Basilisk (28 page)

Nathan said, ‘OK. Glad you had a good time. But you should hit the sack now. We’re going to be doing something real serious tomorrow morning, and I want you both in good shape.’

‘Patti is already in good shape,’ Denver blurted out. ‘She has the goodest shape ever, bar no shape at all.’

Patti looked across at Nathan and smiled. He saw a lot in that smile: amusement, affection, and almost a feeling of family. But he also saw her determination not to be left out of whatever was going on. She was young, and she didn’t take herself too seriously, but she wanted to go back to Philadelphia with the story to top all stories.

‘I think I might actually need to barf,’ Denver announced.

‘Here,’ said Rafał. ‘I guide you to toilet.’

He helped Denver to stagger back across the bar. When they had gone, Patti said to Nathan, ‘So what’s this real serious something that we’re supposed to be doing tomorrow?’

‘A little larceny, that’s all. But if you don’t want to get yourself involved, that’s fine.’

He told her about Zofia Czarwonica, and showed her the charm bag. ‘Take a look inside,’ he said. ‘There’s some real weird stuff in there. But this Zofia swore that it worked.’

Patti picked out the scroll, and the tiny dagger, and the egg, and the colored stones. ‘This is magic, isn’t it? Like, the real genuine thing. I’m finding it hard to get my head around this.’

‘You believe in God.’

‘Sure I do. But that’s different. God may be invisible, but His world has rules, right? Like people don’t appear and disappear,
snap
! like Doctor Zauber did. And people don’t walk around with bags full of eggs, and hair, and all this other junk, thinking that they’re going to protect them.’

Nathan put his elbows on the table and leaned forward. ‘I sense a “but” coming.’

‘Yes. You do. I don’t understand any of this stuff, but that doesn’t mean I’m not prepared to believe in it. I’ll come with you tomorrow. Somebody has to record what happened, even if it all goes wrong.
Especiall
y if it all goes wrong.’

Nathan ordered another glass of wine and another vodka for Rafał. Patti asked for a peach juice.

Rafał came back after five minutes or so, shaking his head. ‘Denver is OK. He was very sick, but he has gone to bed now. He will be fine tomorrow.’

He sat down, picked up his glass of vodka and said, ‘
Na zdrowie
! Good health to all of us, and long lifes!’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Patti. She lifted her glass of pale orange peach juice and said, ‘Long lifes!’

EIGHTEEN

The House of Empty People

T
he next morning, Nathan and Denver and Patti had breakfast together in the hotel dining room. The sun was shining through the stained-glass windows, and the air was swarming with sparkling motes of dust.

Patti wore a tight white rollneck sweater and a very short blue denim skirt, while Denver was wearing a purple T-shirt with
Like, Duh
emblazoned on the front. Denver had completely recovered from his blackberry-juice binge, and ate two hard-cooked eggs, as well as salami and Gruyère cheese and half a basket of rye bread.

Nathan settled for a glass of sweet, synthetic-tasting pomegranate juice and two cups of strong black coffee.

He explained to Denver what they were planning to do, trying to sound as matter-of-fact as possible. ‘Without those remains, Doctor Zauber is totally stymied.’

He had been seriously worried that Denver would think that the whole idea of breaking into Doctor Zauber’s house was too flaky, or too risky. But Denver shook his head admiringly from side to side and said, ‘Wicked, man. Totally wicked,’ with his mouth full.

‘Just remember,’ said Nathan. ‘If you decide to come along, you’ll have to do exactly as I tell you and don’t try to be a hero. I wouldn’t have asked you to come along at all, but we need to search through that entire house, top to bottom, as quickly as possible. God alone knows where Zauber keeps those remains, if he keeps them there at all.’

‘So we’re looking for, like, bones and skin, all wrapped up in an old leather parcel?’

‘Bones and skin, yes, like a snake’s skin. Zauber may have taken them out of the leather parcel by now. But it’s the bones and skin that we’re after. They contain the DNA which he needs to re-create a basilisk. He doesn’t do it the same way I do it, with embryonic stem cells. He uses some kind of medieval hocus-pocus, as far as I know. But however he does it, he still has to start with the same genetic ingredients.’

At ten twenty-five, Rafał appeared, in a green tweed shooting coat with brown suede shoulder patches. He was carrying a red string shopping bag. He bear-hugged Nathan and Denver, kissed Patti twice on each cheek, and then sat down.

