Century #4: Dragon of Seas Read online

  Mistral is dazed, to say the least. She switches on her cell phone, but before she can even dial a number, it starts ringing. It’s her mother.

  “Mistral, there you are, at last! Come home right away, please.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “We might have discovered something.” Cecile Blanchard ends the conversation without asking her daughter a single question.

  As Mistral imagined, the audition at the conservatory is the last thing on her mind, too.

  “THE ANCIENT MAP OF THE CHALDEANS DOESN’T WORK ANYMORE.”

  This is all Elettra manages to think as she sits on the floor between the two bunk beds in her room. The bathroom light is on and the door ajar. Through the window comes the constant hum of traffic on the boulevard along the Tiber River: horns, scooters.

  Elettra sighs.

  She grabs the heart top for the umpteenth time, rests it on the center of the map of Italy and tries to concentrate. She knows the tops never answer specific questions: they indicate places and provide clues. But she also knows she has no choice.

  “Where is my aunt?” she asks under her breath.

  She flicks the top between her fingers and casts it. It starts to spin, its pointy tip following the grooves in the wooden map of the Chaldeans. It whirls silently from one city to the next, from one village to the next, to give its answer. Its revelation.

  Where is Linda Melodia, who’s been missing since the beginning of summer?

  Still resting on the bedroom table are copies of the flyer Elettra posted in half the city. Her aunt’s photo, their home number and the words: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?

  Many people claim they have. There have been lots of phone calls. And just as many prank calls. The woman’s sister, Irene, seems calm, but only one thing is certain: Aunt Linda disappeared without leaving a trace. And given her particular inclination for cleanliness, it’s absolutely impossible to find her. Above all, to find out why she left without saying a word or giving an explanation.

  “You know she’s always been impulsive,” Aunt Irene said, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. “She wanted some time alone.”

  In Elettra’s room, the heart top spins, slows down and finally stops. On the city of Verona, in the Veneto region. The umpteenth different answer …

  Elettra stands up, furious.

  Once again, an answer that doesn’t make sense. But why? She’s getting to the point of thinking that the oracle doesn’t work anymore, that its fall onto the sidewalk of Avenue de l’Opéra, which split one corner of the map, irreparably damaged it.

  Elettra’s tension has risen day by day as the date they plan to meet up in Shanghai draws closer. She’s been wearing the same sweatpants and baggy old T-shirts for days now, and she hasn’t combed her hair for a week, focusing on the sole objective of hearing news about Aunt Linda before leaving for China.

  She holds the top up to the light and peers at it: the faint engraving of the heart that looks like it’s pierced by a thorn has led her and her friends to believe it represents life. A life that goes on despite the pain.

  “Maybe I just can’t use it alone,” Elettra murmurs.

  Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

  The big mirror in the bathroom reflects the image of a girl who’s changed. Her black hair has grown since the drastic haircut she gave herself in Paris, but it’s still short and accentuates her long neck. Her eyes, which are usually intense, have dark shadows.

  Elettra rests her palm against the mirror and savors its cold, reflective surface. When she pulls her hand away, her fingerprints remain on the glass. The secret labyrinth that each of us carries with us.

  “What should I do?” the girl wonders with a shiver. “And who am I?”

  When she closes her eyes, the only answer she can come up with is a whirl of images: the mixed-up New Year’s reservations, the snowstorm, the blackout, their run down Ponte Quattro Capi, Professor Van Der Berger, the briefcase, the map of the Chaldeans, the first four tops.…

  Elettra is one of the four kids born on February twenty-ninth.

  “Why?” she wonders again, well aware that she has no answer.

  Angry, she leaves the bathroom and then the bedroom. She walks down the hallway to the dining room, climbs the stairs, passes by her aunt Irene’s bedroom door and those of the guest rooms and reaches her aunt Linda’s room on the top floor.

  She doesn’t turn on the light. By now she knows the room by heart. She and her father have gone through it with a fine-tooth comb, drawer by drawer, dress by dress, without finding any clue, any lead, any explanation for Aunt Linda’s leaving.

