Century #4: Dragon of Seas

by Pierdomenico Baccalario

  “Why does he call himself Heremit?” Sheng asks.

  “You know what a hermit is?”

  “No.”

  “In Europe, a hermit is someone who shuns the world, who lives secluded from everyone and everything. Heremit Devil created his skyscraper. That’s his world. He’s never left it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that as long as I’ve known him, at least, he’s always lived in it. I think he was born in it. He studied with private tutors. He’s fluent in eight languages. He was in the building when he planned its interior. The private elevator. The top two floors. He personally designed every room, every hallway, every air-conditioning system. Every level. Every security procedure. He’s got everything he needs in there: eight different restaurants. All kinds of exercise equipment … not that he works out. He has a movie theater. A massive library. A museum with works of art from all over the world. A giant swimming pool. You name it, and he’s had it installed inside that building.”

  “But how can he run his … business if he always stays indoors?”

  “His business runs itself.” The killer smiles, as if surprised by how foolish the question is. “If he needs to get in touch with someone, he knows how to do it. He has a satellite at his disposal. He has computers that you and I won’t be using for another ten years or so. And when he needs something done in the outside world … he calls in people like me.”

  Sheng tries to catch Ermete’s eye. “But this time his plans fell through,” he says.

  “I don’t know what plans he made. Maybe he thought sending in one of Egon Nose’s women would be enough to get rid of me.”

  Jacob has already given them a recap of how he managed to escape the American gangster’s female killers. How he hid in the woods, waiting, and how he decided to go out and track them down, ultimately meeting up with them in Paris.

  “I worked for him for years,” Jacob Mahler continues, “without ever asking questions. Never. Not even when he sent me to Rome with instructions that verged on the insane. Kill an old professor. Get a briefcase. Make sure the briefcase contains four wooden tops and an old map covered with engravings.”

  Pause. A long pause.

  “I never really understood what that briefcase meant to him,” the man continues, “except that he needed it to get something even bigger. At first, I thought it was some kind of treasure, but I was wrong. Someone like Heremit Devil would never lift a finger just for money. He already has more than he could manage to spend in his whole life.”

  “Lucky him,” Ermete says. “I could ask him for a hand paying rent for my shop.”

  “In any case,” Mahler concludes, “now he’s got the tops.”

  “We’ve got to get them back,” Sheng whispers.

  Jacob shakes his head. “Impossible. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. The elevator that goes up to the top two floors only opens with a registered, authorized digital fingerprint. And only Heremit can grant the authorization.”

  “Stairs?”

  “One service stairway, sealed off by sixty-four doors with coded locks. A different code for each floor. Not to mention his ferocious security team. And Nik Knife. ‘Four Fingers.’ The knife thrower.”

  “Why ‘Four Fingers’?”

  “Because he misaimed once. And to punish the hand that got it wrong, he cut off a finger.”

  In Paris, on the seventh floor of 89 Boulevard de Magenta, Vladimir Askenazy’s voice falls silent. Mistral and her mother look at each other, hesitant.

  The apartment seems completely empty. It has two bedrooms and a small bathroom. The front door opens onto a living room with an open kitchen, a wall table, a floor lamp and an empty white bookcase. In the middle of the living room are a couch covered with a sheet and a coffee table with a television and an old VCR on it.

  Mistral slowly closes the door behind her. The floorboards creak beneath her feet. Mother and daughter cross the living room to peek into the second room. It’s a bedroom that has two beds with a nightstand between them. On the walls, a poster for a Georges Méliès film: L’éclipse du soleil en pleine lune.

  On the bed they find a map of Shanghai and two red passports that have their faces but different names.

  “Mom!” Mistral cries. “Look!”

  “Fake passports … one for me and one for you,” Cecile Blanchard says, flipping through the pages. “Complete with an entry visa for China. Well, they’ve certainly done a good job.”

  “What do you mean, Mom?”

