Ring of Fire (18 page)

Harvey opens his eyes. He’s covered with sweat. He’s panting and the covers are twisted around his body. His watch is cutting off the circulation in his wrist. He checks the time. It’s six o’clock. “The bed wasn’t falling …,” he says, reassuring himself. “It was only a dream.”

He slowly frees himself from the sheets and blankets, trying
not to wake up the others. His legs are covered with scrapes and bruises. He rests his feet on the cold floor. He needs to feel something solid beneath them.

The moment he shuts his eyes, he can see pages from books flying through the air. Burnt pages fluttering upward. A sea of dust. He sees Elettra unconscious, her legs dangling into nothingness, and Sheng clutching his backpack like a parachute.

He sees what’s left of the floor of the building’s fourth story and the ladder that he and Sheng climbed down, carrying Elettra over their shoulders. He sees the firemen’s flickering lights and their red fire engines, with their tall aluminum ladders.

They slipped out of the building before anyone could notice them. Then Harvey laid Elettra on the ground and turned to go back inside.

“Where are you going?” Sheng asked him.

“To look for Mistral. There’s still a girl in the building!” he shouted.

“We’ll go look for her!” a fireman answered, turning to dash nimbly up the extending ladder. Other firemen entered through what remained of the front door, armed with axes.

“Have you seen a girl come out of there?” Harvey asked the people crowding the street. But no one paid any attention to him. They were concentrating on the show provided by the rescue team.

“Have you seen a girl come out of there?” Harvey continued to ask everyone he passed by.

Finally, a woman answered him. “A young girl with straight,
light brown hair? I saw her leave with her father. A man with gray hair. He had a violin. … Could that have been her?”

Harvey nodded.

It sure could have.

Harvey gets up, grabs something from the nightstand and walks over to the bathroom. He turns on the lights around the mirror and stands there for a long time, staring at himself.

His eyes are like an old man’s.

Then he looks down at Mistral’s sketchbook, which he’d picked up from the nightstand. He slowly leafs through the pages, pausing on the last drawing: the four of them in the professor’s room.

“Harvey?” comes a whisper from behind him. The boy sees Elettra’s reflection in the mirror.

“Can’t sleep?” he asks her, shutting the book.

“Not anymore. How are you?”

“Just a few scratches.”

“Thanks for carrying me back here.”

“What, you think I would’ve left you there?”

“No, but … I mean …”

Harvey turns to look at her. He lets the sketchbook slide down along his back and then slips it into his boxer shorts. “It wasn’t difficult. You don’t weigh much at all, fortunately—otherwise the floor would’ve collapsed a lot earlier.”

“I … I talked to my father. He told me your version of what happened.”

“It’s not my version. I’m not good at making up excuses. It was Sheng.”

“Is he okay?”

“He hurt his arm.”

Elettra hesitates a few seconds before asking the last question. “And Mistral? Have you seen her?”

“No.”

“Do you think … she …?”

“No. A woman saw her leave with the man with the violin.”

Elettra bites her lip. “Alive?”

“Of course.”

The two leave the bedroom and make their way down the hallway, barefoot. They get to the dining room, coming from which is the soft glow of a television. Elettra’s father has fallen asleep on the couch. The morning news is on.

“There,” whispers Harvey when shots of a collapsed building appear on the screen. “That’s us.” A helicopter films the scene from above. The professor’s house is a box of cement folded over on itself, around which are lights, cranes and fire hoses. The reporter aboard the helicopter excitedly relates the little information he’s received. “A dilapidated old building … gas leak … structural failure … thousands of books …”

Elettra and Harvey draw closer, trying to hear better. “It’s unclear how many families resided in the building … other than Professor Alfred Van Der Berger, who lived on the top floor. … At this point, rescuers have found no—”

“No sign of a French girl,” Elettra sighs with new hope.

“I told you. That guy took her away.”

“She’s alive, Harvey,” whispers Elettra. “And she’s in Rome with him.”

Harvey shows her the notes in Mistral’s sketchbook. “The fact is, nobody will believe any of this. We can’t tell anyone anything.”

“No,” Elettra admits. “But maybe we could try to find her ourselves.”

“But how?”

“By asking for help.”

“From who?”

“I think there’s someone who might believe what happened to us. …” Elettra searches through the sketchbook for Mistral’s last notes. Then she lets Harvey read them.

Lying on his bed, Sheng knows perfectly well that he’s dreaming, but he can’t snap himself out of it. The dream scares him, but he just can’t wake himself up. He can only go along with it, an involuntary spectator.

He’s walking through the jungle with Harvey and Elettra. It’s boiling hot and perfectly silent. He can’t hear any insects, any birds. It’s as if the jungle were empty. From time to time, a Roman monument peeks out from behind the plants—a building, a column, an obelisk—as if the forest has grown right over the city. Then the tropical vegetation makes way for an expanse of fine, pure white sand, which crunches beneath his feet.

On the other side of a narrow inlet of clear blue water is a tiny island covered with seaweed. Elettra, Harvey and Shengdive
into the waves and, once again, Sheng notices there isn’t a noise to be heard.

Waiting for them on the island is a woman. Her face is covered by a cloak and she’s wearing a close-fitting gown, drawn on which are all the animals of the world.

The first one to get out of the water, Harvey kneels down before the woman.

Elettra follows him but remains standing.

Sheng, instead, stays in the water, hiding. He’s scared.

The woman stares at them, standing motionless on the beach covered with seaweed. Then she raises her right hand, slips it into her gown and pulls out an old wooden top, which she holds out to the Chinese boy.

And with this, Sheng’s eyes open wide.

“Calm down, Sheng,” Harvey tells him, his hand resting on his shoulder. “It was just a bad dream.”

