by Scott Mebus
“No, I’d remember,” Rory answered, suddenly uncomfortable. He had no clue if either of these men could be trusted.
“So familiar,” Giovanni repeated. “You never sailed with me?”
“Definitely not,” Rory answered. He didn’t like where this line of questioning was leading, so he quickly steered the conversation away from his identity. “You were a sailor?” he asked.
“Sailor?” Giovanni scoffed, taking the bait. “I was a great captain! In my mortal days, five centuries ago, I guided my ship across the great sea, traveling up and down the coast of the New World, claiming huge tracts of land for France!”
“France? I thought you were Italian,” Rory said.
“France paid me a great deal of money to be French, so, for that voyage, I was French. It was I who discovered the untamed shores of Francesca!”
“Where’s Francesca?” Rory asked, confused.
“His name for North America,” Alfred cut in, winking slyly. “It didn’t quite take.”
“America has such a pedestrian sound to it,” Giovanni complained. “Now, Francesca, that is the name of a great land!”
“It’s a done deal, Giovanni,” Alfred told him, his tired tone making it obvious that this argument came up a lot. “Francesca just isn’t going to happen.”
“No respect for the man who discovered the isle of Manhattan!” Giovanni announced, his voice ringing with centuries of resentment.
“But I thought Henry Hudson discovered New York,” Rory said. “Did you sail with him?”
“Oh boy,” Alfred muttered, putting his head in his hands. “Now you’ve done it.”
“How dare you!” Giovanni exclaimed, his voice quavering with indignation. “As if that bumbling nincompoop of an Englishman were even fit to lick my boots! Henry Hudson.” The name came out drenched in disdain. “He followed in my footsteps almost a century later. A century! So why does his name go on all the good stuff? Just because he decided to sail up the river, while I, who was very busy, remember, discovering everything for the first time, stayed out by Staten Island—just because of that, he gets the Hudson River, the Hudson Valley, the Hudson everything! It should be the Verrazano River! The Verrazano Valley! I was here first! All I get is a stupid bridge!”
“Easy, Giovanni,” Alfred soothed his cohort. Indeed what little of the Italian explorer’s face that showed through the beard had turned bright red. “You don’t want to pass out again.”
Pouting like a kid who lost at Candyland, Giovanni crossed his metal-encased arms with a frown. “That is exactly why I gave up on discovering new lands beyond the mists. Everyone is trying it. The true discoveries await belowground! So I recruited Alfred here to help me explore the depths of the island. My only competition down here is Caesar Prince, and who knows what that man is looking for . . .”
“So you’ll be kind of an underground Columbus?” Rory asked.
“Columbus!” Giovanni spat. “Let me tell you about that imbecile Columbus . . .”
Giovanni raged on as the train sped through the dark tunnel, Alfred Beach shaking his head the entire time. Finally, light streamed through the windows as the subway car pulled into the familiar 207th Street station, the end of the line.
“Here you go, Rory,” Alfred said, gesturing outside. Glancing out the window, Rory wasn’t surprised to see that no one even looked in their direction. He thanked his benefactors and stepped off the train, helping Tucket down onto the platform. He gave a wave as the train began to pull out of the station, on its way back to exploring the depths of the island. Then, with a screech, the car shuddered to a halt. One of the windows flew open and Giovanni stuck his head out, his beard hanging over the sill.
“Two’s Boys!” he yelled.
“What?” Rory asked, thoroughly confused.
“That’s where I know you from! It finally came to me. You look like one of Two’s Boys! You sailed with me into the mists a few times, including that last voyage to Fletcher’s Island. Don’t you remember? It was about seventy-five years ago.”
“He’s a mortal, Giovanni,” Alfred said from inside the train. “He never sailed with you anywhere.”
“What are you talking about?” Rory asked, feeling bombarded. Giovanni squinted at him, sticking his head farther out the window as he peered at Rory intently.
“Maybe you’re not him,” he admitted. “You look like him, especially around the cheeks and chin, but you don’t have his eyes. Two’s Boys all have those eyes that never smile. You can’t mistake it. Strange. That man could have been your brother.”
