The After-Room

by Maile Meloy; Illustrated by Ian Schoenherr

  He started to feel the adrenaline rush again, the pounding heart.

  Breathe in. Back in the hotel room, his lungs filled. Breathe out. They emptied. His body was anchored in the leather chair, in the world of the living.

  The drifting figures swayed, and grew more distinct. Some wore modern clothes. Others wore robes, one a tunic, one a high-waisted gown. One young man wore a frock coat with a high collar like the portrait of Keats in the museum, and Benjamin peered at him to see if it was the same face, but he couldn’t tell. Another wore a white shirt that bloomed with black blood.

  Breathe in. His lungs filled. Breathe out. They emptied.

  There was the hazy figure of a small child out there. And a woman with a baby. There were so many of them, looming closer. He shouldn’t be visible to them, because he was only here in his mind. So why were they gathering close?

  “Because you’re alive,” his father said, startling him.

  Breathe in. Breathe out. “Dad?”

  “They want to be close to you,” his father said. The voice was much clearer than it had been before. It still seemed to be the result of great effort, but it resounded inside Benjamin’s head. “They know you have a body, they can sense it. They aren’t ready to let go of their lives.”

  “My mother isn’t with them,” Benjamin said, scanning the gray faces.

  “No,” his father said. “She was much too practical to hold on to human form, your mother. But she’s nearby. I’ll be with her soon.”

  Benjamin was puzzled by the emotion in his father’s voice, and then realized it was joy. Anticipatory joy. He wondered if he had heard his father express anything like it before. “You want to go to her,” he said.

  “I do,” his father said.

  Benjamin felt oddly resentful and jealous. His father wanted to leave him, and go be with his mother. The two of them had a happiness that had nothing to do with Benjamin; he had hardly been there for any of their lives together.

  Benjamin had told Doyle that he wanted to ask for his father’s forgiveness, but now he didn’t know how to do that. He couldn’t find the words.

  “You have to help Jin Lo,” his father said.

  “I do?” Benjamin said. That was a surprise. They hadn’t heard from her in so long. And she never seemed to need anyone. “Can you communicate with her?”

  “In brief flashes,” his father said. “She took your powder once.”

  “Does she have the uranium?”

  “No. She’s on the trail of something else.”

  “What? Where? Is Danby there?” Just the thought of Danby filled him with a perilous rage that threatened to undo his careful concentration. Breathe in, breathe out.

  “I don’t think so,” his father said.

  “So what do I do?” Benjamin said. “How will you tell me?” The room began to flicker. “Help me stay here! I’m slipping!”

  “You have to turn outward, Benjamin,” his father’s voice said. “You need to live in the world.”

  The gray figure in the frock coat still waited, like a cat outside a fishbowl. His face was clearer now, the face of the plaster death mask in the poet’s house. As Benjamin lost his hold on his father’s mind, the ghost loomed forward, reaching for Benjamin, arms outstretched, with a look of fixed determination. Benjamin recoiled from the misty gray hands, but couldn’t escape. He felt a cold shudder pass through him. It was there in his bones, and then gone.

  Then darkness. The smell of furniture polish. The smooth leather chair beneath him, and the faint sounds of traffic outside.

  Chapter 29

  Oranges

  Janie, staring around at the empty apartment, reached for her pocket to make sure she had the powder, but she wasn’t wearing her jacket. Where had she left it? She raced to her bedroom and found it hanging on the doorknob. She felt the pockets, her heart sinking.

  No jar. How could she have been so careless?

  “I take it he’s not really at the aqueduct,” Vili said.

  “He’s with Doyle,” she said. “And they have the powder!”

  They hurried back to the restaurant, where Vili paid the bill and excused himself. He had work to do, he told her parents.

  Janie, trying to hide her agitation, told them that Benjamin had gone to look at the old aqueduct.

  “At night?” her mother said.

  “It’s not that late,” Janie said.

  “But it’s a ruin,” her mother said. “It sounds dangerous.”

