Black Swan Rising (35 page)

“Hey, buddy,” the beefy-looking man at the front of the line said. “There’s a line, y’know!”

“Yes, I see, Mr. . . .” Oberon plucked the sheet of paper the man held from his meaty hands. The paper, which was nearly transparent and the color of old nail clippings, crackled as though it had been ripped, but was intact. “Mr. Arnold A. Herkimer of Kissena Boulevard, Flushing, New York,” Oberon said without looking at the sheet. I looked at the letter and saw that the name and address were correct. “Let’s see what kind of trouble you’re in.”

Dear Mr. Herkimer:

You have been found to be in violation of city code #73197-PYT-C2. Please present yourself to the Office of the Exchequer of the Assessor, Room B7, City Hall, where your fine will be assessed.

Note: All fines must be paid in coin.

Sincerely,
Ignatius T. Ashburn III
Exchequer of the Assessor

When he finished reading, Oberon held the letter up to the light, revealing a watermark of spiral lines, which began to spin. I looked away when I started getting dizzy and saw that Mr. Herkimer’s eyes were moving rapidly back and forth.

“Well then,” Oberon said, handing Arnold Herkimer his letter, “that all appears to be in order. I’ll just have a word with the exchequer on behalf of your case.”

“Thank you, sir,” Arnold Herkimer said, his eyes still flicking back and forth as if he were watching a game of table tennis, “I’d appreciate it. I can’t think what I’ve done wrong—”

“Oh, can’t you, Arnie?” Oberon clucked his tongue. “Why don’t you try while I go ahead.”

Arnold Herkimer blushed bright pink as Oberon bent down and whispered in my ear, “He uses his ninety-seven-year-old mother’s Social Security money to gamble at Atlantic City and tells her the money pays for his son’s college tuition.”

Oberon opened the door, leaving Arnold Herkimer contemplating his sins. Inside was a short hallway and another door, divided horizontally in half. The top section was open onto a counter at which sat a thirtyish man in a red-striped oxford
shirt, with receding ginger-colored hair and heavily freckled skin. A brass nameplate identified him as
IGNATIUS T. ASHBURN III, EXCHEQUER OF THE ASSESSOR
. Another sign, photocopied on pink paper, said
IF YOU ARE GROUCHY, IRRITABLE, OR JUST PLAIN MEAN, THERE WILL BE A $10 CHARGE FOR PUTTING UP WITH YOU
. Oberon closed the first door behind us and pulled me to one side of the narrow corridor. A young girl in skinny jeans, a leather bomber jacket, and UGG boots was standing in front of the counter rummaging in an enormous pocketbook.

“I had it just a second ago,” she said. “Can’t you just look up my case by my name?”

“No, I cannot,” the clerk said, tilting his head back so that he was literally looking down his nose at the girl. The angle revealed unusually large nostrils that widened farther as the girl started unpacking the contents of her bag on the counter. An iPhone, makeup case, and a handful of gum wrappers appeared before the ivory-colored letter was found.

“Here it is,” she said, shoving the paper across the counter. “But I don’t have any idea what it’s about. I mean, I live at home when I’m not at school and my car is in my parents’ names, so anything to do with it or them should go to my home address in Scarsdale.”

“This has nothing to do with your parents, Jenna Abigail Lawrence,” the clerk said, holding the paper up to the light. “Ah, I see, a code 4801929-XNT-8R violation. That’s a violation-of-privacy code.” He lowered the paper and looked across the counter at Jenna Lawrence, a thin trail of smoke curling out of his nostrils. His eyes, which were the color of cinnamon gum, had begun to revolve in the same pattern as the watermark lines on the paper. Looking at them I was overcome with a sick
sense of guilt. I recalled cheating on a seventh-grade French test, a thank-you note I had never sent, and a library book I had never returned to the library. “Your fine will be lowered if you volunteer the information yourself.”