  Missing are eight blouses, four heavy sweaters, five pairs of woolen slacks, a few pairs of socks, two pairs of shoes and a week’s change of underclothes.

  Elettra stares at the bed, the wardrobe, the mirrored dressing table, the Venetian glass collection on the shelf. This is the hundredth time she’s been up here.

  And it’s the hundredth time she thinks something doesn’t add up. Something she’s not being told. Something she needs to find out.

  She quietly steps over to the window, from which she can see the Santa Cecilia bell tower and the four statues that peer down into the inside courtyard of the Domus Quintilia Hotel. They’re black shadows in the night. Stone guardians, silent and still, which the first rains of September have begun to cover with damp streaks.

  Four statues, she thinks. Then she shakes her head.

  She realizes she’s obsessed with that number.

  September, she thinks again.

  In a few days she has to leave for Shanghai. And she’s going, no matter what. Aunt Linda or no Aunt Linda. Because she’s convinced everything is going to end in that city.

  “Did you let them know at the gym?” Mrs. Miller asks her son, walking out the front door with him. “It seems silly to pay if you aren’t going.”

  “I won’t be gone for a whole month. I’ll be back soon, don’t worry,” Harvey replies. He kisses her on the forehead and walks toward the taxi.

  His mother smiles. “I could call them for you.”

  “If you feel like it. The number’s up in my room, on the bed. Ask for Olympia.”

  Harvey opens the taxi door and tosses his backpack onto the backseat. “I’m off. The plane won’t wait.”

  “Tell your father I said hello.”

  “You bet. Oh … darn it.” Harvey hesitates, looking up at the roof of their house.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The boy motions to the taxi driver to wait a moment and goes back into the garden. “There’s something else you should know. I didn’t tell you everything, Mom.”

  “Something else I should know, aside from all this nonsense about boxing?”

  Harvey makes a strange smile. He thinks, Yeah, there’s something else, Mom. In Rome I survived an apartment building collapsing; here in New York a Native American mailman danced with his brothers in Inwood Hill Park to protect my life; in Paris I was kidnapped by a crazy woman who had an aquarium full of carnivorous fish beneath the floor in her office and I escaped aboard a hot-air balloon that crashed into Notre Dame Cathedral. And then I lost everything I had with me before I could even figure out what it was.

  “Something else you should know, Mom?” he says with his strange smile. “Just one thing: I’m raising a carrier pigeon up in the attic. Would you feed him while I’m gone?”

  “A pigeon? A carrier pigeon?”

  “Thanks!” Harvey says, without waiting to hear her protests. He plants another kiss on her forehead and hurries back to the taxi.

  Then, when the car joins the traffic, he checks to make sure he has everything he needs for the flight. Ticket for Shanghai, passport, entrance visa for China. Once he’s there, at China’s biggest port, he’s meeting up with his father on New York University’s oceanographic ship, on which he has been staying for a couple of months now. It’s been his second home ever since he read the latest findings and grew obsessed with the idea that some
thing anomalous is going on with the sea.

  In his mind, Harvey runs down the list of everything his father asked him to bring: warm clothes, papers and charts from his study, packages addressed to Mr. Miller both from the university and from people Harvey doesn’t know.

  “Don’t open anything and don’t mail me anything,” his father said, concerning the last items. “Bring it all with you.” On the phone, he almost sounded scared.

  “SHENG!” HIS MOTHER CALLS OUT THE MOMENT HE WALKS THROUGH their home’s arched gate. “Where have you been? Sheng!” She rushes toward him, the back of her right hand pressed against her forehead in a pose worthy of a movie starlet. “Sheng! That contraption started up again!”

  The boy rests his ever-present backpack on the ground.

  “What contraption?” he asks.

  It could be anything from the fax to the computer to the DVD player to the stereo, or any device that blinks and ticks.