The images from the dream whirl through Sheng’s mind: the jungle, the beach, the island, the woman, the top … “I dreamed about the top!” he cries. “We’ve got to … to use the map!”

“That’s what we were thinking, too.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s early morning. How do you feel?”

Sheng’s right arm is throbbing. “My arm hurts a little … but it’s no big deal. I dreamed about you. There was … some kind of jungle covering the city.”

Elettra motions that he should stop talking. “You can tell us later on, if you want. We don’t have much time.”

“To do what?”

“We’ve got to get out of here before seven o’clock.”

“And go where?”

“To get Mistral back.”

“But how?”

“Are you coming with us?” asks Elettra.

Like she does every morning, Linda Melodia opens her eyes at seven o’clock on the dot. She rather regretfully slides out from beneath the sheets, her toes seeking out her ever-present Tyrolean wool slippers.

“What time is it?” her sister asks from the bed when she comes out of the bathroom a moment later. Linda mumbles something as she puts on an undershirt, a flowered sweater and a pair of cream-colored slacks.

Irene’s head is sunk down into a pillow. “Everything all right?”

Her sister stands before the mirror to do a few breathing exercises. “I wouldn’t say so. After what happened to the kids, I barely shut my eyes. If only you’d seen them when they got back… They were covered head to toe in dust and grime!”

Irene giggles. “Always exaggerating. I’m sure they were just a little dirty, that’s all—”

“Believe me! For a moment I thought Elettra … Well, we’d better just forget about it.”

“They’re only kids, Linda.”

“I was a girl once, too! But I didn’t feel the need to sneak into construction sites and risk my neck just to see a crane. Or am I wrong? What were you doing when you were their age?”

Irene rubs her eyes. “Me? I was trying to save the world.”

Linda rolls her eyes. “Oh, of course! How could I forget?” She
plants a kiss on her forehead and says, “If you don’t need anything, I’ll go down and set the tables for breakfast.”

“Would you hand me the phone, please?”

“Who are you going to call at seven in the morning?”

“My secret lover?”

Linda walks out of the bedroom smiling. She goes down the stairs of the Domus Quintilia, which is still silent, and walks into the dining room. She slips a dozen cream-filled croissants and a hazelnut and chocolate tart into a large toaster oven.

Meanwhile, she thinks back to her sister’s secret lovers. And her own. Faded images return to her mind. Lying on the beach doing summer school homework, which Irene would check over meticulously before letting her go off to play. She remembers running beside the sea, her little beach sandals, the colored ribbons in her hair, the boat rides … and that boy who would dive into the water from the rocks, staring at her passionately.

Oh dear
, thinks Linda, warming up a dish of fig cookies.
I can’t remember his name
. On the other hand, she remembers everything about Irene. She was identical to how she is now. She could still walk then, and steadily, and her face had fewer wrinkles, her eyes sparkled more. … But even back then she would spend all her time huddled over books, her hair billowing out under the sun.

The espresso machine shoots hot steam into the milk, frothing it up for a cappuccino. Linda sprinkles some cocoa on top, makes a little heart shape in the foam and enjoys her customary breakfast before the others wake up. Not far away, Fernando is still snoring on the couch in front of the television, which is still on. He’ll soon wake up with a start, check his watch and ask her to
make him a
caffè ristretto doppio
, which he’ll guzzle down in a single gulp.

A dab of milk foam on the tip of her nose, Linda leaves the dining room and walks down the hall leading to Elettra’s bedroom.

She stops to listen.

Perfect silence.

Good
, she thinks, wiping off her nose.
They’re sleeping. I’d better not wake them
.

“C
OMING
! C
OMING!” BARKS
E
RMETE
D
E
P
ANFILIS, SHUFFLING UP TO
the door of his shop in Testaccio. He casts a glance at the clock along the way. It’s not even eight o’clock. Who could it be at this hour?

Whoever it is, it’s my fault
, he thinks, walking through the room, which is a cross between a living room and a garage. His mother has told him time and time again that you should never work and live in the same place, otherwise you’ll end up working day and night.

The bell rings for the millionth time. It’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back. “Oh, come on!” he hollers, walking past his sidecar, which he’s just put back together. “I hear you, you hear? I’m coming, dammit!”

Then he stops.

Where’s the door?

He looks around, lost. He has the feeling someone’s moved his front door. It’s that horrible feeling of disorientation so typical of early morning. As horrible as everything that has to do with mornings: boiling hot coffee, the latest news, milk trucks, kids
going to school, urgent phone calls. They’re all part of a world that Ermete would gladly do away with forever: the world of “before eleven a.m.”

A world his mother, on the other hand, never stops reminding him about when she calls him every Sunday morning at half past seven.

It might be her at the door. Wherever the door is, obviously … It would be perfectly natural to see her pop in, her clothes and makeup already perfect, her mood just bubbly enough to irritate him to no end, with her endless list of concerns to nag him about.

Here’s the door.

Before he opens it, Ermete De Panfilis scratches his backside for a long moment.

Does he really need to answer the door?

Nothing can be seen through the peephole. But then again, maybe he hasn’t even looked through the peephole yet. With a sigh, he slides the bolt to the side and tries to slick back the last few remaining strands of hair on his head, which are sticking up like porcupine quills.

“Here I am …,” he says, opening the door wide with a sigh.

An icy gust of wind instantly reminds him that he’s still in his robe.

Nobody’s there.

Ermete is an electrical engineer, just like his mother wanted. His degree gave her a trump card to play with her girlfriends. And it helped him, too, in a way, by letting him afford an apartment far from home and giving him the chance to follow his real interests
as a radio ham, an expert in antique motorcycles, a dabbler in archaeology with a passion for mystery, a collector of pig statuettes, an avid reader of comic books and, naturally, the world’s foremost expert on board games from all eras.