Jenna Lawrence shifted her purse from one shoulder to another and flipped her perfectly straight, highlighted blond hair over her right shoulder. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, but if this has to do with my freshman roommate, then you just have to know that you can’t believe a thing she says. I certainly never read her stupid paper on Dante—”

“No, you didn’t. If you had, you might understand a thing or two about
punishment,
Miss Lawrence. No, this has to do with reading your boyfriend Scott’s cell phone messages while he went into the 7-Eleven to get you an iced coffee.”

Jenna Lawrence opened her mouth. “How—? But . . .” she spluttered. And then, finally getting some control of herself: “Did Scott tell you that?”

“Scott has no idea that you read his cell phone messages. He does wonder, though, why you’ve been so angry with him.”

“He called me a spoiled brat!” Jenna wailed. “And he told his so-called best friend from high school, Angie, that I didn’t care about anything but clothes.” Jenna started digging in her bag, and Ignatius plucked a tissue from a box on the counter and handed it to her. He waited patiently while she blew her nose.

“I don’t really understand how you know about this, but what are you going to do about it? You’re not going to tell Scott, are you?”

“No, Jenna, but you are. And you’re going to spend the summer volunteering at the battered women’s shelter instead of lying on the beach in the Hamptons.”

“Okay,” Jenna said, sniffling. “I suppose it will look good on my résumé.”

Ignatius sighed, sending a stream of smoke out of his flared nostrils. “
And
you’ll spend more time with your grandmother Ruth.” He stamped the letter with a large wooden mallet. “And of course there is a fine—” He craned his neck over the counter to look in Jenna’s oversize pocketbook. When he leaned forward, I caught a glimpse of a scaly tail behind the counter. “Is that the new iPhone?”

“Yessss . . . ,” Jenna moaned, “but you can’t—”

The tail snapped over his head, reached into Jenna’s bag, and retrieved the iPhone. “Ah, Peggle. He will be pleased.” The tail vanished behind the counter. Ignatius handed the letter back to Jenna, who held it up to look at the stamp. It was in the shape of a red dragon breathing fire into a spiral pattern that grew, glowed red, then burst into flame, incinerating the letter and singeing the ends of Jenna’s hair. As she turned to leave, the look on her face was as blank as a newborn baby’s.

“Will she remember any of this?” I asked Oberon, but it was Ignatius who answered.

“Only what she’s supposed to do. She’ll think she spent the morning browsing through Bloomingdale’s and that she lost her phone in a cab. Did you need something, Oberon? As you can see, I’ve got a long line this morning.”

Oberon reopened the outside door and waved his hand over the gold letters on the glass. They faded and disappeared, replaced by the words
JANITOR’S CLOSET
. The line of people waiting outside filed down the corridor, scratching their heads. I heard Arnold Herkimer ask someone the way to the Tropicana Casino.

“Sorry, Nate, this can’t wait,” Oberon said. “Is His Honor in?”

“ ‘His Honor’?” I echoed. “I thought you said we weren’t going to see the mayor.”

Both Ignatius and Oberon smiled. “Oh, he’s much more important than the mayor,” Ignatius answered, opening the bottom half of the door to let us in. As I stepped through the door, I saw that the lower part of the clerk’s body was covered in coppery scales. When he turned around, his massive tail writhed across the linoleum floor of the tiny office. The space, small to begin with, was further cramped by numerous bulging sacks, cartons of ivory-colored paper, and what looked to be a year’s supply of ramen noodles. Ignatius used his tail to sweep away a carton of paper from a low arched door fitted with several brass locks, which he unlocked using three different keys from a ring he wore around his neck. The door opened onto a dimly lit stairwell. Ignatius picked up one of the sacks and waved for us to follow him.

“He doesn’t seem so bad,” I whispered to Oberon as we went through the door. “Why is everyone so afraid of him?”

“It’s not him everyone’s afraid of. He’s just the exchequer. It’s the assessor you have to worry about. That’s whom we’re going to see.”

Although we were already in the subbasement of the building, the steps from Ignatius’s office went down another two flights, through a long dimly lit corridor, then down another short flight of stairs. I was expecting another basement at the end, but when Ignatius opened the door to a barrel vault of herringboned bricks and green and white tiles, which was surmounted by a frosted glass oculus, I knew exactly where we were.