  “I don’t know! It lit up and started making terrible noises!” Sheng’s mother exclaims.

  The boy follows her inside. His house is in the heart of the Old City, Shanghai’s original settlement, which has been torn down and rebuilt many times but still has traditional Chinese shikumen architecture: two-story houses that are arranged along alleys and have characteristic stone gates and walled-in front yards used for hanging laundry, reading and relaxing. The last two being practically impossible for Sheng to do there, at least since he got back from Rome. That’s why he goes to read in the park: at home, he would need to build another wall around himself, one that protects him from the intrusiveness of his father, who’s more and more of a full-fledged tourism entrepreneur, and from the anxiousness of his mother, who’s more and more “I-don’t-know-what-you-two-are-doing-but-I-suspect-you’re-going-to-leave-me-all-alone-at-home.” Not to mention that Sheng already has good reason to be worried.

  “Just look at this mess!” his mother groans in the darkness of the house, which she insists on keeping unlit, convinced that electrical energy is a capitalist demon. She stops a few yards away from a gray plastic device spewing out pages and pages of printouts with Chinese characters.

  “It’s just the fax, Mom,” Sheng says, walking past her.

  “It’s a fax of what?”

  The boy checks the printouts: it’s a reservation for a study abroad program his father’s cultural exchange agency has arranged.

  As he’s gathering the pages, Sheng explains to his mother that someone from the agency must have accidentally given out their home number instead of the office number.

  She doesn’t seem so convinced. “But why did it start up all on its own?”

  “Because that’s how it needs to work, Mom,” Sheng says. “When someone sends us a fax, we receive it.”

  “You mean other people decide when this contraption starts up?”

  “In a way, yeah.”

  “And we can’t prevent it?”

  “Well, no … not if we keep it on.”

  “It’s terrible. Typically Western. It means there’s no respect for our privacy.”

  “Mom, it’s a fax machine!”

  “Do you think it’s normal for someone to barge into our house without permission? I just don’t understand you and your father. You call this progress? It’s an invasion!”

  Sheng sighs. There’s no point arguing with someone so stuck in the past. He picks up the sheets addressed to his father and glances over them: the writer is requesting a cultural exchange in Paris so he can learn French.

  Still holding the pages, Sheng drops his arms to his sides, as if the flood of memories from his recent, turbulent summer in Paris is dragging him down. The stifling heat, the halls of the Louvre, the race through the city guided by Napoleon’s clock, the rickety old motor scooter he and Elettra rode to Mistral’s place …

  He runs his finger under his collar and discovers he’s sweating.

  The fax spits out the last page.

  Sheng notices the date printed at the top of it. September 18.

  “Oh, no!” he exclaims.

  It’s already September 18.

  And he forgot he’s supposed to meet someone.

  “Mom!” he calls to her, breathless. “I gotta go!”

  “But you just got home.”

  “A friend of mine is arriving at the station today!”

  “What friend? Tell me it isn’t one of those—”

  “Mom, please! But yeah, he is. He’s one of those Coca-Cola, jeans, comic books and computer friends!”

  His mom is so horrified, she looks ready to faint. “You aren’t bringing him back here to sleep, are you?”

  “No, he’s staying at a hotel.”

  “Of course, and I bet he’s staying at one of those hotels for big-spending billionaires.”

  “Mom, there are more big-spending billionaires in China than where they live!”

  His mother stares at him, a suspicious look in her eye. “I don’t know you anymore, son. I don’t know you anymore.”

  Sheng goes back to the gate, slings his backpack over his shoulder and gets ready to leave a second time. But before he opens the door, he peers out at the alley. It’s a couple of meters wide, gray and crowded with people.

  “At least take these,” his mom says, handing him a little bag full of rice balls. “That way you’ll have something to eat.”

  Sheng smiles at the kind gesture. “Thanks, Mom.”

  They’re probably awful, like most of his mother’s cooking, but it’s the thought that counts.

  “You wouldn’t happen to be in love, would you?” his mother asks, ruffling his jet-black hair.