A shock ran through Rory.
“Or my father?” he asked softly. Giovanni nodded thoughtfully.
“Definitely,” Giovanni agreed. “Was your father a sailor?”
A memory popped up in Rory’s head, of a man who looked just like his father on the deck of the ghost ship Half Moon. He’d doubted he really saw it. But could it be true . . . ?
“Oh well,” Giovanni said, pulling back into the train. “We’ve got a schedule to keep.”
“Wait!” Rory called, running up to the train. “What are Two’s Boys? Did you know him? When did you see him last? Was his name Peter Hennessy?”
“Peter who?” Giovanni replied. “Never heard of him. Grace, forward! Schedules must be met or everything falls apart!”
Alfred shrugged apologetically from inside the train as the subway car began to move. It picked up speed as it headed out of the station, disappearing into the darkness of the tunnel. And all Rory could do was watch, unanswered questions racing through his brain in endless circles.
Who were these Two’s Boys? If his father was one of them, then had he really been sailing on ghost ships, voyaging out into these mists Giovanni spoke of? Is that where he’d been all this time? Was he really that old?
Just who was Peter Hennessy, anyway?
4
HOME AGAIN
Down on the southern tip of the island, not far from the South Street Seaport, stood the oldest fine dining restaurant in the United States. Its rounded entrance looked out proudly onto the corner of Beaver and South William streets, guarded by a pair of stone pillars imported from the doomed city of Pompeii by the two brothers who had opened the establishment back in 1837. The sign above the door still boasted their famous last name, which had come to be synonomous with culinary greatness: DELMONICO’S.
Little besides the name connected the Delmonico’s that occupied the building in the present to its famous namesake. The restaurant had passed out of the family’s control during Prohibition, when the inability to cook with wine or serve spirits of any kind doomed the New York institution to closure. But the pillars from Pompeii remained, as did the name above the door; more importantly, the memory of the great restaurant that had so dominated nineteenth-century New York endured. And upstairs, unreachable by any mortal, a very different Delmonico’s from the pale imitation below lived on. Delmonico’s the way it was in its heyday a century before. Delmonico’s the way it was always meant to be.
Gods and spirits occupied almost all the tables in the large, candlelit room, drinking the memories of wine and diving into fond recollections of Delmonico’s renowned steak. Lorenzo Delmonico himself, the famous nephew of the founders whose sure hand had catapulted the establishment into the annals of history, manned the host station, seating the otherworldly guests as they arrived. Now the God of Fine Dining, Lorenzo prided himself on his attention to his diners’ every need. He had stopped by Diamond Jim Brady’s table at least ten times already in his vain attempt to somehow fill the man’s gigantic belly. Diamond Jim had been a millionare during his life, but it was his legendary love of food and stomach eight times normal size that had earned him the title of God of Overeating. But tonight even Diamond Jim’s jolly belly laughs sounded forced under the suffocating presence of the black-eyed man, who sat barely eating in the darkest corner of the room. He was joined at his table by a man whose girth challenged Jim’s own, a man who was also not a god to tri
fle with: T. R. Tobias.
The entire room quivered on edge as everyone avoided looking in the direction of the two gods’ table. Lorenzo knew he should see if their cups needed refilling, or if their meal was satisfactory. But he couldn’t bring himself to walk over to the black-eyed man’s table again. Each previous time, those eyes had rested upon him, marked him, remembered him. The last thing Lorenzo (or anyone in Mannahatta for that matter) wanted was to be noticed by Willem Kieft.
“What’s he doing here?” Diamond Jim muttered as Lorenzo refilled his wine.
“I believe he’s showing us that everything is fine,” Lorenzo replied. “He doesn’t want a panic.”
“If he doesn’t want a panic, then he shouldn’t come ’round ruining our dinner.” Diamond Jim’s scowl suggested there could be no greater sin.
