Pip put a foot out to stop it. “You have to help me get it back.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Janie almost died, and you’re napping?” Pip said. “Aren’t you their friend?”
Doyle narrowed his eyes at the kid to see where he had been all this time. “I might ask the same of you—running lines with the pretty blonde. Preparing for your close-up.”
Pip flushed. “I didn’t know what had happened! I came running as soon as I knew!”
Doyle pushed the door closed again, but it stuck against the kid’s shoe. “Your foot’s in the way,” he said.
“Don’t you care about anyone?” Pip asked.
“Not really.” But Doyle saw Janie flying through the air again in his mind, and flinched. “Is she all right?”
“They took her home from the hospital, and sent me to find you. They said that if the book wasn’t here, then you were the only one who could find it.”
“Oh, now they need me,” Doyle said. He heard the petulance in his own voice. He thought, suddenly, of choosing baseball teams on the playground, getting picked last because he couldn’t hit the ball, even though he could catch anything. The humiliation of standing there on the field when everyone else had been chosen.
Pip must have heard the sulkiness in his voice, because now he eyed him. “I used to feel left out by Janie and Benjamin,” he said. “Like you do.”
Doyle stiffened. “I don’t feel left out. They’re children.”
“We’re all friends, of course,” Pip went on. “But they’re in love. And they’ve got this important responsibility, the book and all. So it’s always going to be Janie-and-Benjamin and then—whoever. The sidekick.”
“I am no one’s sidekick.”
“You keep telling yourself that, mister.”
“I’m not!”
“We both are, to them,” Pip said. “But we have our own stories, too, where we’re the main players, you know? So how about you start acting like a hero, right now, and not like a rat?”
Doyle blinked. “A rat?”
“Janie and Benjamin have a lot of faith in you,” Pip said. “They say you can do real magic.”
“Well,” Doyle said, tucking in his rumpled shirtfront.
“They say you can move stuff. And read minds.”
Doyle shrugged. That was supposed to be a secret. But he could do a few things.
“So where did Primo take the book?” Pip asked.
“To Sal Rocco,” Doyle said. “The mob boss.”
“And do you know where Sal might be?”
“Oh, you’re on a first-name basis now?” Doyle asked. But his sarcasm sounded pathetic, even to him.
“The book could be halfway to Naples by now,” Pip said. “While you pretend you don’t want to help me.”
Doyle sighed. “Let me get my coat.”
They climbed into a taxi, and wound through the narrow streets. Doyle looked out the window and concentrated on getting a signal: anyone thinking about the big leather-bound book. If he could find two people thinking about it, that would be even better. He could start to triangulate.
“Why would Primo steal it?” Pip asked.
“Because he knows that foreigners always leave Rome,” Doyle said. “While Salvatore Rocco will stay here. The kid felt left out, as you put it. And for him, that means going back to a miserable orphanage. Which he wisely wants to avoid.”
Pip nodded, and Doyle received a flood of images and sensations from Pip’s mind: an empty belly, a stinging slap to the head, chilblains from the cold. Beneath the tweed coat and the posh haircut and the actor’s accent, there was an undersized London pickpocket here, who knew something about hunger and want.
“Are you getting anything?” Pip asked.
“Not with you thinking so much,” Doyle said. “Your miserable childhood is distracting.”
“I don’t know how to stop.”
“Concentrate on the sky,” Doyle said. “How blue it is. How soft the clouds. That will fade nicely into the background.”
“Can’t I help you?”
“I just told you how.”
Pip sighed, gazed out the window, and filled his mind with blueness and clouds.
“Perfect,” Doyle said. “Just like that.”
They had crossed the river into the neighborhood of Trastevere. Doyle was hoping Pip had cash for the taxi, if they were going to drive around like this all day. But then he got a brief flash of the leather cover, the embossed circle inside the star.
“Slow down,” he said to the driver, and he looked up at the buildings around him. “Is there a hotel near here?”
The driver turned down a side street, toward a red awning. Doyle closed his eyes and focused. He could see flashes of the book in people’s minds, but he also thought he could feel the book itself, as an object, in the way he could feel the oranges when he summoned them across the room. The pull was strong in a seven-hundred-year-old book, because it had been held by so many human hands. It had been coveted and treasured.
Pip had started thinking again, wondering how to get into the hotel room, and how many bodyguards Sal Rocco might have.
“Stop that!” Doyle said.
“Sorry.”
“We can’t overpower them,” Doyle said. “And we can’t steal the book. You have to talk to Rocco, and get the book back.”
“Talk to him?”
“You’re a good talker,” Doyle said. “You got me here. You’ll think of something.”
Pip frowned. “What about the kid?” he asked.
“What about the kid?”
“If he doesn’t do this favor for Sal Rocco, then he goes to the orphanage?”
Doyle sighed. “Our mission is to get the book. Not rescue the kid.”
Pip looked at him for a long moment, his mind opaque. “All right,” he said, and he opened the cab door and climbed out, straightening his jacket and shooting his cuffs in a way he must have seen someone do in a film.
