14
THE APARTMENT

THERE ISN’T ANY FURNITURE OR PICTURES OR CARPETS. ALL THERE is on the other side of the door leading into Alfred Van Der Berger’s apartment is a hallway lined by two tall walls of books stacked all the way up to the ceiling. And in the middle of the hallway are other books, arranged one atop the other to form columns, stools, tables, shelves. Magazines, newspapers, pamphlets and notebooks fill every square centimeter of the apartment. Some of the columns are low, others taller than a meter high, while still others reach the ceiling. The piles of books only leave room for a single narrow passageway, barely wide enough to walk through.

“Man …,” whispers Sheng.

There isn’t even space to put down the bags they picked up from the newsstand. The air is stale and musty. The ceiling light seems totally incapable of illuminating the chaotic mass of papers.

“If you ask me, he could’ve used a bookcase,” Sheng adds.

“If you ask me, he was totally crazy,” mutters Harvey.

Mistral shakes her head, flabbergasted.

Elettra takes a few steps into the hallway and feels the floor tremble beneath her feet. “Oh, man …,” she murmurs, staring at the masses of books. “There are so many of them!” There’s dust everywhere. She runs her fingers over the spines of the books. Old leather-bound volumes, economic textbooks, paperbacks, titles in Italian, English, Russian, Portuguese. Light covers, dark covers, photographic books, lettering in gold and others as black as pitch. “It can’t be …,” she murmurs, delving into the jungle of books. “The whole apartment’s like this.”

The hallway leads into two rooms, both completely packed with books. There isn’t even any furniture, just narrow passageways between the publications, which all come together to form one massive maze.

Mistral follows behind her friend slowly. All around them is the stagnant odor of dust mixed with paper and tobacco. “Don’t touch anything …,” she whispers. “Don’t touch a single thing.” She’s afraid that the flimsy construction might collapse on top of her at any moment.

Harvey is about to shut the apartment door behind him when Mistral begs, “No! Leave it open. Otherwise we’ll suffocate!”

Harvey nods.

“Let’s leave these bags outside,” suggests Sheng. “I mean, I don’t think anybody is going to steal them from us. …”

“What’s this?” asks Harvey, stepping into the hallway.

Hanging beside the door is a little board, written on which are two columns of numbers that have progressively been crossed off.

“That looks like the professor’s handwriting …,” remarks Sheng. “But what does it mean?”

“I have no idea,” mumbles Harvey. “Bills to be paid, maybe? Or the number of books in here?”

“It looks like a couple of countdowns.”

“But the second column goes up and then down again.”

“It might be some sort of diet,” Mistral guesses, slowly walking back to them. “My mom keeps a chart like that on the fridge.”

“You think the professor was on a diet?” Harvey grumbles dubiously.

“The woman at the newsstand said he was really thin …,” Sheng remembers. “All skin and bones. I mean, even when he was alive.”

“If I remember correctly, she said he weighed under sixty kilograms, just like this,” Mistral notes, pointing to the last number written on the board.

“And before that, he weighed sixty, sixty-five …” Harvey checks the entire column. “At most, seventy kilos.”

“So what does the first column mean?”

Mistral shakes her head. “I don’t know, but …” She pulls out her sketchbook and patiently copies down the two series of numbers.

“I think I found the kitchen!” comes Elettra’s voice from the depths of the apartment.

“Let’s go take a look,” Sheng proposes.

* * *

Elettra moves around on her tiptoes to avoid the unpleasant feeling of walking on nothingness. She’s already gone through what might be the dining room, which is filled with stacks of books and newspapers.

The kitchen is a narrow little room where the air barely circulates. There are dishes piled up in the sink and magazines stacked up on all the shelves, their pages damp. On the refrigerator is a map of Rome, stuck there with four magnets in the shape of spaceships. The professor used a red marker to draw circles around certain areas of the map. He also wrote the words:

Mistral walks in, looking like a ghost as she emerges from the darkness of the dining room. The moment she steps foot in the kitchen, she feels like she can barely breathe. “What did you find?” she asks Elettra.

“Just this map,” she answers. “Rome. The professor wrote that it would begin on December twenty-ninth. Which means he knew it right down to the day.”

Mistral shakes her head. “Can we get out of here? This place scares me.”

But Elettra is still studying the map. “He circled Trastevere …” she says, pointing to the district where her family’s hotel is located. “Along with Parioli and Esquilino. Those are three of the neighborhoods that the blackout affected yesterday, on the twenty-ninth. … So did the professor know? Had he predicted it? Was that the sign that it had all begun?”

Mistral’s stare gives no answer to her questions.

“Elettra? Mistral?” Sheng calls from some other room in the apartment. “Come here. …”

“I think I found something!” Elettra cries out, taking the map of Rome off the fridge.

“Us too!” calls Sheng. “Come take a look!”

Mistral doesn’t wait for him to repeat himself. She grabs hold of Elettra’s hand and pulls her out of the room. “What did you find?”

“Stars,” replies Harvey. “Stars, everywhere.”

