Cloud and Wallfish (28 page)

There were shouts from the other side of the room, where, out of the corner of his eye, Noah could see a policeman whacking someone’s legs with his baton because he didn’t like how the man was standing.

They’d better obey, then.

That meant letting go of Cloud-Claudia’s hand. He tried to stay very close to her, though.

Cloud was staying close to him, too.

“Why did they take us?” she said. “We were just walking by.”

There was a chorus of complaint from their side of the cellar.

Noah kept hearing the word
Kinder,
which means “children.” The other prisoners clearly thought that Noah and Cloud shouldn’t be there in that awful cellar. They were calling out to the guards, trying to get them to come over and do something for the children, to get the children out of this place.

The guards barked back and thwacked some more people on the legs, trying to shut everyone up, but eventually somebody who seemed perhaps slightly more senior than the others came up to where Noah and Cloud-Claudia and the kind woman were standing.

“Na ja,”
he said to the woman. “Bringing children along to your riots and your vandal parades! Not very clever, you hooligans! What kind of mother are you, putting a child through something like this?”

The kind woman took a deep, shaky breath. Noah could see that she was frightened and angry, and that she was another person, like Noah, trying to do the right thing and not sure what the right thing to do was, exactly.

“You’ve made a mistake, officer,” she said. “These children aren’t mine. They were playing near the church. They weren’t in any protest. I’m just trying to keep them safe from your batons. They shouldn’t be here.”

The policemen’s eyes bugged out.

“Nice try!” he said to her. And to the whole cellar, he shouted, “Who here is the parent of these children?”

And there was silence, of course.

“Let them go,” said some young man standing not too far away. “It’s not right, frightening children this way.”

“Yes, yes!” said other voices from all around that bald, cold room. “Let the kids go!”

The guards shouted again.
“Stand properly and shut your mouths.”
That’s what the guards kept shouting. The wall was cold and slippery under Noah’s fingers. And his legs kept trembling, which made it hard to stand the way the policemen wanted everyone to stand. And he could see, on his right, Cloud-Claudia’s hands on the wall, too. She had her head turned to look at him. Her eyes were large and tired, and her hands were beginning to slide down the wall.

She said something to Noah.

“What?” he whispered. “What?”

Cloud-Claudia scooted a few inches closer to him.

“Now we’ll never get there in time,” she said. “It’s already almost too late. They’ll forget us for good.”

Noah stared at her, not understanding a thing for a second.

Then he realized — it was the Land of the Changelings she was talking about. Nobody but Cloud could be in a police cellar and worry about an imaginary country!

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “We really do.”

Well, Noah certainly agreed with that. He wasn’t at all sure what to do, though.

The policeman nearest Noah and Cloud-Claudia, the one who had said all those nasty things to the kind woman, was consulting with another officer at the door at the far right of the room. Noah could tell they were talking about them, about him and Cloud, because they kept looking over in their direction. They seemed to be having an argument of some kind. Then the man in the door vanished into the hallway.

“Don’t be afraid, children,” said the woman next to Cloud-Claudia. “They can’t possibly keep you here. They’ll have to let you go.”

The next part of the night lasted forever. They just stood there and waited. Their hands would get tired of pressing against the cold wall and start slipping, and then some guard would shout, and they would try to put their hands up higher again.

Finally, Cloud-Claudia just sighed,
“Nein,”
and she let her hands fall right down to her sides and rested with her head against the wall, and the guards didn’t do anything about it, so Noah let his hands slip down, too.

It was like a bad dream.

And he was so tired. Fear and tiredness were kind of wrestling to control his brain.

He wondered whether his parents had even noticed he wasn’t in the apartment anymore. Perhaps they hadn’t! They might just peek into his room in the dark and not notice nobody was in there anymore.

Of course, even if they found out he was missing, what could they do?

And so on and so on. After a long bad stint of these thoughts, Noah saw a couple of officers coming toward him. One of them was a woman.

“Come with me, you two,” she said. Her voice was very curt, no nonsense, the kind of voice that makes people line up and start marching.

Cloud-Claudia darted close to Noah and slipped her hand into his. Her fingers were cold but comforting.

Around the room, tired people were saying things like “Finally!” and “Those poor kids, having to wait here so long. You won’t get away with this!” and, to Noah and Cloud-Claudia as they passed by: “Finally letting you go. You’ll be all right now, children.”

“Silence!” said the woman guard, and she hustled Noah and Cloud out of that cellar, moving them along so fast that Noah didn’t even have time to say
Danke
to the woman who had been so kind. He had to settle for sending grateful thoughts back in her direction from the hall:
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
And then the door of that awful cellar clicked shut behind them.

