“That way,” he says, pointing to a set of rough wooden stairs near the last window.
I consider asking Claude for a hand, but he looks occupied.
“Come along, sister,” I say. Abbie keeps her palms together and walks stiffly with me up the narrow staircase.
The attic only has one tiny window. I stoop to avoid hitting my head on the overhead beams. The room is completely bare except for a simple table and chair. Set into the slanted ceiling directly above the table is a hatch that I almost miss seeing.
I’m about to touch my wrist when Abbie stops me. “Wait, we’re not on the roof yet.”
“No need to,” I say. “We can timeleap from here.”
“True,” she says. “But who knows when we’ll be back in France? C’mon, let’s see what the view is like from up there.”
Checking my fingernail, I see we’ve still got eight minutes left. “All right.”
I climb on the table and tug at the hatch. On my third try, it opens and light spills into the attic along with some fat raindrops.
Abbie scampers onto the table, and I boost her out to the roof.
“Climb up and join me, Cale. It’s glorious out here!”
I grab hold of both sides of the hatch, hoist myself up and then crawl on all fours to a spot beside her.
She’s right. It’s a great view. The road winds past the village into a forest, emerges on the other side and then finally disappears between some distant hills.
It’s raining hard now. If we don’t timeleap soon, we’ll both be completely drenched. But since it’s a warm rain, I don’t mind it so much. Besides, it feels good to be up here, just the two of us, the snatch under our belts.
Just then Abbie stands up and thrusts her hands to the heavens.
“The spire shudders under the cries of travelers gone mad,” she chants, “while the demon’s ill-gotten rubies lie undisturbed beneath still, deep waters.”
I smile at the sight of her.
I can’t help noticing how wet she is and, more to the point, how her wet dress is clinging to her body. While we’re on the topic, I also can’t help noticing how different her body looks from the way I remember it to be. There are definite curves there. Female curves.
New feelings swirl through me. I look away, embarrassed. But it doesn’t seem like Abbie noticed anything. Or, if she has, she’s not letting on.
After a moment she sighs. “I’m ready to head back now. You?”
“Sure,” I say.
I catch a last glimpse of Abbie as she touches her wrist and is gone.
Just before I timeleap, I gaze out at the horizon. The rain is letting up and the sky is definitely brightening. I wonder if there’ll be a rainbow. But I don’t stick around to find out. Tap, tap at my wrist and I leave 1826 far behind.
I land in the same place we left from—the alleyway beside Headquarters. Abbie is already there, just coming out of her time freeze.
“I’m going to go ahead and hand in the snatch object, okay, Cale?” she says. “I need to get out of these wet clothes as soon as possible.”
I grunt in the affirmative, which is about all I can do until I’m out of my time freeze. As she turns to go, I try not to look at her. That is, I try not to look at her in the same way that I was looking at her on the rooftop in France. Why is that so hard to do? After all, this is Abbie we’re talking about. She could be my sister, for all the time we spent together growing up.
As soon as my time freeze thaws, I follow Abbie’s trail of drips to the sidewalk and then up the front walk to Headquarters.
“Don’t young people these days have any respect?” says Phoebe as soon as I step onto the elevator. Her persona is a little gray-haired woman who looks like she’s being swallowed up by a huge armchair. She’s knitting something, but I can’t tell what it is just yet.
“How do you mean?” I say.
“Just look at your feet,” she says, stabbing a knitting needle in the direction of the floor.
I look down. A small puddle, a souvenir from France, is forming near my boots.
“Er … sorry. I’ll clean it up.”
“When?”
“I don’t know … in a few minutes. As soon as you let me off on four, I’ll look around for a rag or something and then come right back.”
“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” she says. “You’re not the only one who uses this elevator. I get a lot of traffic, you know. They’re all going to think I had a little accident on the floor. How can you do this to your grandmother?”
“You’re not my grandmother, Phoebe. In fact, you’re nobody’s grandmother.”
She falls silent, and I grind my teeth. True or not, did I really need to add the second bit about her not being anyone’s grandmother?
