Ring of Fire

by Pierdomenico Baccalario

  “And you never lost sight of him?”

  “No,” Little Linch lies, resting his spoon on the saucer, his hand trembling slightly. “Except for a couple minutes, maybe … when we reached the river,” he admits a moment later. “But that was because of the blackout.”

  Joe Vinile nods. “Something very … rrr … unusual,” he admits. “But that didn’t stop us … rrr … from leading him … rrr … into the trap … rrr … if I’m not mistaken … rrr. …”

  Jacob Mahler leans down on the table with all his weight. “The Guardian had a briefcase with him.”

  Little Linch nods his head. “He did, yeah.”

  “But he wasn’t carrying a briefcase,” Beatrice breaks in. “Not when we saw him.”

  Joe Vinile raises his hands in a sign of helplessness. “He must’ve given it to somebody … rrr … or thrown it into the river. Who … rrr … can say?”

  A sharp sneer darkens the killer’s face. “Either we find that briefcase or it’s all over.”

  “But that would be impossible!” protests Little Linch.

  “You’re the one who lost track of him,” the killer hisses. “And believe me, finding that briefcase at the bottom of the river will be a lot easier than explaining to my boss that we lost it.”

  Beatrice looks worriedly at Joe Vinile and then at Little Linch.

  Jacob Mahler adds viciously, “And most importantly, it’ll be far less painful.”

  Joe Vinile shifts uncomfortably in his chair and asks, “So what was in … rrr … that … rrr … briefcase?”

  9

  THE BRIEFCASE

  THE FIRST THING ELETTRA PULLS OUT OF THE BRIEFCASE IS A LITTLE black-and-white checkered umbrella. She rests it on the ground and announces, a little disappointed, “Your typical umbrella, I’d say.”

  A metal tag stitched into the edge of its cloth reads:

  ANTICO CAFFÉ GRECO

  VIA CONDOTTI

  ROMA

  “Fortunately there’s more,” murmurs Elettra. This time she takes out something about the size of an apple, wrapped in dark cloth. The strong smell of camphor fills the air.

  “What is it?” asks Harvey.

  “Just a sec …” Slowly, Elettra unwraps it. Inside the cloth is an old toy. A round object made of black wooden rings of different sizes and a metal tip at one end.

  “Hao!” whispers Sheng. “Is it my imagination or is that a top?”

  “It’s covered with writing,” Elettra points out, turning it around in her fingers.

  She hands it to Harvey, who studies it carefully. “These aren’t words. They’re drawings.”

  “Really?” Sheng breaks in, looking over his shoulder. “Drawings of what?”

  “I’d say this is … some sort of wolf, maybe?”

  Sheng takes the top from him, frowning. “Wolf,” he confirms.

  “Or a dog,” Harvey continues.

  “Dog,” Sheng confirms once again. The Chinese boy rests the top on the basement floor and makes it spin around.

  “There are more of them,” Elettra announces. She pulls three identical bundles out of the briefcase, each one containing a top. The kids’ expressions show how baffled they are.

  “This one’s covered with spiral designs,” says Harvey, looking at the first one. “And this other one … hmm … It could be some sort of tower, a truncated pyramid, a temple. …”

  Depicted on the last top are stylized eyes. Mistral examines it closely.

  Harvey huffs. “Yeah, but … sorry. Why would somebody chase a guy down for an umbrella and a couple of toy tops?”

  “How should I know?” says Sheng, making all four toys spin around on the floor.

  “And then there’s this,” Elettra says in a low voice, pulling one last thing out of the briefcase, this also wrapped in cloth.

  It’s about the same size as a shirt box. As Elettra slowly unwinds the cloth, it reveals a very dark, very worn wooden box. Its entire outer surface is engraved with writing and overlapping drawings, like signatures left behind on the desks at school by generations of students.

  “What the heck is that?” asks Sheng.

  “I haven’t got the foggiest idea.” The strange object looks like a cross between a jewelry box and a hinged wooden frame, fastened shut by gold clasps. Elettra rests it on the cloth and flicks open the clasps. The inner surface is a rectangle covered with a thick network of grooves, which look a bit like the lines in the palms of people’s hands.

