The Bronze King

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  I fell asleep sweaty with terror and trying to find the headache I’d had the day before, to sort of get the feel of it and see if it felt like a tumor, if that’s what a tumor feels like.

  The next day I coasted through school as if there was a plate glass door between me and everybody else. I tried, once, to talk to Megan about what had happened. All she was interested in was what the three Princes had looked like. She made moronic jokes about how I’d have been better off with them than with some grubby old pervert, meaning I should watch out for the man with the violin, not the creeps. She even got a laugh out of me, calling him a “mole-ster.” I couldn’t help it.

  This was a joke from when we saw the words child molester once in the paper and were struck by the obvious pronunciation. Girls in New York have to get wise about sick-ohs pretty young. You either learn to see them coming a long way off and get out of the way fast or you give up ever going outside.

  “I’m too old to be mole-sted,” I said, and Megan said, “You’re never too old, thank goodness. Now, when Micky tries to mole-st me . . .”

  Off she went again. I made a joke about “Micky Mole-ster,” and she got furious and stomped out of the room. There just wasn’t any point in talking to Megan anymore.

  My heart sort of lurched with joy when I heard faint violin music as I headed into the park to go home that afternoon. A little group of people were gathered around a man playing his fiddle on Jagiello’s terrace.

  As I hurried over he finished, and people dropped money into the open violin case on the ground and wandered off, all except a skinny boy in chinos and a checked shirt and a scarf around his neck, who was sitting on the rock by the lake. He wasn’t from my school or my building. I didn’t know him, but at least he didn’t wear a gray nylon jacket. I felt safe in ignoring him. It was the violinist I needed to talk to.

  He was squatting by the open violin case, fishing out the money. Boy, what would people have given him if they’d seen the Princes of Darkness dancing to his tune? I felt like that was my secret I shared with him (and the rotten Princes, of course, assuming they even knew what had happened), and that gave me the nerve to walk right up and talk to him.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hello,” he said. He had a slow voice with a foreign touch to it, and he sounded surprised and pleased to see me. He carefully set the instrument and the bow into the case’s blue velvet lining and draped a square of bright colored silk over them.

  “Thanks for helping,” I said. “Yesterday. In the subway.”

  “Good thing you got in touch,” he said. He definitely had an accent. “We knew there was something wrong, but we didn’t know where.”

  Now, the funny thing was I didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about, but I had this perfectly sure feeling that it would all make sense pretty soon. I also knew I was in something weird up to my neck, enough to make my hair prickle when I thought of the three Princes, and it made me feel a lot better to be here talking to this guy with the violin. Because he knew something. And he was going to tell me, as if I were another human being, not just a kid that you don’t tell anything to until it’s all over.

  I knew this because as soon as we sat down together on the low wall that rims the terrace on three sides, he pulled a beat-up package of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and offered me one. No big deal, he just held out the pack with this inquiring look.

  I’ve tried smoking. My throat closes up and I gag. It’s very inelegant, and I could tell from his clothes—everything worn and a little frayed but fadedly clean and pressed into sharp edges, socks and shoes almost the same rust brown as his corduroy suit—that this was a very elegant person. But I loved him for making the offer.

  I smiled and shook my head, and he said, “You mind?” And I said no, so he lit a smoke for himself and stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and looked at me, squinting past the smoke and a swipe of his hair that curled down his forehead on one side.

  “I didn’t know I got in touch,” I said. “How did I do that?”

  “The way your granny taught you,” he said.

  Make a wish by running water and seal it with silver.

  “Oh shit,” I said—I didn’t mean to; it just jumped out of me, and I had this ripply feeling of mixed-up delight and terror inside—“you must be from Sorcery Hall!”

  See, when I was little, Granny Gran used to do sort of magic things. She could find anything I had lost and tell me what I was getting for my birthday and heal up my canary when it was walking in the hall one afternoon and Mom didn’t see it and accidentally stepped on it and semi-squished it (which she said was the canary’s fault because it was a bird and was supposed to be flying, not walking around in the dark hall). Whenever I asked Granny Gran how she did those things, she’d say, “Oh, it’s something I learned in Sorcery Hall.”

