Century #4: Dragon of Seas

by Pierdomenico Baccalario

  Mistral flips through her notebook, going back in time. Then she stretches and steps over to the window. Above it, just beneath the gutter outside, the beehive is closed now, sealed up with wax. Indifferent to the changing of the seasons, the bees have already decreed the end of summer.

  “Darn you,” the girl grumbles, thinking of everything she detests about autumn and winter. She walks to the living room.

  Her mother is out doing a little shopping. The purse made of soda can tabs is there, where Mistral left it. The Veil of Isis is draped over the backs of two chairs like an old blanket hung out to air. Sophie’s photographs are scattered over the table, next to the books on calligraphy and alphabets and the one on the language of animals that Agatha, Professor Van Der Berger’s friend, sent to her from New York. Mistral opens her purse to look for the MP3 player Madame Cocot gave her.

  She turns it on, plugs in her earphones and goes back to her room, whistling. She scrolls down the list of songs saved on it: titles and artists she’s never heard of. Classical music, it seems. She sets it on shuffle mode and tumbles into bed.

  Murmurs, applause, and then a piano strikes the first notes of a nocturne by Chopin. Mistral listens to it, enchanted. A loud symphony follows, and she skips over it. Again, a piano. Sweet and extremely slow.

  In the background, a few coughs from the audience. Fourth piece: powerful and romantic. Mistral looks at the display and reads the artist’s name. PRELUDE AND FUGUE BY SHOSTAKOVICH, PERFORMED BY VLADIMIR ASHKENAZY.

  Mistral reads it a second time. She knows that name, but …

  The pianist plays, then coughs, the audience bursts into applause. The MP3 player moves on to the next track.

  “Hello, Mistral,” a voice suddenly says. “If you’re listening to this, it means I had to leave.”

  Mistral barely manages to hold back a shriek. She bolts upright in bed and rests her feet on the floor.

  “I just pray you’re still in Paris,” the voice continues. “Listen carefully: you need to do something important. There’s a small square on Boulevard de Magenta. It’s called Jacques Bonsergent. Go there as soon as possible. But be careful … because they’re probably already following you.”

  Mistral is on her feet now, standing stock-still in front of her mirror. Her eyes are open wide with fright.

  “In the square you’ll find a newsstand,” the voice from the MP3 player continues. VLADIMIR ASHKENAZY, the display reads. PIANIST.

  But what Mistral hears is a voice she knows all too well.

  It’s the voice of the antiques dealer from New York. Vladimir Askenazy.

  THE WELL IN THE DOMUS QUINTILIA’S COURTYARD IS ANCIENT. A stone cylinder a meter and a half tall that rests on two steps and is topped with three intertwined wrought-iron bars with a pulley attached to them.

  Elettra stares at the light coming from the well. But only for a few seconds, because then the light disappears and everything—the well, the courtyard, the wooden terrace, the vines, the four statues that guard the Domus Quintilia—goes dark again.

  Elettra steps outside, barefoot. She walks over the old, smooth paving stones, then over the gravel, where weeds stick up impertinently around her father’s rickety old minibus. In the air, the distant sounds of horns honking, people laughing.

  Elettra climbs up the two steps on her tiptoes. She rests her hand on the stone rim and peers down into the well. The opening is covered by a black grate. And below the grate, only darkness. No light, not even a distant one.

  “Can you hear me?” a voice says just then from inside the well, almost making her lose her balance.

  Elettra looks around. She counts the windows with their closed shutters. She counts the floors of the Domus Quintilia. She counts the doors, the arcades. The statues.

  Her jaw drops. Who said that?

  She leans even farther down over the well and rests her hands on the grate. She listens.

  The voice echoes out again. “Linda, can you hear me?”

  Elettra claps her hand over her mouth. She can’t believe what she just heard.

  “Linda, answer me, please,” the voice in the well whispers.

  Then it falls silent. Everything falls silent. And the distant sounds from the boulevard along the Tiber River return to the courtyard. For the second time, a faint light comes up from the well. A creak, like one from wheels. The sound of the elevator doors.