  “They’re telling us it’s dangerous to travel using our real names. And maybe even to go back home, at this point …”

  There’s little else in the apartment.

  “What I don’t understand,” Cecile says in a low voice, “is why all the spy games. If they wanted to give us fake passports, they could’ve sent them to us at home.”

  “Maybe they were afraid someone else might get hold of them.…”

  “So it was safer to send you a message recorded on an MP3 player, a message you might have deleted? Or never have listened to? We were leaving for Shanghai tomorrow anyway. And we’ve already bought our tickets.”

  Mistral shakes her head. “I don’t know, Mom. Really, I don’t know.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s a good idea to travel using fake documents. It’s dangerous.”

  “More dangerous than traveling under our real names?”

  “Whatever the case, it’s illegal. And we aren’t going to do anything illegal, Mistral.”

  Cecile is opening all the kitchen cabinets. Plates, glasses, silverware. A package of Italian pasta. Oil, salt, pepper. A can of tomatoes that hasn’t expired yet. Pots in different sizes. Everything needed to cook for a short period of time.

  “This apartment hasn’t been used for at least a year,” the woman remarks.

  Mistral checks the VCR to see if there’s a tape in it. She hits the play button.

  “There’s something in here …,” she says as the television turns on.

  A quivering line appears on the screen, followed by a man sitting on a couch holding some sheets of paper. Mistral and Cecile recognize the room. The man is quite old, with a sparse beard and a checked jacket. He clears his throat and looks at the papers in his hands. Next to him on the couch is a series of photographs.

  “Pull in closer,” he says to the person working the camera.

  Zoom in on his face.

  “It’s Professor Van Der Berger!” Mistral exclaims, recognizing him.

  In the video, the professor asks the cameraman to leave. There are footsteps, and the apartment door opens and closes.

  Finally, the professor begins to talk.

  “My name is Alfred Van Der Berger,” he says a bit wearily, “and I was born on February twenty-ninth, 1896. My family fled Holland and moved to New York in 1905 … and it was in New York, two years later, that I learned of the Pact. It happened in a movie theater. I went there to see a short film entitled L’éclipse du soleil en pleine lune, which at that time and to my child’s eyes was an amazing sight to behold. The film was set in a school for astronomers. A great professor strides in, his robe covered with symbols of the zodiac and constellations, and then everyone goes up to the roof with long binoculars to observe the sun and moon as they join together in the sky. After that, you see the stars drifting down to earth with people riding them.”

  Professor Van Der Berger coughs.

  “When the movie was over, there was a woman in the theater whom I’d get to know better many years later,” he continues. “A young woman with a lazy eye. She was Siberian, from a little village named Tunguska, and she’d traveled from Russia to New York for the sole purpose of meeting me. That day, she left me two wooden tops and a name, the name of a shop owned by Russian carpenters who’d recently moved into town. Working there was a boy named Vladimir. He was my age, born on February twenty-ninth, like me. He’d received a top, too, and an old wooden map covered with inscriptions.”

  �
�Goodness …,” Mistral murmurs. Her mother leans over and puts her arm around her.

  “Who gave it to him? The same young woman who gave those things to me in the darkness of the movie theater?” the professor asks in the video. “Thanks to one of Vladimir’s cousins, who worked on Ellis Island, where all the American immigration permits were issued, we discovered that the woman had arrived from Italy on a ship that had set sail from a place called Messina. After writing letters and making our first intercontinental phone call, we determined that the woman had met a Sicilian girl named Irene in Messina. She gave her two tops and a name. Mine. Only one person was missing: the fourth one. Zoe called Irene at the end of the year. She said she found her name beside two old wooden tops she discovered in her toy box.”

  The professor lapses into silence as he shuffles through the pictures beside him.

  “Do you want me to pause it?” Mistral’s mother asks.

  “No,” the girl says. “Let’s keep going.”

