Ring of Fire

by Pierdomenico Baccalario

  “One hundred thirty-seven kilograms,” replies Harvey, helping her up to her feet. “Around three hundred pounds.”

  With the third tremor, Little Linch looks around for his colleague. “Hey, Mahler!” he shouts, still a little groggy from the music. “What’s going on in here?” He spots the gray-haired killer inside the apartment and takes a few steps toward him. “What the heck are all these papers doing flying around?” he grunts.

  The moment he crosses over the threshold, Mahler sees him and shouts, “Don’t!”

  “H-huh?” stammers Little Linch, not understanding. He takes another baby step and a giant pit suddenly opens up beneath his feet. “Hey!” he manages to shout before plunging down, disappearing in a cloud of dust.

  The pit widens, making its way down the hallway. Mountains of books tumble down one after the other like dominoes. “Everything’s collapsing!” shouts Mistral.

  In the bedroom, Elettra holds on tightly to Harvey, who shouts, “The red circles! Look for one of the red circles on the floor! Sheng! Mistral! The red circles!” The hallway floor lurches up with a boom and then disappears in a cloud of dust with a crash. The walls tilt; the plumbing explodes, spraying water everywhere; and the tiles crumble to pieces.

  Elettra clings to Harvey, oblivious to everything except the noise.

  She isn’t even sure where she is, if she’s on solid ground or falling. There’s dust. Only dust. Then she hears a shout. It might be Mistral. It might not. She tries to free herself from Harvey, but his arm won’t let her go. He’s holding her tight, protecting her. She can feel his cheek pressed up against hers. And she can hear his voice whispering, “It’s okay. It’s okay …,” as the world comes crashing down all around them.

  The two kneel and then sit down on the ground. They wait. Now they can hear water running. They can see flashing lights. Sheng’s coughing. The backpack appears for a moment from behind a cloud of dust.

  Elettra tries to move her legs. Little by little, she realizes she’s on a sort of raft suspended over a seemingly bottomless pit. Sheng is also perched on a little patch of the floor that has remained intact.

  And Mistral?

  Elettra shuts her eyes.

  Her legs are dangling down into empty space, like an acrobat’s.

  Sitting in her Mini, Beatrice sees the building’s front door fly out into the middle of the street like a cork popped out of a bottle of champagne. It’s followed by a cloud of dust. She clicks off the radio, opens the car door and rushes out. Only then does she hear the noise. A deafening, echoing roar that bursts out from the old walls of the building. She sees people in neighboring houses looking out their windows. She hears doors slamming and the first repeated screams of “Earthquake!”

  But it isn’t an earthquake.

  Beatrice covers her mouth with both hands. “It’s collapsing!” She doesn’t have time to say anything else. The building is already lurching backward, swaying, folding over on itself like a milk carton ready for the trash can.

  Beatrice runs for cover behind the door of her Mini. Her blinkers shine through the dust. People begin to scramble out of nearby buildings. Some run off, screaming. Others stop to stare. A man walks calmly toward her.

  “It can’t be …,” murmurs Beatrice, recognizing Jacob Mahler.

  He’s covered with dust from head to toe. His clothes are the same color as his hair, but he’s walking along coolly, as if nothing is happening. In one hand he’s holding his violin. With the other he’s dragging a girl behind him.

  Beatrice feels like she’s seeing a ghost.

  “Let’s go,” the ghost says, pushing the girl inside and sitting down in the car.

  His face is a thick mask of dust.

  Beatrice puts the Mini into reverse and slams down on the gas pedal. The car bumps up against the curb. She throws it into first gear, yanks on the steering wheel, honks the horn and swerves around a couple of people standing in the middle of the street.

  “Where’s Little Linch?” she asks.

  “He’s dead,” says Mahler.

  “How did it happen?”

  They hear the first sirens approaching in the distance.

  “He ate too much,” the killer replies with a smirk.

  17

  THE BED

  ELETTRA OPENS HER EYES. SHE’S LYING ON A MATTRESS, HER HEAD sunk down into a pillow. Another bed is right above her, like a ceiling.