They went farther down the hall. A second guard had joined them. Noah was wondering what time it was now. Some impossibly late hour, he guessed. He was so tired. His thoughts were just one big confused tangle. His parents were going to be mad. How were he and Cloud going to get home, anyway? He didn’t know where the van had taken them. He didn’t know what street they were on, or even what part of Berlin they were in. He had a feeling it would be a very long, cold walk home.

Then the woman stopped.

“You,” she said to Noah. “In here. We have a few questions for you. The girl comes with me.”

“No,” said Noah, but it didn’t come out as a word you could understand.

Cloud-Claudia was gripping his hand so tightly, he couldn’t feel the tips of his fingers. She shook her head. Shook her head again.

“Nein, nein!”
she said. “Don’t take him. He can’t even speak right. You have to leave him alone. Let us go home. He can’t talk.”

“Be quiet, I tell you,” said the woman guard. “You both have gotten yourselves and your parents into a huge amount of trouble. You come with me. The boy goes in here.”

And before Noah could think what he should do now, she had peeled Cloud-Claudia’s fingers loose from Noah’s hand and started leading her away. And at the same moment, the second guard pulled a key out of his pocket, unlocked the door on the left, and pushed Noah into that little room.

“Sit down,” said a man behind a desk.

The room was very small and very plain, but there was a bright light spilling over everything. The chair the man wanted him to sit on was practically swimming in light. It made his eyes water. He was so tired. His eyes just wanted to close. He wanted to close his eyes and rest.

He sat down in that chair.

“So,” said the man, “what is your name?”

Noah, however, was too distracted to answer right away. He had just noticed what was on the wall to his right: a blank rectangle of glass, pretending to be a mirror.

Even though he was so tired that he just wanted to curl up in a heap in the corner, he still knew right away what that was.

In the little room with the desk and too much light, Noah gripped his hands tightly together to steady himself.

Remember
Cloud-Claudia,
he told himself.
Remember her father, in prison somewhere.

He was determined that from now on he was not going to mess up. Somehow he was going to figure out what the right thing to do was.

But he was so tired. Just sitting down in that chair had made him break out into a huge yawn.

“Boy!” said the man behind the desk. “I asked you your name! What’s your name, and why were you rioting in the streets of Berlin?”

“I wasn’t,” said Noah, though his tongue stumbled through the words. He was
so
tired.

“What’s that?” said the man, looking taken aback. “Speak up clearly, please. Your name.”

So despite his good intentions, Noah already had no idea what the right thing was to say. He thought it over. In thrillers, you’re not supposed to let the other side know what your name is. But this was real life. And he couldn’t see how his parents were going to be able to come rescue him unless these people knew his name — his Berlin name.

“Jonah,” said Noah. “Jonah Brown.”

Of course, there were about a million extra syllables there. He was so tired! The Astonishing Stutter always got worse when he was tired and stressed out.

“What?” said the man. “Say that again.” Then there was a pause, and Noah realized that the man must be listening to someone talking into some small machine hidden in his ear, the way the policemen on the streets of Berlin paused to listen when they stopped you to ask for your papers seven minutes after you’d left the American embassy.

“You can’t talk?” said the man. “The little girl — your sister? — said you can’t talk. We can ask your sister these questions, then.”

“No, no,” said Noah. “Please, you have to leave her alone.”

“What did you say your name was again?”

“Jonah Brown,” said Noah.

“What?”

“Jonah Brown.”

“Stay here for a moment. You are under surveillance. Do not move.”

The man came out from behind his desk and went right out into the hall. Even before he had fully gone through the door, he had started arguing with somebody on the other side.

All Noah heard was “What? He’s whose? What a mess. And who’s the girl, then?”

And then the door slammed shut, and Noah couldn’t hear anything anymore.

Noah sat in his chair. The man didn’t come back. Time dribbled on.

It felt like it had been a million hours — no, years — since he had looked out his window and seen Cloud-Claudia out there with her coat on, walking away into the night. Could he have done something different, something clever that would have kept her safe? Where was she now, and what were they doing to her?

He would fret, and then doze off, and then go back to fretting, and then find himself half asleep again. It was all a nightmare that wouldn’t stop.

But every time his head nodded forward because sleep was rising like a puddle all around him, a guard banged on the door.

When his head sank forward to rest on the desk, the door behind him actually flew open, and a guard came in to shout at him in person.

“No going to sleep!” said the guard. “You must stay awake here. You have not been given permission to sleep.”

“Where is —?” But he wasn’t sure whether Cloud-Claudia had already told them her name.
Cloud-Claudia,
he thought, wondering what was happening to her. He remembered her father, in prison. He even remembered her mother, who must surely be worrying all the time, wherever she now was on the other side of the Wall, about Cloud-Claudia and Cloud’s father.

The guard slapped the desk with his hand to wake Noah up.

He jumped in his chair, and tears blurred his vision for a moment.