‘We are all ready for this adventure?’ he asked. ‘We have not lost our courage?’

‘I think it’s going to be
ur
-mazing,’ said Denver.

Patti said, ‘Raring to go, Raffo.’

‘I drove past Doctor Zauber’s house on my way here,’ Rafał told them. ‘From the outside it looked as if there was nobody home.’

‘You brought the mirrors?’ Nathan asked him.

‘Of course.’ He lifted up the shopping bag. ‘Five altogether.’

‘And we’re all clear on exactly how we’re going to use these mirrors, if we need to?’

Patti said, ‘Me on your right, Raffo on your left, and Denver in between the basilisk and me. We got it, Professor.’ She pointed her finger to each of them in turn, as if she were shining an intense light. ‘
Bing – bing – bing – bing – whamm
!’

Rafał handed out circular shaving mirrors, with magnifying lenses. Denver peered into his, and pulled a face.

‘Pops?’ he asked. ‘Do you really think that what’s-his-name has bred himself another what-do-you-call-it?’

‘To be honest – no, I don’t. I think it’s more likely that he’s been holding off in the hope that he can persuade me to help him with the cell development. He doesn’t want another deformed monster on his hands. But even if he
has
gone ahead, I wouldn’t have thought that he’s had enough time to breed a full-sized basilisk. Not that I have any idea how fast a basilisk can grow.’

‘Let us just pray that he has not,’ said Rafał.

Nathan pocketed his two mirrors and stood up. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it.’

They walked through the bright cobbled streets to the intersection of Kupa and Izaaka. Nathan felt as if they ought to have theme music playing as the four of them made their way along the crowded sidewalks, like
The Magnificent Seven
or
Gunfight at the OK
Corral
.

The buildings on either side of them were four and five stories, gray and flat-fronted, like the buildings he had seen in wartime newsreels about the invasion of Poland. Most of them were being remodeled now, but a few of them still had empty, shattered window frames, and were pockmarked with shrapnel scars.

Up above them, the sky was a piercing pale blue, with fragmented white clouds that had drifted here all the way across southern Germany and the Czech Republic.

They turned into Kupa Street. Thirty yards to the left there was a narrow alley, and on the corner of this alley stood a tall angular house, four stories high, rendered in gritty gray concrete, with peeling brown shutters and empty window boxes. A rusty yellow plaque with the number seventy-seven was attached to the wall beside the front door. The door was painted a dull maroon color, with a brass knocker in the shape of a hammer. There were two bell pushes, one labeled
R. Cichowlas
and the other labeled
Walach
.

‘Robert Cichowlas was the artist who rented the top-floor studio,’ said Rafał. ‘The Walachs . . . I don’t know. I think they worked for some tourism company.’

Nathan said to Denver, ‘Want to try the bells? Just to see if anybody answers.’

Denver pressed both buttons. They waited and waited, while tourists and shoppers elbowed past them on the sidewalk, but nobody came to the door.

‘Try again,’ said Nathan. ‘And knock this time, too, just in case the bells don’t work.’

Denver pressed the buttons again, holding each of them down for almost half a minute, and then he banged on the door with the hammer-shaped knocker. They could hear it echoing inside the house.

Patti came up to Nathan and peered down the front of his leather jacket. ‘How about your charm bag? What’s that telling you?’

‘Not a peep,’ said Nathan. ‘Although I don’t know what it’s supposed to do if there
is
somebody home.’

‘Cough? Scream? Rattle? Didn’t your witch lady tell you?’

‘No. But she said that I’d know if it happened.’

‘Maybe it whistles Dixie.’

Rafał said, ‘I think we can assume there is nobody here. There is a side window which overlooks the alley.’ He opened his tweed coat, just enough for them to be able to see the handle of the screwdriver that he was carrying in his inside pocket. ‘Denver, please to come with me. You will find it easier to climb inside than me.’

There was nobody in the alley except for an old woman in a black shawl sitting on a wooden chair more than fifty yards away. She was leaning back with her eyes closed, with a ball of red wool and a half-knitted sleeve in her lap, basking in a foot-wide slice of sunlight that was falling between the tenement buildings opposite. A mangy Pomeranian lay asleep at her feet.