  It’s her bunk bed.

  She blinks her eyes and looks around. She recognizes the furniture bathed in the half light, the second bunk bed, her room. She can hear Sheng and Harvey breathing. They’re sleeping nearby.

  It’s nighttime.

  But what day is it?

  She tries to move her arms. Then her legs. She sits up, aching. With one hand she touches her face. There’s a bandage on her temple.

  It wasn’t a dream.

  “Elettra?” comes her father’s whispering voice.

  The girl hadn’t noticed him sitting at the foot of her bed. He’d only been a shadow among the many shadows. Fernando leans over to give her a kiss. “Elettra, my little angel … What did you kids get yourselves into?” He doesn’t hug her. He limits himself to looking at her from the end of the bed. “You were really lucky. …”

  “Dad …” Elettra’s throat is dry. “What time is it? How… how did I get back here?”

  The bedroom door opens up slightly and Aunt Linda walks in. “Elettra!” the woman says, almost shouting. Then she lowers her voice to a hush to avoid waking up the boys. “Thank goodness you’re okay!”

  Aunt Linda dives into the bunk bed, suffocating her niece in an affectionate embrace. “You’re all out of your mind, you and your friends!”

  “Auntie, what—”

  Linda cups her hands around the girl’s face and squeezes her cheeks. “That was foolish! Perfectly foolish!”

  “Dad … Auntie … I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t remember anything—”

  Just then, Elettra remembers the floor caving in, the cloud of dust and the lights shining through the darkness.

  “Don’t worry. Harvey already told us everything …,” Fernando Melodia whispers, pointing to the other bunk bed. “He carried you home. You’d fainted.”

  “Harvey carried me home?”

  Aunt Linda clasps her hands together and waves them right in front of her nose. “Of all places, you kids had to go to a construction site to play? And in winter, of all times?”

  Elettra slowly shakes her head, trying to understand what Harvey might have told them. “A construction site?”

  Fernando stops Aunt Linda with a patient wave of his hand. “We know. Harvey told us you went there to check out the bulldozers, but—”

  “What on earth were you thinking?” interrupts Aunt Linda, appalled. “With all the things to see in Rome … Bulldozers!”

  “Since it was so dark, you should’ve watched where you were walking,” Fernando goes on.

  “Into a manhole, you fell! Into a manhole!” her aunt says, heaving a sigh.

  Her father, on the other hand, caresses Elettra’s forehead. “You hit your head and passed out.” The girl nods, impressed by the excuse Harvey managed to come up with—and by the feeling that her father doesn’t really believe a single word of the story but is repeating it to her so she can avoid giving herself away to Aunt Linda.

  “Sheng was hurt, too,” her aunt breaks in. “I put a nice, sturdy bandage on his arm, but tomorrow, just to be sure, I’m taking all three of you down to the emergency room. I don’t care if it’s New Year’s Eve!”

  “What time is it right now?” Elettra asks her father.

  “Almost two.”

  “It was a trap …,” Elettra thinks aloud.

  “It wasn’t a trap,” Fernando replies, his voice too low for her aunt to hear. “You got yourselves into it, and you got yourselves out of it all right.”

  Elettra stares at her father, trying to understand how much he actually knows. “Dad, we—�
��

  “Naturally, we haven’t said anything to Harvey’s parents or Sheng’s father,” he continues. “But—”

  “But tomorrow we’re all going to have a nice little chat,” Aunt Linda interjects. “Don’t think you can get away with this so easily. You were the one responsible for the boys.”

  Something dawns on Elettra. “What about Mistral?”

  Fernando Melodia stiffens.

  “Well, she’s with her mother, isn’t she?” Aunt Linda answers for him.

  Fernando nods. “Harvey told us that she caught a cab downtown and went to meet her at the station—”

  “And to think they still have all their luggage here!”

  Elettra looks over at Harvey’s sleeping form in the half light, grateful for how well he managed to protect them all by keeping their secret.

  “Get some rest now. We’ll think about all this tomorrow, okay?” her father suggests.