  Janie tried to sound nonchalant. “It might be a good location. Romantic, you know?”

  “You’re not going looking for him,” her father said.

  “No,” she said. “He’ll be back soon.”

  Her parents chatted happily on the walk home, and went to bed, exhausted. Janie took a chair out to the balcony to sit and watch the street below. Vili had promised to start looking for Doyle and Benjamin, but where would he start?

  She tried closing her eyes and summoning memories, in case the faint traces of powder in her body might let her see through Benjamin’s eyes, but it didn’t work. It just made her sad about the vibrant, stubborn, imaginative boy she had known, before the brightness was washed out of him by grief. It wasn’t recklessness that had nearly gotten him killed by a truck, it was apathy. He didn’t seem to care about anything in this world anymore.

  But at least he’d left a message. The oranges on the floor gave her reason for hope. It reminded her of the old Benjamin’s coded letters: inventive and intimate and confidential, a communication just for her. He’d known she would think of the magician when she saw the fallen oranges. She clung to that thought as she watched the empty street for his return.

  The next thing she knew, it was morning, and someone was shaking her arm.

  “Mmmph,” she said in protest. The sun on the balcony was painfully bright, and her neck was stiff from sleeping in a chair.

  “Were you out here all night?” her mother asked.

  “I guess so,” she said, rubbing grit from the corners of her eyes.

  “Oh, Janie. What were you thinking? And Benjamin’s gone out already.”

  Janie sat up straight, remembering that Benjamin had been taken by Doyle. But she had to pretend she thought he’d gone to see the old aqueduct. “He’s not here?”

  “He came home, didn’t he?” her mother asked, alarmed.

  Janie ran to his bedroom, which was exactly as it had been. The same wrinkles in the blanket from the night before. She could hear water running on the other side of the wall—her father in the shower. She grabbed her jacket, to get out while she could. Two parents were more of an obstacle than one. The important thing was to keep them calm. And to find out what Vili had discovered.

  “Wait!” her mother said. “Should we talk to the police?”

  “No!” she said.

  “But what—”

  “I know where Benjamin is,” Janie lied. “Can I have money for a cab?”

  “Oh, Janie, we have to go to work,” her mother said. “We don’t have time for a crisis!” But she was reaching for her purse.

  “There’s no crisis,” Janie said, very firm. “Go to work. It’s all fine.” She took the cash her mother offered, stuffed it deep in her pocket, and ran down the stairs.

  “Be careful!” her mother called after her.

  “I will!” she said, without looking back.

  • • •

  At the address Vili had given her, near the Piazza Navona, the count answered his door unshaven, his hair uncombed, in carpet slippers. He was usually so neat and sleek and smooth.

  “Benjamin didn’t come home,” she said breathlessly. “What did you find out?”

  Vili stepped back to let her in. His apartment wasn’t grand, but the ceilings were high, with ornate moldings, painted white. There was a kitchen with a deep m
arble sink, and a little sitting area with a gold rug. A floor lamp next to the sofa cast a warm glow.

  “I found a boy who’d seen a strange car parked outside your building,” he said. “It was an Alfa Romeo, red and shiny. It made an impression. I offered him money if he tracked it down.”

  “How would he do that?”

  Vili shrugged. “Roman street children are resourceful. And others will have noticed a particularly beautiful car.”

  “So we just wait?”

  Vili nodded.

  “Did you sleep last night?” she asked.

  He shook his head and rubbed his stubbled chin.

  “There must be something we can do!” she said. “I don’t think I can stand this.”

  But she didn’t have to stand it for long, because the doorbell rang. A small, ragged boy with wide eyes and bony cheeks stood outside. He had close-cropped hair and missing teeth. He acted dramatically winded from running: hands on his knees, panting.

  “This is Primo,” Vili said. “My scout and spy.”

  Primo, suddenly recovered, held out an open palm, and Vili dropped some coins into it. The boy studied the coins, then gestured for them to follow, but first Vili had to put on his shoes: leather boots with laces to tighten and tie.

