He smiled and blew more smoke. “That’s right,” he said. “I am.”
“It doesn’t matter though,” I gabbled, clutching the arm of the bench for dear life. “I mean, you’re a magician, you can be any age you want and you could even change my age to match yours, couldn’t you?” God, change my age? To what? To be old like my mother, like Granny Gran even? What was I saying?
“Sure I could change you,” he answered. “Outside. Inside, no. I couldn’t do that and still keep you yourself. And since it’s yourself I love, I don’t want to do that, do I?”
“But you could make yourself younger,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. I had this wild image of him changing himself into a kid right there in Penn Station and nobody even noticing. Except me. It’s yourself I love, he’d said.
He shook his head. “I got nothing left to learn as a youngster. This is what I’m learning now.” He slapped his own leg, an old man’s leg, thin under the wrinkled, rust-colored corduroys. “I got lessons to do like this, and that’s what I’m ready to do, so that’s what I’m doing. I won’t use magic to cut school, Val.”
I giggled at the idea of Paavo in school, and the next thing I knew I was bawling like a little kid. I’d sort of asked him to stay with me after all, and he’d answered, and I couldn’t help it, I cried.
If he’d patted me on the head, I would have expired right there. But he sat smoking, squinting one eye behind the smoke, and saying, “Shaa, Val, it’s okay, take it easy,” until I dried up.
Then he said, “Are you ready for breakfast? I want you to get something to eat, take your time, loaf around a while. About noon, you start looking for Joel; not before.”
“Why?” I said. “We only have today, Granny Gran said. And what about you? What are you going to be doing?”
“Resting, getting set. I’ve got it worked out. Playing on the street, you meet people. Remember that guy who stopped to talk to me in the park that day, before we did some magic? He gave me ten dollars. He’s a musician, and he invited me to stop by his place for coffee any Sunday. Him and some friends, they play chamber music just for their own pleasure, Sunday mornings until noon. You get breakfast. I’ll go to his place and listen.”
“Just listen to music?” I said. My heart was thumping at my ribs because we were so close to going our separate ways, which I wanted to put off as long as I could.
“Listen,” he said, “maybe play a little on somebody’s spare fiddle, eat some herring. He serves bagels and pickled herring, he told me. And good strong coffee. I’ll eat better than you will, and music is good for me.
“Afterward, I’ll go to that little park with the waterfall on Fifty-third Street, you know the one? I got things to do that need plenty of moving water. It’s going to take both of us, your Granny and me, to keep the kraken and the Princes occupied while you find Joel.
“I’ll know when you’ve got the key, and I’ll head for the Eighty-first Street station to meet you. It better be before sundown, Val. The dark helps the kraken. Be quick.”
We went up on the sidewalk. It was cold out. A raw, dirty wind was sweeping paper scraps down the gutters, and the sky was a dull color.
He said, “Can you spare some money for cigarettes? I’m all out.”
I divided the last of Gran’s little roll of bills between us.
“Oh,” he said, “wait a minute.” He pulled a coil of thin cord out of his pocket and handed it to me. “For your fishing.” God knows where he got it, and I didn’t ask.
I said, “You’ll be waiting for me at Jagiello’s station?”
“Once you got the key, you head right there,” he said. “But look, Val, if I don’t come, and the sun sets, take the key downstairs yourself and open the door for Jagiello. No hesitation, no waiting around. Just do it, okay?”
“Why wouldn’t you be there?” I said, feeling this sudden drench of fear.
“I got to figure out how to get Jagiello moving once he’s free so he can go back where he belongs. He’s only a statue, you know, a guardian. He was never meant for more than just standing there. It’s different when all of a sudden you got to be a warrior, you got to pick up your big bronze feet and move. It might take longer than I think, making that work. I might be late.
“Listen, don’t worry, okay? Either we do it, or we don’t, that’s all. What’s to worry about in that? If we fail, no more worries for anybody.”
“But you’ll be there,” I insisted, “when I show up at the station. You’ll meet me.”
