The Eye of Midnight (10 page)

Maxine grimaced. “Let's just hope he's all right.”

“Something has happened to Colonel Battersea?” asked Nura with alarm.

“A couple of men grabbed him at the train station,” William admitted. “That was the last we saw of him.”

Nura uttered an oath in Turkish and paced the sidewalk.

“We cannot leave the city,” she said at last.

“Well, we certainly can't stay here,” replied Maxine. “We shouldn't even be in the city in the first place. Grandpa only brought us along because he had to. He never meant for us to be wandering around out here all on our own. It's better if we go back and wait for him at Battersea Manor.”

Nura shook her head. “Your grandfather will not return home,” she said with chilling certainty. “The enemy has him now; his life hangs by a thread. If you want to see him again, we must recover the parcel. It is the only way.”

“I don't get it,” said Maxine. “How did Grandpa get involved in all of this anyhow? He's supposed to be retired.”

Nura twisted her shawl around her thumb, and for a moment the cousins thought she might explain, but instead she closed her eyes and sighed.

“Go if you will,” she said, “but I must stay. Tomorrow I will return to the harbor to look for the White Rat. It is your grandfather's only hope.”

The cousins watched Nura make her bed on a hard park bench, unwrapping her headscarf and covering herself as best she could.

“So what's the plan?” Maxine asked in a low voice. “Are we spending the night here with our new friend?”

William bit his thumbnail and pondered their predicament thoughtfully.

“Do you trust her, Will?” asked Maxine.

“I'm not sure. I don't think she's telling us everything. Where did she learn that secret whistle? And what do you make of that strange necklace she's wearing?”

“It looks sort of like an eyeball, doesn't it?”

William nodded.
“ ‘Seek the Needle, find the Eye,' ”
he said.

The recollection of the riddle slowed them both for a moment.

“Is that necklace what we were supposed to find?” asked Maxine with a doubtful frown.

“Who knows?” said William. “The necklace, or maybe the girl. I wonder what she's doing here all by herself. She's a million miles from home.”

“I don't know,” replied Maxine. “Somehow I don't think Grandpa was expecting the courier to be a twelve-year-old girl.”

“She seems to think the package is pretty important, though, doesn't she? She's got her own reasons for wanting it back, I'll bet—something more than just helping us track down Grandpa.”

“So why should we do her dirty work for her?” said Maxine. “Let her find it herself. I'll take my chances back at the manor any day over playing hide-and-seek in the city with that creep from the tunnel.”

“What if she's right, though, M? What if that package really is our only chance to find Grandpa?” William turned his back for a moment and stared at the small girl on the bench. “Did you ever come to a fork in the road and get the feeling that whatever path you chose was bound to be the wrong one?” he asked. Not waiting for an answer, he shoved his hands deep in his pockets and ambled toward Nura.

Maxine watched him go. She knew her cousin well enough by now to guess that he had already decided to stay. She knew herself well enough to realize that, despite her doubts, she would stick with him, that his choice would be her choice, even though it was all perfectly absurd.

She followed William halfheartedly and joined him in front of the park bench, her hands on her hips.

“What will you say to the thief?” she asked Nura, who was already half-asleep. “If you find your White Rat again somehow, what will you say?
May I please have my package back?
How do you know he hasn't already gotten rid of it? Sold it or something?”

Nura sat up abruptly. “Has he sold it?” she said, her voice shrill as if she were confronting the thief already. “I do not think so. But if he no longer possesses the parcel, he will know who does, and he will tell me, and I will follow, and I
must
follow, and I will never stop until it comes to me again, and from me to Colonel Battersea.” Her voice had risen almost to a hysteria, and her eyes were glassy and wide.

“Easy, kiddo,” said William, sitting down and putting his arm around her shoulders. “Don't give yourself a nosebleed. You talked us into it, all right? We'll help you get your package back.”

The cousins and their new companion woke the next morning with sore necks and foggy heads and no clear memory of where they were. They opened their eyes and sat bolt upright in alarm. A shabby drifter carrying a bindle on the end of an old axe handle was shuffling around the pavilion, eyeing them with interest in the pale light of dawn.

“Bite to eat in there, by any chance?” he asked, pointing at Nura's haversack. “Haven't sunk my teeth into a thing in two days. Gospel truth.”

Nura shook her head tensely, pulling the sack tight under her arm, and the man responded with a philosophical shrug. “It's a bad habit,” he said, nibbling off a bit of his fingernail and spitting it over his shoulder. “Sleeping on park benches, I mean. Nothing for youngsters.”

The children shifted uncomfortably.

“Ain't you seen the papers? There's cutthroats loose in the city. Two nights ago they murdered a police sergeant down on Maiden Lane. Two days before that, it was a carpet merchant in Brooklyn. Police don't have a clue.”