  Janie exchanged a look of impatience with Primo: Grown-ups were so slow! Finally the boots were on and laced, and she handed Vili his blackthorn walking stick.

  The boy scampered off down the street as if released from a slingshot.

  Janie and Vili followed, down narrow Roman streets, over uneven cobblestones. They walked up a curving avenue to find Primo posed next to a shiny, dark red car, hands on his hips. Vili looked up at the windows above them, and Janie followed his eyes. Benjamin could be in any of them.

  Primo, waiting for praise, looked disappointed. Weren’t they pleased? He’d only been contracted to find the car, not the people in it.

  A doorman stood on the sidewalk, and Janie saw that the brass plaque next to him read HOTEL MAJESTIC. He seemed reluctant to answer Vili’s questions at first. But then a banknote changed hands, and the doorman’s attitude changed. He opened the door, but closed it before the street boy could follow them.

  Janie and Vili entered a lobby with a plush red carpet, then walked up the stairs, circling a steel elevator cage. Down a long white hallway, Vili knocked at a door with the gilt number 208 on the white paneling.

  Janie thought maybe no one was in. Then the door opened, and Doyle stood before them. The bruises beneath his eyes had faded and drooped. He put a finger to his lips and stepped back from the door.

  “He’s fine, you see?” he whispered. “Sleeping like a baby.”

  There were two huge leather chairs in front of a window. Benjamin was curled up in one of them, covered with a blanket. His eyes were closed and his hair stuck out in all directions. The blanket rose and fell with his steady, peaceful breathing as he slept.

  Chapter 30

  Ashore

  Jin Lo tied up the boat in Hangzhou Bay, thinking there must be a working telegraph here. The port was huge and busy, and the city stretched out beyond, full of people going about their business, making a living, or trying to. Walking on dry land felt strange and good. The ground was hard and solid beneath her feet, and her head swayed with the remembered motion of the waves.

  She stopped to buy some vegetables at an open stand and saw, out of the corner of her eye, a tall man with light hair. When she turned, he disappeared around the corner of an old building.

  The plump woman at the vegetable stand smiled at Jin Lo. “A friend of yours?” she asked.

  Jin Lo was annoyed at herself. Part of being uninteresting to strangers was not being interested in strangers. To be curious was to make people curious about you, which was exactly what she wanted to avoid. “No,” she said.

  “I saw him this morning in the market,” the vegetable woman said. “He’s very handsome. And very tall. A foreigner.”

  Jin Lo said nothing, but put her greens and eggplants into her bag.

  “You don’t like handsome men?” the woman asked, teasing her. “You don’t like love?”

  “I am only passing through,” Jin Lo said.

  “Ah, then it’s fate that you should meet!” the woman said.

  “Where is the telegraph office, please?” Jin Lo asked, her voice stiff.

  The woman pointed down the street and grinned, with missing teeth. “Good luck, my girl!”

  Jin Lo left, feeling irritated. The woman would remember her now. Jin Lo had a story. She was not just a forgettable stranger buying vegetables, but a coy girl destined to fall in love with a handsome foreigner.

  But the man had seemed so familiar—it had caught her off-guard.

  She walked in the direction the woman had pointed, moving neither too fast nor too slow, and found the telegraph office.

  Inside, the clerk frowned at the message she handed him, which was clearly not in English. If the Party had destroyed telegraph machines for sending secret messages, then this clerk would not send it if he thought it was in code.

  “It is Romanian,” she lied.

  “Ah,” he said. “Romanian.” He searched her face for signs of foreignness.

  She dropped her eyes to the counter. This was twice that she was becoming memorable. The Romanian girl who looked Chinese. The Chinese girl who spoke Romanian. “I am only delivering this message,” she said. “A family message, to a cousin.”

  He waited for her to tell him more. But she said nothing, and finally he gave up, and began to tap out the signal. “There was an Englishman here this morning,” he said, to fill the silence.