“I plan to,” he said. “Just if I don’t, and the sun goes down, use the key. You’re not Joel, you can do it. Don’t wait.”
He shoved back that stray swatch of hair that the wind kept tugging down over his eye.
“You want to borrow my comb?” I said, wishing like crazy that he would say yes. I wanted to give him something, anything of mine, before we headed in different directions.
“No, thanks,” he said. “Don’t they tell you in school never to lend your comb to people?” He smoothed his thick gray curls back with his palms. “Looks better?”
“Looks great,” I said.
I had a powerful urge to give him the biggest hug in the world, but while I hesitated he put his hand out for me to shake. It was as if we both suddenly got a little shy, having spent the night together, so to speak. He turned my hand in his big, warm paw and kissed the back of it, and then he walked away with that neat, brisk step of his, his head up as if he was staring down anybody taller than he was.
So much for the war horns and prophecies and unicorns and kings from my reading that I’d been missing in real life. It took me a while to work it out—I guess I’m kind of slow about some things—but I knew that morning that however things came out in the end, my honest-to-goodness rumpled old wizard who needed a shave and had to borrow money for cigarettes was worth more than that whole bunch of clichéd fantasy claptrap rolled up together.
14
Blondel
SCARED AS I WAS, I didn’t have much appetite, but I managed to get through some waffles and sausages and a little orange juice, which left me with bus fare, that was all. I walked around the theater district looking at show posters for a while, read part of a Sunday Times somebody had dumped in a trash can—funny how that made me feel. All those dopes and fanatics busy gunning each other down all over the world were going to have to give it up for good if the kraken wasn’t stopped.
At noon on the button I started my search for Joel.
I walked along the gratings above the subway tunnels. I had to carefully not think about the three Princes, for fear they would turn up, called somehow by my thoughts. I hoped like mad that they were completely occupied by Paavo’s and Granny Gran’s diversionary tactics.
But were there any diversionary tactics, or had something gone wrong? The kraken was certainly right there with me. Once, I think I caught a glimpse of it—a sort of oily, bubbling darkness rushing through a tunnel below me, with little chips of dirty red light sparkling in it. I smelled it all the time, and I heard it: a clatter and racket and rumbling came pouring up out of the gratings wherever I went. How would I ever hear Joel’s violin?
It was getting colder and quieter out, the streets emptier, the traffic lighter. How much time did we really have?
I thought about going to the midtown waterfall park to find Paavo. But I didn’t have the key yet. If he could have done without that, he would have. He wouldn’t send me trudging through the city, constantly looking over my shoulder in case the three Princes were on my trail, for nothing.
It was so cold for spring, and I was only wearing a thin cardigan over my T-shirt and the jeans that I’d walked out of my house with yesterday—only yesterday? A day and a night—Mom would be frantic.
I stopped for a rest at Forty-second and Sixth, where at least some people were walking around.
A blind old beggar I’d seen before came stumping up the subway steps with her accordion in her arms. She wore a green wool hat and green socks. The rest of her w
as covered in tweed pants and a hairy checked coat. Granny Gran had said something about musicians being keyed into magic. Wasn’t this a musician?
“Excuse me,” I said.
She hugged her accordion tighter and kind of hunched against the railing, facing me. Maybe she expected to be robbed of whatever she’d made that morning bawling “Annie Laurie” at the top of her lungs to the music of her accordion in the subway cars.
I said, “Have you heard anybody playing the violin anyplace in the subway today?”
She cocked her head and seemed to be looking at me from these closed-down eye sockets with nothing in them. The tin can she wore wired to her coat belt was empty. I took out one of Granny Gran’s silver dollars and dropped it in with a good, solid clink.
The beggar smiled. “Thanks, dear. Sure, there’s somebody playing on the BMT line between the Fourteenth Street and Twenty-third Street stations. If he’s a friend of yours, tell him he’ll never make it unless he electrifies his violin and learns to play something popular.”
