The Secret Cellar

by Michael D. Beil

  His grandfather worked as a projectionist at a movie theater in Times Square in the forties and fifties, and is a real movie nut. I swear, he and Raf have watched every black-and-white movie ever made. Okay, maybe not every one, but Raf has seen a lot of them, and the kid has a remarkable memory for details about each one.

  “Directed by Henry Hathaway. Lloyd Nolan and … Gene Lockhart, I think. Not great, but not bad. It was actually filmed at a house on Ninety-Third Street. It was about these German spies who were in New York to steal secrets from the guys who were working on the atomic bomb. It was a true story—they really were in a house on Ninety-Second Street.”

  See what I mean about the details? He’s a freak.

  “Wait a second. That’s strange. There’s a movie about spies in a house on Ninety-Second Street. And Lindsay’s reading that article about the Third Wise Man and getting all weird when we told her about what I found in the pen. I wonder if she thinks—”

  Raf finishes my thought: “—that the pen guy was some kind of spy?”

  “Exactly.”

  Minds are boggled, and Margaret gets a new Web address

  Friday after school the temperature is all the way back up to the midthirties, and we’re standing on the sidewalk in front of the house on Eighty-Second Street—the former home of Curtis Dedmann. I elbow Becca. “Remember what Madame Zurandot said? She saw an old man with a cane, standing in front of a blue door with the number nine. Well, Dedmann was old, he used a cane, his door is blue, and it has a nine on it. Freeeaaaakkkyyyy.”

  “I see two nines,” says Becca, suddenly Miss Literal.

  “Maybe Madame Z. couldn’t see the other nine because the guy was standing in front of it. And I forgot to tell you the best part. Shelley—the woman who we’re going to see—found him dead at his desk … with his pen in his hand.”

  “Shut up!” says Becca. “Now you’re messin’ with me.”

  “No, I swear!” I say. “Just like Madame Zurandot said.”

  Becca grabs me by the shoulders and looks straight into my eyes. “If you’re lying, I’m going to pound you, St. Pierre.”

  “Okay, everybody just calm down,” says Commander Wrobel. “And let these red blazers work their magic.”

  We follow Margaret up the steps (nine of ’em) to the main entrance, where she pushes the doorbell button. A few seconds later, Shelley Gallivan answers the door; she’s dressed in jeans and a Vassar sweatshirt, with her abundant, wavy red hair pulled back into a thick knot.

  “Hi! It’s Shelley, right?” says Margaret in her most cheerful voice. “Remember us?” She pulls me forward so I’m standing right next to her.

  “Oh, from the auction the other night,” Shelley says. “And you are Margaret and … Sophie.”

  “And Leigh Ann and Rebecca,” says Margaret. “We were wondering—if you’re not too busy—if we could talk to you about something.”

  “Why, uh, yes, I suppose so. Come in out of the cold.”

  Once we’re inside, she leads us into a comfortable denlike room with dark paneling and a fireplace, in which there is a barely smoldering fire.

  “Are you cold?” she asks. “I can stoke the fire if you’d like.”

  “No, we’re fine,” I say. “Boy, this is a great old house. Mr. Dedmann lived here all by himself?”

  “I’m afraid so,” says Shelley. “It was just him and Bertie, his dog, knocking about this old place. Now, what can I do for you girls?”

  “It involves Mr. Dedmann, and his things, and this house,” Margaret explains. “There is something going on—something to do with Mr. Dedmann—and, well, right now we’re not sure who we can trust. But since you’re a St. V’s alumna, we figure you can’t be all bad.”

  “Well, you certainly have my attention,” Shelley says. “Go on.”

  “It started the night of the auction,” I say, reaching into my backpack for the rolled-up grid. “Remember, you told us that Mr. Dedmann’s last words were ‘Look inside,’ and you found that old picture in the box he was holding. Well, I found this inside the fountain pen.”

  Shelley carefully unrolls it and reads the poem. She then holds the paper up to the light to examine the twelve rectangular holes. “What is it?”

  “It all has to do with a book that Mr. Dedmann used to own, which is now owned by Marcus Klinger—”

  At the mere mention of his name, a dark shadow seems to pass across Shelley’s face.

