Lionboy: the Chase

by Zizou Corder

  ‘Quando vado in gondola sogno sempre sempre di Elena,’ he carrolled.

  ‘What do the words mean?’ Charlie called one morning.

  ‘It means when I go in my gondola I dream always always of Elena!’

  Charlie took to humming the tune, but instead of Elena he found himself singing ‘Aneba’, which fitted very well.

  So Claudio and Charlie started looking out for each other. It became a sort of game they played together.

  ‘How the Lions?’ the boatman would call, and Charlie would make a face, as if to say, ‘Well, so-so.’

  ‘I like Lions,’ the boatman would say, warningly, as if to say, ‘Take care of them,’ and his gondola glided on by, going about his business.

  One time, Charlie said, ‘Claudio, could you do something for me?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Claudio.

  Charlie, fluttering with nerves, asked him to post the letter for him. ‘Everyone’s gone out,’ he explained, with a ‘silly-me’ shrug. ‘I forgot to give it to Signora Battistuta.’

  ‘Why don’t you post it yourself?’ asked Claudio, a little puzzled.

  ‘I’m not allowed out,’ whispered Charlie, between the bars of the window.

  Claudio’s gondola rocked on the wake of a passing motoscafo.

  ‘Why not?’ he said carefully.

  Charlie grinned nervously. He hadn’t a clue what to say.

  ‘Please post it!’ he said, and tucked the letter through the bars. Claudio manoeuvred the boat closer and, balancing easily, leaned in to take the letter.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, giving Charlie a curious look. Then he said, ‘The Lions, are they happy inside there?’ and Charlie replied directly, ‘No, they’re not.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Claudio, in such a straight and friendly way that Charlie was very tempted to. But he didn’t. A letter was one thing – a risk worth taking. But Claudio worked for Edward, and Charlie wasn’t about to forget that.

  Rafi was definitely feeling better. He was well enough to sit up and read newspapers.

  ‘Hi,’ he said to the nurse.

  ‘Hmph,’ she replied.

  ‘Sorry I’ve been such a pig,’ he said, giving her a really very beautiful smile.

  The nurse was quite young. Now her bolshy patient had rediscovered his manners, she was quite taken aback by how … attractive he was. Before long she’d brought him all the newspaper reports of the Lions’ disappearance, Maccomo’s disappearance, Charlie’s disappearance, the terrible weather in the Alps and the fact that the train got stuck in it.

  Now why would Charlie have got on that particular train? Rafi wondered to himself. Was it just the first train they came to?

  Rafi didn’t think that anybody, not even a kid like Charlie, would just try to take six Lions on the first train he came across. He must have thought about it.

  He was struck by the fact that the train went via Venice. Venice sounds very like Vence, he thought – knowing perfectly well that Vence was the nearest town to the Corporacy Community where Magdalen and Aneba had been taken.

  But how could Charlie have known anything about that?

  He read on. ‘Reports that creatures which may have been the Lions were spotted during last week’s Alpine blizzard, in which the Orient Express was stranded for several days with the King of Bulgaria aboard, have been dismissed by the Alpine Transport Police.’

  But the Lions could not be anywhere else other than with Charlie.

  And he had seen Charlie on that train!

  And – he had seen which carriage Charlie was in. The second one after the fuelwagon.

  Ha! Dingbat! All he had to do was find out who or what was in that carriage on that journey! See if they were powerful enough – and mad enough – to prevent it from being searched! That person would be protecting Charlie and the Lions.

  Rafi was really feeling a lot better.

  Then: ‘Hang on,’ he said to himself. ‘Hang on a minute.’ Rafi, when visiting the doctor, was not above looking at the celebrity and royalty gossip magazines. He longed to be rich and famous and, when no one was looking, he liked to scrutinize photographs of swimming pools and luxury villas, and fantasize.

  ‘The King of Bulgaria?’ he said. ‘The famous eccentric reclusive King Boris of Bulgaria – who – hang on – has his own private carriage on the Orient Express and sometime drives the dang thing? And – now I think I’m right – owns a traditional Italian-style palace on Venice’s world-famous Grand Canal, into which no celebrity magazine has ever been invited … Of course! Of course!’

