This Same Earth

Chapter Twenty-Two

Cochamó Valley

March 2010

Beatrice’s heart raced.

“Daddy! Daddy, the string game, Daddy!”

She tore out of the bedroom, searching for the unassuming reference book she’d spotted on the bottom shelf in one of the living room bookcases years ago.

“Beatrice, slow down. You’re going to trip if you don’t-”

“I’m going to find the treasure!”

“You think you’re clever enough to solve the puzzle, Mariposa?”

She searched for the blue binding as Giovanni rushed out of the bedroom to join her. “Beatrice-”

“The string game. I called it the string game when I was little,” she muttered. The book wasn’t where she remembered. Her eyes raked over the shelves in the living room, searching for the familiar book as the memories poured over her.

“What?” Giovanni’s voice called from the edge of the room. “The string game?”

“Stephen, are you two playing that silly game again? I’m going to trip and break my neck one of these days!”

“Relax, Mom. But don’t go in the living room, okay?”

“Grandma, I’m in the maze right now!”

She finally spotted it on the bottom shelf in the bookcase closest to the front door; she rushed over. “It used to drive my grandmother nuts. She was always tripping over the strings that we put up.”

“Tesoro, what are you-”

“Theseus and the Minotaur. My dad read me the story…I don’t know how many times. It was my favorite.” Her hands pulled the book out and raced over to the large kitchen table, slamming it down.

“Beatrice, if you need an atlas, I have much better editions-”

“No, no, this is the one we had.” She waved her hand as she opened it. “We had this one in our house. It would be this one.”

“Look for the clues, Mariposa. I left you clues all over the house; find them and follow the string to the treasure.”

“Like Theseus. Follow the string out of the labyrinth!”

“When I was a child, my father would read me the Greek myths. I loved them. He read them to me over and over again, but my favorite was the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.”

“The minotaur in the labyrinth?”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “Theseus goes to Crete, right? His father sends him to King Minos of Crete.”

“In Knossus, the ancient excavation site right outside of Iraklion.”

“Exactly. Theseus kills the Minotaur in the middle of the labyrinth, but then he has to find his way out of the maze again. Luckily, he was smart. He tied a string near the entrance and held onto it so he could find his way out again.”

She opened the atlas and flipped to the large map of Greece, pointing toward the island of Crete. “There’s no way my father picked that location at random. It was our game; he was telling me to play the string game.”

“What’s the first clue?”

“‘What goes up when the rain comes down?’”

“Solve the riddle, Beatrice.”

Giovanni was standing in a corner of the living room, his arms crossed as he stared at her like she was a crazy person. “Can you please explain from the beginning? What is the ‘string game?’”

She looked up at his beautiful, confused face and smiled. “I love mazes, always have, partly because of that story. Solving mazes, building mazes. I told my dad one time that I wanted to build a labyrinth at our house, but how do you make a maze in a little, tiny house, right?”

“…‘comes up when the rain’…an umbrella!”

“Where do we keep the umbrellas?”

“By the door!”

“Go, find my umbrella and tie your string.”

Giovanni was shaking his head. “I still don’t-”

“So he made up this game, the string game. He would leave me clues to random places in the house. I would have to tie a string when I found the first clue and that would start the game. Then I’d find the next clue and tie the string there.”

She began to see Giovanni’s eyes light in understanding. “And you would find the clues and keep tying.”

Beatrice nodded. Her heart pounded in her chest. “They could be any location in the house. There was never a pattern. Totally random locations. There would be riddles, or drawings, or…anything, really. The goal of the string game was to find the locations and tie the string-”

“And then follow it.” He rushed to look over her shoulder as she found the world map in the center of the book. Her eyes raked over the pages crowded with cities, borders, latitude, and longitude.

“The cities where you found my dad were random. They were meant to be.”

“But where does it lead?” He shook his head. “I stopped getting clues from him after he showed up in Santiago two years ago. I thought he had found our house here and that’s why he was so close. I stayed here for months in the middle of summer that year thinking that he would show himself before I gave up and went to New York.”

“Did you find it, Beatrice? Did you find the treasure?”

She grabbed his arm. “No, no, you’re missing the point of the game. Once you mapped out the points and tied off the string, you had to-”

“Follow it back!” he said with a smile. “Clever man. You follow the string back like Theseus out of the labyrinth, but…” His face fell.

“At one point in the web-” She held out her two index fingers and crossed them. “-the strings would touch. That’s where the prize was.”