  Elettra looks through the windows into the dining room. She sees light from the elevator rise up from belowground and stop on the second floor. Its little doors open and close. Aunt Irene’s wheelchair glides across the floor. Her bedroom door opens and closes.

  Elettra sits down on the steps of the well, trying to decide what to do. How do you make the elevator go down another floor? And what’s down there?

  She goes back inside the hotel and steps behind the reception desk. She picks up the green lighter next to her aunt Linda’s pack of cigarettes, the flashlight, opens the basement door and shines the light on the steep stairs that lead down into the maze of dusty rooms.

  Elettra flicks the light around on the sheet-covered furniture. She remembers Aunt Linda calling to her while she was down there last year. Elettra was hunting a mouse.

  “You sure are stupid,” she tells herself, wondering where the underground room might be. “You never noticed a thing, did you?”

  She starts walking down the stairs.

  “I just want my cell phone back,” Harvey hisses on the intercontinental flight once they’ve taken off and the seat belt sign has been turned off.

  The Air China flight attendant is opening and closing aluminum drawers full of soft drinks. She’s very cute, petite and smiling.

  “Of course, sir,” she replies, “but I need to inform you that making phone calls is not allowed for the duration of the flight.”

  “That’s eight hours!” Harvey exclaims. “And for me, eight hours might be too long.”

  “I don’t make the rules. During the flight, you can use a computer on condition that it isn’t connected to a printer, listen to music from a portable media player or watch one of the movies we’re showing. We have all the latest releases and—”

  “Don’t you understand what I’m telling you?” Harvey snaps. “I need to call home and I need to do it now. My mom might be in danger!”

  He shows the flight attendant the article in the New York Times. “You know why somebody set fire to this place? Because of me.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, sir.”

  “Stop calling me sir!” Harvey says, almost shouting. “I’m just a kid who needs to call home. Is that so hard to understand?”

  “Try not to raise your voice.…”

  The flight attendant takes the intercom out of its cradle and says something in Chinese. Then she walks over to two stewards, whispers to them and points at Harvey, who’s standing at the back of the plane, next to the bathroom door, which is ajar.

  “Okay,” he says, sensing what’s going on. “She’s calling for backup.”

  Passing by outside the windows are blankets of white clouds as far as the eye can see.

  Harvey waits for the two men to walk up to him and ask, again, what he needs.

  “I just … need … to make … a phone call,” he says.

  “On this flight—” the burlier of the two men begins.

  “I know! But this is an emergency. AN EMERGENCY. I wouldn’t dream of bothering you over nothing.”

  “We suggest you go back to your seat,” the burly man says.

  “We can bring you some water, if you like,” the thin one says.

  “They’re showing Harry Potter.”

  “You should like that.”

  Harvey shakes his head. “You aren’t listening to me, are you?”

  A moment of turbulence makes them all lose their balance.

  The burly man elbows Harvey, and it’s far from accidental.

  “Forgive me,” he says, but there’s a hint of warning in his eyes.
/>   So the going’s getting tough.

  “Can I at least have my phone back?” Harvey asks.

  “We suggest that you—”

  Harvey raises his hands. “Okay, okay, I get it.”

  The burly man smiles.

  Harvey analyzes the situation. Closed drawers, drinks cart, burly steward, thin steward, bathroom. He looks at the lock on the bathroom door, estimates the distance between the thin man and the door.

  Then he decides. He steps closer to the thin man and points at his pants pocket. “Why do I have to keep mine switched off when yours is still on? Look! It’s blinking.”

  The man thrusts his hand into his pocket, pulls out his phone and checks it. “What are you talking about, kid?”

  Harvey moves like lightning: he shoves the drinks cart toward the thin steward and snatches the cell phone out of his hand. Then he dives into the bathroom and instantly locks the door.

  The bathroom is tiny, but it offers everything he needs. A minute of peace.

  “Sir!”

