A Box of Gargoyles (24 page)

“She was
very
interested in the gargoyles' egg,” said Maya.

“Aha!” said her mother, relaxing again. “That explains it! A child who talks about gargoyles' eggs is for sure going to be an excellent reader. Don't be shy. Apparently the writer wants to invite us over or something. I know I'd like to meet her, if it comes to that.”

It came to that sooner than Maya could have expected. By the time she got home from school the next day, her mother was grinning ear to ear: the writer had called and invited them to drop by her apartment that very Sunday! Just on the other side of the Seine! Brunch with the somewhat famous Pernithia Blakely!

“Have you read any of her books?” asked Maya's mother. “No? Neither have I. Well, all the same, it should be very interesting.”

Yes
, thought Maya.
Interesting, yes
.

By Sunday at ten a.m. she had to learn how to become a very sneaky thief.

She practiced on her family: she tried removing things from rooms they were sitting in, without them noticing. Mostly it did not go well.

“That's
my
fireman's hat!” James would squawk, as Maya tried to smuggle it out of the living room.

Or one of her parents would give her a most quizzical look and ask why she had that book tucked under her shirt like that.

It was beginning to look like Maya might be a total failure at filching.

Since clever thieves in films are always substituting a fake key for the real one, she scouted around after school in the Champ de Mars, eyeing the plantings and paths for a rock that might be about the size and shape of the gargoyles' egg, but the gravel was too small and the ornamental rocks too large, so that was a failure, too.

So far, then, her plan was to show up with her mother at the writer's apartment, let her mother distract Pernithia with lots of questions (this part of the plan was solid: her mother could always be counted on to have a million questions), and then miraculously find the egg, snatch it, grab her mother's hand, and skedaddle.

Valko's opinion of this plan was pretty low. They were standing in the school yard, trying not to mind the faint spatter of rain that had driven most people to the more-protected edges of the place. In
Histoire-géographie
they were beginning to study the Second World War. It was that sort of day.

“You're going to go through this woman's closets and drawers, and she's not going to notice?” he said. “And have you counted to one hundred thirty-seven recently?”

There was a dreadful pause while Maya started adding up hours in her head.

“Eleven a.m. Sunday,” said Valko. “Can you be out of there in an hour? Can you
promise
to be out of there?”

“Won't it be far enough away to be safe?” said Maya. The writer lived on some little street by the Trocadéro, on the far side of the Seine.

“Not this time,” said Valko. “Doubling, remember. If the pattern holds, the strangeness will reach almost to the Arc de Triomphe. Think of the traffic jams then!”

Their dark thoughts were interrupted by the jangle of the bell.

That was Friday.

On Saturday, Maya's mother was in bed with a bad stomach. She looked miserable.

“Don't worry. I'll be fine by tomorrow,” she said, and turned her face to the wall to keep Maya from worrying.

That evening, though, she was no better.

Maya looked at that unhappy gray face, and all sorts of pieces of her heart that had been carefully glued back together over the past year or so fell apart again and were sharp and pointy in her chest. She could see that things were going very wrong.

“I'm so sorry,” her mother said, reaching out to touch the opal on Maya's bracelet, a quick touch of a thin finger. “I know how much you wanted to go see this writer of yours.”

Wanted!
Ha. Not so much.

What Maya really
wanted
was to see her mother truly well and whole and safe again. No want went deeper than that.

She was responsible for that egg, though. She had to get it back somehow. She had promised to take care of it, and you can't take care of something a crazy writer has stolen from you and hidden away somewhere.

“I guess I'll call Valko,” said Maya. “Maybe he can come with me instead. You rest and get better.”

When she talked to Valko, however, his voice was a little strangled.

“All right,” he said, in a half whisper. “Just, you should know, the grandmother has landed. I will have to race back from your scary writer to pacify her. A quiet lunch in her room so she can grill me properly, that's my dreadful fate tomorrow. I can't be late, either.”

“So you'll be leaving me alone with that writer?” said Maya. Worse and worse!

“Are you kidding? We'll both leave if time's running out. You have to be out of that place by eleven, anyway, or who knows what will happen. Just don't be late. I'll meet you downstairs here at nine thirty, right?”

It was a nicer day, that Sunday, than it had been for a week. Not anything even approaching warm for someone who used to live in California, but not raining, sleeting, hailing, or snowing, and the sun was doing its best, under the circumstances.

She made her way fairly cheerfully to Valko's imposing front door, but there was no Valko there. She ran her toe impatiently over a thin tendril of iron root running through the sidewalk outside the door and kept checking her watch: if they were late, then how was any of this going to work? That was when one of the guards—Ivan, she remembered—ducked his head through the doorway and waved her over.

“Note for you,
mademoiselle
,” he said, and handed it over. It was sealed with staples. Maya tore it open as soon as the burly guy had turned his head.

Maya—go on ahead. Grandmother trapped me. I'll catch up. Ten minutes max. Valko
.

Maya's heart sank like a stone. Valko was sending Maya off to the crazy writer
alone
? How could any grandmother possibly be as scary as Valko's grandmother seemed to be?

