Not a sound comes from the other end of the cell phone.
“There,” Ermete says a moment later, pointing at a massive but not-too-tall Chinese man standing by the elevators.
“I see him. He’s here,” Sheng says into the phone. “What’s going on?”
“They found us,” Mahler says. “It’s Four Fingers. Is he looking your way?”
“No.”
“Then he doesn’t know what you look like.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Don’t look at him. Grab all your things and get out of the hotel.”
“What about the others?”
“I’ll take care of that. Be at Rushan Lu, at the corner of Meiyuan Park, in a couple hours.”
“Elettra and Mistral—”
“They’re here with me,” the killer concludes before hanging up.
Many floors above, in the spectacular hallway that leads to their rooms, Mistral feels like she’s about to faint.
Jacob Mahler. The man who kidnapped her in Rome. Who threatened to kill her, locked her up in a room in the Coppedè district. The man who was supposed to be dead.
He’s there now, just a few steps away from them, standing beside her mother.
“Hello, Mistral.” He even has the nerve to speak to her.
Mistral looks the other way. She feels Elettra take her hand.
“Everything’s okay,” the Italian girl tells her. “He—”
Mistral doesn’t want to hear it. She whirls around. She refuses to speak to that man.
She doesn’t trust him.
She’ll never trust him.
“Get him out of here,” she says, standing by their door.
Mahler looks down at the lobby. “In the room, quick,” he orders.
They do as he says, but once they’re inside, Mistral locks herself in the bathroom. She stares into the mirror over the clear glass sink and turns on the water. Under any other circumstances, she would think the bathroom was stunning. But all she can think of right now is Jacob Mahler, who’s right outside the door, talking to Elettra and her mother.
“The second you try to leave, he’ll be on your tail,” the man is saying.
“How do you know that? We used fake names and passports.”
“Harvey, too?”
“What does Harvey have to do with it?”
“Was he supposed to stay at this hotel, too?”
“Yes, why?”
“It’s obvious. He isn’t positive you’re here, but he’s assuming you’ll come. And he’s willing to wait. In fact, he sent in the best man he’s got left to look for you.”
Mistral’s heart races faster and faster. She clearly remembers the moment she woke up in that bedroom in Rome, when Mahler came in to interrogate her.
“Don’t trust him, guys …,” she murmurs from behind the bathroom door. “You shouldn’t trust him.”
The noise of the hot water running in the sink drowns out the rest of the conversation. Steam fogs up the mirror and everything else.
“Mistral?” Elettra asks a moment later, knocking on the door. “Everything okay?” Then, when there’s no reply, she adds, “He’s gone.”
Mistral opens the door a crack. “We shouldn’t trust him.”
“He’s our only hope.”
“That’s not true; he’s not our only hope. Your aunt gave you the clues from 1907. We have those. And we still have one of the tops.”
“Yes, but Jacob … he knows the city. And Heremit Devil’s men.”
“He’s one of Heremit Devil’s men.”
“He used to be.”
“Where did he go?”
“He’s making plans with your mom.”
“What kind of plans? What does he have in mind?”
“He says we can’t go down there.”
“So …?”
“So … we go up.”
“Up? We’re on the seventieth floor! And once we get there?”
Elettra stares at her without replying.
“Once we get there?” Mistral asks again.
“DO YOU KNOW THE WAY THERE?” ERMETE ASKS AS HE DARTS OUT of the Jin Mao Tower, where the hotel is.
Ahead of him, Sheng crosses Lujiazui Green Park and heads toward the wide lanes of Jujiazhi Lu.
They’ve taken Irene’s cookie tin and Elettra’s backpack with them.
“You think he saw us?”
“No, but if you wait up for me, I might avoid having a heart attack.”
Sheng slows his pace a little.
“The address he gave you, is it very far away?” the engineer asks.
The two reach the intersection on the other end of the park. Six lanes of traffic. The first headlights zooming through the fading daylight. Tree branches swaying in the thick, damp, gentle breeze. The smell of rain in the air.