  That’s why I said, “You must be from Sorcery Hall!” The violinist just nodded and blew smoke out of his nose.

  I said, “Are you looking for my Granny Gran? She’s in New Jersey.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want to bother her. I’m looking for you.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re the one who got in touch.”

  “Actually,” I said, “what I asked for was Jagiello.” And there was no way this medium-short, wiry person in corduroy could be that huge, clunky warrior in armor come down magically off his horse to answer me. “I mean,” I added, feeling stupid for the way I said it—as if I was rejecting him for not being exactly what I asked for, that is—“you’re not him, are you?”

  “No,” he said. “We’ll find out how that works after a while, though.”

  “Well, what am I, um, supposed to do now?”

  “We got to figure that out. What we start with is, I need your help.”

  News to me. I thought I’d been the one who wished for help. I said, “Help with what?”

  “Well, you got a kraken here.”

  “A what?”

  “A kraken.”

  He’d offered me a cigarette, he was sitting here talking with me like a real person, and he knew my Granny Gran. Looking sideways at him so as not to seem to be staring, I could see he wasn’t nearly as old as Granny Gran, but he was old, all right, old enough to be a friend of hers. You know how grown-ups are pretty much just grown-ups, meaning not young, whatever their age, when you first look at them? People in a class with your mom, for instance. But then there are the grown-ups who are old people, which I think means they get to the point where they don’t bother trying to pretend they’re young anymore, so you just take them as they are or leave them, which is a great relief. Usually they have gray hair and they stand up a little more slowly than regular grown-ups, that kind of thing. I decided the violinist was one of those.

  That meant to me that, with him, it was okay not to know everything. He wouldn’t look down on me for it, the way grown-ups do sometimes for that kind of thing, putting you down for being too young.

  So I said, “What’s a kraken?”

  He rubbed at the side of his neck. “Okay. It’s a negative interstitial vortex with a big appetite, and it’s going to try and eat up your world if we don’t stop it.”

  “Whoa,” I said, breathless. “Some kind of a monster?”

  “Yah,” he said, nodding and blowing smoke.

  I looked kind of wildly around me, checking to make sure the park was still there. The skinny boy in chinos was still sitting there, picking at the black rock with a pencil and glancing up in our direction and away again, fast. I wondered if he was some kind of a scout for the Princes, deliberately out of uniform so I wouldn’t recognize him.

  The violinist must have noticed me looking. “Don’t worry about him,” he said. “He’s all right.”

  “You know him?” I said.

  “No. But he’s all right.”

  “What does a kraken look like?” I said, keeping my voice down.

  “Depends. It hasn’t formed up here yet, physically
. But it will, if it can get in. It’s already found a place where your defenses are so weak that it can break through pretty soon.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “You got a slip someplace in the system, and this kraken that’s been spinning out there no place for a long time sees a chance to break into a nice warm world and eat it up. It happens sometimes. People get a little careless, they don’t clean up after their work just right, and you get a fault and a kraken digging at it.

  “Your own people that knew about these things left all kinds of protection, special barriers and guardians to keep out something like a kraken. You got the pyramids, the great kiva at Chaco Canyon, big ones like that; and then lots of smaller ones. Only when people get into this mechanistic stage you’re in right now, they start moving things, tearing them down, breaking them to pieces to make room for something new without knowing what they’re doing. It’s a risky time for anybody.

  “You make enough mistakes, you can weaken the system. You bulldoze this ancient graveyard, you close down that old theater nobody cares about, you rip out a special grove of trees to put in some tract housing—pretty soon you got weakness where you need to have strength.

  “Now the kraken is doing its own moving, getting the way completely clear to come in here and chew it all up.”

