Century #4: Dragon of Seas (8 page)

J
ACOB
M
AHLER HANDS THE TAXI DRIVER A SLIP OF PAPER AND SAYS
, “We feel like having a decent coffee.”

Then, in silence, he waits for the car to make its way from Shanghai’s south side to the French Concession. Passing by outside the window are congested streets, skyscrapers in iridescent colors, the characteristic bridge spanning the river with spiral ramps, anonymous cement buildings with all kinds of shops and, finally, the French residential quarter with its old colonial dwellings.

The taxi pulls up in front of the Bonomi Café, located in a villa from the early 1900s, with large, elegant rooms and little tables on the lawn. Immersed in the colossal city, it looks like the classic fairy home in the middle of the woods with a pointed red roof and sponge-cake doors.

Mahler gets out of the car without even looking around and walks up the path leading inside as if it was his own home.

“Hey!” grumbles Ermete, the last one left in the taxi. The engineer pulls out a wad of banknotes and tries to find out from the taxi driver how much they owe him. Then he runs inside
the café. Mahler and Sheng have chosen a secluded room with elegant wooden furniture. Their table offers a view of the garden and is surrounded by low stools in red leather.

The three order two coffees and an ice-cold soda.

“What do you want to know first?”

“Why does he live on the second-to-top floor of his building?” Ermete asks.

Jacob Mahler raises an eyebrow.

“I mean, if the building’s all his, why doesn’t he live on the top floor?” the engineer insists.

“Another question?”

Sheng leans forward nervously and asks, “What kind of business is he in?”

“Triads and
banghui
,” is Mahler’s succinct reply.

Ermete shoots him a puzzled glance.

“Chinese mafia,” Sheng explains.

“Not exactly,” Mahler says. “The
banghui
were secret business societies. Illegal business, naturally. Their names speak for themselves: the Daggers, the Opium Dragons.… They were all that remained of the ancient societies who did business with the English, or the French, back when they still traded here. They came about when the East India Company was shut down. The first wars broke out to gain control of the Indian opium that the English brought to the port in their battleships and sold at the mouths of the river. Bloody wars in which many of the
banghui
were wiped out. But not all of them. Not the Devils, as they called themselves so that the Westerners would be sure to remember them. The Devils. Half English, half Chinese: a mixed family, and one of the city’s most ferocious ones.
The years passed, but they stayed standing. Even when the Green Gang arrived.”

Jacob Mahler takes a long pause, stirring sugar into his coffee. “It was 1888. The Shanghai boatmen’s guild, the most feared of all the local mafias—they were the ones who started the Opium Wars so they could take over the whole city. But they didn’t manage to, not completely. When the Second Opium War broke out, the Devils kept a low profile. They left the opium business to others and started to build houses that they’d sell later on. To both sides. The century passes by, the First World War, the Second. Instead of houses, skyscrapers. The real estate business does better than the drug trade, and while the secret societies dealing in opium are being crushed one by one, the Devils keep on building. Up until today, when the dynasty is cut short. And comes to an end. With our man.”

Mahler finishes half his coffee with one swig.

“He calls himself Heremit. Nobody knows his real name. He’s the one who sent me out to track you down.”

“How old is he?”

“Fifty?” Jacob Mahler replies. “I’m not sure. There aren’t any birth certificates or residency records. There aren’t any documents at all. The building he lives in doesn’t even show up on Shanghai’s city maps. And if you look for him by satellite, well …” He chuckles. “The satellite’s his.”

Sheng gulps.

Ermete, on the other hand, starts fiddling with his spoon. “I’ve always wanted my own satellite. To see things before anyone else does, you know? Do you think it’s true they can actually take pictures of the license plates on your—”

“Why does he call himself Heremit?” Sheng asks.

“You know what a hermit is?”

“No.”

“In Europe, a hermit is someone who shuns the world, who lives secluded from everyone and everything. Heremit Devil created his skyscraper. That’s his world. He’s never left it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that as long as I’ve known him, at least, he’s always lived in it. I think he was born in it. He studied with private tutors. He’s fluent in eight languages. He was in the building when he planned its interior. The private elevator. The top two floors. He personally designed every room, every hallway, every air-conditioning system. Every level. Every security procedure. He’s got everything he needs in there: eight different restaurants. All kinds of exercise equipment … not that he works out. He has a movie theater. A massive library. A museum with works of art from all over the world. A giant swimming pool. You name it, and he’s had it installed inside that building.”

