Century #4: Dragon of Seas

by Pierdomenico Baccalario

  Mistral looks at the newsstand and sees that no women are working there. There’s a young man with a beard.

  “Give it a try,” her mother says.

  Mistral asks anyway and, just like what happened in Piazza Argentina in Rome, a moment later she’s holding a copy of the professor’s keys. And a mountain of newspapers he ordered.

  Play.

  “Go straight down Boulevard de Magenta, toward Place de la République. Stop at number eighty-nine. To get inside, you need to type seven-one-four-five into the entry phone.”

  Pause.

  The time to reach the address, find the entry phone, punch in the access code and step into the courtyard.

  Play.

  “Go to the door all the way at the back. Use the small key to unlock it. Then go upstairs. The big key opens the door on the top floor. No, I’m sorry … there’s no elevator.”

  Pause.

  Mistral and her mom walk across the courtyard, find the door already open and start climbing the narrow spiral staircase. The handrail and steps are worn from use.

  Play.

  “You must be wondering why I left you this message. That’s a good question. Don’t expect just as good an answer, though. All I can tell you is that I probably should’ve been there, in Paris, but the situation got out of our control. I had to go elsewhere. Not trusting the mail system, I entrusted an old friend of ours.”

  Mistral climbs up past the second and third floors.

  “The truth is, it’s very difficult to help you kids without telling you anything. They instructed us that we can only leave you clues and hope you follow them … and get further than we did.”

  Mistral climbs up past the fourth and fifth floors.

  “Just like you, there were four of us. Who are we? That’s easy: we’re the ones who faced the Pact before you did, in 1907. Yes, you heard me right: 1907.”

  Mistral climbs up past the sixth floor and reaches the seventh floor.

  There’s a closed door.

  “Today, the Pact is called Century. That isn’t its real name. It’s the name we gave it … when the problems began.”

  Mistral pulls the keys out of her pocket.

  “The four of us knew nothing about the existence of the Pact when we started out. But, like Alfred always used to say, anything can be learned.”

  Mistral slides the big key into the lock.

  “Be careful around your house, Mistral. Don’t trust anyone.”

  The girl turns the key. One, two, three times.

  “And don’t stop singing, ever.”

  She opens the door a crack and sees a small apartment with parquet floors. Inside, the air is stale. The windows are barred.

  “Keep going, Mistral,” Vladimir’s voice continues. “Because in 1907, we didn’t.”

  NEW YORK.

  Mrs. Miller isn’t used to the house being so empty. With her husband out of town, Harvey out of town, too, and Dwaine gone for years now, she feels like the last person on Earth. It’s nighttime now, the night Harvey left, and the restaurants in the Village in New York have switched on their first lights. She’s going to eat in. She would be embarrassed to eat at a restaurant all alone. Besides, it would make her even sadder.

  There are two messages on the answering machine. The first is just a strange noise. The second is from Harvey’s boxing trainer.

  “Ma’am, this is Olympia MacMahon. I’m sorry I’m calling at this hour, but I thought I should warn you about a possible danger. Watch out for an old guy named Egon Nose. I repeat: Egon Nose. He might do something nasty to your place. If you use a security service, call them. Or check into a hotel for a while. Believe me, this isn’t a joke. If you want to talk to me, my number is 212-234 …”

  Strange message, Mrs. Miller thinks. Disturbing, to say the least.

  She tries the number Olympia left, but it’s busy, so she goes upstairs to her son’s bedroom to look for the gym’s number. When she’s in Harvey’s room, she hears a strange noise coming from the attic but thinks nothing of it.

  The number isn’t on his bed.

  Mrs. Miller opens his desk drawers. She’s surprised to notice the corner of a passport sticking out of a padded envelope addressed to Harvey. She opens it.

  “Heavens!” she exclaims.

  It’s a photocopy of a fake passport with Harvey’s face and the name James Watson. Mrs. Miller scans down the other information, alarmed.

  Then she empties out the drawer and the ones below it.