“Everything’s far away here.”
“I mean, do you want to walk there?”
Sheng scratches his head. “I guess so.”
Ermete opens his tourist map of Pudong, which he picked up at the hotel reception desk. “Where is it?”
“This way.”
“And where are we now?”
Sheng puffs. “C’mon, you know I’m no expert at reading maps.”
“Fine, but where are we?”
“Here, I think.”
“What do you mean, you think?”
“Um, no. Here. Maybe.”
Ermete stomps his foot.
“This is a city of twenty million people,” Sheng says in his defense. “Besides, Pudong isn’t my neighborhood.”
The engineer nervously runs his finger down the street names. “Why do you write them all in Chinese, anyway?” he grumbles. Then he looks up. Standing out against the dark sky, the Grand Hyatt’s tall profile looks like a giant precious gem.
“It sure is something …,” Ermete murmurs, letting his gaze linger. “These skyscrapers are nothing short of incredible. Now I know why they call it the New York of the East.”
“Well, they call it the Paris of the East, too,” Sheng adds. “But we should get moving if we want to reach Meiyuan Park in two hours.”
He waits for the green light and crosses the street.
Behind him, Ermete yawns. “Did you know that walking makes people sleepy?”
“I wish,” Sheng replies, his eyes red from exhaustion.
They walk along, the backpack slung over Ermete’s shoulders and the cookie tin tucked under Sheng’s arm. Tiny black specks in the jungle of mirrors.
“The last time I checked, I weighed forty-five kilos,” Elettra says from the ledge of the eighty-seventh floor of the Jin Mao Tower. The damp wind keeps pushing her hair forward over her eyes. Night descended upon the city like a shroud in under forty minutes. The girl’s voice is trembling. Around her, the Pudong skyscrapers are pillars of light. The immense city is spread out before her, immeasurable, infinite. Five paces in front of her is empty space. And on the very edge of that empty space, a shadow is crouched down.
It’s Jacob Mahler. He’s perfectly still, like a predator. He watches. He waits for the guests on the observation deck above them to leave. Beside him is a large backpack he picked up from his room. And a violin case.
“What about you?” the shadow asks Mistral.
The French girl is as pale as a ghost. Her oval face makes her look like a porcelain statue. Her fine, windswept hair covers her eyes. She keeps her hands pressed against the wall and the bag containing the Veil of Isis slung over her lean shoulder. Ten paces to their left and overhead, the hotel’s searchlights look like beams from a spaceship.
“Mistral?” Elettra asks. “How much do you weigh?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve never weighed myself.”
Jacob Mahler stands up, balancing on the edge of the tower’s eighty-seventh floor as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “You can’t weigh more than she does,” he says.
It’s as if he still remembers Mistral’s weight from wh
en he carried her out of the professor’s apartment in Rome.
He holds his violin case out to the girl, but she refuses to take it.
Jacob doesn’t insist. “You hold it,” he tells Elettra.
Then he begins to fasten the other backpack onto his shoulders, tightening the belt and straps.
“I need the bow,” he orders Elettra.
The girl clicks open the lock on the violin case, raises the lid, then brushes the hair out of her eyes and looks at the wooden instrument that was handmade in a shop in Cremona, S-shaped openings on either side of its unusual metal strings. Beside the violin is a razor-sharp bow.
Elettra hands it to Mahler, who uses it to slice his green-gray raincoat into strips. With astonishing swiftness, he fashions two crude harnesses.
From the street, a distant siren. The skyscrapers’ mirrored windows glimmer.
“Put them on,” Mahler tells the two girls.
“We can’t actually be doing this,” Elettra says, shuddering.
“They’ll hold.”
“What if they don’t?”
“Hug your friend,” Jacob Mahler orders.
“What?”
“Hug her.”
Mistral keeps her eyes shut and shakes her head. Elettra gently wraps her arms around her.
“Tighter,” Jacob Mahler says, behind her.