  Rafi felt absolutely fit as a fiddle. He would bet his recovering right arm that King Boris was his man. All he had to do was get a phone number, maybe an address, and he could track the Lions – and Charlie – down.

  Venice, eh.

  He laughed so loud and long that the nurse came back to check on him.

  ‘Hi there,’ he said. ‘What’s your name again?’

  Late one afternoon, Charlie was staring out at the piazza. There were an awful lot of cats. Most of them were pretty skinny. It was the fatter skinny ones, he noticed, who ganged up on the skinnier skinny ones.

  There was a group of young children playing with one of the fatter skinny ones, trailing what looked like a feather on a stiff long plastic cord, which made the feather twitch and jump. The fat skinny cat – not much more than a kitten really – jumped and leapt after it, hunting it down, then pretended to ignore it, then sneaked up on it from the side, pouncing and leaping. It made Charlie smile. He’d like to have played with the cat like that. One of the children, a small yellow-haired girl in a grubby dress, pounced on the cat and carried it with one arm round its chest to the fountain in the middle of the piazza. She was rubbing her nose on its head and hugging it while it struggled, mewling, its back legs flopping, its forelegs waving in outrage, its clean white furry tummy displayed for all to see. Charlie laughed out loud.

  Charlie had a loud laugh, like his dad.

  When he laughed, one of the older cats looked round suddenly.

  Charlie saw the movement. He turned swiftly and caught the cat’s eye. Laughed again – a fake laugh, but a loud laugh – a loud, fake Cat laugh.

  The older cat stared at him and twitched his ear. Charlie stared back. ‘Come to me come to me come to me come to me,’ he urged silently. Could he risk shouting out?

  He did.

  ‘Come and talk to me!’ he shrieked, from his high window, at the top of his voice, in Cat. To any listening human, it would have sounded as if a cat had been trodden on.

  Did the sound carry over the little canal? Did it carry through the late-afternoon sounds of children and cats and life on the piazza?

  Did the cat hear him?

  It might have.

  Did it respond?

  If a flicked ear and a sudden intense look were a response, then yes it did.

  Did it come over and talk to him?

  It did not.

  The next day Charlie was loping around on the first floor, in the great chamber, the portego, which stretched the length of the building. It had high, deep, mullioned windows looking out over the Grand Canal, and a flat stone balcony, with arches and decorations that he had admired from the outside. He had gone out on to the balcony, and settled himself on the broad, high ledge, leaning against the carved stone wall and staring with dry, angry eyes not at Venice, but at the curls of stone and metalwork that decorated the outside of the palazzo. It was strange to be seeing it from inside out, close up, from the wrong direction. It was like sitting on the rim of someone’s eye, looking up at gigantic eyelashes.

  What was Edward up to?

  Charlie didn’t like the view from this balcony – when he looked beyond the close-up-from-inside carved ice cream he could see the weird floodsite with all its paraphernalia and debris, looking smaller under the high midday sun. He was just deciding to go and find another place to sit and either think about what on earth they were going to do, or, as was happening more and more la
tely, feel miserable about the fact that he had been so close to his parents in Paris and now he had lost them. God only knew how they were, where they were, if he would be able to make contact with them again … Or he could fret about his letter to King Boris – had Claudio posted it? Had King Boris received it? When would he hear anything?

  But then a small commotion at the front door below attracted his attention.

  A smallish motoscafo had pulled up, making a creamy wake to her stern. The curly old bloke driving it was instructing a younger man to unload some very big, odd-shaped packages on to the steps of the palazzo, and someone at the door was telling him not to. There was a bit of shouting, and then the motoscafo drew off, taking its big packages with it. But it didn’t go away; it drew round the corner into the damp little sun-dappled canal that ran along the side of the palazzo.

  Maybe it’s going to a back entrance, thought Charlie.

  He was curious.

