Ring of Fire (17 page)

She opens her eyes.

Mistral is talking.

“Please …,” the French girl says, staring at Mahler as he walks toward her. “What do you want? We haven’t done anything. …”

“You haven’t done anything. True. But I want something from you.” Jacob Mahler’s cynical gaze studies the walls and columns of books without showing the slightest bit of surprise. “So I’m going to ask you this just once: did you take it?”

“What?” asks Mistral.

“My briefcase.”

“N-no.”

“ ‘No’ because you didn’t take it or ‘no’ because you don’t want to tell me?”

Mistral looks around. She sees Elettra and Sheng lying on the floor in the bedroom. “No, because the briefcase wasn’t yours to begin with,” she replies.

Elettra shuts her eyes.

“Very well, then …,” Jacob Mahler says calmly, raising his violin again.

“No!” groans Mistral, instinctively clapping her hands over her ears. “No more music!”

“Where is my briefcase?” the man asks, taking two more steps into the apartment.

Lying on the ground, Elettra feels her body trembling. But immediately afterward she realizes it’s not her body that’s trembling … it’s the floor.

Jacob Mahler has noticed something strange. His voice has become slightly tense.

“Listen …,” he says. “I know you took it, you and your friends. … So go call them and give me back my briefcase.”

Mistral stubbornly shakes her head.

“Why on earth,” the man continues, “is a sweet, sensible girl like you in a terrible place like this? What did you come here to do, hmm? If your parents found out, I think they’d be very angry. …”

“I’ve only got my mother …,” replies Mistral, backing toward the dining room. “And she never gets angry.”

Jacob Mahler smiles, but it’s as if his smile is trying to hold back a river of rage ready to burst forth. “You’re lucky. Why don’t we make a deal, hmm? You tell me where you’ve hidden my briefcase … and I’ll let you go back to your mother. What do you say?”

“I don’t have the briefcase. …”

“Well then, who does?”

“Nero,” replies the girl, challenging Jacob Mahler with a resolute stare.

T
HE APARTMENT FLOOR IS SHAKEN BY A STRONG TREMOR.
A
FEW
books tumble to the ground. Elettra wakes up with a start. Harvey’s beside her, his hand resting on her shoulder. “How much do you weigh?” he asks in a hushed voice.

“Why?”

“I figured out what all those numbers by the door are. They’re—” A second tremor, this one stronger than the last one, makes him lose his balance and fall down on top of her. The apartment walls let out a long groan. More books slide to the floor.

“Help!” yells Sheng, waking up with a start and noticing that the floor in the room is lurching. Elettra looks out into the hallway. The walls of books are billowing out like sails. A horrible noise echoes beneath them, followed by a metallic creak, like plumbing being ripped apart.

“It’s a trap, you see?” says Harvey, trying to get back to his feet. “The second column kept track of the professor’s weight. The first column is the weight that the apartment floor can still support!”

A third tremor.

“And how much is that, right now?” asks Elettra, her eyes open wide.

“One hundred thirty-seven kilograms,” replies Harvey, helping her up to her feet. “Around three hundred pounds.”

With the third tremor, Little Linch looks around for his colleague. “Hey, Mahler!” he shouts, still a little groggy from the music. “What’s going on in here?” He spots the gray-haired killer inside the apartment and takes a few steps toward him. “What the heck are all these papers doing flying around?” he grunts.

The moment he crosses over the threshold, Mahler sees him and shouts, “Don’t!”

“H-huh?” stammers Little Linch, not understanding. He takes another baby step and a giant pit suddenly opens up beneath his feet. “Hey!” he manages to shout before plunging down, disappearing in a cloud of dust.

The pit widens, making its way down the hallway. Mountains of books tumble down one after the other like dominoes. “Everything’s collapsing!” shouts Mistral.

In the bedroom, Elettra holds on tightly to Harvey, who shouts, “The red circles! Look for one of the red circles on the floor! Sheng! Mistral! The red circles!” The hallway floor lurches up with a boom and then disappears in a cloud of dust with a crash. The walls tilt; the plumbing explodes, spraying water everywhere; and the tiles crumble to pieces.

Elettra clings to Harvey, oblivious to everything except the noise.

She isn’t even sure where she is, if she’s on solid ground or
falling. There’s dust. Only dust. Then she hears a shout. It might be Mistral. It might not. She tries to free herself from Harvey, but his arm won’t let her go. He’s holding her tight, protecting her. She can feel his cheek pressed up against hers. And she can hear his voice whispering, “It’s okay. It’s okay …,” as the world comes crashing down all around them.

The two kneel and then sit down on the ground. They wait. Now they can hear water running. They can see flashing lights. Sheng’s coughing. The backpack appears for a moment from behind a cloud of dust.

Elettra tries to move her legs. Little by little, she realizes she’s on a sort of raft suspended over a seemingly bottomless pit. Sheng is also perched on a little patch of the floor that has remained intact.

And Mistral?

Elettra shuts her eyes.

Her legs are dangling down into empty space, like an acrobat’s.

Sitting in her Mini, Beatrice sees the building’s front door fly out into the middle of the street like a cork popped out of a bottle of champagne. It’s followed by a cloud of dust. She clicks off the radio, opens the car door and rushes out. Only then does she hear the noise. A deafening, echoing roar that bursts out from the old walls of the building. She sees people in neighboring houses looking out their windows. She hears doors slamming and the first repeated screams of “Earthquake!”

But it isn’t an earthquake.

