Century #4: Dragon of Seas (19 page)

“S
HENG
! S
HENG
!” E
RMETE CALLS OUT.
“W
OULD YOU WAKE UP
?”

Sheng moves his head on the pillow from one side to the other before opening his eyes.

He’s in a room he doesn’t recognize. Electric light. A shuttered window with a strange glow filtering through it. Ermete is standing next to him.

“Finally!” he grumbles.

“Where am I?”

“Who knows?” the engineer replies. “I brought you to the first hotel I could find. On my back!”

“But …” Sheng sits up. “What time is it?”

“Six-thirty in the morning.”

Sheng shakes his head. “I was having a strange dream.… There were lots of people. The antiques dealer, Elettra’s aunt and even … the gypsy woman from Rome … and Quilleran the postman, and the guard from the Louvre museum. Then there was some kind of monk with a graying beard. They were all talking to me at the same time. But I don’t remember what they were saying.” Sheng concentrates. “Wait … now … now I remember.
They were saying, ‘Be brave. Look at the things others can’t see.’ ”

Ermete steps away from the bed, sighing. He grabs the pair of pants draped over the back of a chair and starts to dry them with a tiny whirring hair dryer.

“The boy!” Sheng exclaims, remembering. “I was following that boy in the jersey!”

“I have no idea what you were doing.”

“I got to the park and then … then the insects appeared!” Sheng jumps up from the bed. “Mistral! Elettra! Where—”

“Stop your brain right there, my friend,” Ermete says, pointing the hair dryer at him. “There’s nothing you can do about it. And you can’t go there.”

“Go where?”

The engineer steps over to a window and pulls back the curtain, letting in a pale light that filters through the dense clouds. Heavy, vibrant rain oozes from the sky like icing. And at the end of the leaden view is a black skyscraper.

Heremit Devil’s skyscraper.

Below, the police cars’ blue beacons fill the street with flashing lights. Above, two helicopters point their searchlights at the mirrored windows and circle the building like giant, crazed bees searching for the entrance to their hive.

“What happened?”

“It’s been like this for hours,” Ermete replies. “The police cordoned off the whole area. Nobody goes in and nobody comes out. No one’s answering their cell phones anymore. Not Harvey, not Mistral, not Elettra. In three words: I don’t know. But whatever happened, it’s big. They talked about it on TV not long ago. The
only captions in English read
SKYSCRAPER ATTACK. CHINESE MAFIA PAYBACK?
”

“I—I …,” Sheng stammers, without adding anything else. He stares at the building flooded with lights, trying to overcome his fear. “I should be there with them.”

“Great idea,” Ermete grumbles. “Great idea, really.” He switches off the hair dryer and tosses it on the floor. “I don’t know what you guys are thinking of doing, but as far as I know, you aren’t superheroes yet. In any case, you aren’t there with them. You’re here with me.”

“And what are we doing here?”

“I should be asking you that,” Ermete shoots back. “For example, would you mind telling me why you decided to climb up that gate to the park?”

Sheng rubs his eyes and sits on the edge of the bed.

“My headache was driving me crazy,” he says. “I couldn’t take it anymore. And when I saw that boy staring at me from the steps, I thought I’d completely lost it. So I decided to go talk to him so I could understand.”

“There was no boy, Sheng.”

“Yes, there was!” he protests. “And when he saw I was heading his way, he ran off!”

“So yesterday you wanted to talk to an imaginary boy that only you can see?”

“Exactly.”

Ermete shakes his head. He remembers Sheng running, but he’s absolutely certain there was no boy in front of him, running away.

“And then”—Sheng spreads open his arms—“when I was
climbing up the park gate … he disappeared … and the insects showed up.”

“You said Mistral did that,” Ermete reminds him.

“I figured they were there because of her. Like in Paris, when she summoned the bees.”

Ermete clearly remembers how, not long after the insects appeared, Heremit Devil’s skyscraper lit up in a burst of blinding light. He tells Sheng.

“Elettra was furious. She got a call from Harvey.…” Ermete can’t exactly reconstruct what they said during their call. All he knows is that right after that, the two girls headed off for the skyscraper.

While the engineer talks, Sheng keeps thinking about what he dreamed.

Be brave enough to see what others can’t see
.