  “So what are these?”

  “It all looks scratched … or engraved, maybe. …”

  “Spiderwebs,” says Mistral. “Ripples in water.”

  “It makes me think of a maze,” Harvey remarks.

  The grooves inside the object intersect each other intricately, all joined together in a single highly stylized design.

  “It’s a woman with stars all around her,” says Harvey, running his fingers over them.

  “He’s right,” says Elettra. “It’s a woman surrounded by stars.”

  “One, two …,” counts Sheng. “Seven stars. Hao!” he shouts. “And …?”

  “And … I don’t know. But this thing looks really old.”

  “And really used.”

  “This is what the guy wanted to protect, if you ask me.”

  “Do you think it’s valuable?”

  “I’d imagine so,” says Mistral, studying it with a critical eye. “It looks really old.”

  Sheng notices something written along its outer frame and asks the others if they can make out what it says. Harvey shakes his head. “They aren’t letters from our alphabet. It looks like it’s written in Chinese.”

  “But it isn’t Chinese,” Sheng snaps. “It’s definitely another language.”

  “Greek,” concludes Mistral. “But I can’t read Greek.” Then she asks, “Is there anything else in the briefcase?”

  Elettra checks carefully. “I don’t think so. Wait … hang on!”

  There’s a sheet of graph notebook paper and one last, tiny object wrapped in black tissue paper. Elettra looks inside it.

  It’s a human tooth.

  “Bleah!” Mistral cries out. “That’s not a real tooth, is it?”

  Harvey picks it up between his thumb and his index finger, holding it up in the light. “I think so. A cuspid, to be precise. And … whoa! There’s something engraved on it, too.”

  “Let me see! Let me see!” says Sheng, smiling excitedly.

  “A circle,” Harvey announces, holding it firmly in his fingers.

  “A circle … a zero, a ring, an ‘O’ …”

  He shrugs. “I give up. I don’t get any of this.”

  “So what’s on the piece of paper?”

  “A paragraph,” says Elettra. “But if you think it’s going to explain all this stuff, you’re wrong.”

  “Read it.”

  Elettra takes a breath and reads aloud, “ ‘Every hundred years it is time to contemplate the stars. Every hundred years it is time to understand the world. 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.’”

  A baffled silence echoes through the basement.

  * * *

  Elettra searches the briefcase inch by inch to make sure it’s completely empty. The kids summarize everything they’ve found: a strange folded wooden box, four toy tops, a tooth with a circle engraved on it, a piece of paper with an enigmatic note, and a black-and-white checkered umbrella.

  “So what do we do now?” asks Mistral, a bit worried. Her long, curved eyelashes look like a series of question marks.

  “I say we put all this weird stuff back in the briefcase,” Harvey suggests, running his fingers through his hair, “and throw it into the Tiber.”

  “The person who gave it to us—”

  “Was a nut.”

  “But he was trying to escape,” remarks Elettra.
“He was afraid he’d be caught by … someone.”

  “Exactly. A paranoid nut.”

  “You think he was crazy, huh? Remember: somebody killed him.”

  “And they didn’t just shoot him … I mean … you know.” Sheng slides a hand across his throat.

  “A secret … that you can’t let others discover.”

  “Do you think he knew the secret?”

  “Sorry, but what secret are we talking about, anyway?”

  “ ‘Every hundred years’ …,” Elettra quotes, rereading the note.

  “It’s time to contemplate the stars …,” adds Mistral, passing her finger over the ones engraved in the wood.

  “It says that whoever discovers the secret needs to keep others from doing the same.”

  “Them!” cries out Sheng. “I get it!”

  “Give me a break!” Harvey moans. “What could you possibly get? We barely know anything. We don’t even know the crazy guy’s name or who … who the ‘others,’ or whatever you want to call them, are.”

  “All we know is that they’re really dangerous.”

  “And that the man on the bridge wanted to protect these things,” adds Elettra. “As though they were really important.”

