Nikolski (24 page)

Right then, someone knocks at the door. I limp over to open it.

It’s Joyce, an hour ahead of time. She drops her old sailor’s duffel in the hallway and, shivering, hangs up her raincoat.

“Am I too early?”

“Not at all,” I say, rubbing my little toe. “You look like you’ve just rounded Cape Horn in a cardboard box. Can I get you a dry sweater?”

“No, thanks.”

“A hot drink, then?”

“That would be nice.”

I hobble over to the kitchen. While I’m putting on the kettle, Joyce tosses her boots in a corner of the hallway and ventures into the living room.

“Watch your step—there’s a hole in the floor.”

The warning is wasted. She’s found the switch. Out of the darkness come sea serpents and horned whales with torrents of water spewing out of their nostrils.

Amused, Joyce contemplates the facsimile of a nautical map dated 1675, the margins decorated with compass roses and legendary monsters. She adjusts her glasses and steps closer to the map, evidently intrigued by the environs of Hispaniola Island. I spy on her as I measure out the tea leaves.

How strange it is to see this girl in my living room. I know nothing about her, really, except for her tendency to steal computer-programming handbooks. She seems harmless enough, with her little reading glasses and her short hair, but for all I know she could be a dangerous outlaw on the run. Tired of petty thievery, she may have knocked off six banks in a row. In which case, her old sailor’s duffel probably contains a gun as long as a harpoon, and a sheaf of blood-soaked banknotes.

I can almost hear the sound of gunfire, but then a high-pitched whistle interrupts my flight of fancy. Shaking my head, I take the kettle off the stove and crane my neck toward the living room. “The travel guides are in the small bookcase, behind you.”

When I step out of the kitchen with a steaming teapot of oolong, Joyce is perusing my travel guides.

“You’ve travelled a lot,” she says, without taking her eyes off the bookcase.

“Me? Never set foot outside Montreal. My longest trip was when I left Châteauguay.”

“So why all these guides?”

“My mother collected them. After she died, I kept up the collection.”

“Your mother liked to travel?”

“No. It’s quite odd, actually, because she worked in a travel agency. She could have gone around the world for free, but she preferred to spend the summer in the
backyard with her feet in the plastic wading pool and a pile of books at her side. Ultimately, I think she liked travel guides better than travelling.”

I pour the tea through a cloud of steam. Joyce takes the cup between her hands to warm herself and sits down on the couch cross-legged. “Tea …,” she murmurs as she sniffs her cup. Immediately, a peculiar tautness seems to flow out of her body. She suddenly appears exhausted, slightly stooped and with dark rings under her eyes.

“When I was small, I would go see my grandfather every day after school. He had a Ming dynasty teapot, blue and white porcelain, with a long crack running through it, and completely red on the inside. We drank bitter tea, and he would tell me pirate stories.”

She yawns. There’s a pause. Her eyes grow smaller and smaller, swollen with fatigue.

“What sort of pirates?” I ask, by way of prompting her to continue.

“All kinds. I think he’d learned his stories from an old sailor’s almanac. But he talked mainly about our ancestors. It seems my great-great-great-grandfather was a renowned Acadian pirate. I was never able to verify that. He talked so much about it that I ended up wanting to become a pirate. My cousins said women pirates didn’t exist, but the more often they said it, the more I wanted to prove them wrong. Sometimes kids get strange notions into their heads.”

“Not at all. As a matter of fact, women pirates did exist. There were two of them among the crew of Calico Rackham.”

“Red Rackham?!” she exclaims in a burst of laughter. “Aren’t you getting that mixed up with a Tintin story?”

“Hergé always drew on true stories. The real Red Rackham lived in the Bahamas in the eighteenth century. His name was Jack Rackham, but he was nicknamed Calico Rackham. He had a pretty run-of-the-mill career, and the English hanged him after a few years.”

She perks up, visibly revived by the discussion.

“My grandfather never told me about him. Who were the two women?”

“I’ve forgotten their names. One of them was called Bonny something.”

“Bonnie Parker?” she jokes.

“I can’t remember. But they’re relatively well known. Legend has it they were the only ones to defend the ship when the English broadsided them. The rest of the crew were dead drunk and cowering below deck.”

“How romantic!”

“I’ve got a book on the subject, if you’re interested.”

I have an exact picture of the book in my head. It’s the Three-Headed Book, forgotten by a customer at the bookshop in 1994.

As I walk over to the bookcase, I realize I haven’t laid eyes on that book for quite some time. I quickly
locate a number of books without covers—I like books that have had a rough time of it. I grab the first one, but it’s only a threadbare copy of the
Ashley Book of Knots.
With the second book I’m sure my luck has turned, but it’s the 1945 edition of Damase Potvin’s
Saint-Laurent et ses îles.
The third is an inexpensive copy of
Robinson Crusoe,
and the fourth a fragment
of Japan Expedition
by Matthew Perry.

After going through my entire library, I have to face the fact: I’ve lost a book, an extraordinary delinquency that makes me the disgrace of the Guild of Booksellers. I resign myself to consulting an ordinary travel guide on the Bahamas.

“Have you found it?” Joyce asks, pouring herself more tea.

“No,” I reply, blushing. “But as Jack Rackham was based on Providence Island, there should be some mention of him in the history of the Bahamas.”

“Isn’t Providence Island to the north of Haiti?”