I got on a downtown bus.
It broke down. I had to wait for another bus.
This one got stuck in traffic because of construction and double-parking. Then there was a collision with a delivery van. The third bus went slowly, but it went.
Finally I reached Twenty-third and got started on foot, and this part should have been easy: just find the subway gratings over the BMT line between Twenty-third and Fourteenth and follow them. Surely the kraken had lost track of me while I was traveling in the bus.
But when I did find a grating and stood looking down through it into the subway, what I heard wasn’t Joel’s violin but the kraken again. Not just its horrible multiple voices. Now there was a sound of big motion like someone in creaky leather armor flexing enormous muscles: a sort of heavy, dark hiss, and a harsh scraping and dragging.
I reached Fourteenth Street without any luck, and I began to think that the kraken must have moved Joel and the phantom station again. I started working outward, east and west, block by block, listening at all the gratings in the sidewalk, which is a lot of gratings, most of them for deliveries into the basements of buildings. I was catching the kraken sound through any sidewalk grating at all now, and I began to panic.
Couldn’t the kraken stick the phantom station in a basement instead of right on the subway line if it wanted? Suppose I had already passed Joel a couple of times and he just couldn’t make himself heard over the noise of the kraken? Suppose I never heard him, never found him?
I was crying by then as I walked.
All of a sudden there was this blast from below, like a stream engine whooping. Those jibbery, fussing voices, like a flock of snaky birds pecking and climbing on each other, faded. The leathery noises ended. The subway seemed to be holding its breath down there.
Granny Gran and Paavo must have found some way to draw the kraken off.
Then I heard music, like a sad voice singing far away and without words. I ran along, pausing to listen at each grating, until I found the source.
Here: it was Joel’s violin, of course. I squatted down beside a grille outside a closed-up travel agency. The music had turned spiky and snappish. All I could see below was what looked like train track, very dim and dusky, where no track should be. It was the phantom station.
I checked around quickly, and sure enough, the kraken had included the little square entrance grilles set into the street corners around the phantom station, just like at the real Ninety-first Street station on Broadway. But as Paavo had warned me, the one that should open wouldn’t.
The metal was real, all right: it cut into my fingers when I pulled hard. But the grating wouldn’t budge, and anyway there were no dirty concrete steps under it, just a blank, dark space. There was no way to bring Joel out.
I went back to the main grille over the pretend tracks. I was scared to call Joel by name in case the kraken heard and came tearing back. So I sang, sort of, over the furious notes Joel was playing. I must have sounded awful, but I had to be loud to be heard over the screaming of the violin. What the heck, I’d sung for Paavo in the park and hadn’t died of inadequacy because of it. It wasn’t the opera.
I sang, “Here I am, I’ve come for the thing you have for me. I’ll drop down some string. Tie the something onto it and I’ll pull it up. I hope you’re okay.”
A woman with her arms full of packages walked by and gave me a weird look. I gave her a weird look back. She kept going.
The music stopped. I heard sounds of movement below, and suddenly there was Joel, standing right on the tracks, his face turned up to me. I knew he couldn’t see me by the way he was stretching his eyes as wide as he could.
He looked awful, white-faced and skinny, and I wondered if he was getting anything to eat or drink down there in his phantom prison. My night wandering around with Paavo was suddenly more special than before: all that time Joel had been stuck here, in the cold and the dark, alone with nothing but his music to keep him company, nothing but his fiddle to trust.
“Is it night up there?” he whispered. “I can’t see you.”
I whispered back, “Paavo says the kraken has wrapped you up in darkness to keep you here. There’s nothing wrong with your eyes.”
“I’m not worried,” he said in this bitter voice, “there’ve been blind fiddlers in the world before. How are you going to get me out of here?”
“I can’t.”
“But you’ve got to!” he said, straining up toward me. “I can’t do anything down here, I can’t see! How can I fight the damned kraken like this?”
I explained about the string I was about to lower, weighted with a pack of gum I’d bought for the purpose.