Doyle walked the hallways of the hotel until he found the room where the signal from the book was strongest. Pip rapped smartly on the door.
After a long moment, the enormous Gianni answered. Doyle was inordinately happy to see the great slab of the giant’s face, and to feel the blessed silence of his mind.
“Gianni!” he said.
“I need to talk to Rocco,” Pip said. “I have a business proposition for him.”
The giant closed the door in their faces.
Pip blew all his breath out. “Great,” he said. “Now what?”
“Just wait,” Doyle said. “Think of this as a performance. Yours, theirs. It doesn’t happen all at once. It requires patience.”
After a long moment, the door opened again and Gianni led them inside. Salvatore Rocco sat in the corner of the room with his fingers tented in front of his face. He was not happy to see them. He was trying to decide what to do with them, in his cold and calculating way.
Pip stepped forward and thrust out a hand to shake.
Rocco looked at the hand as if it were a rat that had just scuttled into the room, but Pip left it there.
“Sal,” he said. “I’ve got a proposal for you.”
Chapter 61
Intercepted
Jin Lo worked in the boat’s galley, peering through a microscope the pirates had stolen from a hapless research vessel, trying to reverse what the apothecary had done. She thought she had found a microbe that, with a little encouragement, could be coaxed to eat the uranium, and render it nonradioactive.
They were in the open sea now, trying to steer a course just far enough from shore to avoid Mao’s patrol boats, and not so far as to run into water patrolled by the Americans. The waves tossed them so that she had to lash her equipment down.
She heard Ned Maddox call her name,
and she ran on deck to see him training his binoculars on the horizon. It was a gray day, unseasonably cold.
“U.S. Navy patrol boat,” he said, passing her the binoculars.
She studied the distant boat through them. “I’m not ready,” she said.
“Can you make another storm?”
She shook her head. Danby, searching for the avian elixir, had drunk her storm-seeding solution. “How soon will they reach us?” she asked.
“Depends on if we run or not.”
“If we run, they will chase,” she said.
“Yes.”
“But if we don’t run, they will take us.”
“Probably. There’s a slight chance they’ll ignore us.”
“I need time,” she said.
Ned Maddox made a considering face. “They’ve got twin screws—double propellers. If we run, we might have an hour or two. If we stay on course and play innocent, and they don’t buy it, then we’ve got maybe twenty minutes.”
Jin Lo calculated. She hadn’t cultured enough of the bacteria yet to devour all of the uranium. She needed the hour or two. “Okay,” she said. “Run.”
Ned spun the wheel and the boat responded, heeling over to change course. Jin Lo put a hand out to steady herself as she staggered back to the galley.
In her makeshift lab, she put her eye to the microscope. Beneath it, her bacteria were happily eating the uranium, excreting a harmless, dull orange substance. But how to make the microbes multiply and thrive? She tried not to panic, but to think—or not to think, but to let her mind wander. The universe is doing its work. We are the vessel through which it flows.
She rummaged through the little bottles and packets from the herbalist. She didn’t have exactly what she needed, but she might be able to improvise.
“They’re gaining!” Ned Maddox called from the deck, over the wind.
She wished he wouldn’t interrupt. Of course the patrol boat was gaining. Unless it sank or capsized, it was going to gain.
She tapped a few grains of saltpeter into her culture, and then a small amount of sulfur. If the bacteria liked uranium so much, maybe they would like the makings of gunpowder. The bacteria seemed perfectly content with the addition, but they weren’t multiplying. An anxious feeling fluttered in her middle, and she willed it down. She added the extract of a variety of nightshade, thinking it might act as an accelerator. But nothing happened.
The boat lurched, and she lunged for her materials, to keep them from flying in all directions. Her hands were cold, and she thought Ned Maddox must be freezing on deck, in the wind and the spray. It was hard to work or to think when you were cold. Warmth was essential to life.
Warmth. Was essential to life.
She turned on a flame on the galley stove, and held the glass dish high over it with tongs, just enough to warm it. Her hands felt less stiff and clumsy already, in the rising heat.
And as she watched, the bacteria began to divide, and divide again. She made another culture, and another, in every available cup and bowl the pirates owned. Then she heated a bucket of water on the galley stove. When it was warm enough, she rinsed each of her dishes into it, making a happy bacterial soup.
She carried the bucket, sloshing, to the hold. She pried open the first barrel of uranium, and poured the warm solution over the top. The microbe-rich liquid reached out like damp fingers to devour the white crust, reversing the apothecary’s transformation. They feasted on the orange uranium, changing its valence, leaving it inert and nonradioactive. She opened the next barrel, and the next, and poured the solution over the top of each one. Then she clamped the lids back on, to let her little friends eat.
She ran up to the galley and dismantled her lab, sweeping the remains of her supplies into her bag. When she emerged on deck, the patrol boat was much closer. She could see the tiny shapes of the men on board.
“You should go now,” Ned Maddox said.
Jin Lo had spent most of her life alone, but now the prospect of separation from Ned Maddox was painful. They hadn’t been apart since she’d washed up on his beach.
“Come with me,” she said.
