Century #4: Dragon of Seas (30 page)

“Yet another surprise!” Ermete exclaims.

He’s pulling a second helmet out of the sidecar’s storage compartment when he sees Sheng, in jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers. The boy is holding a giant stack of fluttering papers.

“They lost my luggage!” he exclaims, furious.

Ermete seems relieved. “Whew! That’s good,” he says, handing him the second helmet. “It means we’re still in Rome after all.”

Having a conversation aboard a sidecar in the middle of traffic in the Italian capital is far from easy, but that’s no reason not to try.

“News from home?” Ermete asks, hunched over the handlebars and zooming along.

“Nothing big, except that they finally managed to get their hands on the Devil family’s accounting books.”

“Great! So what happened?”

“The accountant gave them the figures and the proof they needed to expose all sorts of dirty dealings.” Sheng laughs. “And to arrest other officials. Corrupt people on every level. Some of them agreed to explain how the family really made their fortune. And you won’t believe this, but in the aftermath they found out what Heremit Devil’s real name was. He was called John Smith.”

Ermete turns to look at Sheng. “You’re kidding me.”

“No, I swear. That was his name. John Smith. A mixed family, Chinese and English, like Mahler told us. The devil was hiding behind the most ordinary name possible.”

“And now that his empire’s falling to pieces?”

“People are a lot more careful, and they might think twice the next time they want to authorize building a nine-lane superhighway that would be a total eyesore.”

Ermete smiles. “Harmony,” he says to himself, taking the exit for the city center.

The entrance of the Domus Quintilia is decorated with colorful paper festoons. Ermete parks his motorcycle in Piazza in Piscinula and, when the roar of the Ural engine dies down, he and Sheng hear music coming from the inner courtyard.

“Sounds like the party’s already started.…”

“Hao!”
Sheng exclaims, baring his gums. “Let’s get going, then!”

The hotel courtyard is crowded with guests, and new faces can be seen among familiar ones. A strand of blinking white lights has been wound around the arches and down to the central well. On the far end, a table covered with red-and-white-checked cloths is piled high with treats and freshly uncorked bottles.

Ermete nudges Sheng and gestures at waiters in black tuxedo jackets and bow ties who are serving the guests. “You know where they found the catering?”

“No, where?”

Ermete points at what at first sight looked like a flowered tent but turns out to be a giant woman in a rustling silk gown.

“Mademoiselle Cybel de Paris.”

“But isn’t that dangerous?”

“Well, Sheng, after we got out of that hole of a reservoir,” Ermete remembers, “you might just say we became good friends.”

“Sheng!” Harvey says, leaning against a column a few steps away. “How’s it going?”

The boy from New York has a strange bandage on his nose.

“
Hao!
Harvey!” Sheng smiles and shakes his hand. “Fine, thanks. I mean, except for my luggage. How about you?”

Harvey touches his nose. “Except for my nose … pretty good.”

“What happened?”

“It broke. Finally.”

“Finally?”

“If you practice boxing, it’s bound to happen sooner or later.

At least now I don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

“How did your folks take it?”

“Let’s just say we made a compromise: if I want to go on boxing, I have to get tutoring and keep my grades up.”

“And you agreed?”

As his answer, Harvey points at a corner of the courtyard.

Olympia and two other people from the gym are there.

“You been here long?” Sheng asks.

“Got in yesterday. I planted my last seed here in Rome.”

“Where?”

Harvey raises a finger to his lips to say it’s a secret. “I’ll tell you once it’s grown.”

“Ermete, do you know?” Sheng asks, but he finds that the engineer has slipped away without saying a word, so he turns back to Harvey. “Then will you tell me where you planted the one in Shanghai, too?”

“I promise.”

Sheng spots Mrs. Miller on the other side of the courtyard, deep in conversation with Vladimir Askenazy.

“Come on,” Harvey says, pushing his friend toward them. “You can say hi.”

“Harvey!” the woman exclaims as though she hasn’t seen her son in ages. “I didn’t know you had a friend like Vladimir! What a delightful person. He has such wonderful taste!”

The boy grins. “Well, Sheng’s a friend of mine, too,” he jokes.

Vladimir shakes Sheng’s hand and welcomes him. Harvey and Sheng leave him in Mrs. Miller’s company and go over to the refreshments table.

“The others?”