  “We figured out that the riddle refers to Alexander the Great, one of the Nine Worthies,” Leigh Ann says. “And if you set this grid on the page where his story begins, the twelve words that show up are: ‘pull the ribbon and you’ll see the walking stick is the key.’ So, now we know that we need to pull the marker ribbon attached to Mr. Dedmann’s own copy of the book, Nine Worthy Men, but—”

  “Marcus Klinger bought that copy of the book at the auction,” Margaret adds.

  “And he won’t let us touch his copy,” Becca finishes.

  “There’s no chance Mr. Dedmann has another copy lying around here, is there?” I ask.

  Shelley shakes her head. “Afraid not. I’ve been through all the books left in his study, and I’m positive it’s not there.”

  “Do you have any idea what this is all about?” Margaret asks. “Do you know much about … Mr. Dedmann’s past?”

  “To tell you the truth, no, I don’t know much about his past; I only knew him the last year of his life. It was kind of strange, to tell the truth. I was finishing up my last semester in grad school when, out of the blue, I got a call from his lawyer, Mr. Garrison Applewood. He told me that Mr. Dedmann wanted to hire me to catalog his music collection—he owns hundreds of original manuscripts from a number of different composers—and maybe even help him write a memoir. It was … Well, it was like a dream come true. A job in Manhattan, the chance to work with an amazing collection, and best of all, the position came with a place to live, so I didn’t have to go through the usual apartment-hunting nonsense. I live right here, in the garden apartment. It’s much nicer than anything I could afford on my own.”

  “You didn’t know him before that?” I ask.

  Shelley shakes her head. “I’d never even heard of him. When I asked Mr. Applewood why Mr. Dedmann picked me, he said that one of my professors had recommended me for the job, but I never really believed it. I didn’t want to ask too many questions because I was afraid he would change his mind.”

  “Did he ever say anything about the Nine Worthies?” Margaret asks.

  “No, I never heard him mention them, but there is something you should see—in the basement. A room like no other. I think you’ll be amazed.”

  She heads down the first-floor hallway, beckoning us to follow. A spiral staircase takes us a full level below the garden apartment, and into a room that is unlike any other I’ve ever seen, at least in New York. I have seen rooms like it before, though—in castles in France! First of all, it’s enormous: it stretches the length of the entire building, which must be eighty or ninety feet.

  And second, it’s beautiful, in that dark-and-stormy-night-in-a-castle kind of way. The ceiling, a good twelve feet above our heads, is arched stone, and reminds me of the secret passageways we discovered in St. Veronica’s Church. There’s one big difference, though: on this ceiling, somebody has painted the solar system and the constellations in incredible detail. The sun, blazing in yellows and oranges that are so bright I swear they’re giving off heat, must be six feet across. The planets stretch the length of the room, with sorry-but-you’re-not-quite-a-planet-anymore Pluto a dim gray disk in the farthest corner. In the spaces between the planets, gold-leaf stars form the twelve constellations that make up the signs of the zodiac.

  “Whoa! That is cool,” says Becca, staring up at Jupiter, with its brightly colored bands, distinctive red spot, and multiple moons.

  “If you think that’s cool, check this out,” I say, pointing to the enormous round table in the center of the room. It is surrounded by nine chairs
, and like the ceiling, the top has a celestial-themed paint job. A spiraling mass of stars—thousands of them, most in red and blue—cover the surface, glittering under layers and layers of clear varnish.

  “That’s our galaxy,” Margaret informs me. “The Milky Way. Astronomers estimate that it contains more than two hundred billion stars. And it’s just one of billions of galaxies. It’s mind-boggling.”

  “Oh, my mind is boggled, all right,” I say. “I mean, who needs the Internet when we have you?”

  “Yeah,” agrees Leigh Ann. “We should just call you Margapedia.”

  Margaret does her best to ignore us. “This must be where Beethoven’s Nine had their meetings. Now that they are Beethoven’s Eight, I wonder what they’ll do.”

  “I don’t know about that, but check out this floor,” says Becca. “I was so busy looking at the ceiling that I almost missed it.”

