Century #4: Dragon of Seas (10 page)

Harvey is left breathless.

The pressure from the knife eases.

“Let’s go,” the man hisses, pushing him toward the door.

“Where to?”

“Home.”

“Irene? Hello, Irene? Can you hear me?”

“Vladimir? Is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me. I have great news: our master is still alive! She’s here in Siberia. She’s very old and very frail … but she’s alive. She even sent a man to Paris.”

“Now I see who did it.”

“Who did what?”

“The kids met him. He had the heart top with him.”

“Your top?”

“Yes, my top.”

“Is it the connection, Irene … or are you crying?”

“Yes, Vladimir, I’m crying. Elettra discovered the room. I had to … make her fall asleep. And have Fernando take her away.”

“What did she see?”

“The photographs. And my notes.”

“She would’ve found out sooner or later. Better this way than hearing about it from Mistral.”

“I know, but looking in her eyes and seeing that she didn’t trust me anymore … that she was afraid of me … it was
terrible. And now that she’s gone, I feel so alone. And so full of doubt.”

“We’re all alone and full of doubt, Irene.”

“Take care of yourself, Vladimir. And take care of my sister.”

“Your sister?”

“She’s on her way there.”

“O
H, NO, PLEASE DON
’
T BOTHER,
” L
INDA
M
ELODIA SAYS IN
I
TALIAN
, smiling. She’s in the third-class car of the train from Moscow that’s going—or should be going—to Omsk, not far from the Kazakhstani border. “There’s no need for you to get up.”

Naturally, the woman beside her doesn’t understand and simply smiles, slipping off her skirt to put on a pair of light blue flannel pajama pants. Linda tries to avoid looking at her, but deep down she’s shocked by how casually the woman is changing her clothes in front of everyone. She doesn’t say a word, partly because she wouldn’t know what language to say it in. The woman’s husband, who is already in pajamas and has a mustache that looks like a pair of sabers, has tried to speak to Linda in Italian, but as it turns out, all he knows are the names of a few soccer players, which he’s repeated to her at least twenty times. The two are in the seats beside Linda’s, and in front of them is a wool-lined cradle with a baby girl sleeping inside it.

Now the woman is working on her pajama top and Linda has to dodge her elbow. Still, it’s a quick process and in under a minute the woman has taken off her good dress and put on her train
clothes. She folds the dress and shoves it, crumpled, into the luggage rack over their heads.

Linda is horrified. “You can’t leave it like that,” she murmurs, biting her lip. “You’ll ruin the crease!”

But the woman beside her couldn’t care less about the crease. She tosses everything overhead, including her shoes, and ends up barefoot, as are her husband and many of the other passengers in the train car. Rows of shoes hang by their laces, jackets and shirts are draped over seats, swaying with the train’s every lurch. The air is filled with the hum from the heater and has a mix of smells that are anything but pleasant: sweat, cheap soap, gasoline, salted fish, smoked mutton and other odors better left unidentified. The train car doesn’t have compartments—just rows of high-backed wooden seats divided by a central aisle and small folding tables. In Linda’s row, across the aisle, four men have been playing chess for hours. That is, two are playing and the other two are watching. And although there’s probably a No Smoking sign somewhere, the players appear to have no intention of obeying it.

Linda sits in her little corner, trying not to touch, look at or breathe in anything. Her large suitcase has been stowed in the train car behind theirs and her small traveling bag is on her lap, sealed tight. She’s so tense that she’s on the edge of her seat, ready to spring to her feet at the slightest contact.

On the other hand, the woman next to her seems more relaxed now that she’s in her pajamas. She even offers Linda a cup of coffee as thick as motor oil.

“Oh, no, thank you!” Linda exclaims, horrified but polite.

She stares at the cup as it’s passed halfway around the train car and back again to be refilled. When the woman’s husband holds
the cup out to the baby in the cradle, Linda can’t stand it any longer. “No! You can’t give coffee to a baby!”

The man with the mustache stares at her, not understanding, so Linda takes the cup away from the little girl and sits down again.

“Ah, da!”
The mustachioed man smiles, thinking Linda wants to finish the coffee herself. Holding back a shudder, she raises the cup to her lips and pretends to take a sip.

“Daaa!”
the mustachioed man cheers as his wife offers her some more.

Linda politely declines and tries to concentrate on the monotonous landscape passing by outside the window. It’s the endless expanse of the taiga: green fields, shrubs and countless rivers dotted here and there with tiny villages of little wooden houses or huge cement buildings devoid of beauty, the work of some overzealous local party administrator.

Once the thermos has been put away, Linda studies the train car again. The chess players smoke like chimneys as they calculate their next moves. A thick cloud of smoke hangs in the air over their wooden seats. A few of the travelers noisily flip through newspapers as big as bedsheets.

Linda imperceptibly unzips her bag. She takes out a slip of paper folded in eight, on which she’s written down her departure and arrival times. But once the train set off, she realized that for some strange reason both schedules are in Moscow time, which means two time zones ago, so the times on the clocks at the various stations don’t coincide.

Sighing, Linda tries to sort it out in her mind: ten more hours on the train, she thinks. Or eight. Or twelve.

She huffs, completely downcast.

Then she reflects. She’s surrounded by strangers who don’t speak her language. But maybe she could try to make herself useful.

She unzips her bag a bit wider and pulls out her little Italian-Russian phrase book.