Elettra squeezes Mistral tight. Then, suddenly, she feels weightless. Mistral stifles a scream. A viselike grip has grabbed them by the sides and lifted them up. After a few seconds, Jacob Mahler puts them back down.
He used only one arm. “If they don’t hold,” he says, nodding at their harnesses, “I’ll hold you.”
At Rushan Lu, on the corner of Meiyuan Park, is a high-rise from the 1970s. A dozen stories, no taller. Gray and anonymous, apart from a tall radio/TV antenna that looks like a plume swaying on its roof. The main door at the top of the stairs is closed. And there’s no intercom.
“What now?” Ermete asks.
“We wait?” Sheng suggests.
The two sit down on the lowest steps, far from the fluorescent lights illuminating the entrance, far from the swarms of tiny insects dancing all around them.
“We could take a look inside the box,” Ermete says. “What do you say?” He rests the cookie tin on his lap and opens it: coins in different shapes and sizes, and the red-lacquered tile with four small black stylized knives.
“That’s it?”
“I guess so.”
They hand the coins to each other, one by one, reading the dates against the light.
“Old,” Sheng remarks, “and English.”
“What do you think they’re for?”
“I have no idea. No idea at all. Besides, today the city’s totally different from what it was like in 1907. I don’t think very much from back then is still around.”
Ermete examines the stylized knives on the red tile.
“We don’t like old things,” Sheng continues. “When a building needs renovations, we tear it down and build a new one that’s identical to the old one.”
Ermete nods, putting down the tile. “So to use these clues, the first thing we need to do is get a map of the areas of the city that were around back in 1907 … and are still around today.”
“Exactly,” Sheng agrees. “That won’t be so hard. The Huxinting Teahouse, the Yuyuan Garden, the Jade Buddha Temple, a couple old English buildings by the river in the Bund area … and a little something among the houses in the French Concession.”
“Not such a big area to investigate, then,” Ermete murmurs, handing Sheng the red tile.
“Oh!” the boy says, staring at it.
“Does it mean anything to you?”
“Nothing good,” Sheng says in a low voice. “Four daggers.”
“Meaning?”
“The Daggers is the name of the group of rebels who started up the revolt against the Westerners in the late eighteen hundreds.”
“Great.”
“And there are four of them.” Sheng shakes his head.
“So what?”
“It’s a superstition: in Shanghai, the number four brings bad luck because it’s pronounced like our word for death.”
“Death?”
Sheng nods, a bleak look on his face. “The word also means … to lose.”
Base jump.
That’s what they call leaping from tall buildings with the kind of equipment now strapped to Jacob Mahler’s back. To some, it’s an extreme sport. To others, the only possibility of getting out of a skyscraper without attracting too much attention.
“Ready?” Jacob Mahler asks from the ledge of the hotel.
“Yes,” Elettra answers.
Mistral doesn’t say anything. There’s no need.
“On three, all you have to do is run forward.”
Ahead of them is empty space. The wind. The city. The river. The girls are held in place by the harness made of strips of Jacob Mahler’s raincoat and by his arms.
Elettra can’t even think.
“One …”
Mistral moves her lips slowly. She’s singing beneath her breath.
“Two …”
Maybe she’s summoning the spirits of the air, Elettra thinks. Shanghai’s insects. The seagulls.
“Three.”
Jacob lunges forward. Elettra runs up to the edge of the Grand Hyatt, not even breathing. But by the time she even realizes she’s running, she’s already out there. In the void.
The wind swirls around her head, her body clasped in the strong arms of Jacob Mahler, the killer with the violin, the man who survived being shot in the gut, the explosion in a building in the Coppedè district. The man everyone believes was killed by Egon Nose’s women. The man who, instead, hid in the woods, perfectly still, waiting.
A dead man walking.
And who’s trying to fly.
Their forward thrust lasts less than a second. A long, eternal second. Then the fall surprises Elettra like a scream. It’s like being dragged down into the dark of night. A blinding whirl of lights springs to her eyes.