  At the thought of Mistral, Elettra feels tears welling up in her eyes. “We shouldn’t have gone there,” she murmurs.

  Her aunt rests a hand on her forehead. “Right now just get some rest. …”

  Elettra nods and slips back into a deep sleep. She hears the bedroom door closing and her father saying, “It all went extremely well.”

  Harvey opens his eyes. He’s covered with sweat. He’s panting and the covers are twisted around his body. His watch is cutting off the circulation in his wrist. He checks the time. It’s six o’clock. “The bed wasn’t falling …,” he says, reassuring himself. “It was only a dream.”

  He slowly frees himself from the sheets and blankets, trying not to wake up the others. His legs are covered with scrapes and bruises. He rests his feet on the cold floor. He needs to feel something solid beneath them.

  The moment he shuts his eyes, he can see pages from books flying through the air. Burnt pages fluttering upward. A sea of dust. He sees Elettra unconscious, her legs dangling into nothingness, and Sheng clutching his backpack like a parachute.

  He sees what’s left of the floor of the building’s fourth story and the ladder that he and Sheng climbed down, carrying Elettra over their shoulders. He sees the firemen’s flickering lights and their red fire engines, with their tall aluminum ladders.

  They slipped out of the building before anyone could notice them. Then Harvey laid Elettra on the ground and turned to go back inside.

  “Where are you going?” Sheng asked him.

  “To look for Mistral. There’s still a girl in the building!” he shouted.

  “We’ll go look for her!” a fireman answered, turning to dash nimbly up the extending ladder. Other firemen entered through what remained of the front door, armed with axes.

  “Have you seen a girl come out of there?” Harvey asked the people crowding the street. But no one paid any attention to him. They were concentrating on the show provided by the rescue team.

  “Have you seen a girl come out of there?” Harvey continued to ask everyone he passed by.

  Finally, a woman answered him. “A young girl with straight, light brown hair? I saw her leave with her father. A man with gray hair. He had a violin. … Could that have been her?”

  Harvey nodded.

  It sure could have.

  Harvey gets up, grabs something from the nightstand and walks over to the bathroom. He turns on the lights around the mirror and stands there for a long time, staring at himself.

  His eyes are like an old man’s.

  Then he looks down at Mistral’s sketchbook, which he’d picked up from the nightstand. He slowly leafs through the pages, pausing on the last drawing: the four of them in the professor’s room.

  “Harvey?” comes a whisper from behind him. The boy sees Elettra’s reflection in the mirror.

  “Can’t sleep?” he asks her, shutting the book.

  “Not anymore. How are you?”

  “Just a few scratches.”

  “Thanks for carrying me back here.”

  “What, you think I would’ve left you there?”

  “No, but … I mean …”

  Harvey turns to look at her. He lets the sketchbook slide down along his back and then slips it into his boxer shorts. “It wasn’t difficult. You don’t weigh much at all, fortunately—otherwise the floor would’ve collapsed a lot earlier.”

  “I … I talked to my father. He told me your version of what happened.”

  “It’s not my version. I’m not good at making up excuses. It was Sheng.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He hurt his arm.”

  Elettra hesitates a few seconds before asking the last question. “And Mistral? Have you seen her?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think … she …?”

  “No. A woman saw her leave with the man with the violin.”

  Elettra bites her lip. “Alive?”

  “Of course.”

  The two leave the bedroom and make their way down the hallway, barefoot. They get to the dining room, coming from which is the soft glow of a television. Elettra’s father has fallen asleep on the couch. The morning news is on.

  “There,” whispers Harvey when shots of a collapsed building appear on the screen. “That’s us.” A helicopter films the scene from above. The professor’s house is a box of cement folded over on itself, around which are lights, cranes and fire hoses. The reporter aboard the helicopter excitedly relates the little information he’s received. “A dilapidated old building … gas leak … structural failure … thousands of books …”

  Elettra and Harvey draw closer, trying to hear better. “It’s unclear how many families resided in the building … other than Professor Alfred Van Der Berger, who lived on the top floor. … At this point, rescuers have found no—”

  “No sign of a French girl,” Elettra sighs with new hope.