“But how can he run his … business if he always stays indoors?”

“His business runs itself.” The killer smiles, as if surprised by how foolish the question is. “If he needs to get in touch with someone, he knows how to do it. He has a satellite at his disposal. He has computers that you and I won’t be using for another ten years or so. And when he needs something done in the outside world … he calls in people like me.”

Sheng tries to catch Ermete’s eye. “But this time his plans fell through,” he says.

“I don’t know what plans he made. Maybe he thought sending in one of Egon Nose’s women would be enough to get rid of me.”

Jacob has already given them a recap of how he managed to escape the American gangster’s female killers. How he hid in the woods, waiting, and how he decided to go out and track them down, ultimately meeting up with them in Paris.

“I worked for him for years,” Jacob Mahler continues, “without ever asking questions. Never. Not even when he sent me to Rome with instructions that verged on the insane. Kill an old professor. Get a briefcase. Make sure the briefcase contains four wooden tops and an old map covered with engravings.”

Pause. A long pause.

“I never really understood what that briefcase meant to him,” the man continues, “except that he needed it to get something even bigger. At first, I thought it was some kind of treasure, but I was wrong. Someone like Heremit Devil would never lift a finger just for money. He already has more than he could manage to spend in his whole life.”

“Lucky him,” Ermete says. “I could ask him for a hand paying rent for my shop.”

“In any case,” Mahler concludes, “now he’s got the tops.”

“We’ve got to get them back,” Sheng whispers.

Jacob shakes his head. “Impossible. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. The elevator that goes up to the top two floors only opens with a registered, authorized digital fingerprint. And only Heremit can grant the authorization.”

“Stairs?”

“One service stairway, sealed off by sixty-four doors with coded
locks. A different code for each floor. Not to mention his ferocious security team. And Nik Knife. ‘Four Fingers.’ The knife thrower.”

“Why ‘Four Fingers’?”

“Because he misaimed once. And to punish the hand that got it wrong, he cut off a finger.”

In Paris, on the seventh floor of 89 Boulevard de Magenta, Vladimir Askenazy’s voice falls silent. Mistral and her mother look at each other, hesitant.

The apartment seems completely empty. It has two bedrooms and a small bathroom. The front door opens onto a living room with an open kitchen, a wall table, a floor lamp and an empty white bookcase. In the middle of the living room are a couch covered with a sheet and a coffee table with a television and an old VCR on it.

Mistral slowly closes the door behind her. The floorboards creak beneath her feet. Mother and daughter cross the living room to peek into the second room. It’s a bedroom that has two beds with a nightstand between them. On the walls, a poster for a Georges Méliès film:
L’éclipse du soleil en pleine lune
.

On the bed they find a map of Shanghai and two red passports that have their faces but different names.

“Mom!” Mistral cries. “Look!”

“Fake passports … one for me and one for you,” Cecile Blanchard says, flipping through the pages. “Complete with an entry visa for China. Well, they’ve certainly done a good job.”

“What do you mean, Mom?”

“They’re telling us it’s dangerous to travel using our real names. And maybe even to go back home, at this point …”

There’s little else in the apartment.

“What I don’t understand,” Cecile says in a low voice, “is why all the spy games. If they wanted to give us fake passports, they could’ve sent them to us at home.”

“Maybe they were afraid someone else might get hold of them.…”

“So it was safer to send you a message recorded on an MP3 player, a message you might have deleted? Or never have listened to? We were leaving for Shanghai tomorrow anyway. And we’ve already bought our tickets.”

Mistral shakes her head. “I don’t know, Mom. Really, I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s a good idea to travel using fake documents. It’s dangerous.”

“More dangerous than traveling under our real names?”

“Whatever the case, it’s illegal. And we aren’t going to do anything illegal, Mistral.”