“My dad’s over there, talking to those big-shot professors,” Harvey says. “He’s instilling a bit of healthy environmental panic in all of them. Without overdoing it, naturally.”

“Like by telling them that in a hundred years a planet’s going to come wipe us off the face of the universe?”

“Something like that.”

Among the various smiling faces in the courtyard, Sheng recognizes Cecile Blanchard, Mistral’s mom, who’s surrounded by Parisian friends from the world of fashion, as well as Madame Cocot, who wears a flashy dress with peacock feathers. The music teacher has cornered a smartly dressed, arrogant-looking man: François Ganglof from the Conservatoire de Paris.

As Sheng watches them, Fernando Melodia appears, carrying two flutes of champagne. He hands one to Cecile.

“Hmm … so how’s it going between those two?” Sheng asks.

“Mistral and Elettra won’t say much about it … but they seem to be getting along great,” Harvey replies.

“Why, if it isn’t
Alfred’s nephew!
” Agatha chimes in, appearing behind Sheng. “How is everything?”

“
Hao!
Agatha!” Sheng is really surprised to see the elderly New York actress, who was Professor Van Der Berger’s longtime love. “Nice to see you! I didn’t think you’d be coming.”

“Oh, I traveled in excellent company.”

Sheng finds himself shaking a massive hand, which belongs to an equally giant man. After a moment’s hesitation, Sheng smiles. “I almost didn’t recognize you without your mailman’s uniform on.”

Quilleran winks at him and then, when Agatha turns to follow the scent of fresh canapés arriving, he trails behind her like a bodyguard.

Sheng suddenly thinks of Egon Nose and asks Harvey how things turned out with the owner of the nightclub Lucifer.

“Problem solved,” Harvey replies. “One of his chauffeurs got into an accident while they were driving down Broadway. She wasn’t hurt, but Egon …”

“I can’t say I’ll cry, but … how did it happen?”

Harvey’s eyes become piercing. “It seems a crow flew in front of her car.”

At the party, time flies, but Sheng doesn’t see any trace of Elettra or Mistral. He’s spotted Quilleran’s Seneca friends and the gypsy woman with the gold earring, who wears a cheerful flowered apron and is carrying a tray full of hot ravioli.

“The girls?” he asks Harvey, tired of wandering around aimlessly.

“No sign of them,” Harvey confirms, biting into a canapé.

Sheng leans against a column.

“Hello, son,” his father says, taking him by surprise. “Did you have a good trip?”

“Yeah, Dad. Nice clothes,” Sheng remarks, staring at his father’s pea-green silk suit. “You could win the prize for the evening’s worst outfit.”

His father laughs. “Well, I might come in second.…”

In fact, a man standing off to the side in a dark corner of the courtyard is dressed in a mismatched suit, the pinstripes on the trousers and jacket in different colors. Sheng doesn’t remember him, so he has to ask Ermete, who’s passing by with a blond woman.

“That’s the Siberian who gave us the heart top in Paris,” the engineer says. “He doesn’t speak a single word of French, English or Italian, but it looks like he’s having fun.”

A peal of unmistakable laughter makes Sheng turn to look at the door of the Domus Quintilia, and his heart skips a beat.

It’s Mistral, dressed in a knee-length red and white outfit and black lace tights with a flower pattern. Her laugh announces the long-awaited entrance of the ladies of the house: the three Melodia women in sparkling sequins. The elderly Irene, in her wheelchair, wears a light gray gown, gray pearl earrings and a shawl draped over her lap. Linda, to her left, sports a short hairdo, dangling gemstone earrings and a very elegant snake-shaped bracelet. On the other side is Elettra, whose wild black hair hangs down over her shoulders. She’s wearing a glittering lilac-colored tube dress with purple tights and ballerina flats.

Their entrance is a bit theatrical, but it wins applause from all the guests. Elettra, Linda and Irene look around like movie stars, going along with it. They reach the center of the courtyard and go their separate ways to mingle.

“Hello, my dear!” Elettra says with a coquettish tone, walking up to Harvey.

Her purple eye shadow sparkles, as does her red lip gloss.

“Isn’t purple supposed to be bad luck?” Harvey says.

He turns to Sheng for backup, but his friend is gone. He’s slipped through the other guests, carrying two glasses, and pops up right behind Mistral, who’s saying hello to her mother’s friends, Professor Ganglof and the other people in the Parisian delegation.