Nathan and Patti stood in the entrance to the alley, pretending to have an animated conversation together, to distract the attention of passers-by along Kupa Street.

‘So where do you want to go next?’ Nathan demanded.

‘I don’t know!’ snapped Patti. ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘I don’t know!
You
choose!’

‘Jesus,’ said Patti. ‘We sound like those crows in
Dumbo
.’

Meanwhile, resting his shoulder against the wall, so that he kept his back to the old woman in the wooden chair, Rafał took out his long, wide-bladed screwdriver. He forced it into the side of the window frame, an inch below the catch. He looked around, just to make sure that nobody was watching, and then took hold of the screwdriver in both hands and wrenched it sideways. The wood was so rotten that he cracked the frame apart, which loosened the screws that fastened the catch.

Denver clawed the window open, while Rafał got down on one knee and clasped his hands together to give him a boost. Denver took one step back, and then jumped up on Rafał’s hands and dived over the window sill like an acrobat. Nathan heard a clattering sound, and then a crash, like a vase breaking, and Denver saying, ‘
Shit
.’

‘Denver?’ called Rafał, trying to keep his voice down.

Denver’s face appeared at the window. ‘It’s OK, Raffo. I’m fine. Broke some jug, that’s all.’

He hesitated for a moment, looking around, and listening. Then he said, ‘Doesn’t seem like there’s anybody here. I’ll let you guys in, OK?’

Rafał carefully closed the window and wedged it shut with a triangular splinter of wood. He came back to join Nathan and Patti and the three of them returned to the front door. Denver opened it almost at once, and said, triumphantly, ‘Tah-
dah
!’

‘You should be a burglar when you grow up,’ Patti told him, as they stepped inside.

‘You think so? So what are
you
going to be, when
you
grow up?’

‘Come on, you two,’ Nathan interrupted them, ‘we have some serious searching to do.’ But he knew that they were only bantering like that because they liked each other.

Doctor Zauber’s house was gloomy and cold inside, because it was so deeply overshadowed by the buildings that surrounded it. The interior looked as if it hadn’t been redecorated since the war. The wallpaper was covered in tiny red-and-yellow flowers, but on one side of the staircase they had been erased completely by years of shoulders rubbing past, and up on the landing they had faded to a pale sepia color, as if they were real flowers that had dried up and died. The doors and the skirting boards and the banisters were all painted dark brown, and the paint was scabby and cracked.

‘Rafał and I will start looking up in the attic,’ said Nathan. ‘Why don’t you guys start searching down here?’ He opened the door on the right-hand side of the hall, and peered inside. ‘Living room,’ he said. It was stuffy and dark, with thick net curtains that were heavy with dust, and overcrowded with 1930s-style furniture. A large mirror hung over the fireplace, so that they could see themselves standing in the doorway, looking in.

‘Looks like a dining room next door, and a kitchen in back. You’ll need to search through every closet and every drawer. If you think you’ve found what we’re looking for, don’t touch it. Just yell out.’

Denver and Patti went into the living room and started to tug open the drawers of an elaborate walnut cabinet. ‘Take a look under the chairs, too,’ Nathan told them.

He and Rafał climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing. A chandelier with two of its five bulbs missing hung from the ceiling like a giant spider. The ceiling itself was cracked all the way across and stained with brown blotches of damp.

‘If you fix up this house, you make yourself fortune,’ said Rafał. On the wall beside him hung a reproduction of a sour-looking monk, with a sinister-looking monastery in the background, and a sky that was peppered with rooks. The picture was rippled with damp, which made the monk look as if he had leprosy.

They climbed up the next flight of stairs, and then the next. Rafał was wheezing by the time they reached the door to the attic, and he punched his chest with his fist. ‘I need to take more exercise,’ he said. ‘Not so much beer, not so much potatoes, not so much
kiełbasa
!’

Nathan cautiously opened the attic door. It was brighter in here than it was downstairs, because there were six large skylights in the ceiling, although the three south-facing skylights had dark gray roller blinds drawn down over them. This was Robert Cichowlas’ studio. It smelled strongly of oil paint and turpentine and stale cigarettes, and there was a long wooden table crowded with half-squeezed tubes of paint, like wriggling metal worms, as well as jars filled with brushes and paint-dotted palettes and multi-colored rags. At the far end, up against the brick chimney breast, there was a single bed with a grubby green quilt dragged over it.