  “Oh?” she said, remembering the tall man rounding the corner.

  “Sending a message to Korea,” the clerk said.

  “In English?” she asked.

  “In Latin,” he said, with a shy pride. “Romanian and Latin, both in one day!”

  Jin Lo held very still. She did not want to disturb the air around her. She knew, now, why the man in the street had looked familiar. He was skinnier now than he had been, almost gaunt. “Did the Englishman have white hair in front?”

  “Yes!” the clerk said. “You know him?”

  “I saw him in the street,” she said.

  “Maybe something frightened him!” He laughed.

  Jin Lo didn’t answer. She was trying to think.

  “It made his hair white!” the clerk explained, pointing to his forehead.

  Jin Lo nodded, to show that she’d understood the joke in the first place. Jokes were useful, Ned Maddox said. She tried to smile.

  Finally the clerk finished sending her message, and she thanked him and slipped out the door.

  She walked back to the docks, trying not to look hurried. She had been searching for Danby for so long, and now he was here, and she wasn’t ready. The American commander with the stolen shell was a more urgent problem than the uranium: Hayes had a functioning weapon, and was prepared to use it. But the commander could be anywhere, and Danby was right here! She could feel people watching her. She was walking too fast. She tried to slow down, but couldn’t.

  What were the chances that she and Danby would send a telegram in the same office, on the same day? Were they better or worse than the chances that she would wash up on Ned Maddox’s beach? The universe is doing its work, she thought. But did the universe really want her to run into Danby, unprepared?

  The answer, apparently, was yes, because a moment later he stepped out of a building and stood in front of her. He wore a faded shirt, open at the collar, and worn khaki pants belted tight over his bony hips. His hair had grown out on top into its old curls, but there was still the white forelock, startling on a man who could not be more than thirty-five. The Soviets had sent him to Siberia, and it had turned his hair white.

  “Hullo,” Danby sa
id. “I thought it was you. You have the most distinctive step. A long, efficient step, the spine very straight and strong, the chin neither raised nor ducked.”

  “Where is the uranium?” Jin Lo asked.

  “With my friends, on their boat,” he said. “Shall we walk there together?”

  He took her arm as if they were only going for a stroll, but his grip was like a steel clamp. Would Ned Maddox see what was happening as they approached the harbor? He was supposed to be staying out of sight. She was amazed that Danby, a foreigner in possession of dangerous contraband, would walk about so freely. But he had always been reckless.

  “Who are your friends?” she asked.

  “Now, that’s a funny story,” he said. “They’re pirates.”

  She waited to see if this was a joke. He was still propelling her inexorably toward the docks. “Pirates?” she said.

  “Maybe you’ve heard of their leader, Huang P’ei-mei,” he said. “She’s quite a woman.”

  Jin Lo had heard of Huang P’ei-mei, since her childhood. The pirate queen was a legend, with a vast network of boats. “I thought she was only a story.”

  “Oh, no,” Danby said. “Quite solid flesh. I ran out of fuel and was starving when one of her boats came upon me.”

  “They took the uranium?”

  “Cargo is cargo,” he said. “I have persuaded her to transport it north and sell it, as I planned.”

  “So you are partners?”

  “No one is partners with pirates!” he said. “She won’t give me a penny. But you’re going to help me change that.”

  Jin Lo tried to wrench her arm free, and stumbled as he dragged her forward.

  “Don’t draw attention,” he hissed. “That’s no good for either of us.”

  They were back at the docks: the smell of salt, and fish. The calls of men unloading boats.

  “I’ll tell you how this is going to go,” he said evenly. “I will introduce you to the legendary Madame Huang. You’ll compliment her, tell her you have heard of her exploits, and that will please her. You’ll do a few of your magic tricks. She’s very superstitious, and she’ll want to keep you as a pet. Then we’ll go north and sell the uranium. And you’ll help me get my money.”