Cecile is opening all the kitchen cabinets. Plates, glasses, silverware. A package of Italian pasta. Oil, salt, pepper. A can of tomatoes that hasn’t expired yet. Pots in different sizes. Everything needed to cook for a short period of time.

“This apartment hasn’t been used for at least a year,” the woman remarks.

Mistral checks the VCR to see if there’s a tape in it. She hits the play button.

“There’s something in here …,” she says as the television turns on.

A quivering line appears on the screen, followed by a man sitting on a couch holding some sheets of paper. Mistral and Cecile
recognize the room. The man is quite old, with a sparse beard and a checked jacket. He clears his throat and looks at the papers in his hands. Next to him on the couch is a series of photographs.

“Pull in closer,” he says to the person working the camera.

Zoom in on his face.

“It’s Professor Van Der Berger!” Mistral exclaims, recognizing him.

In the video, the professor asks the cameraman to leave. There are footsteps, and the apartment door opens and closes.

Finally, the professor begins to talk.

“My name is Alfred Van Der Berger,” he says a bit wearily, “and I was born on February twenty-ninth, 1896. My family fled Holland and moved to New York in 1905 … and it was in New York, two years later, that I learned of the Pact. It happened in a movie theater. I went there to see a short film entitled
L’éclipse du soleil en pleine lune
, which at that time and to my child’s eyes was an amazing sight to behold. The film was set in a school for astronomers. A great professor strides in, his robe covered with symbols of the zodiac and constellations, and then everyone goes up to the roof with long binoculars to observe the sun and moon as they join together in the sky. After that, you see the stars drifting down to earth with people riding them.”

Professor Van Der Berger coughs.

“When the movie was over, there was a woman in the theater whom I’d get to know better many years later,” he continues. “A young woman with a lazy eye. She was Siberian, from a little village named Tunguska, and she’d traveled from Russia to New York for the sole purpose of meeting me. That day, she left me two wooden tops and a name, the name of a shop owned by Russian
carpenters who’d recently moved into town. Working there was a boy named Vladimir. He was my age, born on February twenty-ninth, like me. He’d received a top, too, and an old wooden map covered with inscriptions.”

“Goodness …,” Mistral murmurs. Her mother leans over and puts her arm around her.

“Who gave it to him? The same young woman who gave those things to me in the darkness of the movie theater?” the professor asks in the video. “Thanks to one of Vladimir’s cousins, who worked on Ellis Island, where all the American immigration permits were issued, we discovered that the woman had arrived from Italy on a ship that had set sail from a place called Messina. After writing letters and making our first intercontinental phone call, we determined that the woman had met a Sicilian girl named Irene in Messina. She gave her two tops and a name. Mine. Only one person was missing: the fourth one. Zoe called Irene at the end of the year. She said she found her name beside two old wooden tops she discovered in her toy box.”

The professor lapses into silence as he shuffles through the pictures beside him.

“Do you want me to pause it?” Mistral’s mother asks.

“No,” the girl says. “Let’s keep going.”

“What we didn’t realize back then is that we were part of a master plan. An ancient plan, as we would realize much later. A plan that had begun many centuries earlier, in the time of the ancient Chaldeans, who lived three thousand years before Christ. A plan that first came about in the Orient and whose name was connected to the name of a god: Mithra. Which means ‘pact.’ ‘Alliance.’ Today we call it Century, after the name of the place
where the Pact was broken. Like all respectable alliances, this one had its rules: every hundred years, four Sages had the task of finding their four successors and giving them four tests. The masters were sworn to silence. They could only guide their disciples and observe their behavior. If the children passed the tests, they would discover the masters’ ultimate secret. If they didn’t pass the tests, the masters would explain to the disciples only what they, themselves, had managed to discover, and not the entire plan behind the Pact … and little by little, this would decrease the chances of figuring everything out.”

Again, Van Der Berger takes a long pause.

“The woman who was my master—and Irene’s, Vladimir’s and Zoe’s—knew only a small part of the ancient Pact: the part that her master had passed down to her in the early eighteen hundreds, when he gave her the map and the tops. She wasn’t aware of there being any other master alive. She set out to find us after the big solar eclipse of January fourteenth, 1907 … when, she said, she dreamed about us.”