  “A mystery,” pronounces Mistral, standing up to stretch her legs. “A big, giant mystery.”

  “Well, I think it’s cool,” says Sheng. “I mean, this is all really strange stuff.”

  “‘Such a great secret is not to be reached by a single path,’ ” Elettra says, rereading the note. “Maybe there really is a great secret to discover. And maybe the man was scared because he’d discovered it.”

  “And let’s not forget the ‘twenty-nine,’ ” Mistral reminds them.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it isn’t exactly normal for a guy who’s running for his life to keep on repeating ‘twenty-nine, twenty-nine’ unless he thinks it’s important.”

  “That is, if you’re assuming the guy was really thinking. Instead of just being completely off his rocker,” remarks Harvey.

  “Yesterday was December twenty-ninth,” Sheng reminds them for the hundredth time. “And he was convinced something had begun.”

  “But what?”

  “Who knows? But whatever it was, it began on the twenty-ninth of December. That’s why he kept repeating ‘twenty-nine.’”

  “So you guys are convinced that his saying ‘twenty-nine’ had nothing to do with our birthday?” Elettra asks.

  “What do you think?” Harvey blurts out.

  “Of course!” answers Sheng. “Yesterday was our night. The Night of the Super Twenty-nine …”

  “And the blackout …”

  “You think it’s all connected?” Mistral asks in a hushed voice.

  “But what if what happened to us last night,” Elettra says, cutting them all off, “just happened so we’d go out and end up on Ponte Quattro Capi …?”

  Harvey shakes his head. “Oh, come on! We aren’t puppets. We did what we did because we decided to do it. And we wouldn’t be here talking about this stuff if one of the four of us, who was a little too … curious … hadn’t agreed to take a briefcase full of junk from an old crazy guy who can’t come get it back anymore.”

  “Four of us. Ponte Quattro Capi. Four toy tops,” Sheng remarks. “Maybe the number four has something to do with this, too.”

  Elettra runs her hands through her hair. “None of this makes any sense! I … I don’t know why I took the briefcase. I felt like I had to. And now that I know what’s inside it, I’m even more curious to figure all of this out.” She grabs the black-and-white checkered umbrella. “I’m going to try,” she says, showing the others the brass tag, “by going to the Antico Caffè Greco.”

  “Which would be …?” Harvey asks inquisitively.

  “An old café in the center of Rome.”

  “Good idea,” agrees Mistral. “The umbrella might be a lead that could point us in the right direction.”

  Sheng grins. “Why not? After all, what does the note say? ‘Such a great secret … is not to be reached by a single path,’ right?”

  Harvey’s the only one who doesn’t seem at all enthusiastic about the idea. “I say it’d just be a big waste of time.”

  “Like you’ve got anything better to do?”

  “Well, I could go visit a museum …,” he jokes.

  Beatrice and Little Linch walk along the right bank of the Tiber. After their meeting with Jacob Mahler at the Sant’Eustachio Café, they’re both in a lousy mood. Little Linch is frowning. Beatrice is brooding.

  “Here. This is right about where I lost him,” the man says. “That’s when all the lights went out and he started running. It was only for a second … but then I couldn’t see him anymore. I figured he’d gone back to cross over the Tiber, so I headed that way to look for him.”

  “You didn’t go down to the island?” Beatrice asks him, staring out at Ponte Cestio, a bridge leading to Tiber Island.

  “No,” Little Linch admits.

  Beatrice tries to reconstruct the scene in her mind. If the man had started running south, he might have reached Ponte Cestio, and from there he could’ve crossed the square and gone over Ponte Quattro Capi to get to the other side of the river.

  “Let’s take a look around the island,” she proposes.

  The two walk along the riverbank, making their way along the parapet. A few pigeons coo, perched among the cold stone bricks.