“You hurt my feelings,” she says predictably.
I’ve got to stay calm and work this out. Otherwise, I’ll never get to the fourth floor. I wonder what Abbie did about her drips? She was even wetter than me.
“All right, what would you like me to do? Wipe it up with my sleeve?” I say.
“Is your sleeve dry?”
I run my fingers along my sleeve. The outside is still pretty wet, but the part closest to my body is bone dry. “Half and half,” I say.
Phoebe’s persona looks up from her knitting and gives me a grandmotherly smile. “Well, then, you may use the dry half.”
I drop to the floor and wipe the puddle away.
Finally, the elevator starts to move.
“What are you knitting, Phoebe?” I ask to lighten the mood.
“A noose,” she says, and we ride the rest of the way in silence.
June 22, 2061, 5:47 P.M.
Timeless Treasures Headquarters
Tribeca, New Beijing (formerly New York City)
The couch squeaks in protest as I sit and press the Access button.
The opposite wall retracts, revealing the reception area for Timeless Treasures. It’s totally lit up, but even so, before I move, I ready myself. Although Nassim prefers to strike under cover of darkness, he has also been known to launch surprise attacks with all the lights on.
All is quiet, though, when I step through. He must still be with Abbie, completing the paperwork for Operation Shutterbox.
No one is in the hall or in the lounge. Then I remember Frank saying something about going on a collection for Uncle and that the others had traveled back to 2059 on garbage duty.
I enter the boys’ dorm, kick off my boots, strip off my wet clothes and flop down on my bed. The room has two double bunk beds. Mine is the lower bunk nearest the door. Raoul, a junior time snatcher, has the bunk above me. Frank sleeps in the other lower. The top bunk above Frank has been empty for about two weeks. Johan, its most recent occupant, went missing during a mission to Renaissance Italy. The word around Timeless Treasures is that he tried to escape but Uncle found him working as a street musician in 1553 Florence and shipped him off to the Barrens as a punishment, leaving Raoul without a partner. Before Johan, there was Vlad, and before Vlad, there was Rudy, who used to sneak out of the dorm late at night and wander the streets of New Beijing aimlessly, carrying a lock of hair that he said belonged to his dog. There were also a couple of others whose names I forget.
In any event, Frank uses the top bunk now as extra storage space for all of his junk. From the look of things, he’s brought back souvenirs from every mission he and Lydia have been on plus all of his solo missions. If Lydia did the same, I’m betting the two of them could make a killing holding a garage sale. Some of Frank’s stuff, like the coins and pocket watches, doesn’t take up that much space, but throw in the upper half of a seventeenth-century suit of armor, a twentieth-century wet suit and a fifteenth-century crossbow, and that bed fills up in no time.
I’m tired. Two snatches is a lot for one day. Of course, Uncle wouldn’t call it two because I came back empty-handed from China. Well, I don’t want to think about that right now.
I let my thought
s wander, and an image from Beijing pops into my head—of the father swinging his young son through the air. I wish I had known my own father. The way Uncle tells it, just before she died, my mother signed the papers giving me up for adoption. “Your father was never in the picture, Caleb. He abandoned you and your mother right after you were born,” was all he said.
For a long time I used to think Uncle made up the whole story of me being adopted so that I’d see him as a hero, saving me from a life on the streets. And if it was a lie, I figured, then Uncle must have kidnapped me—grabbed me away from my parents just like Frank is going to do to that kid. Which, quite frankly, is what I wanted to believe. I just couldn’t stand to think of my parents as being dead or as having abandoned me. But now I don’t know what I think. A few times, I came close to traveling to my own past to find out the truth. But I stopped myself each time, afraid that if I did go back and found out the real truth, it would be too much for me to handle.
I reach under my bunk and search until I feel the driftwood. It’s in its usual spot snug between the bed frame and the mattress.