“What if I was simply brave enough?” he exclaims.

“What?”

“I swear I really saw that boy. Maybe … I was brave enough to see him.”

“Mistral was shouting that your eyes were yellow.”

“Like during the blackout in Rome!” Sheng continues, electrified. “That’s when my eyes turned yellow for the first time. Nobody could see a thing, but I could, like it was broad daylight.”

“That doesn’t—”

“And then at the museum in Paris! I was talking to a guard that Mistral couldn’t see. Maybe it’s my eyes that … How do they look now?”

“They’re blue.”

“They need to turn yellow. Maybe they turn yellow in
dangerous situations. Or maybe I’m the one that needs to … command them.”

“We could ask Elettra’s aunt.”

Sheng shakes his head. “There’s no time for that. We need to find out what happened to the others.”

“Be my guest.” He smirks, pointing at the skyscraper. “Go over there and ask him.”

Sheng starts to throw on his clothes. “We need to do something for them, and fast! We can’t wait another second!”

“You want to go to the skyscraper?”

“No, I want to follow the clues and find the Shanghai object,” the boy says. “Elettra, Harvey and Mistral did their part. Now it’s up to me. I’m the fourth and final element: water.”

Ermete holds up the dripping clothes. “If you want water, just go outside.”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.” Sheng finishes putting on his wet clothes, holding back a shiver. “You coming with me?”

“Where?”

“To the place the heart top suggested.”

A humid dawn, trickling and heavy with mist, rises over the city.

The air is still, the rain slicing through it. Colorful umbrellas blossom on the streets, and Sheng and Ermete need to push their way through the crowd. They’ve just come out from the metro station in Sheng’s neighborhood, a few blocks away from the Small Peach Garden Mosque.

“Everything’s fine, Mom,” the boy says into his cell phone.

He snaps it shut at the first cry of desperation.

“Next time, send her a fax,” the engineer suggests.

The Yuyuan Garden is closed. At the main entrance, a sign in two languages says it opens at eight-thirty.

“One hour to go,” Ermete says.

“We can’t wait an hour,” Sheng decides, walking along the perimeter of the garden. His determination stems from the only idea he’s come up with to help Harvey, Elettra and Mistral: find the Shanghai object as fast as he can and hand it over to Heremit Devil in exchange for his friends.

When Sheng reaches the corner of Anren Lu and Fuyou Lu, he climbs up the wall without thinking twice. It takes only a minute. He jumps down on the other side, rolls over on the ground, gets back up covered with mud and damp leaves and calls out to Ermete, “Wait for me out there! I’m Chinese. I can pretend I work as an errand boy for them, but you …”

“Go on, go ahead,” the engineer encourages him. “I’ll find someplace dry and have a cup of coffee.”

Mist rises from the ground of the Yuyuan Garden. Beneath the rain, it pools together like a blanket of fog. The raindrops form winding rivulets in the earth and, as they fall, hide the unattractive profiles of the cement buildings all around it. As he makes his way deeper into the garden, even the city’s noises seem to disappear. Sheng walks down the paths and over small wooden bridges, skirting ponds where giant carp swim. Bamboo stalks sag in dripping clusters. Lotus blossoms quiver. The only things peeking through the gray fog that shrouds everything are the pavilions’ white walls and the shapes of wooden dragons, which look like they’re leaping out from a dream. The corrugated rooftops on the red-lacquered wooden pagodas sparkle with legend.

When Sheng reaches the Ten Thousand Flower Pavilion, he’s left gaping in awe. He stops in front of a tree, its trunk massive, its branches trickling with rain. It’s like a four-century-old wise man with pearls falling from his open arms.

“The city’s great tree …,” Sheng whispers, touching its trunk. It’s a ginkgo biloba, one of the world’s most ancient trees, the same species whose seeds they found inside the Star of Stone.

The tree seems to confirm his hunch.

Sheng starts running again, his heart racing faster and faster.

Be brave enough to see what others can’t see
.

The emperor’s teahouse pavilion is in the middle of a lake and is reached by crossing nine bridges built to keep out evil spirits. The pagoda is still dark, but a side door is ajar. Sheng walks in.

Without the throngs of tourists and their cameras, the old pagoda appears in all its magical charm, with its curved wood and dragon profiles. The picture windows that overlook the green lake fill the silent interior with shafts of gray light.