  “Jagiello!” I said. “It moved Jagiello!”

  He nodded. “Yah. He’s the key. This park was made to hold down a local manifestation of the weakness and Jagiello was put here to seal that place. Him, and the little castle there, and what you call Cleopatra’s Needle.”

  Cleopatra’s Needle is a stone obelisk from Egypt, which stands on a little hill across the path northward from Jagiello’s hill, half hidden by cherry trees.

  “But some of those are modern things,” I said. “Don’t you need really ancient monuments, like Stonehenge?”

  “Not Stonehenge,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s a little out of whack, always was. Avebury, yah. There are plenty of newer things, too. Even when you don’t know exactly why anymore, there are still people around with a good instinct for where a marker or a guardian is needed, and they put it there and say it looks pretty.

  “Trouble here is, they took the weather instruments off the castle roof, which was a mistake; and the hieroglyphs that give the needle its power are almost worn off by erosion. With two down, it wasn’t so hard for the kraken to shove the third out of the way. So those three that stood guard here are disarmed or lost.

  “Which doesn’t have to mean something terrible, provided we can find Jagiello and get him back in position in the next few days. I can go around and fiddle up the power of some other markers you got around here, and with them he can hold the line all right. Only we got to find him.”

  This stranger was going to want something from me after all. I felt disappointed, as though I’d let somebody put something over on me. Maybe he was just a nut, a fancy nut with a great imagination and a violin.

  Except he knew my Granny Gran. So I couldn’t just duck out on him. On the other hand, I was not really delighted by the idea of being loaded with more stuff to do. I mean, with a working mother and me the only child, I already had my hands full a lot of the time.

  “What have I got to do with any of that?” I said.

  “You’re mixed up in it somehow,” he said, shoving the hair off his forehead and blowing more smoke. “Or what do the Princes want with you? They belong to the kraken.”

  “You mean they’re—magical? Devils or something?” I squeaked.

  “No, just creeps, like you call them. They were down in the subway, looking for what they could take off the poor bums who sometimes crawl down there to sleep when it’s cold. And they’ve done worse than just stealing; you don’t need to know. The kraken was naturally drawn to them, and it took them on. There are always people dumb enough to agree to that kind of thing.”

  The Princes! It was way too late to get cautious, I realized. With the Princes after me, I was in this anyway, like it or not. I said, “I don’t know what they were looking for, but if you hadn’t come along and—and—” And what? I didn’t know what to say.

  He didn’t smile, exactly, but the corners of his mouth twitched. “You liked that? Pretty good, eh?”

  “How did you do it?”

  “I just played good music,” he said. He was sort of twinkling at me, but still, well, serious. It was weird, in a warm sort of way. His light gray eyes looked right at me the whole time we talked, right into my eyes, which was actually uncomfortable for me. I knew his stare was friendly, wasn’t a stare at all really. It was just his way of looking at a person. But I had to keep looking away.

  He said, “What are you called?”

  Which surprised me—you’d think a magician would know your name. “Tina,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “No what?” I said. “Tina, that’s my name—for Valentine. Mr., ah—?”

  He said something that sounded like “Povvo,” only the first syllable was pronounced more like the a in “cat” than like o.

  “Um, could you spell that for me, Mr. Povvo?” I said.

  “P-a-a-v-o,” he said. “And it’s my first name. The last name is Latvela, but call me Paavo, okay? We don’t need formal for what we got to do. All right if I call you Val?”

  He stuck out his hand and we shook. He didn’t have the kind of hands you’d expect in a musician, all slim and arty-looking. My hand got squeezed in this thick, warm, meaty mitt.

  I said, “Can you tell me why things are disappearing?”

  Thank goodness, for once I didn’t have to explain or convince or anything. He said, “You mean besides Jagiello?”

  “Yes, like our linoleum and my sandwich and—”

  “Tell me the whole list,” he said.

  I did. He listened without saying anything, just taking a puff on his cigarette every now and then and squinting past the smoke.