Lorenzo said nothing, noting that both Kieft and Tobias had drained their glasses. Kieft drank only wine and barely touched his plate of vegetables, while Tobias was well into his fifth course. Lorenzo sighed, and gestured to a waiter nearby. He handed the luckless waiter a bottle of wine and sent the protesting spirit toward Kieft’s table. No need to risk himself, he thought, returning with a sigh to the host’s station. He had a restaurant to run.
The waiter had been one of the restaurant’s prize servers in his day; he’d seen no reason to stop after death. But right then he regretted not letting oblivion take him; anything to avoid the black-eyed man. As he timidly approached Kieft’s table, the waiter heard snippets of his conversation with Tobias; they seemed to be discussing a new play. But then something strange happened; the waiter stepped through some sort of invisible barrier and suddenly Kieft and Tobias were discussing something else entirely, and apparently had been the whole time. He froze, wine bottle in hand, terrified they’d realize that he’d broken their ward. They hadn’t noticed him yet, giving him time to make his escape, but he couldn’t make his legs work. Fear held him captive as their conversation drifted by.
“The rumors are flying all over the island,” Tobias was saying, waving his heavily laden fork about before taking a bite. “They may not all believe the Munsees are responsible, but it’s on everyone’s mind.”
“Good,” Kieft said, running a finger along the rim of his empty glass. The waiter prayed Kieft didn’t turn to ask for more wine. “I did not think it would take much pushing to remind the sheep why they feared the wolves.”
Tobias leaned back, his face looking bored with the entire conversation. “I still don’t understand the point.”
“Things are changing,” Kieft replied. “And we must change as well. Today’s earthquake will not be the last natural disaster to assail us. The island tries to throw off its shackles, and each attempt will be more violent than the last, until at last everything will lie in rubble at our feet.”
“That’s depressing,” Tobias replied, taking a small bite of a carrot before making a face and throwing it over his shoulder onto the floor. He picked up a potato and took a big bite with a satisfied sigh.
“Do you care for nothing but your next meal, you gluttonous fool?” Kieft said, his voice a whip across the God of Banking’s face. Tobias’s bored mask dropped for a moment and the waiter noted a real fear in the god’s eyes before the mask returned so quickly he doubted seeing it in the first place.
“Money and fine dining, is there anything else?” Tobias said glibly. “I will miss them both if the island falls apart around our ears.”
“That is why the Trap must come down,” Kieft said. “The island will no longer tolerate it.”
“This is . . . unexpected,” Tobias replied, putting down his fork. “Are you sure?”
“I assumed it would last forever, but that has proved optimistic of me. The Trap must fall or I will rule over a dead city. But once it falls . . . that is when we must act. Our secrets will be exposed, which must be handled swiftly, and with care. And then there are the Munsees. They are a threat to us and they must be eliminated. That is why I sow the rumors and the insinuations . . . we must ready the people for a desperate battle to the death with their ancient enemies. That is the only way to protect ourselves as we reach for what we ultimately desire.”
“What about the boy?” Tobias asked. “He has proven hard to kill.”
“We cannot kill him anymore, not if we want the Trap opened.” Kieft picked up his glass and stared at the empty bottom. “We must capture him and hold him until the city is ready for war. Then he will release the enemy and the games will begin. Of course it helps that after using every last trick I’ve learned over the past four hundred years, I have finally divined his own lost Light’s name . . . waiter!”
Kieft had turned to call for wine, when his gaze fell on the waiter standing near. His eyes widened, then glinted in the soft lamplight. “I see you anticipate my needs,” he said, in a voice that made the waiter’s bowels turn to water. “I fear I require you to stay close from now on. We have much to discuss, now, don’t we?”
The waiter couldn’t move as Kieft held him fast with those deep, black eyes. He knew he’d never repeat anything he just heard. He would never get the chance . . .