  “What we didn’t realize back then is that we were part of a master plan. An ancient plan, as we would realize much later. A plan that had begun many centuries earlier, in the time of the ancient Chaldeans, who lived three thousand years before Christ. A plan that first came about in the Orient and whose name was connected to the name of a god: Mithra. Which means ‘pact.’ ‘Alliance.’ Today we call it Century, after the name of the place where the Pact was broken. Like all respectable alliances, this one had its rules: every hundred years, four Sages had the task of finding their four successors and giving them four tests. The masters were sworn to silence. They could only guide their disciples and observe their behavior. If the children passed the tests, they would discover the masters’ ultimate secret. If they didn’t pass the tests, the masters would explain to the disciples only what they, themselves, had managed to discover, and not the entire plan behind the Pact … and little by little, this would decrease the chances of figuring everything out.”

  Again, Van Der Berger takes a long pause.

  “The woman who was my master—and Irene’s, Vladimir’s and Zoe’s—knew only a small part of the ancient Pact: the part that her master had passed down to her in the early eighteen hundreds, when he gave her the map and the tops. She wasn’t aware of there being any other master alive. She set out to find us after the big solar eclipse of January fourteenth, 1907 … when, she said, she dreamed about us.”

  The professor turns toward the door to make sure no one has come in.

  “Naturally, it took us a long time to believe her story, especially the fact that the young woman could be over a hundred years old. Her reply to that was very simple: when you become a master of the Pact, even to the smallest degree, you age more slowly than other people. That’s the gift Nature gives us for undertaking the task.”

  The professor looks around nervously and goes on. “As I was saying, in 1907, we had only one master and only the tops as clues. And we did nothing, or practically nothing. We failed the Pact, just as our master’s companions had done, and their masters before them. But then we realized that the Pact was more than a simple secret agreement among men. We discovered that Nature had some kind of … punishment in store for us.”

  Alfred Van Der Berger holds up a photo of an ice-covered valley.

  “June thirtieth, 1908, in the Siberian town where our master lived, there was an enormous explosion that flattened two thousand square kilometers of forestland. Even now, no one can explain what happened that day.”

  Another photo: buildings and cities in ruins.

  “The same year, on December twenty-eighth at five twenty-one in the morning, Messina, Irene’s city, was struck by one of the most devastating earthquakes in its history. The resulting tsunami submerged the coast for miles. At least seventy thousand people died. During the earthquake, Irene’s back was injured, as were her legs. She could still walk, but only thanks to her incredible willpower and the force of Nature that flowed through her veins. The more she aged, the more painful and difficult it became for her to move.”

  Alfred Van Der Berger puts down the photographs and stares straight into the camera. “The four of us could only think one thing: that it was our fault. That we didn’t do what we were supposed to do. We had special powers, but we didn’t put them to good use. Walking down the streets ravaged by the earthquake, I could hear the Earth weep. At that point, we started searching, even though the time wasn’t ripe anymore. We learned to use the tops, and with their guidance we found the Ring of Fire in Rome and the Star of Stone in New York. We spent a long time searching Paris and just as long searching Shanghai, which in those years was war torn. But that’s as far as we got. And so, we put everything back in its place and created a series of clues to do what we were instructed to do: choose four successors and give them the clues without saying anything else. But things unexpectedly came to a head. That’s why I’m making this tape. The last time we saw each other, we were in Iceland. It was an important moment; we could feel it in our bones. The century was coming to an end and the chosen ones had to be selected from among the ones on the list we brought with us. Zoe was the last to arrive, and when she did, she told us the Pact would begin in Rome.”

  Professor Van Der Berger’s face moves offscreen for a moment. He’s picked up an inflatable globe from the floor.

  “The four cities aren’t simply four cities. They’re symbols of the four elements: Fire, Earth, Air and Water. They’re all north of the equator, below the polestar and the constellations of Draco and Ursa Major. That’s why the chosen ones are also called the Children of the Bear. The constellation contains seven stars, and there are just as many tops. What do the stars have to do with it? It’s simple.…”

  Mistral listens to Professor Van Der Berger’s words, unable to breathe.