He looked the three of them over and shook his head, then turned at last and wandered off.

Maxine clutched her hand to her nose and mouth. “He smelled terrible,” she said, watching the drifter leave.

“We've slept too long,” said Nura. “We should have been at the harbor already. The White Rat may have come and gone without our knowing, and the package with him.”

Above them, the skies had filled with clouds, and through the trees they could see a few early visitors to the park glancing upward and fumbling with their umbrellas. Maxine pulled her mother's red hat down tight and held out her palm to catch the opening notes of a May shower, while Nura wrapped her scarf around her head and shouldered her haversack, starting off without looking back.

William glanced at Maxine and shrugged, and the two of them rose from their benches and trotted after.

They hurried downtown under a steady rain that bloomed in perfect circles in the puddles on the street. Nura pulled a few coins from her bag, and they caught the Broadway trolley, which brought them all the way to Battery Park, to the gray harbor and the ships moored there, to the pier where the parcel was stolen.

Across the waves Lady Liberty held her pale green torch aloft and searched the horizon while the children sat and waited and the morning passed into afternoon.

A ferry landed from Ellis Island. A great press of tired, damp souls churned into the city, clutching their every earthly possession, glancing side to side in uncertainty as they pondered what might come next and then moved on.

William and Maxine sat beneath a steady drizzle and watched the passing crowds. They began to believe they had come on a fool's errand, that Nura's thief would never darken this dock again. But just when they had convinced themselves that the entire day had been wasted, a particular individual among the host of weary immigrants caught William's eye.

It was a young man, a gangling, disagreeable-looking sort, wearing a white suit that rode high at the wrists and ankles and set him apart from the drab crowd like a pale scarecrow. He had a vulgar face with a wisp of a mustache, and a prominent Adam's apple, and he moved among the skittish population of the Battery with a predatory air.

William pinched the girls, and their sagging eyelids snapped open. He jerked his head toward the man, and Nura's face went rigid.

“The White Rat,” she said.

The thief wandered the waterfront, casing the park, then turned and angled toward a huddle of young women in tattered shawls, sprawling on a bench behind them with a heavy sigh and a sideways glance. He popped a match with his fingernail, lit a cigarette, and pretended to stare off into the distance.

The cluster of women glanced uneasily at the White Rat and edged away, and he tossed his spent match aside and cursed under his breath, surveying the park for less wary prey.

His eye fell on Nura, who had been watching his charade with disgust. He smoothed an eyebrow and gave her a sneer, then rose and sauntered off, leaving a sickly-sweet waft of pomade in his wake.

The cousins sat frozen in indecision, but Nura sprang to her feet and motioned wildly for them to follow.

The white hat bobbed away, and the three children raced after, doing their best to stay out of sight. Hiding in doorways and behind street-corner postboxes, they darted through the constant stream of pedestrians on the sidewalk until the chase led them several blocks from the Battery, where the wet streets turned dank and desolate.

The afternoon was dwindling. The White Rat turned off the waterfront down a lonesome boulevard lined by burned-out buildings and vacant lots overgrown with withered, whispering grass. The factories and warehouses here lacked the rigid perpendicularity of the living part of the city and loomed ponderously over the three children with a gothic malevolence. From a rooftop nearby they heard the cooing of a dove, and the sound was hollow and unearthly to their ears. If there were monsters in the city, this was where they lurked.

The White Rat stopped at a boarded-up warehouse. In the light of a bare bulb, he glanced over both shoulders and descended into a gloomy stairwell.

“Now what?” said William.

“Let's just wait a minute,” Maxine replied. “Maybe he'll come back out.”

They stood and watched from a distance, listening to the steady patter of the rain. Nura shivered and fingered the blue pendant that dangled at her neck.

“What is that thing, anyways?” asked William.

“Oh,” said Nura, dropping her hand self-consciously. “It is nothing. It is a
nazar boncugu—
a charm against the Evil Eye.”

William bent forward and examined it skeptically.

“It preserves the wearer from harm or evil,” she explained, “especially from a covetous glance. In my country we say that when someone looks with envy on something precious to you, they bring upon it the curse of the Evil Eye, and it will soon be stolen or lost or grow sick and die. So we keep the
nazar
as protection.”

“No kidding,” said William. “Were you wearing it when you lost the package?”

Nura nodded solemnly.

“Well then, you might want to take it to a repair shop,” he said with a grin.

Nura scowled at him, then couldn't help smiling, too. “Perhaps I do need a new one,” she said. She held the charm to her ear and rattled it like a broken watch.

The rain fell yet. Somewhere far off in the city a car horn honked, but a ghostly canopy of fog dampened every sound.

“Looks like the White Rat is staying put,” said Maxine finally.

“Come on, let's go take a closer look,” William replied. “We didn't walk all this way for nothing.”