Century #4: Dragon of Seas (15 page)

“When you were a child, Miller, did you already have one of these? One of the tops of the Chaldeans?”

Don’t listen. Don’t react
.

“No, you didn’t. You weren’t a lucky child. You were just a child born on a very strange day. A day that doesn’t exist. A strange child. Very strange. A child who grew up with everyone smiling at you, but they were really thinking, ‘He’s so strange.’ Isn’t that right?”

Keep your head up. Stay light on your feet
.

“But when it came to your brother, everyone said, ‘Oh, he’s smart. Very smart. He’s going to make us proud. Not like Harvey. Leap year. Bad luck.’ Like the tail on a comet. Something that sticks to you forever. You don’t think that, but others do.”

Strike blow for blow
. “You’re pathetic,” Harvey says.

The man spins the top on the desk. “And you didn’t have this. Your masters gave it to you much later. In an old, worn leather briefcase. After a long journey from Paris to Rome. Hoping to get there in time. Four tops. One for each of you. Which one was yours?”

Heremit Devil holds up the other tops one by one. “The
soldiers’ quarters … or tower, as you call it? Here’s the million-dollar answer, you ignorant fool: the Chaldeans didn’t have towers. Was this one yours?”

“Nobody has their own top. The tops belong to everybody.”

“To everybody? Of course! That’s what I used to believe. Instead, someone decided they were only yours, that they belonged to Harvey Miller. And Mistral Blanchard. Elettra Melodia and … finally … the Chinese boy.”

When the office is quiet again, Harvey thinks he hears a faint, distant yet persistent call. A voice is calling his name, but with a pained, suffering tone.

“Who’s calling me?” he asks Heremit Devil in a hushed voice.

The skull top has come to a halt in the center of the desk.

“What’s that?”

“I hear someone calling my name,” Harvey says. And as he does, he sees the man’s stony mask quiver. He watches the man reach out, his perfectly manicured fingers trembling slightly, press a button on the intercom and bark the order, “Take Mr. Miller to his room.”

Keep your head up. Light on your feet. And when the time’s right, throw your punch
.

“There are things you still haven’t figured out, aren’t there?” Harvey asks, taking a step toward the man.

Separated from him by the perfectly polished desk, Heremit Devil shows no sign that he even heard him.

“There are things you still haven’t figured out, and you don’t know what to do,” Harvey says again, with greater conviction. “You know about the Pact, the four Sages, us.… You had us followed, you stole everything from us, you had our masters and your
own rotten thugs killed … and after all that, after five years, you still don’t know what to do. And you don’t know what you did it for. Am I right?”

“Watch what you say, boy.”

The elevator door in the office opens silently.

“Who is it that’s calling me?” Harvey asks again before two strong hands grab him by the shoulders and drag him out of the room.

To someplace.

In the black skyscraper.

I
T
’
S A NIGHT FULL OF LIFE, ILLUMINATED WITH NEON STREAKS
in different colors. Shanghai is a tangle of serpents of light. The signs are buzzing masks. Hidden behind the tree-lined boulevards with their five-star hotels, sparkling marble-floored restaurants and perfectly manicured flower beds are smaller, darker streets. The forgotten alleys. Alleys lined with the service exits of bars, kitchen doors. Where tired waiters chat to each other in Wu, English, French, Russian, Italian. While stiletto heels and designer shoes tread the sidewalks along the main roads, the forgotten alleys are silent. Only shadows walk there. Shadows pulling other shadows behind them: billowing fabric, nylon cords. The wing of a parachute, to be quickly folded up and hidden among the plastic skeletons of garbage bins.

Elettra and Mistral stand guard on the forgotten alley where they landed, not even sure what they have to be afraid of. In their minds, they relive second after second of their descent between the skyscrapers.

In the shadows, the human bat finishes tucking away the parachute and motions to the girls to follow him.

They walk along in the darkness, hearing muffled music pulsing on the other side of the thin walls. Jacob Mahler reaches a well-lit street. He crosses it and walks past a row of trees. Once again, darkness.

When he reaches a large roundabout, the man seems to reflect on which way to go. Then the trio turns left, crossing over a green area illuminated by bright, flat disks they can walk over. All around them, the treetops look like shrouds. A stairway covered with graffiti. And a long sidewalk that leads back to the street. On the ground level of the block of buildings are restaurants. Mahler walks into the first one, whose flashing sign depicts a blue pig. He sits down on one of the stools facing the sidewalk and orders meat dumplings and tea for all of them. Then he turns to the girls and points at the skyscraper just across the street.

It’s a completely black building.

Tall, shiny and black. Heremit Devil’s skyscraper.

“That’s it,” Mahler says.

A middle-aged waiter serves them three glasses filled with a strange, yellowish beverage and a basket of steamed dumplings to be eaten with chopsticks or their hands.

“Now I understand,” murmurs Mistral, who refuses to touch the food.

“What?”

“Why it’s called Century.” She turns to Elettra and points at a sign on the corner, which is written in two languages: Chinese and English.

CENTURY PARK

“The name of the place where the Pact was broken …,” Elettra murmurs.

“It happened five years ago,” Jacob Mahler says in a low voice, “when that woman, the archeologist, responded to an ad in the paper.”

“An ad?”

“Heremit ordered work to be done on the building’s foundation. In the process, they unearthed an ancient dwelling. He put an ad in the papers to find someone who could explain what he found.”

