fire.
Maybe I’ll discover that, too, thinks Vladimir. He’s tired. Very tired. He wearily makes his way to the bank, gets in line at a window and clenches his teeth. There are still so many things to do. Many open wounds that someone needs to try to heal.
When it’s his turn, the antiques dealer pulls a roll of banknotes out of the pocket of his overcoat. He hands it to the teller, who counts them. Two thousand dollars.
“Deposit it into this account,” Vladimir orders, handing over a slip of paper with a long number written on it. “It’s under the name Agatha Meyrink.” He waits for the receipt, puts it in his pocket and wearily walks out of the bank.
The Chanin Building isn’t very far away. Vladimir goes there on foot, steps into the elevator and presses the button for an apartment number he knows very well. Agatha Meyrink opens the door a moment later. She stares at him, a bewildered look on her face, and asks, “Who are you?”
Vladimir makes a little smile. “A friend of Alfred’s,” he replies.
Agatha looks him up and down for a few seconds and then adds, “I’ve already seen you somewhere before….”
“That could be,” the antiques dealer answers, holding an old camera out to her. “I’ve come to give you this back.”
Agatha retreats a step. “Alfred’s camera?”
“I believe it is.” Vladimir nods.
For a moment, Agatha is still suspicious. “Why is it you’re all looking for Alfred these days, after so many years of silence?”
The man lets the camera fall to his side. “I wanted to tell you what happened to him.” His frank, firm tone of voice tells Agatha a great deal more than his words do.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Agatha asks, slumping against the doorframe, as if the burden of all those years is suddenly unbearable.
Vladimir doesn’t reply, but his silence makes the answer clear.
“Where did it happen?”
“In Rome,” the antiques dealer says.
Agatha steps aside, gesturing for him to come in. “How do you know that?”
“I was one of his last friends,” Vladimir answers, limping over to the living room.
“Help me remember,” Agatha says softly. “Where have I seen you before?”
“I know you have a picture of Alfred, here in the house.”
Agatha remains silent.
“I’m in that picture,” Vladimir admits, leaning on the arm of the chair. “I’m the shadow, the photographer.”
Harvey, Elettra, Sheng and Mistral are in Ermete’s
hospital room, sitting on the edge of his bed. They tell him everything that’s happened in a confused, excited way, in an outpour riddled with doubts and second thoughts. On the engineer’s lap are three objects: the mirror set in a copper frame, which they call the Ring of Fire; a shiny red egg-shaped rock, which they call the Star of Stone; and three dried seeds. Harvey explains that he planted one of them in the garden where they ended up last night.
Mistral is convinced the egg-shaped stone is a meteorite. She says she’s seen one like it, with the same red color. On the other hand, Ermete thinks it’s a sculpture, a symbol: the primordial egg from which all forms of life were born.
“What if the primordial chicken came first?” Sheng asks jokingly.
The mood of the five friends is relaxed. They’re starting to get used to the fear and rash decisions forced upon them, like when Mistral went back to get the tops.
The others ask her at least three times to tell them how she managed to escape from Egon Nose. “I just hid in the bathroom,” the girl says, “while he ran out of the hotel room as fast as lightning!”
“And got a pummeling from Olympia!” Elettra continues.
Naturally, the kids have one more problem now: Linda Melodia’s questions. “Actually, what my aunt just can’t get over,” the girl from Rome explains, “is that some stranger ruined all of her perfectly wrapped presents.”
“It’s pretty obvious that there’s something I need to do….” Harvey sighs when he’s finished describing in detail how they made their way down into the maze in the library, crossed through the door with the magic square and took a ride on the pneumatic train.
“Something we need to do, Harvey. Not just you. All of us,” Sheng interjects.
Harvey continues. “Professor Van Der Berger’s known about me ever since I was little and he named me as his successor, whatever that’s supposed to mean. To the Seneca Indians, I’m Star of Stone, just like he used to be. I don’t know what to make of that, but I know the professor believed in it. He wants me to go down a path paved with strange clues, to track down a place we don’t know anything about yet. To discover a secret.”
“I say we should do it,” Mistral says, stroking the stone resting on the bed. “Even if it might turn out to be pretty frightening.”
“We could get really hurt,” adds Sheng.
“Then there are these seeds,” Elettra murmurs. “Are we supposed to plant them all?”
Harvey shakes his head. “I don’t know, but we’ll find out soon enough, I guess.”
“Oh, no!” Ermete groans, lying in the hospital bed. He tenses up and points at someone who’s just appeared in the doorway.
The four friends whirl around, scared.
It’s a tall black woman with a lean physique and a determined look on her face. She’s staring at them.
Harvey’s the first to recognize her. “Don’t worry, Ermete! That’s Olympia, my boxing coach.”
Olympia smiles and walks into the room. She has a bruise on her right cheek where one of the two women managed to punch her. “Sorry to barge in. I called the Millers and they told me I’d find you guys here.”
They introduce her to Ermete and thank her for coming to their rescue. She doesn’t ask many questions. She slugs Harvey lightly on the shoulder. “See you tomorrow, then, okay?”
Harvey smiles at her. “Okay.”
When they’re alone again, Sheng goes to shut the door to the room and Elettra pulls the map out of a bag. “Before we split up again,” she says, “there’s something we’d better do….” She takes out the top with the rainbow, which Mistral got back from the hotel room.
When he sees it, Ermete smiles. “There it is, at last….” Then he frowns. “Don’t you think we should give it back to Vladimir? After all, it was stolen from him.”