She thought about not going at all, about just giving up and going home, but that was not what a brave person would do. A brave person with responsibilities. She had
promised
those gargoyles. She
had
to keep that egg safe. She could handle ten minutes with a writer on her own, right?

The patchwork of iron roots became thicker as Maya came closer to the Eiffel Tower. She had not been directly under the Tower since the strangeness had changed it, and she had to stand there for a while and get used to the new version of it, with its iron vines and iron leaves sprouting out from that massive trunk.

“Eiffel Tower! Tree of the world!” said one of the young men waving the heavy loops of Eiffel Tower key chains he hoped to sell for a euro or so. The key chains showed the old untree-like Tower, but he didn't seem to notice. The not-noticing power of the strangeness was the strangest part of it, as far as Maya was concerned. It made her feel slightly ill, the way everybody kept not noticing everything changing all around them. “Take the Tower home with you! Souvenirs! Cheap!”

Maya shook her head and pulled herself away from the Tower, went fast under the noses of the enormous stone horses guarding the Pont d'Iéna, and crossed the Seine, wishing all the time and with all her heart she was not walking alone.

She was heading for the merry-go-round in the Trocadéro gardens. Those were the instructions her mother had passed on to her. A carousel at the foot of the great stairs up to the Palais de Chaillot (which was really just a few imposing museums and the plaza where tour buses stopped to let everyone get pictures of themselves in front of the Tower, to prove they had really come to Paris). She avoided the stairs, turned left at the carousel, and walked along the edge of the gardens. At the end of the park, there were supposed to be, according to Maya's mother, “secret stairs to a secret street.”

Maya's mother had gotten the directions from the writer, but then, being Maya's mother, she had probably fancied them up a little.

There they were, though: stairs built into a dark brick wall, and a gate barring the way. Maya peered through, uncertain. Then she gave the gate a little push—it had been propped open.

The top of the stairs spilled her into a short street with fancy buildings on the left and a cliff's-edge view of the Trocadéro park on the right. There were guards, too, because one of those buildings was flying a bright red flag with a star on it: another embassy, Maya figured. She walked by like someone who knew where she was going, which was almost all the way down the block, almost to the end, to number nine.

At the door, which was all elegant ironwork and glass except for the gleaming handles, Maya nearly lost her courage for a moment. It was the door handles that did it, because they were not ordinary handles; they were pairs of golden salamanders entwined. She put a hand on the disk of Cabinet glass around her neck and remembered dragging her brother through the halls of the Salamander House, and for a moment she considered turning around right there and walking away.

Some might say that, considering Maya's recent history, it was stupid to walk into a building with a salamander for a door handle. Or, for that matter, to go visiting someone with a streak of craziness running through her hair and her mind. But then again, there was the gargoyles' egg, waiting. And Valko was on his way. Ten minutes, tops, and then he would be there. So she sighed and rang the buzzer instead.

Pernithia Blakely turned out to live at the very, very top of the building, in one of those rooms that overworked maids had been housed in, long ago in other centuries. Maya trudged up the last bald flight of wooden stairs and concentrated on not thinking too far ahead.

Please be obvious, egg
, she thought.
Please don't be hard to find
.

She stared at the door for a moment, gathering her courage together and waiting for some magical force to make this last little part of the decision for her, but no magic emerged. She was still on her own, in front of a plain wooden door with a crazy writer and a gargoyles' egg behind it.

She knocked.

The door opened; a shy head looked out.

“Oh, it's the American girl!” said Pernithia Blakely. “I was so afraid you might have changed your mind!”

Wait
, thought Maya.
Did I just think the word
shy?
The crazy writer looks
shy?

“Come on in, please,” said the writer. “Did all those steps wear you out? Sometimes I don't even want to go outside, thinking about the stairs waiting for me at the end of the day.”

She seemed like the nicest person in the world. Dark hair twisted into a tame knot at the back of her head (the white streak of
samodiva
hair hardly even visible). Sensible clothes that looked like they would be perfect for typing in all day.

Still Maya hesitated for a second.
Don't be the fly that waltzes into the spider's parlor!
That was one of her mother's cautionary phrases. It was probably chiseled right into Maya's neurons by now.

But there wasn't anything spiderish about this shy, smiling woman at the door, was there? Nothing spiderish at all. And Maya wasn't a little kid like James anymore. At thirteen, you start having to make your own choices in life. And taking care of your own gargoyles' eggs. Et cetera.

“We have a lot of stairs at our place, too,” said Maya, and, fly or not, she waltzed right in.

 
15
 

T
ucked away neatly under the whitewashed slope of the ceiling, the writer's room was filled with everything tiny, from the small table (set for three), to the doll-sized desk against the side wall and the extra-narrow inner door leading into a sliver of a kitchen. The wooden floors squeaked slightly underfoot; they were clean and old and as dark as the walls were white. But in fact Maya didn't even notice the floors or the kitchen or the desk for a minute or two: that was the window's fault.