“Wow! The City Hall subway station. I’ve always wanted to see this!” I’d read about the station in histories of the city. Opened in 1904 and designed by Rafael Guastavino, it was called the “crown jewel of the system.” “I heard they closed it because the tracks were too curved to be extended.”

Ignatius and Oberon exchanged a look. “That was the official reason,” Ignatius said, waddling across the vaulted space to a sealed doorway.

“There were also the incidents,” Oberon said.

“Incidents?” I asked.

Ignatius unlocked the door but didn’t open it and turned to me. In the dim subterranean light his eyes glowed red. “Purse snatchings, child abductions, workmen injuries, burns . . .”

“Burns?”

“From steam vents,” Oberon said. “A confidential task force decided that the station was built over a ‘geologically unstable area’ and was best closed to the public.”

“Since then there have been minimal incidents,” Ignatius added. “As long as I bring him a sufficient amount of loot, he hardly ever goes afield.”

“Hardly?” Oberon asked. “I thought you had the area secured, Ignatius.”

“There are tunnels that even I don’t know about. I’m only one dragon. If you want better service, hire more help.”

“Wish I could, Nate, but we’ve had budget cuts too. He’s here now, though, right?”

Ignatius sniffed the air, his broad nostrils dilating. “I’d say so.” Then he opened the door and ushered us into another flight of stairs. These were cut into the granite bedrock; veins of silver and gray glimmered in the light from Ignatius’s red eyes. As we descended, I noticed a strong odor rising from below us—a mixture of burnt toast, copper, and something faintly sweet. The other thing I noticed was that Ignatius was changing as we went deeper into the earth. His back hunched over more, dragging the upper part of his body farther down to the ground with each step until he was walking on all fours. A spiky ridge of scales broke through his oxford shirt along his backbone. Underneath the torn shirt his skin gleamed copper. When he reached a barred door at the bottom of the stairs and turned around, I saw that his face had turned into the long snout of a dragon. I still recognized the red eyes, the distended nostrils, and the voice, which admonished us to hurry.

“Something has him agitated,” he said, unlocking the three bolts on the door. “We’d better see what it is.”

As the door opened, a roar filled the stairwell. It sounded like a subway train headed straight for us. I wondered how many times I’d heard the rumble of a train underfoot and it had really been this creature stirring in the bowels of the earth.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I whispered to Oberon. “I mean, if he’s agitated—”

“If Ddraik is agitated, then we’d better find out why,” he answered. “He’s very . . . sensitive.”

Sensitive? It wasn’t the word I would have used to describe the creature I saw as I went through the door. The room was huge; like the station above, it was vaulted and tiled in Guastavino’s characterisitic herringbone pattern, only these tiles were encrusted with a mosaic of various metals and jewels and the top of the vault was nearly two stories high. But the creature who crouched at its center took up almost all the space. Just one of its copper-red scales was the size of a Hummer door, and the red-glowing eye that fastened on me was as large as a manhole cover. What frightened me the most, though, was that I recognized him. He was the spitting image of Jaws, the dragon I had welded out of my worst nightmares.

“Aaahhh,” he breathed, his hot breath lapping against my face. “Garet James. I’ve been wanting to”—he paused to extend a long forked tongue over his crooked jaw—“
meet
you.” He huffed three times rapidly—a sound I supposed was his version of laughter.

“How does he know who I am?” I turned to ask Oberon—but I found that Oberon and Ignatius were several feet behind me in front of the doorway.

“Ddraik the Assessor knows everything,” Oberon said. “He’s a hoarder of information.”

“Knowledge is power,” the dragon roared. “Have you brought me some?”

Ignatius tossed the sack he’d brought toward Ddraik. Coins and jewelry—I saw a Rolex smash against the floor and caught the glitter of several wedding bands—sprayed across the floor as the dragon rooted in the bag, but it was the iPhone that Ignatius had confiscated from Jenna Lawrence that he plucked out of the heap. Holding it in one six-inch claw he used the tip of his tail to touch the screen.