  Polished white marble—acres of it—covers the cellar floor, but down the centerline of the room, three large squares of black, each a three-by-three grid of large tiles, are bordered by reddish-brown stone. A brass medallion marks the center of each of the black tiles, and Margaret kneels down to get a closer look.

  “The floor is extraordinary, isn’t it?” says Shelley. She stands in the middle of the square closest to the back of the house. “These are the nine Muses of Greek mythology. The other two are the nine planets, and—”

  “—the nine worthy men,” finishes Margaret, standing on the medallion in the third square. “Here is our old friend, Alexander the Great.”

  “Boy, this guy has, er, had an issue with the number nine,” says Becca.

  Shelley smiles. “So you’ve noticed.” She turns and walks toward the back wall, gently touching the wood paneling that stretches from floor to ceiling. She points to the thirty-six smaller medallions (yep, I counted, and, yep, thirty-six is a multiple of nine) centered on the wood panels surrounding us. “These smaller brass medallions represent mankind’s highest achievers. According to Mr. Dedmann, they are the top nine in art, music, literature, and science. Here’s Galileo, and Goethe, and Wagner, and Rubens. It’s fascinating, really. And if you’ll pardon the expression, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  Ironic, don’t you think, that this is chapter 9?

  Shelley directs us to take seats around the table before she continues. “Mr. Dedmann only brought me down here a few times, but each time, he told me that one day he was going to tell me a secret about this room, and about him—a huge secret, he said. I was dying to know what it was, but I didn’t dare press him. Mr. Dedmann could be … well, ‘difficult’ I suppose is the best word. One day he seemed to trust me completely, and then the next he would be very secretive, unwilling to share any information—even details I needed to know about his music collection. I hesitate to say it, but he could be a little … paranoid. Whatever his secret was, he was terrified it would be discovered.”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I whisper to Margaret.

  “Probably.”

  Shelley continues: “Then one day we were down here preparing for one of his Beethoven meetings, and he said something about a combination. I asked him if he had a safe in the house, and he just smiled. He walked over to that wall, the one at the back of the house. He placed his hands against it and looked all around the room—at the walls, the floor, the ceiling, everything. Then he looked me right in the eyes and said, ‘In this cellar, my dear, are all the answers. You just have to know where to look for the questions.’ ”

  “What do you think he meant?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure. Once, out of curiosity, I counted the number of steps it took me to walk from one end of the room to the other, and then did the same thing upstairs. It’s the same distance in both directions as the upper floors, which makes sense, right? But then one day I saw something strange. We were down here together, and when we finished what we were doing, he sent me up ahead of him. I started to climb the spiral stairs, and then, I know I shouldn’t have done it, but I sneaked back down just far enough to spy on him.”

  The four of us lean across the table, eyes wide.

  “What did you see?” Leigh Ann asks, her voice barely a whisper.

  Shelley points at the paneled wall behind me, where Johann Sebastian Bach’s medallion is attached. “That wall was opened up like a door, and Mr. Dedmann was inside for a while. It was dark, so I couldn’t see what was there, but when he came out, I could see that he was trying to conceal something under his jacket. He pushed the door closed, and that’s when I hurried up the stairs. My heart was pounding—I was so afraid he would see me and fire me on the spot.”

  “Sophie would have tripped and fallen down the stairs,” says Becca. “She’s the worst snoop ever.”

  I can’t deny that. It’s a sad fact that I am the world’s most incompetent criminal.

  “But it proved something to me.… Somehow, the basement is bigger than what’s above it,” Shelley says.

  Margaret is on her feet, completing a thorough examination of Mr. Bach’s wood panel. She runs her fingers all around the edges. She taps. She pounds. She presses her ear against it. She sniffs. When she gets to the brass medallion, she looks it over very carefully before touching it. “What are you hiding in there, Johann?”

  “I see that you’re on a first-name basis with Bach,” I note.

  Around the outer ring of the medallion, a six-inch circle, is engraved “JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH, 1685–1750.” The center is a sculpture of his face that sticks out a couple of inches. But between the outer ring and the sculpture is a second ring, half an inch wide, with nine stars, each a slightly different shape, cut deeply into it.