“Hi, Sheng!” the French girl says.

But before he can even hand her the glass, she introduces him to a blond boy, whom Sheng instantly finds detestable. “You remember Michel, don’t you?”

“Actually, no.” Sheng forces a smile.

“Of course you do! The organist from Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris!”

“Oh, right!” he exclaims, giving in. “But it’s a little hard for me to shake his hand,” he adds, looking at the glasses he’s holding.

Mistral accepts a flute and makes Sheng give the other one to Michel.

Sheng notices something in Mistral’s eyes, something he’s never noticed before. A strange energy …

Whatever it is, they’re interrupted by applause. People are trying to persuade Irene to make a speech.

The elderly woman finally gives in. “Oh, all right!” she
exclaims. “You want me to speak, so I’ll speak: Thank you all for coming!”

She then pretends to roll herself away in her wheelchair. The guests’ laughter makes her smile and stop. Her gray pearls gleam.

“Honestly!” she continues. “I don’t have much more to tell you. All around me, I see the people dearest to my heart, along with others whom I met only tonight. I know they’re here because they’re all connected in some way by a common friendship … with an extraordinary person.”

The courtyard falls silent. Unseen by the others, Fernando turns down the music.

“A special person who traveled, studied and read a great, great deal … all to pursue his big dream: to help us better understand the world we live in.”

Sheng stares hard at Irene, trying to avoid looking at Mistral and the blond boy from Paris.

“And so … thank you, Alfred! God willing, we’ll all get together from time to time, like tonight, to show our gratitude for everything you did for us and for giving us the chance to meet. And maybe to try to change the things that need changing, at least a little bit.”

“To Alfred!” Fernando exclaims, raising his glass.

“To Alfred!” the others repeat, applauding.

Sheng sneaks away to avoid seeing Mistral and the blond French boy toast and sadly heads toward the dark archway leading outside.

For a moment, he has the impression he sees old Professor Van Der Berger coming in through the entrance, like a friend
who’s stopping by to say hello. The impression is so vivid that Sheng does a double take, but then he realizes he’s wrong. The music is turned up again and the party goes on, but something in the courtyard is bothering him, making him feel the need to be alone for a while.

He goes out onto the street.

There, he sees another person, who’s standing beside the door.

“Hello, Sheng.”

It’s a hard, inflexible voice. The voice of a shadow.

“Jacob …,” Sheng replies in a whisper.

Jacob Mahler is dressed in an elegant black-and-white herringbone overcoat with a fur-trimmed collar. He’s holding the violin he used to take Professor Van Der Berger’s life not far from here. It’s a strange moment: the killer and the professor’s friend standing face to face, both of them feeling awkward in their own way.

“There’s something I’d like to do,” Jacob Mahler says, breaking the silence, “but I need your help.”

Sheng nods and, without saying a word, listens to what the shadow has to tell him.

“All right,” he says, nodding, once the man’s finished. He takes the musical score from the violinist’s hands, turns to go back inside and then stops, realizing that this is a sort of final farewell. And he hasn’t said goodbye.

But when he turns around, Jacob Mahler has already disappeared.

Sheng pushes his way through the guests, determined.

He sees Mistral, makes a beeline for her and tries to interrupt
her conversation with the French organist. He has to say her name a couple of times and ends up pulling her away.

“Sheng! Do you have to be so pushy?”

“I think so,” the boy replies, handing her the score Jacob Mahler gave him. “I need you to sing this.”

Mistral glances at the sheet music. “What? Oh, no, are you crazy? I’d be ashamed!”

“You’ve got to do it.”

“Sheng, cut it out! What is it, anyway?” The female chorus solo of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no. 2, called
The Resurrection
. “I’ve never sung this in my life!”

“The notes are there,” Sheng insists. “Sing.”

Seeing Mistral’s hesitation, the boy calls out to everyone, “Your attention for a moment, please! We have a pleasant surprise! Mistral Blanchard would like to sing us a song.”

“Sheng!” Mistral protests. “Have you lost your mind?”

But he doesn’t even look her way. Instead, he repeats his announcement, tapping a spoon against a glass to quiet down the people who didn’t hear him the first time. He asks Fernando to switch off the music, turns to Mistral and looks her straight in the eye.