The Serpent's Curse (15 page)

“Boris was a scholar, right?” said Darrell. “So maybe one of the books is a clue?”

Becca found herself drawn to the shelves, even though she couldn't read any of the titles. “I don't know any Cyrillic. I should learn. I'll buy a phrase book before we leave.” She suddenly hoped they had interpreted Roald's signal correctly.
Was
the Order near? How did he know? Was he in danger? Should they really be helping him? Did he mean to raise four fingers instead of five? She was finally only certain of one thing: that she felt afraid in Boris's dark apartment. Boris, who might already be dead.

“Come on, everybody,” said Wade. “It's here, and we're not seeing it. Boris
wanted
us here. I think we're all pretty sure of that. So what did he want us to find?”

“Maybe it's not here,” said Lily. “Maybe we should get back to your dad. Or the safe flat. Or somewhere else. This place is kind of sad. If Boris is, you know . . .”

“Dad would call,” said Darrell. “And if he doesn't call, it means he's tied up. If he's tied up, it means
we
have to move forward. His words. He told us to.”

“Okay, you're all witnesses,” Lily said. “Whatever happens, it's Darrell's fault.”

“Fine,” he said. “But if there's something here Boris wanted to give us, it'll take us closer to my mom, so yeah, bring it on.”

Wade and Lily started opening every drawer they could find, while Darrell looked into and under every piece of furniture in all three rooms. For her part, Becca found herself unable to leave the books. She fingered them one after another, as if they would somehow make sense to her the closer she was to them. Rows and rows of old bindings, some with dust jackets with faded colors, others with dented spines, wrinkled boards, and vanished titles. Then she stopped. She tugged a book bound in black cloth from the shelf. She read its title aloud. “
The Teeth, in Relation to Beauty, Voice, and Health.
”

“You
can
read Russian,” said Darrell. “That didn't take long.”

“No,” she said. “It's in English. It's the only book in English out of all of them.” She turned. “Wade? It's about teeth. Do you think—”

He moved next to her, and she handed it to him. He opened the cover, only to find that a rectangular area had been cut out of the pages to a depth of about one and a half inches. Inside the hole was a black plastic box.

“A videotape,” he said. “Do you think he wanted us to see the tape?”

“How can we play that?” said Lily. “That's like 1970 or something, isn't it?”

Becca whirled around. There was a low cabinet against the opposite wall. She knelt to it. A small television was inside. On top of the television was a tape player. “Oh, man. This is it. This is what Boris wanted us to find.”

She turned on the television, popped the tape into the player, and hit Play.

The screen slowly came alive with gray snow, then went black with a flicker of color, and there was Boris, reaching his hand away from the screen and plopping his bulk down on a couch that was not the same as the couch in the room with them.

Boris was as large as he had been in the restaurant, but younger, as if the video had been made some years ago and somewhere else.

“So . . . ,” he began. “Is Boris here. If you find this, you know. My little time here is over. Your time has just begun. Your journey? Miles, miles, and more miles. The clock ticks many hours, and still you may not find what you wish to find. But as last final thing, Boris tell what
he
knows.”

He had said some of those words at the restaurant, Becca recalled. It was strange and sad to see his large face staring at them from beyond the television, maybe from beyond the grave.
Was
Boris dead? They might have resuscitated him in the ambulance, or at the hospital. Maybe . . .

“We all want to know secret, yes?” Boris went on. “This is why we are here on this earth. Starting with great astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, then with Guardians, secret is hidden inside secret!” His face, even on the video, grew dark, and the gleam of perspiration was already on his forehead. “Secret is hidden, and is hidden, and is hidden like layers of onion. In the center . . . is relic.”

“This is meant for the Guardians,” Darrell said. “He's going to tell us—”

“Once comes powerful man,” Boris said urgently. He twisted his body this way and that, apparently unable to settle into his surroundings, until his own story took him, and he looked away from the camera. “He is ruler of men. Of nation. Many nation. His name, Albrecht von Hohenzollern. Grand Master of Teutonic Order. He live in castle far away. Today it is in Mother Russia. Not so then. Not so in 1517 . . .”

And just like at the restaurant, his tortured English dissolved, and, despite themselves, the four of them fell under his heavy spell.

M
oonlight falls over the frosted ramparts of a castle on the banks of a black river.

It is Schloss Königsberg, crowning fortress of the Teutonic Knights.

The year is 1517, the month February, the day the eighteenth.

A figure wrapped in long robes stalks the snowy walls silently. It is he, the Grand Master, Albrecht von Hohenzollern. His face is a mask of sorrow, wet with tears he futilely attempts to wipe away. Bitter howling coils up from the rooms below, a tender voice in agony. Albrecht slaps his hands over his frozen ears, yet louder, louder come the shrieks. Then—
clack-clack!

It is the clatter of hobnail boots.

“What is it?” Albrecht growls.

Two knights appear: his nephews, sons of his sister. “Grand Master, we have returned from the wastes of Muscovy with words from Duke Vasily—”

“Words? Only words? What of the astronomer? His machine? I sent thirty knights after one man! Where are the others?”

“Dead,” says one nephew. “We two alone have returned.”

“The others were slain by the astronomer's sword,” says the other. “Their bodies prayed over by a monk. But we managed to steal part of the relic.”