“Found it, Daddy!”

“And that’s where your father is,” he murmured.

She shook her head and fought the tears that she felt pricking the corner of her eyes. “It was our game. I’m the only one who would be able to figure it out.”

“And you would only solve it if you were cooperating with me.”

“Exactly.”

They both looked down at the map on the table. She grabbed a pencil from the counter, put the tip on the small island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and looked at Giovanni.

“Do you remember where he went next?”

He nodded. “Budapest. The next sighting was in Budapest.”

She began to drag the pencil north.

“Wait.” He held up a hand. “You need something-”

“Oh, a straight edge, just give me a magazine or-”

“Got it!” He tossed her a thin book from the end of the table.

“Okay…Budapest, Hungary.”

Her pencil stopped on the map, and she looked up.

“Then Warsaw.”

She moved the book and her pencil tip traced a light line over the soft, pastel colors of the map, each thread drawing them closer to the mystery of her father’s whereabouts.

“Stockholm.”

“Novosibirsk.”

She could feel his crackling energy fill the room as he listed the cities. “It will be a major city,” he mused. “It’s much easier to stay hidden in a major city.”

Beatrice looked up at him. “Okay, next?”

“Shanghai.”

“Madras.”

The line dipped and traced over the world, zagging north and south as each city was reached, slowly working east, then south.

“Johannesburg.”

“Lima.”

“San Francisco, right?”

“Yes, then El Paso.”

“Boston.”

“Tripoli.”

“Santiago,” she whispered, and her breath hitched when she saw the faint lines finally cross in front of her. Tears spilled down her face and she felt his hand on her shoulder as he took the shaking pencil from her grasp.

“Very well done, Beatrice! There’s my clever girl.”

“Found it, Daddy! Can we go for ice cream now?”

He held her as she cried, her tears soaking the front of his shirt.

“So close,” Giovanni murmured as he stroked her hair.

“Brasilia. He’s in Brasilia.”

Brasilia, Brazil

March 2010

“Why would he come here?” she asked over the steady hum of the engine.

“In a way, it’s very much like Houston,” Giovanni said as he steered the old car through the wide streets of the Brazilian capitol. Though it was built in the 1960s as the modern ideal of contemporary city planning, Beatrice thought the capitol and fourth largest city in Brazil seemed empty.

“What do you mean, it’s like Houston?”

He turned right at the small road leading to the resort where Isabel and Gustavo’s contacts had informed them a quiet vampire going by the name “Emil Gonzales” owned a cottage on the shore of Lake Paranoá.

“If you are trying to remain anonymous, you go to a city like Brasilia. With the popularity and proximity of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, the immortal population here is very low and tends to mind its own business.”

“So not very much politics?”

“Practically none. It’s like a ghost town,” he said quietly, his eyes scanning the low, red painted cottages with dark roofs. “There,” he said, “the one on the end.”

She gripped her seat as he parked along the curb, almost unwilling to step out of the car, afraid of what she might find. Giovanni hadn’t had any sign of her father for the last two years. He’d dropped off the radar when he finished giving the clues to his location. If they had been together two years before, she thought, she might have seen it sooner.

As if reading her thoughts, she heard him say, “If we’ve lost him because of my own stubbornness-”

“Can we save that for another time, please?” she murmured as she eyed the small house surrounded by low palms. The cottage was part of a larger resort, though some of the apartments and cottages were privately owned. The gardens surrounding it were well tended, but because it was part of the hotel property, there was no way of knowing who took care of them.

She took a deep breath and reached across the car to squeeze Giovanni’s hand. “I’m fine; let’s go see if anyone’s home.”

He pulled her toward him and laid a gentle kiss on her lips before giving her a small smile. His eyes were shuttered, and his shoulders were fixed. She knew he thought they would find nothing.

They walked toward the low cottage tucked into a quiet corner at the edge of the lake. Streams ran through the grounds, under small footbridges, and trickled over rocks through the lush gardens.

“Definitely a water vampire,” he muttered, taking her hand as they crossed a small bridge. “And a smart one.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He’s surrounded himself with his element. The lake, the streams. For him, this is an excellent defensive position.”

“Oh.”

They drew closer to the small house and she heard him drawing deep, testing breaths.

“Sense anything?”

His nose twitched. “I smell guava. Coffee. No vampires.”

She could feel the clench in her chest, but she continued to walk toward the house. They stopped in front of the green door, and Giovanni shot her a sad look as he took a fist and punched, splintering the frame near the lock and pushing it open.