  “Come out, sir!”

  The stewards shout and pound on the door.

  “Just a minute!” Harvey replies.

  He switches on the phone.

  Dials his home number.

  “Sir! Don’t force us to knock the door down!”

  “Sir! My phone!”

  Harvey waits for the line to start ringing.

  “C’mon, Mom.…”

  “Open up at once!”

  “Oh, man!” Harvey grumbles seconds later. He stands up and looks at himself in the mirror. He flicks open the lock and is almost knocked down by the burly steward, who grabs him by the sleeve of his sweater.

  “Okay! Okay! I’m coming out!” Harvey says, holding the cell phone well in sight. “Here you go.” He smiles wryly. “No reception.”

  AFTER CHANGING FROM LINE 4 TO LINE 1, SHENG REACHES THE South Railway Station a few minutes after two o’clock. He walks away from the waiting areas on the basement level and ends up below the giant dome in glass, aluminum and polycarbonate structures. It’s one of the world’s largest waiting rooms, 270 meters in diameter and almost 50 meters high, supported by a web of columns and tie rods that look like they’re floating. Bright and clean, it’s a massive hall capable of holding over ten thousand people, with direct access to the thirteen incoming train platforms. On the opposite side is the VIP lounge and, on the upper floor, the departure platforms. It’s impossible to run into anyone by chance here.

  Sheng calmly walks through the murmuring river of people and reaches track 13. The screen above it indicates that the train from Beijing will arrive in just under a quarter of an hour, right on time.

  He looks around, tense. A man with a mustache gestures strangely to him. He’s sitting at a sushi stand by the picture windows of the Soft Seat waiting area. Sheng doesn’t recognize him at first glance and is about to walk past him when the man with the mustache clears his throat loudly. He wears a big gray-on-gray tartan hat, a shot silk shirt, a dark overcoat and a pair of pointy black shoes that look like they’ve come straight out of an early-century gangster’s wardrobe. When Sheng smiles at him sheepishly, the man holds up his chopsticks and spreads them open in a V-for-victory sign. Then he puts them down, winks at him and gestures at the wheeled wicker stool beside his own. When Sheng goes to check the arrivals board one last time, the mustachioed man leaves the stand and walks up to him, annoyed.

  “Would you grace me with your presence at the stand, most honorable Mr. Sheng?” he asks point-blank.

  “Hao! Ermete!”

  “Sorry, but who were you expecting?” says the engineer from Rome, in his latest disguise. “Brad Pitt?”

  Ermete walks him over to the stools, chuckling. Then he shows him a train ticket. “Did you know you can only wait in the Soft Seat hall if you have a ‘Soft Class’ train ticket? They wouldn’t let me in, so I stopped off at Mr. Sushi’s.” The Roman engineer turns to the man behind the counter, points at a couple of fish dumplings and asks Sheng if he wants anything.

  “No thanks.”

  “Rice noodles,” Ermete De Panfilis says, ordering for him.

  “But I said no!”

  “No eats, no seats. So how’s it going, old pal?”

  “Not bad, you?”

  “Ready to get back to it?”

  “I dunno. What about you? Aren’t you tired of changing from one disguise to another?”

  “What are you talking about? This is nothing for a role-playing gamer like me. Still, I’ve had some serious problems.…”

  “Your broken leg?”

  Ermete waves it off with his hand. “Are you kidding? I mean my mother. She didn’t want to let me leave the country. But then I managed to convince her by saying I was coming here to find a millionaire girlfriend.” Ermete automatically pulls his cell phone out of his pocket, checks it and puts it back. “And here I am, just as planned.”

  “Have you seen the city yet?”

  “I know all about it. Shanghai is sinking by a centimeter every year, it has a population of twenty million, you all go out to eat on Friday nights and you don’t have street names.”

  He shows Sheng a printout with a picture of his hotel on it. “I booked a room on this street, which is simultaneously called Huaihai Middle Road, Central Huaihai Road, Huaihai Zhonglu and Huai Hai Zhong Lu.”