  “I told you. That guy took her away.”

  “She’s alive, Harvey,” whispers Elettra. “And she’s in Rome with him.”

  Harvey shows her the notes in Mistral’s sketchbook. “The fact is, nobody will believe any of this. We can’t tell anyone anything.”

  “No,” Elettra admits. “But maybe we could try to find her ourselves.”

  “But how?”

  “By asking for help.”

  “From who?”

  “I think there’s someone who might believe what happened to us. …” Elettra searches through the sketchbook for Mistral’s last notes. Then she lets Harvey read them.

  Lying on his bed, Sheng knows perfectly well that he’s dreaming, but he can’t snap himself out of it. The dream scares him, but he just can’t wake himself up. He can only go along with it, an involuntary spectator.

  He’s walking through the jungle with Harvey and Elettra. It’s boiling hot and perfectly silent. He can’t hear any insects, any birds. It’s as if the jungle were empty. From time to time, a Roman monument peeks out from behind the plants—a building, a column, an obelisk—as if the forest has grown right over the city. Then the tropical vegetation makes way for an expanse of fine, pure white sand, which crunches beneath his feet.

  On the other side of a narrow inlet of clear blue water is a tiny island covered with seaweed. Elettra, Harvey and Shengdive into the waves and, once again, Sheng notices there isn’t a noise to be heard.

  Waiting for them on the island is a woman. Her face is covered by a cloak and she’s wearing a close-fitting gown, drawn on which are all the animals of the world.

  The first one to get out of the water, Harvey kneels down before the woman.

  Elettra follows him but remains standing.

  Sheng, instead, stays in the water, hiding. He’s scared.

  The woman stares at them, standing motionless on the beach covered with seaweed. Then she raises her right hand, slips it into her gown and pulls out an old wooden top, which she holds out to the Chinese boy.

  And with this, Sheng’s eyes open wide.

  “Calm down, Sheng,” Harvey tells him, his hand resting on his shoulder. �
��It was just a bad dream.”

  The images from the dream whirl through Sheng’s mind: the jungle, the beach, the island, the woman, the top … “I dreamed about the top!” he cries. “We’ve got to … to use the map!”

  “That’s what we were thinking, too.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s early morning. How do you feel?”

  Sheng’s right arm is throbbing. “My arm hurts a little … but it’s no big deal. I dreamed about you. There was … some kind of jungle covering the city.”

  Elettra motions that he should stop talking. “You can tell us later on, if you want. We don’t have much time.”

  “To do what?”

  “We’ve got to get out of here before seven o’clock.”

  “And go where?”

  “To get Mistral back.”

  “But how?”

  “Are you coming with us?” asks Elettra.

  Like she does every morning, Linda Melodia opens her eyes at seven o’clock on the dot. She rather regretfully slides out from beneath the sheets, her toes seeking out her ever-present Tyrolean wool slippers.

  “What time is it?” her sister asks from the bed when she comes out of the bathroom a moment later. Linda mumbles something as she puts on an undershirt, a flowered sweater and a pair of cream-colored slacks.

  Irene’s head is sunk down into a pillow. “Everything all right?”

  Her sister stands before the mirror to do a few breathing exercises. “I wouldn’t say so. After what happened to the kids, I barely shut my eyes. If only you’d seen them when they got back… They were covered head to toe in dust and grime!”

  Irene giggles. “Always exaggerating. I’m sure they were just a little dirty, that’s all—”

  “Believe me! For a moment I thought Elettra … Well, we’d better just forget about it.”

  “They’re only kids, Linda.”

  “I was a girl once, too! But I didn’t feel the need to sneak into construction sites and risk my neck just to see a crane. Or am I wrong? What were you doing when you were their age?”

  Irene rubs her eyes. “Me? I was trying to save the world.”

  Linda rolls her eyes. “Oh, of course! How could I forget?” She plants a kiss on her forehead and says, “If you don’t need anything, I’ll go down and set the tables for breakfast.”