  What is Harvey doing with a fake passport? And what’s the meaning behind the young woman’s warning about that man called Nose? What kind of people is her son mixed up with?

  There’s another suspicious package: a private investigator’s kit. Micro-flashlights concealed in the most unimaginable objects. An all-purpose micro-screwdriver …

  The phone rings, making her shriek.

  “Hello?”

  They hang up.

  Mrs. Miller’s heart beats faster.

  The first thing that comes to her mind is to call her husband. The second … is that someone’s on the roof.

  Gun, Harvey’s mother thinks instantly. But she knows perfectly well there’s no gun in the house.

  Again, noises on the roof.

  Wait, Mrs. Miller tells herself, trying to muster up her courage. She looks at the pull-down ladder that leads up to the attic door. Maybe the noise is just Harvey’s carrier pigeon. Maybe it’s hungry. It’s getting restless in its cage and I thought it was footsteps on the roof.

  She climbs up the ladder and opens the door. Everything is dark, with the exception of a shaft of light coming in through the skylight. The woman gropes around for the light switch.

  Her hand gets caught in something.

  She screams.

  She flicks on the light.

  They’re just strings. Strings everywhere, with photographs of Elettra hanging from them.

  Mrs. Miller lays a hand on her chest. How foolish of her to be so frightened. They’re just pictures. And the girl is so pretty. Harvey is clearly very fond of her.

  The attic ceiling is so low that she’s forced to walk hunched over. Where on earth is the pigeon’s cage?

  Another noise, this time louder, from on top of the roof.

  She stares at the skylight, terrified. She moves toward it, trying to figure out where the noise—and she screams.

  There’s a man outside the dormer.

  An enormous man.

  Who kicks open the window.

  Letting a crow with a cloudy eye fly into the attic.

  Paris.

  A small group of people is staked out on Rue de l’Abreuvoir in Montmartre, the artists’ quarter. They’re sitting at a corner café called La Maison Rose and keeping tabs on the building across the street, which is covered with creeping ivy tinged a fiery autumn red. They’ve been sitting on the green plastic chairs for hours. And now their boss is asking for an update.

  “No one’s here,” one of them says over the phone. “No Mistral Blanchard.”

  He pulls the receiver away from his ear as a deafening shower of protests comes from the other end of the line.

  “Very well, Mademoiselle Cybel, I understand: she’ll turn up. All right,” he concludes. “We’ll wait for her.”

  Rome.

  The shadow of a long-haired woman sneaks along the southern boulevard by the Tiber before turning down the lane to Piazza in Piscinula. She’s careful not to be noticed and keeps close to the walls.

  It doesn’t take her long to spot the Domus Quintilia sign. Or to check whether the front door is locked.

  IT’S COLD DOWN THERE.

  The basement is a maze of rooms, each one damper and more deserted than the last. Dark niches, flaking walls, furniture with open, empty drawers. Black-and-white photographs and old documents that the mice have begun to gnaw on.

  Elettra looks for a passageway leading to the spot below the well. To her surprise, it doesn’t take long to find it. It’s behin
d a massive wardrobe positioned at an awkward angle by the wall. There’s a gap between the wall and the heavy wood, and she needs to squeeze through it, ignoring the spiderwebs and the dust.

  The passageway leads into another room, its floor covered with rugs.

  The air isn’t as musty here. On one end, the metal doors to the elevator. On the other end, a little wooden door that leads who knows where. A lightbulb hangs from the wall.

  She’s below the courtyard of the Domus Quintilia.

  Elettra shivers. She shines her flashlight on the ground and goes over to the wooden door. Before trying to open it, she listens. Not a sound. Not even someone’s breathing as they sleep. She pushes on the door gently, opens it a crack, slips her flashlight inside.

  Another room.

  To the right of the door, the light switch. Elettra shines her flashlight all around.

  In the center of the room is a big, wooden desk. On it, an open address book, a portable satellite telephone and an old black Bakelite phone whose cord trails off into the darkness.