Beatrice covers her mouth with both hands. “It’s collapsing!” She doesn’t have time to say anything else. The building is
already lurching backward, swaying, folding over on itself like a milk carton ready for the trash can.

Beatrice runs for cover behind the door of her Mini. Her blinkers shine through the dust. People begin to scramble out of nearby buildings. Some run off, screaming. Others stop to stare. A man walks calmly toward her.

“It can’t be …,” murmurs Beatrice, recognizing Jacob Mahler.

He’s covered with dust from head to toe. His clothes are the same color as his hair, but he’s walking along coolly, as if nothing is happening. In one hand he’s holding his violin. With the other he’s dragging a girl behind him.

Beatrice feels like she’s seeing a ghost.

“Let’s go,” the ghost says, pushing the girl inside and sitting down in the car.

His face is a thick mask of dust.

Beatrice puts the Mini into reverse and slams down on the gas pedal. The car bumps up against the curb. She throws it into first gear, yanks on the steering wheel, honks the horn and swerves around a couple of people standing in the middle of the street.

“Where’s Little Linch?” she asks.

“He’s dead,” says Mahler.

“How did it happen?”

They hear the first sirens approaching in the distance.

“He ate too much,” the killer replies with a smirk.

E
LETTRA OPENS HER EYES
. S
HE’S LYING ON A MATTRESS, HER HEAD
sunk down into a pillow. Another bed is right above her, like a ceiling.

It’s her bunk bed.

She blinks her eyes and looks around. She recognizes the furniture bathed in the half light, the second bunk bed, her room. She can hear Sheng and Harvey breathing. They’re sleeping nearby.

It’s nighttime.

But what day is it?

She tries to move her arms. Then her legs. She sits up, aching. With one hand she touches her face. There’s a bandage on her temple.

It wasn’t a dream.

“Elettra?” comes her father’s whispering voice.

The girl hadn’t noticed him sitting at the foot of her bed. He’d only been a shadow among the many shadows. Fernando leans over to give her a kiss. “Elettra, my little angel … What did you
kids get yourselves into?” He doesn’t hug her. He limits himself to looking at her from the end of the bed. “You were really lucky. …”

“Dad …” Elettra’s throat is dry. “What time is it? How… how did I get back here?”

The bedroom door opens up slightly and Aunt Linda walks in. “Elettra!” the woman says, almost shouting. Then she lowers her voice to a hush to avoid waking up the boys. “Thank goodness you’re okay!”

Aunt Linda dives into the bunk bed, suffocating her niece in an affectionate embrace. “You’re all out of your mind, you and your friends!”

“Auntie, what—”

Linda cups her hands around the girl’s face and squeezes her cheeks. “That was foolish! Perfectly foolish!”

“Dad … Auntie … I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t remember anything—”

Just then, Elettra remembers the floor caving in, the cloud of dust and the lights shining through the darkness.

“Don’t worry. Harvey already told us everything …,” Fernando Melodia whispers, pointing to the other bunk bed. “He carried you home. You’d fainted.”

“Harvey carried me home?”

Aunt Linda clasps her hands together and waves them right in front of her nose. “Of all places, you kids had to go to a construction site to play? And in winter, of all times?”

Elettra slowly shakes her head, trying to understand what Harvey might have told them. “A construction site?”

Fernando stops Aunt Linda with a patient wave of his hand. “We know. Harvey told us you went there to check out the bulldozers, but—”

“What on earth were you thinking?” interrupts Aunt Linda, appalled. “With all the things to see in Rome … Bulldozers!”

“Since it was so dark, you should’ve watched where you were walking,” Fernando goes on.

“Into a manhole, you fell! Into a manhole!” her aunt says, heaving a sigh.

Her father, on the other hand, caresses Elettra’s forehead. “You hit your head and passed out.” The girl nods, impressed by the excuse Harvey managed to come up with—and by the feeling that her father doesn’t really believe a single word of the story but is repeating it to her so she can avoid giving herself away to Aunt Linda.

“Sheng was hurt, too,” her aunt breaks in. “I put a nice, sturdy bandage on his arm, but tomorrow, just to be sure, I’m taking all three of you down to the emergency room. I don’t care if it’s New Year’s Eve!”

“What time is it right now?” Elettra asks her father.

“Almost two.”

“It was a trap …,” Elettra thinks aloud.

“It wasn’t a trap,” Fernando replies, his voice too low for her aunt to hear. “You got yourselves into it, and you got yourselves out of it all right.”

Elettra stares at her father, trying to understand how much he actually knows. “Dad, we—”

“Naturally, we haven’t said anything to Harvey’s parents or Sheng’s father,” he continues. “But—”

“But tomorrow we’re all going to have a nice little chat,” Aunt Linda interjects. “Don’t think you can get away with this so easily. You were the one responsible for the boys.”

Something dawns on Elettra. “What about Mistral?”

Fernando Melodia stiffens.

“Well, she’s with her mother, isn’t she?” Aunt Linda answers for him.

Fernando nods. “Harvey told us that she caught a cab downtown and went to meet her at the station—”

“And to think they still have all their luggage here!”

Elettra looks over at Harvey’s sleeping form in the half light, grateful for how well he managed to protect them all by keeping their secret.

“Get some rest now. We’ll think about all this tomorrow, okay?” her father suggests.

At the thought of Mistral, Elettra feels tears welling up in her eyes. “We shouldn’t have gone there,” she murmurs.

Her aunt rests a hand on her forehead. “Right now just get some rest. …”

Elettra nods and slips back into a deep sleep. She hears the bedroom door closing and her father saying, “It all went extremely well.”