“And Zoe replied to it.”

“I went to meet her in Iceland and then she came here.”

“And she told him everything.”

Jacob’s silence is his answer.

Mistral shakes her head and lets out a shrill laugh. “And then,” she whispers, “you went to Rome to kill the professor. And to kill us.”

“I wasn’t ordered to kill you.”

Mistral looks at him intently with her big, clear eyes. And her stare summarizes everything she’s thinking.

“I was just carrying out orders,” Jacob Mahler says.

Another long moment of silence. Elettra and Jacob eat slowly, order more dumplings. Across the street, the skyscraper’s shiny black steel seems to swallow up even the reflections of the streetlights.

“Time for us to meet up with the others,” Mahler decides when they’re done. “Once you’re with them, find a place to spend the night.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I need to see an old friend of mine”—Jacob checks his watch—“in exactly two hours.”

“Who’s the old friend?”

Mahler pays in cash. They leave the restaurant, walk down Century Avenue on the opposite side of the street from Heremit Devil’s skyscraper and turn down an alley going in the other direction.

“Who’s the old friend?” Elettra asks again.

Jacob Mahler doesn’t answer.

He isn’t used to talking much.

Elettra catches Mistral’s eye. The French girl walks along, staring at the toes of her gym shoes. “Don’t trust him,” she whispers.

Sheng and Ermete are still sitting on the steps.

They’ve unfolded the tourist map of Shanghai and covered it with circles: one for each building constructed before 1907.

“
Hao!
Finally,” Sheng says when he sees Jacob Mahler show up, followed by the two girls. They don’t seem to be in a very good mood. And the man with the violin is dressed differently than before. “What happened to your coat?”

Running. Jumping. Plummeting. Gliding. At the very thought of what they went through, Elettra’s skin starts to tingle with shivers.

“Are you guys okay?”

Ermete and Sheng show them the work they’ve done on the map. Meanwhile, Mahler punches a code into the panel by the door. He has everyone follow him up to an apartment on the ninth floor.

It’s a big, empty room with wires all over the floor. In the center of it, on a tripod, is a round naval signal lamp that faces the window. A table without chairs. A dozen or so black spray
canisters. A row of identical suits still wrapped in cellophane hung on an aluminum rod.

Mahler waits until they’re all inside and shuts the door behind them. He doesn’t turn on the light.

No lightbulbs to be seen.

“There should be something to drink in the refrigerator. The bathroom’s over there.”

“Is it without lights, too?” Ermete asks.

He gets no answer.

Jacob Mahler rests the violin case on the table, undresses, removes the cellophane from one of his other suits and puts it on. Then he feeds his old clothes into a paper shredder.

“Where are we?” Elettra asks him.

“My place,” the man replies.

“Nice,” Sheng says.

“Yeah, real cozy,” Elettra points out. “Beautiful wires on the floor … no furniture getting in the way, not even a lightbulb …”

Sheng rests the cookie tin and Elettra’s backpack on the room’s only table.

“You can stay here for a couple hours, tops,” Jacob Mahler says. “Then you have to go.”

He walks over to Elettra, talking to her as if she was the head of the group. “There’s a red button by the door. When you leave, push it. Then close the door. And don’t open it again, no matter what.”

“Or else …?”

“You’ll get blown up, too.”

Mahler buckles his belt.

Mistral steps over to the signal lamp by the window. In the
distance, among the other buildings, she recognizes the shape of Heremit Devil’s black, crystal skyscraper.

“You’re going over there, aren’t you?” she asks, not expecting an answer.

Mahler slips by her without making a sound. “That’s why I came back.”

“But yesterday you said it was impossible!” Sheng exclaims.

“And I’ll say it again: it’s impossible. Unless there’s someone inside who can open the door for you.”

“Your friend,” Elettra says.

Jacob Mahler nods. He checks his watch.

Then he leans over behind the lamp, throws its large switch, and the heating element inside of it starts to heat up, glowing bright red. In half a minute, the lamp is ready and it projects a shaft of white light through the windowpane, straight at Heremit Devil’s building. A push-button control is connected to the switch. When it’s pressed, the light blinks off and on again. Off and on again.

Off and on again.

Sheng is the first one to figure out what’s going on.

“Morse code,” he says, his voice low. Then he runs over to the window. “To communicate with someone inside Heremit’s building! Brilliant idea!”

Mahler doesn’t reply. He continues to switch the signal lamp on and off, focusing on his message.

“What are you transmitting?”

“I’m asking him what his name is.”

Five pairs of eyes stare at the black skyscraper between Century Park and Century Avenue. Most of the windows on the
lower floors are dark. Only the second-to-top floor is completely lit up.

For a long time, nothing happens.

Then the light in one of the rooms suddenly turns on, turns off, turns on again.

“There he is,” Jacob Mahler remarks.

“What’s he saying?” Elettra asks, fascinated by the silent messages crossing through the night.

“ ‘H … A …
,
’
 ” Ermete reads. And without even looking at Elettra, he explains, “Morse code is a role-player’s bread and butter.”

“
H, A
 … and then?” Sheng speaks up.

“Harvey,” Jacob Mahler says, smiling.

“S
OMEONE
’
S AT THE DOOR
,” I
RENE
M
ELODIA SAYS
. S
HE TURNS IN
her wheelchair, looking for Fernando. “Fernando?”

He glances up from the stacks of papers all around him. “Hmm?”