  Sheng laughs. “You could’ve stayed at the Grand Hyatt, like the others.”

  “At those rates?” exclaims the engineer/radio ham/archeologist/comics reader/gaming master Ermete De Panfilis. “I’m paying out of my own pocket for this trip to save the world … or whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing. Besides, the Grand Hyatt is on the wrong side of town, near where Mr. Congeniality lives. A place it’s best to steer clear of …” Ermete points to track 13 and adds, “For a little while longer.”

  In the silence that follows he gobbles down a few portions of raw fish. Then, noticing that Sheng is looking around nervously, he asks, “Hey, everything okay?”

  “I can’t sleep,” Sheng admits. “Too stressed.”

  The engineer slaps him on the back. “You’ll get over it. The others will be here tomorrow.”

  “Harvey texted me. He should be getting in tonight. But first he’s going to see his dad, who’s still at the port, on the oceanographic ship. There seem to be some anomalies.”

  “What’s Harvey got to do with that?”

  Sheng shrugs. “He’s taking some documents to his dad, who doesn’t trust anybody.”

  “Hmm … interesting,” Ermete says under his breath, digging into Sheng’s rice noodles. “You weren’t going to eat these anyway, right?”

  “No.”

  The engineer starts to slip the first noodles into his mouth, which makes it hard for him to speak. “It’ll all … go great … you’ll see.”

  Sheng shakes his head. “I don’t think so. We don’t have a chance, this time.…”

  “You’re forgetting the ace up our sleeve.”

  At the end of track 13, a white train enters the station.

  “Right on time.”

  Ermete tosses a handful of yuan onto the counter and gets up from the stool.

  “Are we sure we know what we’re doing?” Sheng asks, following him.

  “You tell me,” Ermete replies.

  The train stops, its brakes squealing, and the doors open, letting the first passengers out. Standing out against the gray sky, they’re like dark shadows of different heights. They whoosh past Ermete and Sheng and let themselves be swallowed up by the city.

  “My father always used to say,” the Roman engineer says softly as he braces himself against the oncoming flow of commuters, “that there are only two kinds of people who keep their cool when their house collapses.”

  Sheng looks up at his friend. “Being …?”

  “Stupid people and people who know why the house is collapsing.”

  “And which one do you think we are?”

  “The second, I hope,”
Ermete admits.

  A shadow that’s come out of the train stops right in front of them. He shouldn’t be there. He shouldn’t even exist. He has very short gray hair beneath his baseball cap, a dark, murky green-gray raincoat and black leather boots whose heels make no noise. Tucked under the shadow’s arm is a case containing a violin that was custom-made by a luthier in Cremona. Its strings and bow are razor-sharp. He breathes in the air, satisfied, and says, “Home at last.”

  He wears leather gloves. He doesn’t hold out his hand.

  “Is it just us?” Jacob Mahler finally asks, seeing that neither Sheng nor Ermete is brave enough to speak.

  Cecile and Mistral Blanchard come out of the Line 5 metro stop in Place Jacques Bonsergent. There really is a newsstand: it’s just to the left of the exit, with an ad for Le Monde above it.

  After Mistral told Cecile what she found stored on her MP3 player, the mother and daughter split up the earphones. They left their apartment without even changing clothes: Mistral in the flowered sweat suit, her mother in cargo pants and a long-sleeved sweatshirt. They brought along an oversized shoulder bag with the Veil of Isis and Mistral’s notebooks in it.

  “Hit play,” Cecile tells her daughter. “Let’s hear what he says next.”

  Mistral presses the center button on the MP3 player and listens to the New York antiques dealer’s recorded voice.

  “The woman at the newsstand is called Jenne. Go up to her and tell her you’re Professor Van Der Berger’s niece. Ask her for his spare house keys. Don’t worry, it’s nothing unusual. Alfred had the habit of trusting newsagents. If she asks about him, say he’s fine but out of town. Don’t mention New York. Rome, if you like …”