  “I believe that by studying the stars, the Chaldeans discovered man. The same laws apply to men and stars. This is the meaning of the signs of the zodiac. I believe their scholars—the Magi, as we call them—discovered something they kept secret, protected by this succession of masters. A secret, yes. A secret that we gradually forgot, failure by failure. But the failures of those who came before you won’t prevent you from discovering it. I’m convinced the students can surpass their teachers.”

  There’s a knock on the door. Frightened, the professor spins around in his seat. Then he looks back into the camera and whispers, “May Nature be with you, children. And may it protect you always!”

  Alfred Van Der Berger gets up from the couch and switches off the camera.

  Mistral and Cecile stare at the blank screen.

  “We’ve got to show this to the others,” Mistral says.

  Cecile nods.

  “In Shanghai,” the girl adds, holding up the passports.

  WHEN ELETTRA OPENS HER EYES, SHE’S SITTING IN THE FRONT SEAT of her father’s minibus. Outside the window are the lanes of the Grande Raccordo Anulare, Rome’s ring-shaped highway. She blinks, surprised.

  “Hi,” Fernando Melodia says from behind the wheel.

  “What’s going on? Where am I?”

  “We’re going to the airport,” her father replies, perfectly calm.

  “The airport?”

  “You have to leave for Shanghai, don’t you remember?”

  “But …” Elettra looks around, bewildered. “I’m supposed to leave tomorrow.”

  “It’s already tomorrow.”

  Then, slowly, the girl remembers the elevator, the light in the well, the room in the basement, her aunt Irene showing up.

  “I can’t believe it, Dad!” she exclaims. “I was at home. And Aunt Irene was there, too. We were—there’s a room with a phone, below the well! The elevator goes straight down there!”

  “Oh, sure,” Fernando says. “We’ve got a couple Martians up in the attic, too!”

  “Dad, I’m not kidding! Aunt Irene is … one of them!”

  “One of who?”

  “She’s one of the four … Sages … the masters … the Magi! T
he ones who got us tied up in all this.”

  Fernando skillfully passes a Japanese car. “Could be,” he admits, returning to his own lane.

  Elettra stares at him, stunned. “You know about it, too,” she guesses. “You’ve always known.”

  “Known what?”

  “Stop playing dumb!”

  “Oh, great. Your mother always used to tell me that, too.”

  Elettra crosses her arms, furious. “You guys can’t keep treating me like a little girl.”

  “Well then, try to calm down. Otherwise you’ll make the minivan’s engine boil over.”

  “You know about that, too?”

  “What? That you let off fire and flames whenever you get mad?”

  “That I really do it. Literally.”

  Fernando drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “It’s hard not to notice.”

  “And you’ve never said anything about it? You can’t pretend nothing’s happening, Dad. Aunt Irene claims she’s over a hundred years old, do you realize?”

  “I hope I make it that long.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is that down in that room under the well, there are photos of all of us. Of me, Mistral, Harvey, Sheng … and another boy, too. A boy I’d never heard of before, but maybe … Of course!” Elettra shouts, pounding her fist on the dashboard.

  “Hey, are you trying to set off the air bag?”

  “And then I was fast asleep,” Elettra remembers, struck by the memory. “Just like that, I was fast asleep.”

  “Yes, you were fast asleep until a minute ago. And it might’ve been better if you’d kept on sleeping all the way to the airport.”

  “Last night, Aunt Irene called you, you went down to get me, you loaded me into the minibus and now you’re sending me away to Shanghai so I won’t find out anything else about that room. Which I bet you’ve cleaned out already.”

  “You’re sounding a bit paranoid, Elettra.”

  “I saw it! There were pictures of me with comments from you guys. You even know I like Harvey.”