“No,” I explain, while scanning the table of contents. “It’s the island where Nassau is situated. Actually, these days it’s called New Providence.”

I turn the pages, looking for the historical section. Joyce has moved closer and she is staring at me.

“What are you wearing around your neck?” she asks.

“A Nikolski compass.”

“A
what?”
she presses, her hand reaching for the compass.

I don’t know why, but I trust this girl. I put down the Bahamas guide and carefully untie the string from around my neck. But my hands are unsteady and the compass slips from my fingers. I don’t yet fully realize what’s happening, what is about to happen. I watch the compass drop in slow motion. There is a noise of shattering plastic as the casing breaks apart. The central sphere, freed from its shell, bounces on the floor, flies between Joyce’s feet, spins across the living room pointing in all directions at once, and rolls down the gaping hot-air vent in the middle of the room.

I drop to my knees by the vent, just in time to hear the heart of the compass ricocheting more and more faintly against the metallic walls of the duct, until it gradually dwindles into silence far below.

The furnace takes this cue to start up and blow a scornful blast of air into my face.

I OPEN THE CELLAR DOOR
and flip the switch, but nothing happens. Another burnt-out light bulb. I have to feel my way along to the next switch. I hesitate to move into the dimness of the staircase. Every time I find myself in an enclosed space, I somehow end up having to deal with bizarre situations.

Joyce looks over my shoulder into the dark. I suggested she wait for me quietly with the teapot and the travel guides, but she insisted on coming along, on the pretext that if I left her alone for two minutes she would fall asleep.

I cautiously advance into the stairway. Behind me, Joyce counts the steps in a low voice. The staircase seems longer than usual. I feel as if we’re diving twenty thousand leagues under the ground floor. The walls become covered with little spiral shells that I never noticed before, and after many minutes—“One hundred and thirty-five steps,” Joyce specifies—the stairs disappear under inky water.

“Shit, the sump pump has broken down again! That’s the second time this fall.”

“Is the water very deep?” Joyce asks.

Probing farther, I take one step too many. I lose my footing, try to catch hold of the banister, hurtle down the remaining steps on my heels and plunge thigh-deep into the icy water. The cold and shock leave me breathless. I turn toward Joyce to inform her that we’re going right back up to the apartment, but too late. She’s come down to join me in the water, apparently impervious to the cold.

She greets my look of astonishment with a quick smile and a shrug.

“I know. I only came to borrow a travel guide. But”—she gestures toward the darkness—“there’s no choice. We have to find your compass, right?”

What is there to say, now that both of us are standing in the freezing water? We plunge into the gloom, moving like deep-sea divers. I grope around for the light switch, but Joyce is one step ahead of me, and I hear her tug on the chain.

The light goes on—an old 20-watt bulb hanging from a stripped wire—and the Beast emerges from the darkness.

The furnace in our building frightens me in a way that is hard to account for. It is, after all, nothing but an ordinary oil furnace of the interwar period, massively corpulent, once painted white but now covered with
scars and bumps. Through the grate, thin little strings of soot leak out into the water, and on its huge square brow a pair of screw holes form small, glowing eyes. The screws once fastened a brass plaque, which now lies at the foot of the furnace. Judging from the dust marks, the plaque has not been moved since I last looked at it, eight years ago.

Etched onto the brass plaque is the Beast’s pedigree:

Eight Januarys in this building have allowed me to observe with absolute precision the furnace’s breathing habits. It always begins with a long sigh that then breaks up into a number of short sighs. It doles out about sixty of these sighs over a period of ten minutes, without hurrying, then dives once again into the depths. After an hour and a half of apnea, the cycle starts over again. This respiratory pattern is unchanging, whether the thermometer shows 5 or 55 degrees below zero. As a result, in the middle of winter, the interval between start-ups provides a good demonstration of the climate in northern Siberia.

I never thought that I would have to delve into furnace anatomy tonight. I sidle along the wall to investigate the situation more closely. Flames growl in the
belly of the Beast, just a few centimetres from my nose. I would rather turn back, but I think of the Nikolski compass and keep going.

At the back of the machine, a dozen or so hot-air ducts going up toward the inhabited part of the building are intertwined in a complex intestinal network. One look is enough to convince me that a conscientious worker once riveted these tubes in place to last for centuries, thus condemning to a process of slow digestion any object that happened to drop down the air vents of the upper floors.

My whole body begins to shake. The burning proximity of the furnace does nothing to raise the temperature of the water we’re standing in. I think of the steaming teapot three floors up. If we don’t get out of here, we run the risk of hypothermia or pneumonia of the brain. I mumble a quick requiem for the compass and, with my legs gnawed away by the cold, start to climb out of this hole.

“My compass is a lost cause!” I announce dramatically.

Joyce seems not to have heard me. While I was examining the back of the furnace, she has been inspecting the rest of the cellar, as comfortable in standing in ice water as she was in my living room.

“Where does this go?” she asks, pointing to a padlocked door.

“Nowhere. That’s my locker. And to think I have boxes in there. It must be crawling with crabs by now.”

I find the key on my key ring and force it into the rusted lock. The door opens onto a half-dozen spongy cardboard boxes covered with purply urchins. I let out a downhearted sigh and, having ripped open a box, feel around inside with a certain sense of apprehension. My frozen hand recognizes the rough texture of a familiar object.

It’s the old Three-Headed Book.