He shook his head. “I can’t just go AWOL. I need to resign my commission, and leave the navy in a way that’s honorable for me.”
“But you left your post,” she said. “How will you explain?”
“I’ll find a way,” he said.
“You won’t betray me?”
He shook his head. “Of course not.”
“So how will it be honorable, if you lie?”
There was a struggle on his face. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “I’ll meet you in Seoul, at the Chosun Hotel. I’ll get there.”
Jin Lo nodded, trying to hide the despair she felt.
Ned Maddox turned away, to watch the approaching boat.
She held her bag of supplies at the rail. She couldn’t take it with her, and couldn’t leave it behind, but it was hard to let it go. She would be diminished without it. She might not find someone like the old herbalist in Xiangshan for a long time. She forced her hand to open, and the bag dropped and disappeared beneath the waves.
She had kept out a small vial, but she couldn’t bring herself to drink it. Why was this so difficult? It never had been before.
Ned Maddox caught her around the waist and kissed her, which didn’t help. She fit so neatly against his body—her husband. How could she leave him? How would they treat him?
“I can’t let you be taken,” she said.
“I’ll be fine. You have to go.”
He dropped his arms and she felt the cold air between them. She uncorked the vial and drank, and Ned Maddox watched her closely.
It didn’t take long. She felt her skull lighten, and her bones began to shrink. Her skin grew a layer of feathers, and her mind gained a protective distance from human concerns. Her feet became sharp talons, and her heart became the heart of a predator, hardened and remote.
By the time she lifted off the fishing boat, the ache in her chest was gone. She could see Ned Maddox grow smaller, looking up at her. His eyes were filled with concern, but human eyes were puny, underpowered things, always leaking tears. The patrol boat leaped into focus, every detail clear and sharp. The men on board were very young. One had chicken pox scars on his chin, the other had cut himself shaving. She was not afraid of them.
She could see everything for miles. Nothing sentimental or soft or foolish was left in her. The wind lifted her wings and she soared.
Chapter 62
Shooting Script
Benjamin sat beside Janie in a director’s chair, watching the filming. The costume designer had found a warm wool shawl for Janie, and she had it wrapped around her shoulders even though it was August. It had been two months since she’d walked out of the hospital, and she was stronger every day, but she was always cold, as if she had caught a chill in the land of the dead. She said the back of her neck got especially cold, and she was always reaching to push away the hair that wasn’t there. The hairstylists had cleaned up her haircut and cooed about how chic it was, but sometimes her own parents looked around the set and didn’t see her, not recognizing this short-haired girl.
The caterers brought her hot honey and lemon drinks as she sat wrapped in the shawl, and generally doted on her. They knew she had been hit by a car, and they were apologetic on behalf of the notorious drivers of Rome.
“People should stop making such a fuss,” Janie said. “It’s embarrassing.”
“You don’t want hot drinks?”
“I do like the hot drinks,” she admitted.
As Janie’s parents had rewritten the movie, it became clear that it would cost more to shoot than Tony had in the original budget. But that was all right, because the film had a new backer.
Salvatore Rocco had come on board as an executive producer, thanks to Pip, bringing
with him an influx of cash. Rocco had his own canvas chair with his name on it, and he sat watching the filming through tented fingers. He’d traded his tailored suit for a cashmere sweater and a silk scarf tied at the neck, to look more like movie people. He still had the look of a coiled snake, with hooded eyes, but most of the time he seemed satisfied with his first film.
His giant bodyguard, Gianni, was given the boom mike to operate. Gianni could hold the long pole so high and so effortlessly that the microphone in its fuzzy cover never crept down into any of the shots. Tony kept asking, “Where has he been all my life?”
Primo stood by the director’s side, ready to run messages or relay demands. He conveyed a sense of great urgency, and people jumped when he called. The actors came straight from their dressing rooms without complaint, and the makeup girls materialized with powder and brushes. The caterers had stuffed Primo with food, and his face had filled out. His head was covered with soft down.
“Silenzio!” he shouted now, and everyone on the set went silent. “Suono,” Primo said, and Gianni nodded in response. “Camera,” Primo said.
“Velocitá,” the cameraman said.
Primo clapped a slate in front of the camera and scurried out of the frame.
“Azione,” Tony said, and Pip climbed in through the princess’s bedroom window, on the set.
Evie, as the princess, turned to see him, looking anxious and beautiful in an embroidered nightgown and a white robe.
Pip had become an actual actor, since his Robin Hood days. Evie was beautiful, but everyone agreed that you couldn’t take your eyes off Pip. Everything he said rang true, except when you knew his character was lying, and then you wanted him to get away with it.
When the shot was finished, Pip flopped down in the canvas chair next to Benjamin, with an exasperated sigh.
“Evie’s supposed to have her hair cut short,” he said. “When she’s in the hospital with the head injury. And she won’t do it, she’s pitching a fit.”
“Short hair’s not so bad,” Janie said.
“She says she’ll look like a boy,” Pip said. “I told her, ‘Who cares? It’ll grow out again!’” He looked from Benjamin to Janie. “I see from your faces that was the wrong thing to say.”
The After-Room Page 25