The ceiling of the professor’s room is covered by a map of the sky, composed of dozens of sheets of paper carefully positioned one beside the other. Dotted lines join together the brightest stars, creating glowing figures with ancient names: Draco, Orion, Hercules, Canis Major, Auriga, Ursa Minor, Polaris, Ursa Major. Some of the stars are circled in red, like boats in a game of battleship.

“It looks like the professor was studying the stars,” Harvey comments, sitting down on the mattress to stare up at the ceiling. There are slightly fewer books around the bed, and the air seems more breathable.

“Together with a million other things,” adds Elettra.

“Do any of you understand astronomy?” asks Sheng.

“Not me,” sighs Harvey. “But I can ask my dad. That’s what he teaches at college.”

“So the professor was studying the stars to discover … what?”

“The … the secret, I guess. The Ring of Fire. To find it you need to use the map, and by looking below you find it above … or something like that,” summarizes Mistral, leafing through her sketchbook filled with notes.

“Oh, that explains everything!” Sheng exclaims ironically.

“What could be this important?” wonders Mistral.

“Something other people are looking for, too … a secret they mustn’t discover … but something that people are willing to kill for …,” Sheng murmurs.

“ ‘Search below and you shall find it above’…,” recites Elettra. “Above us are the stars, right?”

“And below?”

“The floor,” Sheng answers.

“So what’s on the floor?”

“Us. Plus tons of books.”

“And big red circles …,” Elettra notes, pointing at a series of marks made on the few areas of the floor that aren’t covered with books.

“What could those be for?”

“I don’t know,” she admits. She walks out of the bedroom to check the rest of the house. “But there are other ones in the hallway.”

“They look like circles on a treasure map,” Sheng comments. “You know, like ‘X’ marks the spot!”

“I don’t get it,” says Harvey, giving up. “I don’t get any of this. Maybe … maybe we’re going too fast. Maybe we should get the book we found in the library translated first. Or reread the professor’s journal more carefully.”

Sheng pats his backpack. “It’s all here, safe and sound.”

Mistral points out a book resting beside the bed to Harvey. “Take a look at what he was reading.”

The boy reaches over the bed and picks it up. He brushes away the dust and tells them, “I think it’s been a while since he last read this. It’s entitled Naturales Quaestiones. It’s about comets. And it’s by Seneca.”

Sheng snaps his fingers. “Nero’s tutor!”

“That’s the one,” confirms Harvey, thumbing through the pages. “It’s all written in Latin, in case any of you know how to translate it. …”

“So let’s summarize,” says Sheng. “We’ve got a tooth, a thing the professor calls a wooden map, four toy tops, an incomprehensible book in Greek and an incomprehensible book in Latin.”

“Very well put,” cackles Harvey.

“And finally, there are some mysterious ‘thems’ out there who’ve killed the only person who could explain how we can piece all these things together. Am I forgetting anything?” concludes Sheng.

“Apart from aliens, the American Secret Service and an island inhabited by dinosaurs, I don’t think so, Professor Sheng,” replies Harvey, shaking his head theatrically.

“All right,” breaks in Elettra. “What we do know is that we’ve wound up on the trail of something called the Ring of Fire, which seems to be really ancient … and that it’s hidden in Rome. We know that the professor had been searching for it for years and that he might just have found it in one of these places.” She shows the others the map of Rome with the various neighborhoods circled in red.

At that very moment, the phone rings.

Sheng yelps. Mistral snaps her sketchbook shut.

And an icy shiver runs down the kids’ spines.

* * *

“This must be it…” says Beatrice, pulling the Mini up to the curb.

Jacob Mahler slips out of the car door in a single nimble movement.

“Hey! Hold on!” protests Little Linch, who’s still crammed in the backseat. He grabs hold of the headrest and the roof of the car to hoist himself out. Once on the street, he uselessly tries to smooth out his rumpled suit.

“Couldn’t you get yourself a real car?” he complains to Beatrice.

“I’m already lucky I got this one back,” the young woman replies.

Jacob Mahler is looking at a gray four-story building. He raises his hand to point at a light coming from the apartment on the top floor.

“Someone’s still there …,” he says. “Perfect.” He takes the bow out of his violin case and brandishes it like a sword.

Beatrice quickly assesses the building. The news vendor in Largo Argentina told them about the professor’s nieces and nephews and where they were headed. It must’ve been a second home, based on what they were told by Little Linch, who’d been following Alfred Van Der Berger for a few weeks and had never seen him in that neighborhood. He was living in a studio apartment in the center of town, not far from the Caffè Greco. A studio apartment that had turned out to be completely empty, with the exception of a few changes of clothes.

“Would you look at this place?” protests Little Linch, squashing something under the heels of his boots. He tries to clean them in a snowbank, but in the end he gives up. “What a dump!”

Beatrice switches on her car’s blinkers. “Should we go up and take a look?”

Jacob Mahler shakes his head. “The two of us will go.” He nods to Little Linch, who follows behind him, trotting like a wild boar.

Beatrice doesn’t breathe. She glares at Mahler’s back.

“Keep the engine running,” the hit man orders her. Then he slides the tip of his bow into the lock, opening the front door, and walks into the building.

Little Linch follows him. He switches on a flashlight and turns one last time to look at Beatrice. “We’ll be right back, sweets. …”

After which he disappears inside.