  Sheng turns away, his face flushing. Is it so easy to see? he thinks, running outside to go to the central station.

  “Is that you, Mistral?” Cecile Blanchard asks when the girl walks into the apartment. She’s in the dining room, leaning over the table, which they’ve turned into the base of operations for their investigation. “I was looking all over for—” She stops, puzzled by her daughter’s elegant dress. A second later, she slaps her forehead with the palm of her hand. “Your exam!”

  “Audition.”

  Cecile rushes over to hug her. “How could I forget! Well, how did it go?”

  Mistral smiles. “They accepted me.”

  “Why, that’s wonderful! Then we need to … celebrate!”

  “Mm-hmm.” Mistral nods, putting down her purse made of aluminum pull tabs from Coke cans.

  Her description of the audition is calm. She doesn’t show any enthusiasm or particular emotion. Or criticism for her mother’s forgetfulness, for that matter. As she talks, she goes over to the dining room table.

  “You told me there was news,” Mistral says, once she’s finished. “Have they found Elettra’s aunt?”

  “No news on that front,” her mother replies. “I heard from Fernando a little while ago.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Cecile points at some photographs spread out on the table like petals on a big daisy. “Do you remember Sophie?”

  “Not exactly,” Mistral says.

  “That colleague of mine … tall, blond, thin, always dressed in black … In any case, she works with fabrics. She travels the world looking for the best wools, the finest cottons and so on. She’s studied the compositions of different synthetic fabrics for so long now that she’s practically a chemistry expert. She uses lab equipment you couldn’t begin to imagine.”

  Cecile picks up some photos and sits down beside her daughter. “So I gave her you-know-what to analyze.”

  Mistral pictures what her mother is alluding to: the Veil of Isis. The mysterious cloth they found folded up in a niche at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, along with the black statue of a woman whose face was worn with time.

  “Sophie ran some in-depth analyses.” Cecile smiles.

  “And …?”

  First picture.

  “She says the cloth is old, but not that old. A blend of cotton and silk from at least seven or
eight centuries ago. Let’s say … from the early twelve hundreds. Marco Polo.”

  “Okay,” Mistral replies, catching her breath. “Keep going.”

  Second picture.

  “She says that for cloth it’s extremely well preserved. The lines here and here coincide with the folds, and judging from how worn they are, the cloth was probably folded up like that for a long time. There are openings in two places on this side, near the edge, as if buttons or cords were slipped through them to keep it suspended … or tied to something.”

  “Like a sail?”

  “It could be, but sails normally have a whole row of openings for the lines, above and below, so they can unfurl. This seems more like a flag than anything else. A really big flag, but still a flag.”

  Cecile hands Mistral a colored chart.

  “Sophie detected high amounts of sodium carbonate in the fabric. Salt, basically.”

  “Like it was exposed to seawater for a long time.”

  “Exactly.”

  Mistral and her mother stare at each other.

  Then Cecile goes on. “In any case, that isn’t the most interesting thing Sophie discovered. The most interesting thing, which we overlooked, is that just above the openings there’s an almost-invisible gold pattern in the fabric.”

  “A gold pattern?”

  Third picture.

  “Look here and here. And then here. On this side of the fabric are small golden fibers interwoven with the cotton and silk. In a long line from top to bottom on this end. Grouped together on the opposite end. They form circles, some whole, others broken.”

  Mistral sees them clearly in the enlarged photographs. The tiny thread patterns form some sort of outline on the veil’s lower-left-hand side and, on the other side, a series of tiny designs, or …

  “Are they letters?” she asks, running her fingertip over the pictures.

  Cecile nods. “I think so. But they’re incomprehensible.”

  She picks up a large illustrated book, thumbs through it and sets it down in front of Mistral. It’s opened to illustrations of Chinese characters. “They don’t look like these.…” Then she flips back to the cuneiform writing of the Assyrians. “Or like these. They look like … something in between.”