“Forget that,” he said. “Come get me, Tina!”
“I can’t,” I said, carefully feeding the weighted end of the string through the grating. I had the other end tied to my wrist, not to take any chances.
“You have to get me out of here!” He yelled.
I said, “For God’s sake, Joel, stop it! Are you crazy? We need the key!”
The bright yellow gum package turned and dangled above Joel’s pale face. I waited, kneeling there, hardly able to breathe. Of all things, this was the least expected: that Joel wouldn’t help, that Joel would refuse.
“He told you to leave me down here?” he demanded.
“There isn’t any choice,” I said. “Come on, hurry, will you?” The wind was digging at me and the sky was this heavy, sullen gray. I thought I could feel the entire sidewalk trembling a little, vibrating, getting ready to tear apart and collapse as the kraken returned to get us both. “You don’t know what it’s like up here—”
“You don’t know what it’s like down here,” he said. “You don’t know what’s it’s like to be stuck in the dark like a helpless, brainless baby while everybody else is out there fighting!”
“Please, Joel! Give me the key! What if the kraken comes back?”
All around was this tremendous stillness that falls on commercial parts of the city on Sundays when everybody’s gone. That made it easier to listen for the return of the kraken.
Joel brushed the gum pack away where it had touched his cheek. Then he grabbed at it and pulled hard on the cord. “You didn’t answer me,” he said. “Paavo said to do this? To leave me here?” From the sound of his voice, he was almost crying.
“Nobody wants to, Joel. But we have to,” I said. “Just until we take care of the kraken. Then you’ll be able to get out of there. Paavo said that, too.”
Nothing.
I said, “He said it, Joel. I’m sorry, it’s how things are.”
The string jiggled. He was working on it, without a word. I waited, listening for the kraken.
“Come on,” I said.
He gave a tug on the string. He had taken off the gum and tied the key to the blue door on in its place. I drew it up. For a second the key stuck in the little square opening of the grating—the rounded part of the key was wider than the pack of gum h
ad been—and I thought, if it’s too big to pass through, what are we going to do? I took a deep breath and kind of eased and wiggled the key through, and there it was in my hand again, the little piece of metal that could defeat the kraken.
Maybe.
Down below Joel whispered, “It’s so dark. What am I going to do?”
I said, “It’ll be okay, now that I’ve got this,” but I was thinking of black, greasy kraken smoke coiling around him and flying up to grab me. “Play Paavo’s music, Joel. You have your violin, and you have Paavo’s bow. Use them! The gum is for you, too. I’ve got to go now.”
My watch had stopped. I didn’t know what time it was, but it felt late. I was sure not going to take the subway uptown.
I started trotting north.
There were no cabs, no buses, no nothing. The streets down here looked deep and black with shadow.
Jogging along, I could hear something, under my own breathing. It was a far-off, ugly sound, a chittering-grinding-growling-many-voices sound. It came pouring up out of the sidewalk gratings on a hot, dark wind. The kraken was coming back.
I turned sharply and headed over to Fifth Avenue so I wouldn’t be right over the subway line. I settled down to run.
Megan and I have walked all the way from Battery Park, at the tip of Manhattan, to where we live on the Upper West Side. Once we even went as far as Columbia University, just for the heck of it. It’s not so hard and it doesn’t take so long, not if you swing your arms and move and if you don’t stop and look at store windows or anything, and if you get the right rhythm so the traffic lights don’t stop you at every corner.
The traffic lights were no problem for me now. They were all red. Around Thirty-fourth Street, drivers were screaming and honking their horns on the outskirts of a huge traffic jam. They were getting out of their cars to argue and complain.
“The goddamn trains,” they said. “The goddamn traffic lights!” I caught enough to realize that the kraken—or something—had messed around with the underground electrical system so that the subways were not working at all and the traffic lights were all out of sync or jammed. No wonder the midtown streets were crazy with stalled traffic.
The Bronze King Page 12
