Century #4: Dragon of Seas (16 page)

“Someone’s at the door.”

“I didn’t hear anything.” He points at his papers. “I—I was …”

The Domus Quintilia is closed and strangely silent. All the guests have checked out, and Fernando and Irene decided not to take in any more, not until things are back to normal, at least. During the wait, Elettra’s father is turning his efforts to working on his interminable novel in the only lit room.

Once again, clangs from the iron knocker on the front door fill the courtyard. This time, Fernando hears it, too. He stands up and rubs his eyes. “Who could it be at this hour? And why don’t they use the bell?”

“If you like, I’ll go down to see,” Irene says.

The man stretches and walks out of the room, grumbling. But a moment before shutting the door behind him, Irene calls out, “Don’t open it right away. Be careful.”

Fernando goes downstairs to the reception area, sees a broom propped up by the door and, thinking the person knocking might be up to no good, grabs it. He weighs it in his hands. Better than nothing.

He crosses the dark courtyard, passing under the yellowing vines, reaches the front door and clicks open its old, heavy lock.

“Sorry, we’re clo—” he begins to say the moment the light from the nearby streetlamp creeps into the courtyard.

Outside is a gypsy woman.

“Oh, no … look … don’t even ask,” Fernando says, hurrying to close the door.

A gold earring glimmers through the woman’s grimy, curly hair. “I am a friend of your daughter,” she says.

The man leaves the door open a crack, hesitant.

“Your daughter, Elettra,” the gypsy woman adds.

Fernando opens the door a little wider. There’s something familiar about her face. He has the impression he’s seen her before. Then he remembers: she’s the gypsy woman who often begs in Piazza in Piscinula or on the bridge over the Tiber. Now he recognizes her. He also seems to recognize the sweater the woman is wearing. Is it Elettra’s? Or Irene’s?

“That’s my sweater …,” he finally mumbles.

The gypsy looks down at her clothes. “It is? Oh, I didn’t know.… I’m sorry. Elettra gave it to me.”

“My daughter—”

“She is in Shanghai, I know.” The woman smiles. It’s a yellow, ugly smile, but it’s unusually friendly. She pulls a black appointment book out from underneath her sweater and hands it to Fernando. “Look at this. I stole it.”

The man stiffens.

“Read it! You are in danger!” the gypsy woman insists.

“Listen, if this is some kind of joke …” Fernando leans against the doorframe and opens the appointment book. It’s full of entries.

“What is all this?” Elettra’s father asks.

The gypsy woman points to nearby Piazza in Piscinula. “This book belongs to the waiter over at that restaurant, the one who just started working there. I stole it from him not long ago. They are watching you.”

“What?” Fernando gasps.

“Look at the last page,” the woman insists.

Fernando Melodia gapes at the page.

“I think you should leave,” the gypsy woman says. Then she adds, “At once.”

I
N
H
EREMIT
D
EVIL
’
S BUILDING
, H
ARVEY IS IN THE DARK AGAIN
.

He stares at Shanghai’s skyscrapers, the many lights switching on and off.

And he wonders if those windows might be hiding other messages.

Other Morse codes.

When Jacob started to blink his light, Harvey had just walked into the room. He didn’t notice it right away, even though he’d gone over the plan for weeks and knew exactly where to look. Jacob explained it to him because he was sure that once Harvey was captured, Heremit would lock him up in that very room. He explained how to attract attention on the plane, how to act toward Heremit and, once he was alone, what direction to look in as he waited for the coded message.

On. Off.

On. On.

Off.

On.

The instructions for getting out of the room traveled slowly through the night. And Harvey replied.

On. On. On.

“Okay.”

In the darkness of the room, the boy opens his backpack, which was searched at the airport in New York and later by Heremit Devil’s security team. He pulls out his shaving kit, takes out his toothbrush and twists its head. The sharp tip of a screwdriver appears among the bristles. Harvey puts it on the bed. Then he uncaps the tube of toothpaste and squeezes its bottom end. Hidden beneath a small layer of toothpaste is a tiny yet powerful flashlight.

The boy sits down on the bed and undoes his shoelaces: they’re made of the same material as Mahler’s violin bow. Razor-sharp threads.

He reaches into his sweater sleeves and tears out the linings, which are shaped into two perfectly fitting gloves. He puts them on.

Then he goes into the bathroom and detaches the plastic curtain from the shower rod. He brings it into the main room and spreads it out on the floor right below the small, square thermostat. He folds it into two insulating layers and steps onto it with his shoes. He studies the device in front of him. He loosens its four screws with his toothbrush, removes the cover from the little box and shines his toothpaste-tube flashlight into it. Inside the thermostat is a notched disk, a tiny glass tube with mercury in it, a green wire, a red wire, a blue wire. Mahler told him to clip the blue one. He loops a shoelace around the blue wire and tugs on it. The lights in the room go out for a second.

And the lock on the door goes
clack
.

* * *

The lights come back on a second later, but Harvey has already pulled the door toward him. He puts on his backpack and hurries out.

Once he’s in the hallway, he checks his watch. He has just under twenty minutes.