  Jumping lightly down from the window ledge (the Young Lion had given him some landing lessons, showing him how to spread the bones of his feet so as to be light and silent like – well, like a cat. Sigi Lucidi would have loved it), Charlie slipped across to one of the rooms overlooking the side canal.

  Sure enough, he heard voices. Signora Battistuta was giving someone a ticking-off in the back hall, but at the same time there was the huff and puff and creak and scuff of things being unloaded. Charlie hung out of the window as best he could to see the boat, and the figures popping in and out.

  As soon as it was all done, and Signora Battistuta had bustled off to find somebody else to boss around, Charlie sneaked downstairs into the back hall to look at the packages: one fat bundle, and two the same peculiar shape – about six feet long and flat, but curved. Charlie was intrigued.

  Behind him came a soft fall of footsteps. He slipped behind the big coat cupboard (thank goodness Venetian furniture was so huge) as Lavinia and the young man from the motoscafo came into the room, and started squabbling quietly about how best to manoeuvre the long, stiff packages out of the room. One at each end, they tried to edge the first of them through the doorway. The young man must have hit his hand on something, for he suddenly swore and dropped his end of the package.

  The paper caught on the door’s heavy latch, and ripped open, a long revealing wound.

  Inside the brown paper was white soft paper, and inside the white paper all was feathers – creamy-white feathers tipped with crimson, lying smooth and plump like the most inviting bed, or a swan’s breast. And in among the feathers were eyes: golden eyes.

  Eyes!

  Charlie couldn’t see how they were made – embroidered, perhaps, with gold wiry thread? Or were they printed on the feathered base?

  Eyes. Feathers.

  It reminded him of something. Something recently …

  When the packages had all been carried away, Charlie went back up to the Chinese room and lay on his bed, thinking about feathers and eyes.

  Feathers and eyes.

  When he woke up half an hour later, he knew what was in the packages, and he had a pretty good idea why.

  Chapter Six

  After lunch, everybody would go for a siesta and the palazzo was quiet. Charlie, though he had snoozed that morning, would have happily snoozed some more, as his late-night visits to the Lions were taking it out of him, but instead he went to the window at the back and stared out over the sun-drenched piazza. That cat yesterday had nearly responded to him. Perhaps he would be there again now, looking for a place in the shade to rest during the afternoon heat. Charlie leaned against the cool stone of the window frame and sniffed the damp canal smell rising up. He scanned the piazza as well as he could from this distance. There was a gang of the fatter cats, lying about in piles, stretching out their legs and arching their backs a little as they settled in for a good laze. There was the fatter skinny cat with the white tummy, the one the blonde kid had been teasing the other day, and one of the skinny skinny cats, on his own. He couldn’t see the cat who had almost noticed him. Rats.

  Oh, look – there was the blonde kid! She was alone today. She was too little to be out on her own, in Charlie’s opinion. She couldn’t have been more than four or five. Maybe her brothers were round the corner, out of Charlie’s view.

  A couple of the fatter cats were making comments about the skinny cat. Charlie could tell just from the way they were lying about that they were being insolent. The skinny cat avoided them, stalking instead down towards the canalside, in Charlie’s full view. He didn’t look very well, to tell the truth.

  Suddenly, the little blonde girl spied the white-tummied cat – ‘her’ cat, the one she had had such fun with before. She jumped on it but it ran away. Annoyed, she pounced instead on the skinny cat, and much to her own – and the cat’s – amazement, she caught it. She was delighted. (The cat was not.)

  With the cat scratching and kicking in her arms, she sat down and hugged it to her. She kissed it, she talked to it, she ruffled up its fur with her free hand, and then quickly clamped down again when the cat seemed likely to wriggle out of her grasp. Charlie watched, with mild interest. He was a bit sorry for the cat, actually, but really he was still looking out for the older one, the one he hoped to speak to. His attention wandered from the blonde child and her poor furry victim.