By the time Rory reached his family’s stoop on 218th Street, Tucket padding dutifully behind, the afternoon sun was beginning to dip behind the apartment buildings. The Hennessys lived in Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan, on the last street before the river. As Rory walked up his street, many of his neighbors were out on the sidewalks, picking up rubble and clearing the stoops and driveways of debris. Rory had no idea how powerful the quake had been, but the people of Inwood seemed to have weathered it all right; many of them were already smiling and joking as they worked. Lightning-fast Spanish darted back and forth through the air as the mostly Dominican and Puerto Rican families slowly relaxed after the ordeal of the day. Even though the ethnic makeup of Inwood had changed over the years, Rory’s mother fit in among her Hispanic neighbors as well as her mother had with the Irish who used to make up most of Inwood. Mrs. Hennessy had made it a point to learn the language, though she constantly apologized for her thick accent. Bridget, for her part, loved speaking Spanish (especially the cursing, to their mother’s mortification). It made Bridget feel like a great adventurer, able to speak many tongues. Rory had picked up some through osmosis, though not much. Enough to ask someone to throw him his ball on the basketball courts when it rolled away.
Even though thoughts of his father ran circles around his brain, Rory was still worried about his sister, and he raced up the steps to their second-floor apartment to make certain she’d made it home all right.
“Hello!” he called as he walked in the front door, Tucket trotting in behind him. “Is everyone okay?”
A loud squeal rang through the apartment. A figure ran across the living room and dove into the next room, slamming the door behind it.
“Bridget?” Rory called out, bemused. “Is that you?”
A muffled voice drifted through the door.
“Hold on! Jeez! Can’t I have a minute to myself? I am nine, you know. I’m not a baby!”
Rory rolled his eyes at Tucket, who, unsurprisingly, did not return the gesture.
“I just wanted to know that you weren’t dead or bleeding on the carpet.”
“Can’t I have some privacy?” Bridget shouted through the wood.
“Sure. It was just an earthquake. Nothing too important. By all means, enjoy your privacy. Did Mom come home yet?”
“She called to say that she’s still walking. So give me a second, already!”
Rory plopped down on the sofa as Tucket lay at his feet. The TV was on, a newscaster giving a solemn report in front of a couple of crashed cars.
“. . . out of nowhere,” she was saying. “No one got a good look at the figure’s face as it pulled the woman and her child from inside the car that had been almost completely crushed.”
A young woman appeared on-screen, being interviewed by the reporter.
“Whoever he was, I’m thankful
. We would have been goners without him. Thank you, stranger! Thank you!”
The door to Bridget’s room opened behind him and his younger sister ran in and gave a quick twirl.
“I’m great!” she cried. “See! How are you? Hey, Tucket! Here doggy!”
Tucket bounded up to Bridget and leaped up on her, licking at her face. Besides Rory, she was the only mortal who could see the dog, and she loved him to death (which, judging from the mauling she put the poor beast through when they played, wasn’t so far-fetched a concept). Rory gazed past her to her bedroom door, which was closed. Lately, Bridget was closing her door a lot. It was unlike her, and at first he had been worried she was using her papier-mâché body again—which he’d only allowed her to keep as a souvenir if she promised to never actually enter it—so he took an old bike chain and chained the empty paper shell to an ancient pipe in the back of her closet. He hid the key in the back of his own closet, in a shoe box under some old baseball cards, where he knew she’d never find it. And sure enough, the body remained locked up, undisturbed. But Bridget continued hiding away in her bedroom, so Rory decided it must be some sort of girl phase. He was a boy, so he couldn’t understand what she was doing in there all the time. But he knew enough not to get involved.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Where were you when the quake hit?”
“We were just finishing a basketball game, and I was killing them all,” Bridget exclaimed, waving her arms around her head, making Tucket chase her hands. “And then everything went crazy! The ground jumped around and everyone fell down except me. I was ready to fight whatever creature was coming to kill us, because I was sure it was something bad, like a giant hedgehog or something, but nothing showed up! It was just a stupid earthquake. All the girls were crying, but not me. I’ve beaten up big green monsters! I was like ‘Ooo, the ground moved! Scary!’ and the counselor told me to stop being sarcastic. It’s not my fault I’m not easy to scare!”