He listens. A constant, ominous hum fills the air.

He peers around. The floor is made of sturdy teak. Overhead, in the corner, the red blinking light of a security camera. From what Mahler told him, it rotates to film the hallway every forty seconds. Harvey ducks back into the room a moment before the camera turns his way, then waits for it to return to its place and runs out again. He has forty seconds to reach a white door that should be somewhere on the opposite wall.

Thirty seconds. Twenty.

Beside the door is a keypad. Harvey knows the code. And he types it in.

8 … 2 … 6 … 8 …

He casts a final glance at the security camera.

Ten seconds.

 … 6

The lock clicks open. Harvey hurries out the door, closes it behind him and starts going down the service stairs in Heremit Devil’s building.

He goes down cautiously, careful not to make the slightest noise.

There aren’t supposed to be any surveillance cameras here, but Harvey checks for them anyway. With every other flight of stairs, he counts down, keeping track of what floor he’s reached,
because there aren’t any signs indicating the skyscraper’s various levels.

Once he’s reached what should be the ground floor, he goes down another half flight of stairs. A service door should be on the left.

Instead, he sees a keypad halfway up the two-tone wall. Harvey punches in the access code and a small section of the wall slides open along an invisible track.

On the other side is a passageway with a ceiling so low that he needs to crawl through it. On the far end, a second door with a coded lock.

Clack!

Harvey peeks outside. Nighttime. Darkness. A simple external metal cage in a narrow cement atrium. A tangle of rumbling pipes that plunge down belowground and disappear through a grate overhead. No access panel on the outside.

Harvey carefully keeps the door propped open with his foot. Then he leans out and whistles.

Three times.

He lets a minute go by and whistles again.

The pipes belch out hot steam. They hum, puff, hiss. Underground machinery lets out echoed thuds.

Suddenly, he spots a shadow passing over the grate ten meters overhead.

Harvey hides in the passageway, holding the door open a crack. The shadow slides under the grate, clips a snap hook to one of the metal cables running along the pipes and dangles in the void.

Harvey opens the door a little wider.

The shadow begins to slide down, the thick, heavy soles of his boots letting off sparks. When he’s less than a meter away from the cage, he unclips himself and crouches down beside Harvey.

“You okay?” he asks.

The boy nods.

“Think you can handle going back up there?” The shadow looks at the passageway leading to the service stairs. He’s brought along the violin case.

Again, Harvey nods. “We need to go up to the top floor of the building.”

“It’s not the top floor,” Jacob Mahler corrects him, slipping into the passageway.

I
N THE NINTH-STORY APARTMENT ON THE CORNER OF
L
UJIAZUI
Park, Elettra, Mistral, Ermete and Sheng have no idea what to do.

Mistral sends her mother a message saying everything is fine, no need to worry. “In any case, we can’t stay here,” she murmurs.

“Mahler told us to leave within two hours.”

“And to push the red button.”

They look apprehensively at the tangle of wires on the floor.

“The red button and … boom!” Ermete mimes, holding up some wires attached to a black box that’s been leaned up against the wall.

Elettra paces the room. “I’m going after them,” she says.

“Where?”

“The skyscraper.”

“And do what, once you get there? Ask for permission to go inside? ‘Hello, my name is Elettra. Is Mr. Devil here? Check your list. I should have an appointment.’ ”

“Harvey’s in there.”

“He went there on purpose. They had a plan,” Mistral says.

“Did they let any of you in on it?” Ermete asks. “Or did the two of them make an agreement without telling us anything?”

They all shake their heads.

Elettra pounds her fist on the table. “Why didn’t he warn us?”

“Because we wouldn’t have let him get captured just so he could get our things back.”

Ermete nods vigorously. “Nice idea, though. If Harvey and Jacob’s plan works, we’ll have the tops and everything else back,” he says. Then, while the kids are talking things over, he takes out the ancient map of the Chaldeans and rests it on the table. On the outside, it looks like a box covered with initials and signatures carved in the wood. Once it’s open, it reveals its surface, marked with whorls and grooves, like deep fingerprints. One of its four corners is missing. “I say we try using the map,” the engineer suggests, scratching his head, which is almost completely bald.

“But Harvey isn’t here,” Elettra points out.

“Let’s try it anyway,” Ermete insists.

“But what map do we put on top of it?” Mistral asks.

Sheng takes the Shanghai tourist map and spreads it out on the ancient wooden artifact. Then he reaches into the backpack, finds the last top they have left and puts it on the table. “Who’s going to cast it?”

Indecision.

“I’ll do it, then,” Sheng decides after a moment.

He grabs the top, rests it on the center of the map and flicks it between his fingers. The oracle of the heart begins to whirl around, running along the ancient lines carved in the wood. It races through the area with the skyscrapers, crosses the river near the tourist ferries and heads toward the English Bund, the French
Concession and veers off to the streets that border the Old City, the most ancient area of Shanghai.

“Good top,” Sheng says when it comes to a halt on a small rectangle surrounded by a jumble of narrow streets. At that spot is one of the red circles Sheng and Ermete drew during their search for the city’s oldest buildings.