“We tried to,” Sheng explains, looking at Harvey. “But he doesn’t want it.”
“And so,” Mistral continues, “we thought you should keep it.” Elettra hands Ermete the ancient top with a rainbow engraved on it. A little embarrassed, Ermete cradles it in his fingertips.
“What do you think this top points to?” Harvey asks him.
“I don’t know,” the engineer admits. “To answer that, I’d have to spend a little time looking through my books, and maybe what’s left of the professor’s books, too.”
“If you had to take a wild guess?”
“A rainbow is a bridge, and a bridge connects two things that used to be distant. It’s a passageway, a link, a connection. It’s a way to get over something that would otherwise divide two things,” he answers hesitantly.
“Go ahead … cast it!” Sheng urges him, gesturing at the wooden map. “Let’s see what it points to.”
“What kind of paper map should we put on top of the wooden one?” asks Mistral.
“I thought we should think big! Let’s use one of the whole globe,” Elettra replies. She spreads a world map showing all the continents on top of it.
Ermete nods, makes himself more comfortable in the bed and positions the top at one edge of the map. “I’m ready,” he says. With this, he spins it.
The top whirls around over the seas and continents until it reaches a remote area in the middle of Siberia, almost on the border with China. There, it pauses, spinning around slower and slower.
“Siberia?” the kids exclaim, looking at each other, bewildered.
A moment before it stops, the top bounces, swiftly crossing over the Russian steppes, the Ural Mountains, Eastern Europe and a part of Western Europe, finishing its trek in …
“Paris,” Mistral murmurs, fascinated.
Sheng twists his lips with disappointment. “Why couldn’t something happen in Shanghai, huh?”
“So the top jumped from Siberia to Paris,” Harvey observes. “Why?”
No one has an answer.
“Fire connected Rome and New York,” Harvey continues, brushing his fingers over Prometheus’s mirror. Then he picks up the red stone. “Maybe the next connection is going to be stone?”
Before anyone can reply, the hospital room door bursts open. Linda Melodia appears in the doorway. She has a platinum-blond hairdo.
“Auntie!” Elettra exclaims the minute she sees her. “What have you done to your hair?”
The woman smooths down one of her locks sensually. “Nice, isn’t it? I thought a New York style would do me some good! But please, let’s not talk about me. Hello there!” she says to Ermete. “You must be the friend from Rome Elettra’s told me so much about.”
“That’s me….” Ermete smiles from his bed.
“Heavens! What happened to you?” Aunt Linda asks, reaching the bed with only a few long strides.
Sheng makes the tops disappear, but he doesn’t have time to hide the mirror or the stone.
“Oh, what pretty souvenirs!” she exclaims. “Where did you find them?” Before they can even react, she snatches them up, looking for a label or logo. “They’re filthy dirty, though,” she proclaims, placing them on the nightstand. “You’d better not keep them on the bed.”
Elettra tries to get rid of the woman, but it’s no use. “Listen, Auntie, we were just saying goodbye to Ermete. Pretty soon …”
Linda Melodia shakes her head vigorously. She looks around for a chair, finds one and plunks it down at the foot of the bed. From there, one by one, she looks all five of them in the eye. “That’s enough, my dears! Now, make yourselves comfortable and explain everything, and I mean everything, about the tops and the wooden box.”
“Auntie …”
Linda raises a finger threateningly. “Otherwise, the first time I get my hands on them, I’ll throw them all away in the trash!” The kids exchange long, worried glances. “Who wants to start?” Elettra’s aunt asks.
35
THE HERMIT
MOTIONLESS BEHIND THE PICTURE WINDOWS OF HIS SKYSCRAPER, late at night, the man shows no signs of wanting to sleep. He hates sleeping. He hates sleep. Most of all, he hates dreams.
> He’s standing there, looking outside. A light drizzle is streaking the windows. Gray clouds on the horizon are concealing the most distant neighborhoods of Shanghai. The minutes go by quickly.
And still, no phone call.
The man waits patiently, even though patience has never been one of his qualities.
Jacob Mahler is dead.
Egon Nose isn’t calling.
Clack! goes the automatic calendar on his desk at the stroke of midnight.
March twenty-first, the first day of spring.
The man takes off his black Bakelite glasses and clutches them in his fist. He’d love to shatter them, but he doesn’t.
He’s been expecting a completely different outcome. He expected that, come spring, he’d already have a great deal of the Pact under his control. Instead, he’s lost his best agent in Rome as well as contact with his trusted man in New York.
March twenty-first. And he still doesn’t have the map.
“Don’t think you’ve gotten anywhere,” the man hisses. “You don’t know anything yet. You haven’t understood anything yet. We’re two sides of the same coin, young Mr. Miller, Miss Melodia and Miss Blanchard. As for you, little Chinese boy, sooner or later you’ll come back to see your family. Sooner or later …”
The kids are following a path that others have prepared for them. A path that’s not very clear and has been a carefully guarded secret over the course of the years. A path that’s mysterious in some respects, even for the man standing at the window of his skyscraper. But it’s still a path. One of the many that leads to the secret behind Century.
“What difference does it make which road you follow as you seek the truth? Such a great secret is not to be reached by a single path. If you find it, you must guard it with care and keep others from discovering it as well. This is the secret behind Century …,” the man whispers before stepping away from the window.
He takes a few steps into the room, reaches its only door and walks through it. The moment the door closes, the air-conditioning system begins to sterilize the room to eliminate every last germ.
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