“Part of it? Part of it! What part?”

“The head, Grand Master. The double-eyed serpent's head.”

Suddenly in Albrecht's palm sits a jeweled device, glittering in the moonlight. The twin diamond eyes of the serpent are surrounded by a complex fixture of filigreed silver and more diamonds.

“Duke Vasily sends a hundred knights in pursuit of the astronomer and the traitor monk,” says one nephew.

“To honor his alliance with you,” says the other.

Albrecht breathes more calmly, or so his nephews think. “You have accomplished half your mission. Kneel before me.”

Without a word, they do.

He draws his sword and swings it once, and the head of one nephew rolls across the stone to his feet, where he kicks it over the wall into the snow.

To the other, Albrecht says, “I have another task for you. The child below . . . the child must leave here with its nurse. There is a ship departing Königsberg in three days' time—”

A deafening shriek freezes his voice, his blood.

The Grand Master turns away, all too aware that the journey to the end of the sea is long, so very long.

“Child!” he cries. “Child, cease your cries! Your mother is lost . . . lost . . .”

Alone once more, Albrecht stalks the walls over and over, night after night, lamenting, pondering, waiting . . .

And that was all. Boris slumped back into himself and said no more.

“Boris, where is Serpens now?” Becca asked, staring at the face on the screen as if it could answer her, until the screen went black again.

Darrell switched off the player and the television. “So Albrecht had his goons steal the head of Serpens when Copernicus was in Russia, and after that Albrecht had it. But . . . is Boris also saying that Albrecht had a baby, and that his wife died?”

“I think so,” Lily said. “At least maybe. But did everyone hear that? He said ‘the journey to the end of the sea is long.' He said at the restaurant that it's a quote from Copernicus. What did he mean? What sea? Whose journey? Ours? Albrecht's? And ‘the clock ticks many hours.' Boris talks like a fortune-teller.”

“One thing is sure,” said Wade. “And it's kind of what I suspected. That Serpens was, and may still be, in two parts. The head that Albrecht stole, and the body that Copernicus still had.”

As they sat in the cold room, staring at the blank television screen, the fence gate outside squealed on its hinges, the front door down below edged open, and someone stepped inside the building.

W
ade rose to his feet. “Don't anyone move.”

“You just did,” said Darrell.

“Shhh!”

The buzzer on the wall next to the flat door sounded. Wade shot his finger to his lips. The buzzer sounded again. After a few moments of silence, slow footsteps echoed up the staircase.

“What do we do?” Lily whispered.

Wade listened. The footsteps were closer, louder, but slow, like those of an elderly person. And . . . what was that? . . . The clacking of a cane up the stairs. “Maybe it's . . . let's just be cool.” He went to the door and pulled it open casually as if they had not just entered a possibly dead man's apartment and weren't being hunted by international assassins.

A man with a mop of gray hair and a beard made his last slow steps up to the fifth-floor landing. He wore thick spectacles and a bulky buttoned sweater, and he used a slender umbrella as a cane. He wheezed for breath, adjusted his glasses, and gazed blinkingly at the children. “You . . .” His voice was hoarse. “But you are not Boris Rubashov. Where is my dear friend Boris?”

Rubashov,
Wade thought.
Is that Boris's real last name?

“No. We were just looking in his flat. He . . . asked us to come over. But he's not here . . . yet.”

“Ah,” the man said, scratching his chin and leaning inside. “He asked you to pick up the, er, thing, did he?”

Darrell stepped forward next to Wade. “What thing?”

The old man blinked quizzically through his glasses. “You know, the, er, thing. You know.” He cupped his free hand on the side of his mouth and whispered, “The relic!”

Suddenly, Lily pushed her way between the boys. “You're
him
,” she said, pointing to the umbrella. “The man . . .”

“Man? Me? No, no. I'm not him. Him who?”

“The man at the Dorchester Hotel. You wore a suit. You pretended to be a doctor.”

“No, I didn't. You
thought
I was a doctor because I am such a good actor!”

“You poisoned Boris!” she screamed. “It
is
murder! You killed him. That umbrella. And this . . . beard . . .” She grabbed it and pulled hard.

“Owww!” the man cried as his beard peeled halfway off his cheeks. “Bloody rude, that was! Now you've changed the game. Ex-ter-min-ate! Ex-ter-min-ate!” He swept his umbrella up like a sword. There was the sound of a spring letting loose, a slender silver point thrust itself from the tip of the umbrella, and he stabbed the air in front of Wade. “You—die—now!”

“Murderer!” Becca shouted, tugging Lily past the boys and back into the room.

Wade felt his hand move instinctively to his left side, but the dagger was in a vault in New York. Instead he grabbed the nearest unattached thing—the small table lamp by the door. He yanked its cord from the wall and knocked the end of the umbrella down. But the guy, with his fake beard still dangling from his chin, swung the weapon around in a neat O and jabbed. Its needle point gleamed in the half-light and pierced the lampshade. The man danced back like a stage actor in a duel.

“She forbade me terminate you, but I have a duty to defend myself!” the man said. “For the Order!” He slashed away madly in the air, while Becca spun around in the flat and grabbed a handful of fat Russian novels from the shelf and threw them at the weird little man.