  He only noticed what was happening gradually. There was a noise: from the piazza, so distant, but unmistakable nonetheless. Had it been going on for long? It was a noise Charlie had hoped never to hear again: harsh, small, rasping, punctuated with coughs. It was like breathing, but too short, too high, too hard, too painful and uncomfortable, with a nasty hollow cough on the in-breath. It was the sound of a small child having a sudden, severe asthma attack.

  Charlie looked back at the girl. Her shoulders were high, swamping her neck, and her face was pale. Her chest was sunken, rising and falling swiftly. Her eyes looked small in her face. He knew that look; he knew that feeling.

  Charlie shouted.

  Were there any grown-ups over there? Who was with her? She needed her medicine and she needed it now.

  Even as Charlie shouted, he noticed the fatter cats leaping up from their reverie. As a gang, they turned on the cat the girl had been holding and ran at him. But it was as if he had expected it – he was already away and running down a narrow street off the piazza, terrified. The others chased after him, vicious, hunting, caterwauling.

  Charlie was shocked. He was used to cats fighting. He’d seen enough of them in the Ruins at home, but he had never seen cats gang up like this. What was it about?

  Two women had appeared beside the little girl. Charlie leaned right out of the window, craning to hear what was being said. He could hear something about soldi and medicina and non posso and sporco gatto – he knew that meant filthy cat – but he couldn’t understand. He could see that the girl was not being given any medicine. It seemed that neither woman had any.

  Maybe it’s her first attack, he thought. If they didn’t know she was asthmatic, they wouldn’t know that she should take her medicine with her everywhere.

  Then he remembered what King Boris had said about people not being able to afford medicine.

  Without a second thought, Charlie pulled his puffer from his pocket (he had spare ones in his bag). He knew that you shouldn’t lend or borrow medicine, but this was an emergency. He yelled out to the women.

  ‘Signora!’ he shouted – he knew that meant ‘Mrs’. ‘Signora! Here!’ And he threw the puffer as hard as he could, out of the window, across the canal. Don’t let it fall in, he prayed.

  It didn’t. It landed near the little group, and one of the women picked it up. Clearly she did know the child was asthmatic, because they both knew exactly how to use the puffer. As the child breathed in the medicine and the mother – so Charlie supposed her to be – hugged her and helped her, the other, older woman fussed around them.

  The child took a puff, breathed for ten breaths, took another. Charlie knew the routine. It was hard t
o tell from so far away, but it seemed she was calming down. Another puff. They’d just have to keep at it till they could get her either breathing properly again or to hospital.

  The older woman, reassured now that the child was improving, had turned to face over the water to Charlie. She was craning to see him, holding her arms out.

  ‘Grazie, bambino!’ she called out. ‘Sei un angelo venuto dal Cielo! Grazie a Dio eri qui con la medicina, senza di te non so che cosa sarebbe successo, sei gentillissimo, vieni qui, vieni fuori, vogliamo ringraziati, vieni, per favore, vieni …’

  She was beckoning to him. She was getting rather enthusiastic. It seemed she wanted him to come out and be thanked. Charlie smiled at her, and withdrew from the window. He couldn’t go out. He wouldn’t understand what they had to say anyway. He didn’t want to attract any more attention, and have Edward or Signora Battistuta come and shout at him. He was sorry to have to withdraw, because he was glad to have helped, but what else could he do?

  Ten minutes later, he risked looking out again. The girl and her mother were gone, but the older woman was still there. Perhaps she was the granny.

  The moment she spotted Charlie she started up her chorus again. ‘Vieni, angelo salvatore della figliola, vieni …’

  Charlie ducked away again. Oh dear. Was she going to stay for long?

  Ten minutes later she was still there. Five minutes after that she was gone, and Charlie settled back to his vigil, watching for the Cat Who Had Responded.

  The Cat Who Had Responded, it turned out, was watching for him too. He was sitting on the window ledge, licking his paws. When Charlie, safe in the absence of the granny, looked out the window, the cat mewed right in his ear.

  ‘Aggh!’ cried Charlie. ‘Don’t surprise me like that!’

  At that the cat fell in the canal. Clearly he was more surprised than Charlie.