It’s a matter of another second.
Of two seconds.
Three.
Then Jacob Mahler lets go of the two girls, who plunge down along the vertical walls of the Jin Mao Tower, bound together with strips of green-gray fabric.
Upside down, Elettra sees her reflection in the building’s windows. Mistral is still singing.
Four seconds.
And the parachute finally opens.
A big black bat, which glides over the green lawns of Lujiazui Park and slips between the tall buildings like a ghost.
With three pairs of legs dangling in the void.
“DID YOU HAVE MADEMOISELLE CYBEL KILLED?” HARVEY ASKS.
Several minutes have passed since Nik Knife left the office. And Heremit Devil hasn’t said a word. Not one.
They’re the only two people in the room.
“Are you going to have me killed, too?”
Heremit Devil slowly looks up at him.
“And then who are you going to have killed?” the boy insists.
“You should know all about death,” the man replies. “Shall we talk about Dwaine?”
To Harvey, hearing his late brother’s name is like a punch in the stomach. He feels bitter rage boiling up inside of him. But he can’t let himself react. Heremit is a cold, heartless, contemptible creature who’s just trying to provoke him. Harvey’s boxing trainer taught him how to act. Don’t listen. Don’t react. Keep your head up. Stay light on your feet. Focus. Don’t listen. Don’t react. But strike blow for blow.
“Sure, why not?”
The hum of TV screens switching on. New York. Rome. Paris. Shanghai. Images of places Harvey recognizes. The remote control zooms in on an image here, an image there. Rockefeller Center. Cybel’s restaurant in Paris. Tiberina Island. The images flash by one after the other in a fury of zapping.
“Just one day left until September twenty-first, Miller.
”
“And two left until the twenty-second.”
“Very amusing. But useless.”
The remote clatters onto the desk. Heremit Devil’s hand sweeps over the tops and grabs the one marked with a skull.
Harvey gives a start. He’s never seen that top before.
“When you were a child, Miller, did you already have one of these? One of the tops of the Chaldeans?”
Don’t listen. Don’t react.
“No, you didn’t. You weren’t a lucky child. You were just a child born on a very strange day. A day that doesn’t exist. A strange child. Very strange. A child who grew up with everyone smiling at you, but they were really thinking, ‘He’s so strange.’ Isn’t that right?”
Keep your head up. Stay light on your feet.
“But when it came to your brother, everyone said, ‘Oh, he’s smart. Very smart. He’s going to make us proud. Not like Harvey. Leap year. Bad luck.’ Like the tail on a comet. Something that sticks to you forever. You don’t think that, but others do.”
Strike blow for blow. “You’re pathetic,” Harvey says.
The man spins the top on the desk. “And you didn’t have this. Your masters gave it to you much later. In an old, worn leather briefcase. After a long journey from Paris to Rome. Hoping to get there in time. Four tops. One for each of you. Which one was yours?”
Heremit Devil holds up the other tops one by one. “The soldiers’ quarters … or tower, as you call it? Here’s the million-dollar answer, you ignorant fool: the Chaldeans didn’t have towers. Was this one yours?”
“Nobody has their own top. The tops belong to everybody.”
“To everybody? Of course! That’s what I used to believe. Instead, someone decided they were only yours, that they belonged to Harvey Miller. And Mistral Blanchard. Elettra Melodia and … finally … the Chinese boy.”
When the office is quiet again, Harvey thinks he hears a faint, distant yet persistent call. A voice is calling his name, but with a pained, suffering tone.
“Who’s calling me?” he asks Heremit Devil in a hushed voice.
The skull top has come to a halt in the center of the desk.
“What’s that?”
“I hear someone calling my name,” Harvey says. And as he does, he sees the man’s stony mask quiver. He watches the man reach out, his perfectly manicured fingers trembling slightly, press a button on the intercom and bark the order, “Take Mr. Miller to his room.”
Century #4: Dragon of Seas Page 10