  On the back wall is a world map with all the cities crossed out in black ink. On the continents are dark lines, dotted lines, arrows, incomprehensible annotations. Four yellow pieces of paper are attached with just as many pushpins to Rome, New York, Paris and Shanghai.

  Then, a blackboard, on which Aunt Irene has written and circled in chalk: SEE TO IT THAT SHENG GROWS UP.

  On the last wall are dozens of photos of children, their faces crossed out with a red marker. A sign above the pictures reads LIST OF THOSE BORN ON FEBRUARY 29.

  Beside it, a filing cabinet. One of its drawers is open a crack. Elettra steps into the room and walks over to the cabinet. She opens the drawer, shines her flashlight into it and takes a peek. It contains dozens of pink file folders labeled ELETTRA.

  Inside the folders are photos, notes, episodes from her life, all organized year by year. A picture of her mom. Her parents at their wedding. The first mirror she burned out. There’s even a photograph of Zoe with three red circles drawn around her.

  Her aunt Irene has written meticulous notes on all the material.

  Powers of fire: strong magnetic fields. Watch out for her outbursts of anger. She tends to lose control (December 28 and 29, March 20, June 19).

  Close friendship with Harvey, or stronger feelings?

  Elettra is horrified. They know me. They’ve been watching me and studying me since I was born. But why, Aunt Irene?

  She yanks open the other drawers: Harvey’s life, Mistral’s, Sheng’s.

  Harvey Miller. Powers of earth. Suspected bouts of depression (December 4, April 9). Introverted. Inclination to act alone.

  Mistral Blanchard. Powers of air. Possible psychological consequences from kidnapping in Rome (December 30). Indispensible that she do well on her exams at the Paris Conservatory.

  Sheng Young Wan. Powers of water. As yet unmanifested. Only known episodes: anomalous coloration of his pupils. Replaces Hi-Nau, the chosen one.

  “Hi-Nau?” Elettra asks aloud.

  Flipping through the folder, she finds the picture of a young boy with Asian features, black hair and deep-set eyes.

  Elettra hears the wheelchair creak behind her. She doesn’t even try to put everything back in its place. There’s no time.

  She stands there, stock-still, until the wheelchair reaches the doorway.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be Sheng,” Aunt Irene says softly, behind her. “That boy, Hi-Nau, was tremendously powerful. More powerful than the rest of you.”

  Elettra turns around slowly, very slowly. Her aunt—or the woman who claims to be her aunt—is staring at her. Her face is aglow from a candle on the arm of her wheelchair.

  “Us who, Aunt Irene?”

  “The four of you. The four disciples.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you are the four children of Ursa Major … and the others are hunters trying to track you down.”

  “Auntie, what does all this mean?”

  “Quite simply, that we’re all stars.”

  “Please don’t talk in riddles.”

  “It’s the only way I’m allowed to talk to you.”

  “Why? Who are you, really?”

  “I’m one of the four who came before you,” the old woman says, wheeling herself into the room with both hands.

  “The four what, Auntie?”

  “The four disciples,” Irene answers with a weary smile.

  Then she raises her hand in a strange gesture, the candle goes out and Elettra instantly slides to the ground, fast asleep.

  “We suggest you take a nap now,” the two Air China stewards threaten. After his prank with the bathroom, they searched Harvey’s things and insisted he move to the back row of the plane so the service staff can keep a constant eye on him.

  “Thanks for understanding, guys,” he says.

  “We’ll have some fun when we get to Shanghai, wait and see,” the burly steward adds.

  “I’m already laughing.”

  “I’ve never liked smart-aleck kids.”

  “Well, I’ve always had a weakness for mountains of muscles.”

  The steward glares at him and walks off. Harvey puts his father’s books and journals into his backpack, along with his notes and opened letters. There are all kinds of things: studies on global air pollution, catastrophic graphs, charts on the present status of the greenhouse effect, a book documenting temperature changes and tides, an astronomical abstract, a list of solar eclipse dates between 1950 and 2050, and a long newspaper article about intelligent rocks, on which his father has underlined several passages and written his name followed by a question mark.