I found the hand-sized piece of driftwood three years ago on a mission to Tofino, Canada. I read once that real artists don’t start with a fixed idea of what their sculpture’s going to be. Instead, they try to uncover the sculpture from the piece of stone or wood. I don’t consider myself an artist, but I like that idea: taking layers off of something to discover what’s really underneath. It took me a whole year to figure out what my wood carving was going to be. I’m fairly sure that I’m uncovering a face, but the jury’s still out on whose.
My progress is slow, but I’ve got it to the point where you can see a bit of the nose and the eyes.
I flip the wood around and look at it from different angles. I wonder if it will have a happy or sad expression.
Running my fingers along the surface, I allow my mind and body to relax. With any luck, I can make some good progress before it’s time for supper. But after about a minute, I find it hard to keep my eyes open.
Nassim’s voice over the intercom wakes me.
“Good evening, people. Dinner will be in five minutes. The word for this evening is piào liàng, translation: ‘beautiful.’ Everyone must use this word in a sentence at dinner this evening.”
I groan. Uncle has been on this Mandarin kick for about a month now. He’s convinced that, with the Great Friendship, it’s just a matter of time before Mandarin becomes the language of choice for conducting business in the West. Don’t get me wrong. I like learning new languages as much as the next guy. But does it have to happen at mealtime?
With some effort, I trudge to the bathroom and wash my face. No matter how tightly I close the tap, water still drips from the faucet. “The only place where a leaky faucet is piào liàng is in the desert,” I think. Not bad, but I doubt the others will appreciate it.
When I get to the lounge, everyone is already there except for Uncle. I take my usual seat next to Abbie.
Abbie runs a hand through her hair and flashes me a smile.
Lydia is seated on the other side of Abbie. She likes that spot because she can see her reflection in the window. As far as she is concerned, there are not nearly enough mirrors in the world. Apart from loving herself, Lydia’s a bit of a mystery. She laughs hard at all Frank’s inane jokes, however, which puts her on his team as far as I’m concerned.
Across from Lydia is Raoul. Now, there’s a guy who gets my sympathy. He wants to do well but just hasn’t got the talent. He can’t seem to size up a situation and take appropriate action, which is almost second nature for the rest of us. And he tends to drop stuff. Again, not a great quality for a thief. None of this was obvious while Johan was his partner because I think he used to cover for Raoul. But now with Johan gone his flaws are more noticeable. It’s anyone’s guess why Uncle still keeps him around.
“Uncle has asked that we start without him,” says Nassim, and immediately I can feel the tension in the room go down.
“He will join us as soon as he finishes up with a client,” he continues, and the tension ratchets back up a notch.
“Caleb, will you say the prayer, please?”
I look down at my plate. Saying the blessing is still fairly new. Uncle introduced the idea a couple of weeks ago, saying that studies show that saying a prayer before eating has spiritual and physical health benefits. Healthy or not, I hate it. We’re not allowed to say the same one twice, and all the variations of the easy ones are already long used up. Then I remember something I saw on a Domino’s pizza billboard on West Broadway.
“A slice is twice as nice as rice. Amen.”
Nassim opens his mouth as if he’s about to say something but then closes it.
Frank gets up. “Abbie, would you like to help me serve the Peking duck?”
She jumps out of her seat, as if her pants are on fire. “You made Peking duck, Frank? You’re amazing.”
And there it is. She thinks he’s amazing just because he can cook a dead bird. But this isn’t the first time I’ve heard Abbie say the words amazing and Frank in the same sentence. Why anyone would be impressed with Frank easily makes my top ten list of life’s greatest mysteries (I have it as number four, right between Stonehenge and the Pyramids). Maybe it’s his looks: I suppose he could be considered handsome by some members of the opposite sex, what with all those muscles and teeth. Not that he has more teeth than average—they’re just so blindingly white. Or maybe it’s his take-charge attitude. Whatever. In my book, Frank is totally false: he cares only about himself. Plus, if he sees you as a threat, he’ll do everything in his power to take you down.