  “What we’re doing is totally pointless,” Little Linch reminds her, leaning against the parapet. Despite the chilly December air, he’s panting and sweating, which makes him look particularly revolting. “What could we possibly find? That briefcase could be anywhere. If he threw it in the river, it’s gone. So then what do we do? Slap on diving masks and flippers and swim out to dig through the mud for it? Bah! That guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

  Beatrice doesn’t reply. She just keeps walking. Then she asks, point-blank, “What do you know about Mahler, exactly?”

  Little Linch splashes through the slush in his boots. “I know he’s a snake. A mean one. A devil. They say he’s the best there is.”

  “The best there is at killing …,” mumbles Beatrice, not very convinced.

  “Joe claims this is the job that could change our lives forever. That we should consider it an honor to work for him.”

  “For him who, exactly?”

  Little Linch drags his feet through the snow without answering.

  “Mahler was sent here to Italy for this job by someone else, you know.”

  “The hermit,” Beatrice says in a low voice.

  “Heremit,” Little Linch corrects her. “It’s not a nickname. That’s his name.”

  “Heremit? What kind of a name is that? Is he British?”

  “Half-Chinese, half-Dutch, from what I’ve heard. But his full name is even worse: Heremit Devil.”

  “Heremit Devil?” Beatrice forces a smile. “Quite a reassuring name. Where does he live?”

  “In Shanghai, in an incredible skyscraper …” Little Linch spits on the ground. “They say he’s so crazy he’s never even left it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he’s never left it. He runs his whole life from inside of it. Like a giant glass-and-concrete kingdom. I think he’s one of those freaks who are scared of catching something, of touching people, of poisoned air. … How should I know? He’s bonkers. A total nutcase.”

  “But still, an intelligent hit man like Jacob Mahler—”

  “Shhh!” Little Linch hushes her, gesturing for her to lower her voice. “Are you out of your mind? Don’t go around saying stuff like that out loud! Somebody could hear you!”

  “But still, the legendary Jacob Mahler,” Beatrice says, correcting herself, “the snake, the devil, the very best there is … he works for a madman like Heremit Devil. So basically we’re working for two insane men who want to find a briefcase, even if it means making us comb through the
Tiber inch by inch. What’s wrong with this picture?”

  The two quickly cross over Tiber Island, looking around distractedly in search of any clue that might tell them if their man passed by there. And since they naturally find nothing, they walk over to the opposite side, down Ponte Quattro Capi.

  “Joe warned us not to ask too many questions,” Little Linch mutters, “and I’m happy not asking any. Because we’re playing with fire, sweets. A whole lot of fire. And I have no intention of getting burned.”

  “He told me not even to say his name.”

  “Huh?”

  “Mahler. Yesterday, in the car. He didn’t even want me to say the name ‘Heremit.’”

  Little Linch shrugs. “So don’t.”

  “Is he so scary?”

  “He’s the one who makes the rules. And rule number one is: not one word too many.”

  Beatrice stops in her tracks. She leans over to pick up something that’s half-buried in the snow.

  “What is it?” the man asks.

  Beatrice turns it over in her fingers. It’s a shower cap, on which is written: HOTEL DOMUS QUINTILLA.

  10

  THE CAFÉ

  VIA CONDOTTI IS PACKED WITH PEOPLE. PILES OF SNOW LINE THE curbs and colorful Christmas decorations hang overhead, forming lines of blinking lights. The gleaming white Spanish Steps of the Trinità dei Monti are animated by the scurrying hustle and bustle of people wearing colorful coats, furs and extravagant outfits.

  Just a few steps away from the square is Caffè Greco, which is surrounded by shops with elegant picture-window displays. Out side, a dark marble sign points out the otherwise anonymous entrance. Inside is a series of elegant rooms and little round tables. Hanging on the walls are paintings in gold frames, prints from the 1800s, portraits, articles from old newspapers, sheathed swords and sparkling mirrors.

  Waiters dressed in black dart around the tables, carrying trays of hot drinks and steaming cups of punch, while the patrons chat cheerfully in ten different languages, sitting in the shade of statues and gigantic vases that peek out from behind the columns.

  “This place is incredible …,” whispers Mistral, clutching to her chest a purse in which she’s put her sketchbook and some soft-tipped pencils.