  As Margaret touches the ring with the stars, she gasps when it moves under her finger. “Did you see that? This part moved.” She slowly spins the stars all the way around, clockwise at first, then counterclockwise. “I can feel it … clicking inside, like there are gears or something.”

  Within seconds, we discover that all thirty-six medallions have one movable ring built into the design. The shapes cut into them are different, but each has exactly nine. Nine circles, nine triangles, nine octagons, nine ovals, and so on.

  “Again with the number nine,” says Becca.

  Leigh Ann is on her hands and knees, crawling over the nine planet medallions, stopping on Jupiter. “Hey, these are different! It’s the center that moves.”

  The floor medallions—Nine Worthies, nine planets, and nine Muses—are larger than those on the walls, and are perfectly flat. In place of the sculpture that sticks out on the wall medallions is an elaborate engraving, and in the center of that is an oddly shaped, inch-deep indentation.

  Leigh Ann has her fingers in the indentation, trying to move it. “I can’t really make it turn, but I can wiggle it a bit,” says Leigh Ann. “There’s like little … buttons down in the hole. Same thing with Mars.”

  “Wait! Do that again,” Margaret says. “Wiggle Mars, just like you were doing before.” She puts her ear on the Bach medallion. “When you wiggle it like that, I can hear it in here. It’s like they’re connected, like they’re … all … part … of …”

  Her voice trails off as she makes the leap to mental hyperspace, leaving us mere mortals in her wake. Muttering to herself all the while, she scurries from the Muses to the worthies to the planets, lying facedown on the floor to examine each medallion with her magnifying glass. Then she makes a complete circuit of the room, pausing to look at every artist, composer, writer, and scientist, finally coming to stop in front of Mr. Bach.

  “Sophie, go to Saturn and kneel down next to the medallion,” she says. “Leigh Ann, you go to Hector, and Rebecca, one of the Muses. Good. Now, when I point at you, jiggle the center just like Leigh Ann was doing earlier.”

  “What’s going on?” Becca asks.

  “You’ll see,” says Margaret.

  Her smile widens with each wiggle of the brass medallions. “Incredible. Whoever created this was an absolute geniu
s.”

  “Are you going to share?” I ask.

  “The whole thing—the floor, the walls, all these medallions—is a giant lock. It’s ingenious. Instead of numbers, the combination is made up of planets, and Muses, and the Nine Worthies.”

  And then it hits me like a ten-ton sledgehammer (courtesy of the Acme Sledgehammer Company, naturally). “The walking stick is the key!” I shout. Everyone looks at me as if I have flipped. “Don’t you see? Remember the clue? I’ll bet you anything that the end of the walking stick is shaped just like this”—I point to the indentation in the center of Saturn’s medallion—“and when you give it a turn, voilà! The lock opens.”

  “If you know the combination,” says Margaret. “But I think you’re right about the walking stick. That would explain why Klinger was so determined to buy it. He must know how this works and is trying to open it.”

  Shelley’s face clouds over suddenly. “Oh no.”

  “What’s the matter?” Leigh Ann asks.

  “Mr. Klinger isn’t trying to open the lock. He’s trying to stop me—or anyone else—from opening it before the end of the year.”

  “But … why?” Margaret asks.

  “Because I have to be out of the house by December thirty-first. The only reason I’m still here is the slow pace of lawyers and probate courts. You see, Mr. Dedmann left the house to Mr. Klinger and the rest of the Beethoven people. But all the contents of the house, except for some of the furniture, were left to me. That’s why we were able to have the auction that you went to. But once I’m gone … I know it’s mean to say this, but I don’t think Mr. Klinger can be trusted to carry out Curtis’s wishes. If he finds anything of value, he’s not going to tell anyone. He’s been spiteful to me ever since he learned that I was a beneficiary of the will. He even accused me of improperly influencing Mr. Dedmann.”

  “What a jerk,” says Leigh Ann. “Just because you’re pretty …”

  “Why didn’t he leave everything to his relatives?” Becca asks. “Isn’t that what people usually do?”