I slouch in my chair. Much as I can’t stand Frank, I have to admit he’s good at everything he does, including cooking. And with the Great Friendship, he’s expanded his repertoire to Chinese dishes.
A minute later, he returns, toting a huge platter with a shiny brown roast duck on it. Abbie is right behind him with a plate of cucumbers and a bowl of sauce.
He starts carving up the bird with expert strokes. Frankly, I’m surprised that Uncle okayed this meal. That duck must have been très expensive.
Just then, Nassim sits up ramrod straight. Next, I hear crisp, military-like footfalls coming down the hall. Only one person walks that way.
“Good evening, all,” says Uncle as he sweeps into the room. He’s wearing a bright yellow silk robe with red dragons up and down the sleeves, which, as he likes to point out, is a hanfu, the same kind of robe the emperors of ancient China wore. But it doesn’t end there. He’s got a funny-looking black hat on that looks like the ones university students wear when they graduate. Except that his has strands of pearls dangling from the front and back. And to top it all off, tucked into his belt is the most amazing sword I’ve ever seen: polished dark wood handle encrusted with rubies and emeralds and a wicked-looking blade.
“Good evening, Uncle,” we all say at once.
He tilts his head up and breathes in. “Glorious!” he says. “Who is responsible for this wonderful aroma?”
“Frank cooked tonight, boss,” says Nassim.
“Excellent,” says Uncle, taking his seat at the head of the table and digging in.
We eat in silence. The key to eating when Uncle’s around is to finish before him because he doesn’t like people eating when he’s talking. The problem is he’s a speedy eater, and sometimes it’s really tough to keep up.
While I chow down, I sneak glances to see how far along he is. On my third glance, Uncle’s already dabbing his mouth with his napkin.
“A wonderful meal,” he proclaims. “My compliments to the chef.” He tips his head toward Frank.
“Thank you, Uncle,” says Frank, beaming.
“No. Thank you, Frank!” Uncle repeats. “Did you know, people,” he continues, “that in addition to his fine abilities as chef, Frank completed fifteen snatches so far this month?”
While everyone else oohs and ahhs, I’m doing some quick calculations in my head. By my co
unt, including the Great Friendship flag, Frank actually has sixteen snatches to my eighteen. But Uncle said fifteen. He must not have counted the Great Friendship flag as one of Frank’s completed snatches. But why not?
“Before we begin with the sentences you have been asked to prepare,” says Uncle, “I’d like to tell a short story.”
I fidget in my seat. It’s going to be a long night. Despite what he said, Uncle doesn’t tell short stories.
“This particular story is true,” Uncle says. “Some of you may have heard it before. It is the story of the beginning of Timeless Treasures.”
We all smile. Each of us has heard the story at least a million times. But it’s one of his all-time favorites, and it would be unwise for any of us to point that out.
“At the time, I was a young man, not much older than each of you,” begins Uncle. “One of my favorite activities was to wander through Central Park late at night and see what I could see.”
What he really means is “steal what I could steal.”
“One night, while prowling the park,” he continues, “I came upon an old woman seated on a bench. She looked no different than any of the other deranged people I had often encountered on my nocturnal wanderings—her hair was a frazzle of gray, and she wore layers and layers of mismatched clothes. A shopping cart next to the bench contained all of her earthly possessions. I approached her very carefully with my hands in full view. One had to be that way with the old ones, you know, because some of them grew their fingernails quite long and weren’t shy to use them if they felt threatened.
“In fact, the old woman was not particularly pleased to see me. I distinctly remember her baring her yellowed teeth, much like a cornered animal, and growling at me to leave.”
“So what did you do, Uncle?” asks Lydia. Leave it to her to encourage him. Why is she even asking the question? We all know exactly what he did.
“Well, Lydia,” says Uncle, “I actually would have left the park at that point, had I not noticed that one of the old woman’s hands was clenched tight around something and that, even as she was warning me away, she kept sneaking glances at her fist. I sensed that whatever she held in her hand was very important. At that moment, I made up my mind not to leave until I found out what it was.”
Time Snatchers Page 5