Sheng takes a deep breath and concentrates. He needs to find something that it’s important to find. He walks across the creaking floor and closes his eyes for a moment. It’s like going back through the centuries, back to when Shanghai was just a little fishermen’s village on the big, winding river.

But the illusion lasts only a few seconds.

“Hey! We’re still closed!” an old waiter says, his voice shrill. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Sheng admits, looking at him. The waiter has come out from behind a giant candelabrum. The rain is pounding
against the windows, but to Sheng it’s like a drumroll. He smiles, flashing his gums. “That sounds nice, doesn’t it?”

The waiter seems surprised by his remark. He walks over to Sheng as if his feet weren’t even touching the ground and returns his smile. “You haven’t answered my question, young man.”

“Well, all I know is that I need to find something, and I’m convinced it’s somewhere in this pagoda. But I don’t know what it is, exactly.”

“Very interesting …,” the waiter replies, his long silk robe rustling. “And why are you so sure it’s here?”

“Because a toy top told me,” Sheng replies calmly. “And because I dreamed about it.”

“A toy and a dream. You are guided by great certainty.…”

“I don’t know of any better guide.”

“I don’t believe there is one.” The man looks around. “If this thing really is here, what do you plan on doing once you’ve recognized it?”

“I’ll try to figure out why it let itself be recognized.”

The man checks the big clock behind the counter that separates the tea room from the kitchen. “And do you think you’ll manage to do all that in an hour’s time?”

One hour later, the gates of the Yuyuan Garden are opened. Sheng runs out, dripping wet. He looks for Ermete where they split up and finds him at a small outdoor café not far away, leafing through the English edition of
Shanghai Daily
.

“Hey! Seen this?” the engineer asks, folding the paper and sticking the day’s latest news under Sheng’s nose.

GUNSHOTS AND EXPLOSIONS ON CENTURY AVENUE. ARE THE TRIADS BACK?

“We’ve gotta move!” Sheng exclaims, even more excited. “I found it, Ermete!”

“What?”

“The clue! In the teahouse there was a big Chinese painting hanging right in the middle of the pavilion. It’s always been there! Right in front of everybody’s eyes in the most touristy place in the whole city, but it’s like nobody ever saw it before!”

“Painting? What painting?”

“Picture this: four kids with different-color clothes on the back of a big dragon. A water dragon. A blue one.”

“You mean one of those big, wingless snakes with horse snouts that you Chinese call dragons?”

“I mean the most powerful dragon of all dragons, with us four on it!”

“What do you mean,
us
four?”

“Listen! The boy sitting on the dragon’s tail is holding some sort of stone egg. The girl in front of him has a mirror. The third one, a long, white mantle decorated with golden scales …”

“Stone, mirror, veil … and the fourth?”

“The fourth is holding the dragon’s reins and making it fly toward a star that’s shining over the sea.”

“Wow!” Ermete says.

Sheng goes on. “Wait, there’s more. A Jesuit priest painted it in the seventeen hundreds.”

“A Jesuit priest? In the seventeen hundreds?”

“You got it! His name was Giuseppe Castiglione.”

Ermete gapes. “How do you know that?”

“The waiter told me.”

“A Jesuit from the seventeen hundreds who was a painter in China? Whoa!”

“The waiter says that if I want to find out more, I should ask the Shanghai Jesuits,” Sheng goes on. “He says they’ve got a massive library and that they might help us.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“We need to take the metro to Xujiahui, but that’s no problem. The problem is getting in: from what the waiter told me, the library isn’t open to the public, and it’s got strange opening hours.”

“Jesuits, huh?” Ermete murmurs. “I went to a Jesuit school. Let’s see.… What time is it in Italy right now?” He makes a quick calculation. “It’s early, but …”

The engineer dials a number.

“What are you doing?”

“Calling my mom. Meanwhile, lead the way to the metro.”

“Are you insane? At this hour, she’ll still be sleeping!”

“So? You want to get into a Jesuit library? I’ll get you into a Jesuit library.” Ermete waits for the phone to start ringing. “Haven’t I mentioned I was an altar boy in all the churches in Rome? I’ve got connections. Important connections. And it looks like the time has come to use them!”