  Harvey glances over it. The author claims that many ancient myths about gods born from stone might have a deeper meaning; that is, that men were actually born from stones that fell from space. Stars of stone that contained microorganisms complete with DNA, waiting to crack open and return to life as soon as they came into contact with water.

  “Whoa,” Harvey murmurs. He flips through the rest of the material, growing more nervous with every page.

  JACOB MAHLER HANDS THE TAXI DRIVER A SLIP OF PAPER AND SAYS, “We feel like having a decent coffee.”

  Then, in silence, he waits for the car to make its way from Shanghai’s south side to the French Concession. Passing by outside the window are congested streets, skyscrapers in iridescent colors, the characteristic bridge spanning the river with spiral ramps, anonymous cement buildings with all kinds of shops and, finally, the French residential quarter with its old colonial dwellings.

  The taxi pulls up in front of the Bonomi Café, located in a villa from the early 1900s, with large, elegant rooms and little tables on the lawn. Immersed in the colossal city, it looks like the classic fairy home in the middle of the woods with a pointed red roof and sponge-cake doors.

  Mahler gets out of the car without even looking around and walks up the path leading inside as if it was his own home.

  “Hey!” grumbles Ermete, the last one left in the taxi. The engineer pulls out a wad of banknotes and tries to find out from the taxi driver how much they owe him. Then he runs inside the café. Mahler and Sheng have chosen a secluded room with elegant wooden furniture. Their table offers a view of the garden and is surrounded by low stools in red leather.

  The three order two coffees and an ice-cold soda.

  “What do you want to know first?”

  “Why does he live on the second-to-top floor of his building?” Ermete asks.

  Jacob Mahler raises an eyebrow.

  “I mean, if the building’s all his, why doesn’t he live on the top floor?” the engineer insists.

  “Another question?”

  Sheng leans forward nervously and asks, “What kind of business is he in?”

  “Triads and banghui,” is Mahler’s succinct reply.

  Ermete shoots him a puzzled glance.

  “Chinese mafia,” Sheng explains.

  “Not exactly,” Ma
hler says. “The banghui were secret business societies. Illegal business, naturally. Their names speak for themselves: the Daggers, the Opium Dragons.… They were all that remained of the ancient societies who did business with the English, or the French, back when they still traded here. They came about when the East India Company was shut down. The first wars broke out to gain control of the Indian opium that the English brought to the port in their battleships and sold at the mouths of the river. Bloody wars in which many of the banghui were wiped out. But not all of them. Not the Devils, as they called themselves so that the Westerners would be sure to remember them. The Devils. Half English, half Chinese: a mixed family, and one of the city’s most ferocious ones. The years passed, but they stayed standing. Even when the Green Gang arrived.”

  Jacob Mahler takes a long pause, stirring sugar into his coffee. “It was 1888. The Shanghai boatmen’s guild, the most feared of all the local mafias—they were the ones who started the Opium Wars so they could take over the whole city. But they didn’t manage to, not completely. When the Second Opium War broke out, the Devils kept a low profile. They left the opium business to others and started to build houses that they’d sell later on. To both sides. The century passes by, the First World War, the Second. Instead of houses, skyscrapers. The real estate business does better than the drug trade, and while the secret societies dealing in opium are being crushed one by one, the Devils keep on building. Up until today, when the dynasty is cut short. And comes to an end. With our man.”

  Mahler finishes half his coffee with one swig.

  “He calls himself Heremit. Nobody knows his real name. He’s the one who sent me out to track you down.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Fifty?” Jacob Mahler replies. “I’m not sure. There aren’t any birth certificates or residency records. There aren’t any documents at all. The building he lives in doesn’t even show up on Shanghai’s city maps. And if you look for him by satellite, well …” He chuckles. “The satellite’s his.”

  Sheng gulps.

  Ermete, on the other hand, starts fiddling with his spoon. “I’ve always wanted my own satellite. To see things before anyone else does, you know? Do you think it’s true they can actually take pictures of the license plates on your—”