“Hmm … so …,” she begins, staring straight at the woman in blue pajamas. “So, par … don … me.”

She nods and repeats, with greater emphasis, “Pardon me!”

Then, with an inquiring tone, “Pardon me?”

Finally, she closes the phrase book. The woman smiles. Her husband smiles.

The chess players smile.

Did they understand?
Linda Melodia wonders. She gets up, grabs the woman’s clothes, pulls them down and folds them properly.

S
HENG IS DREAMING
.

And it’s the same dream as always.

He’s in the jungle with the other kids, a jungle that’s silent, noiseless. A jungle they cross through almost running, as if being chased. Beyond the tropical vegetation is the sea. Sheng and the others dive in, swim over to a tiny island covered with seaweed. They see a woman waiting for them on the beach. Her face is covered by a cloak, a veil hiding her features. And she wears a close-fitting gown with all the animals of the world printed on it. This time, the woman’s hands are empty and she raises them to bless Sheng’s friends, who slowly pass before her: first Harvey, then Elettra, then Mistral. Sheng tries to get out of the water, but he can’t: it’s like he’s being crushed, trapped by the weight of the sea. When the others have passed by, the woman turns toward him. And … and Sheng wakes up with a start.

He’s in his room, in his house, the walls so thin he can hear his father snoring in the next room and his mother bustling around downstairs in the kitchen. If Sheng listens carefully, he can hear her feet shuffling across the floor.

He rolls over in bed, restless. The computer monitor on the table in the corner is a pale rectangle the color of ghosts. Their laundry is hung out to dry on dark clotheslines strung across the courtyard. TV antennas stick up from the rooftops of the old neighborhood’s squat houses like a modern, flowerless rose garden.

Sheng buries his head under the pillow. He thinks back on the dream. On what it might mean. Slowly, he starts to sweat.

He gets out of bed, crosses the narrow hallway that leads to the bathroom and goes down to the kitchen, still half-asleep.

“What time is it?”

His mother motions for him to lower his voice: his father is still sleeping.

“Six in the morning.”

A layer of dew covers the pavestones in the courtyard. Outside the rectangular windows, the alley is already bustling with people, with bicycles, with strange goods carried on people’s shoulders or on old motor scooters.

“Sheng, are you sure you feel all right?” his mother asks, serving him a bowl of dark bancha tea directly from the pot. Then she surprises him by resting a dish with two mooncakes in the center of the table.

She smiles.

“I’m practicing for the Chung-Ch’iu Chieh festival,” she whispers.

The Mid-Autumn festival. When fruit and treats are laid out on the home altars for visitors to enjoy.

He picks up one of the cakes between his fingers. It’s firm, heavy. Looks good.

“Sugar, sesame seeds, walnuts, lotus seeds, eggs, ham, flower
petals, plus … my secret ingredient,” his mother says, running down the list as if she was reading from a cookbook.

Sheng takes a bite. Not bad. But with his second bite he tastes something strange in the filling, something vaguely pungent.

“Mpff … what exactly … did you use … as your secret ingredient?”

“Oh, who remembers? I improvised a little!”

With the fourth bite, the cake becomes a pasty glob that sticks there on the middle of his tongue. It won’t come out and it won’t go down. Sheng tries to loosen it with a sip of bancha tea and after a few failed attempts he finally manages to swallow it.

“Well? How is it?” his mother asks, still whispering.

Sheng stares at the other mooncake on the dish, terrified. “Not bad,” he lies, stashing the uneaten half of the first one in his pajama pocket.

As he drinks his tea, he mentally goes over the day ahead of him and breaks into a sweat. He hasn’t heard from Harvey and he thinks about everything he needs to do: pretend to go to school, meet up with Ermete and again with Mahler. Cross the river, try to figure out a way to get into the skyscraper. Wait for the others to arrive.

But then what?

He quickly finishes his breakfast, goes back up to his room, gets dressed without looking at himself in the mirror, grabs his backpack with his books and stops a moment. But his every thought is interrupted by his father’s steady snoring, which echoes through the room. To Sheng, it sounds like he can barely breathe.

And so, he goes downstairs and walks back into the kitchen, ready to leave.

His mother stops him. “Where are you going, Sheng? It’s too early for school.”

“I can’t sleep, Mom. I might as well go out.”

“You’re just like your father,” the woman whispers. “At your age he couldn’t sit still one minute.”

Sheng pecks her cheek and goes out into the alley. He looks around. Vendors selling eyeglasses, billboards, shops with trousers displayed on aluminum hangers, colorful fabrics, people walking their motor scooters.

And across the street, him. Leaning against some cardboard boxes of fluorescent tube lights. The pale boy in the number 89 jersey.

The boy who’s been following him.

On the second-to-top floor of a black skyscraper in the heart of Pudong, the new area of Shanghai, the phone used for confidential calls rings. Heremit Devil closes the little door to the children’s bedroom where he normally sleeps, walks down the long hallway covered with childish, scrawled drawings and writings, and reaches his desk.

“Heremit,” he hisses into the phone with a trace of breathlessness.

“I have the boy,” a man’s voice replies.

Nik Knife. Four Fingers. The knife thrower. The head of his security team.

Very good
, Heremit thinks.
The first one has arrived
.

“Bring him up.”

“Can he keep his own clothes? He traveled by plane.”

“Have him decontaminated first.”