  Then he said, “The kraken is trying to get from you whatever it is you got that it wants. The Princes are one way to get it from you. The kraken is using other ways, too. Only it can’t get a good fix on this thing, whatever it is, so it’s grabbing around blind for anything it senses might be connected with you.”

  “Will the lost things ever get found again?” I said. I mean, who knew what else was gone besides what I was personally aware of? Who knew what else might go? My mother was connected with me, for one thing. You can fight all you want with your mom, but you don’t want to have to try and get along without one altogether. Also I wanted my sneakers back.

  Paavo shrugged. “Maybe. I’d like my cap back, too.”

  “It’s gone?” I said. “You think the kraken took it?”

  “No, I think somebody grabbed it while I was sleeping last night, but I don’t know for sure. It’s okay, it was a little too small anyhow.”

  I wondered where he had slept where he could have his stuff stolen; not outside, I hoped, but there was no point in asking because there was nothing I could do about it if that was where he slept. I asked instead about what was really on my mind.

  “What can we do about this kraken?”

  “Nothing today,” he said, glancing up at the sky. “The air’s all wrong and the light’s bad.” It was true we had this low overcast, very gray and dimming.

  “You said we only have a few days!”

  “Yah. Meet me here tomorrow, same time. We’ll see if we can find Jagiello.” He got up and took his violin case and walked away, just like that.

  He wasn’t tall but he walked with his head up, as though he was looking somebody taller right in the eye, and he had a quick, precise step that reminded me of some very sure-footed, bright-eyed animal—maybe a mountain goat. I thought he was neat.

  On my way home I stopped outside the local deli, the Lox Populi, where I shop a lot for Mom. Mr. Canetti and Mr. Steinberg, the owners, were out on the sidewalk with a bunch of cops. The two old guys were stamping and yellin
g and waving their arms.

  “Next time it could be the whole building!” Mr. Canetti shouted. “And who sees anything, who hears, who knows? Where are the police? Out giving tickets! While some lousy bums are carrying out a whole goddamn cold case loaded with food!”

  “Take it easy, Frank,” Mr. Steinberg said. “You’ll have a heart attack.” Then he took over the yelling while Mr. Canetti stood there glaring around like an old walrus.

  Somebody behind me said, “What’s going on?”

  It was the skinny boy from the park.

  4

  Fiddle Magic

  PAAVO HAD SAID THIS KID WAS ALL RIGHT, so he must be all right. In fact he was nice-looking, in a sharp-faced, irritable way, with long reddish brown hair and a green scarf tied around his neck. Now that I thought of it, I might have seen him before in the neighborhood. “Do you live around here?”

  “No, on the East Side, but I’ve got friends over here. Why are those old guys in such an uproar?”

  “Somebody stole their cold case,” I said. “Full of food.”

  He said, “Who, King Kong?”

  I laughed, and we hung around and talked a little, pointing out to each other the cop who kept picking his nose and the one with the ketchup on his shirt, that kind of thing. He said what about some coffee or soda or whatever, and I said fine, and we ended up in a coffee shop on Broadway where I finally found out what he was after.

  His name was Joel Wechsler. I liked his sort of cranky hawk looks and his bright scarf and his nervous, long-fingered hands that kept torturing the rim of his wax-coated paper Coke cup all the time we talked.

  He asked about Paavo.

  “Has he been playing there long, your friend the fiddler?” he said.

  “No,” I said, getting cautious. Paavo was one heck of a big secret, after all, him and Sorcery Hall and the kraken, and who knew how much this kid had managed to overhear? I began to wish Paavo hadn’t gone off and left me with this situation. I began to mentally limber up my I-have-to-go-home-now speech.

  “I didn’t think I’d seen him there before,” he said. “Most of these guys have fixed beats, you know? A kind of informal territory. Maybe he’s just started trying it out there, though I don’t think anybody could make much of a living playing on weekdays in Central Park.”