Beatrice stepped into the dim cottage, immediately hit by the musty scent that clung to the room. She reached to flip on the lights but Giovanni’s hand stopped her.

“Not a good idea. Better not to draw attention to ourselves, even if it is a quiet location.”

“Okay.” She pulled out her mobile phone and turned on the small flashlight.

“I’m afraid no vampire has been here for many months, Beatrice.”

She sighed. “I was getting that feeling.”

They both walked around the small living area, and she noticed the lack of dust on the surfaces, and the quiet hum of the refrigerator and air conditioner.

“Appliances running.”

Giovanni sniffed again. “I do smell a human. Older. He smells sick. Cancer maybe.”

“A caretaker?”

“Possibly. If he planned on leaving, it’s something he might have arranged.” He lingered in front of the wall of bookcases that lined one side of the room. “And these books are not molded. In this climate, they would be unless the air conditioner was usually on.”

“So why the musty smell?”

“Just the perils of a closed house by the lake, I imagine.” He was already lost studying the texts in front of him.

Beatrice roamed through the small house. There was nothing in the modern kitchen, not even any canned food. A drip coffeemaker sat on the otherwise empty counter, and nothing was in the refrigerator. There were no indications of life anywhere.

She pushed open the door to the bedroom and was surprised to find traces of the man she remembered. A pair of shoes sat at the end of the bed where he would kick them off. A pile of books lay on the bedside table, and there was a note propped on top of it. Heavy curtains were pinned around the large French doors, and one window was covered with carefully cut plywood.

Picking up the note on the bedside table, she noticed it was written in Portuguese; the signature read, ‘Maria.’ She tucked it in the pocket of her jeans and went to the small desk on the other side of the room.

Under a sheet of glass were several pictures of her and her grandparents, along with blank spaces where some had been removed. There was a finger painting she remembered had been tucked into a childhood scrapbook, along with a poem she had written when she was ten, signed by a juvenile hand.

Beatrice sniffed and rubbed at the tears on her cheeks. She pulled open the single drawer and began to look through it. There were receipts and scraps of paper; most of the notes had been written in Portuguese. Spare change rattled around the bottom of the drawer. Occasionally, she would find something that looked more personal. A single cufflink. A disposable lighter. A rosary twisted into knots.

She heard Giovanni approach and relaxed a little as his arms encircled her waist. She turned and buried her face in his chest, breathing in the comforting smell of wood smoke and whiskey.

“He’s not here, tesoro.”

“I know,” she whispered.

He tilted her face up and she was struck by the anguish in his expression.

“I was wrong to stay away from you for so long. I didn’t know. And I hurt you. This is my fault.”

“We don’t know if we would have found him even if we had been together.” She ran her hand up his chest and into the hair at the nape of his neck. “We don’t know. He may have left before we could get here years ago. There’s no way of knowing.”

“I think you need to see a few things on the bookcase.”

She sighed and hugged him closer. “Just give me a minute.”

They stood holding each other for a few more minutes in the empty bedroom. She heard the trickle of a stream running outside the terrace doors. Eventually, she took Giovanni’s hand and walked back out to the living room and the wall of books.

“Here.” He pointed toward a corner of the room. “These are textbooks for the study of old Arabic and old Persian. It appears he taught himself how to read both.”

“Why?”

“Alchemy. Remember what Tywyll said? The manuscript was about alchemy. Much early medieval alchemic work was done in the Middle East, so if he wanted to learn more, he might have started there.”

She paged through the books, looking at her father’s familiar scrawl in the margins of each volume. Most of it, she couldn’t understand.

“Aristotle,” Giovanni murmured, dragging his finger along the spines. “Zosimos, Mary…did your father read classical Greek?”

“A little,” she muttered, paging through a dense history of the burned library of Alexandria in Egypt.

“He appeared to be well-versed in Greco-Roman roots of alchemy and was studying the work done in the Middle East. Khalid ibn Yazid. A lot of Geber.”

“Who?”

“Ah…he was known during my time as Geber, but he was a Persian, possibly Arab, medieval alchemist. Jabir ibn Hayyan was his Arabic name. It also appears he was looking into Bön, Spagyric-”

“What?” she asked with a frown. “I haven’t even heard of those.”

“Bön is an ancient Asian belief system. I’m only familiar with it through Tenzin. Spagyric refers to a subset of alchemy, plant alchemy. Again, Tenzin studied it at one point.” Giovanni stepped back and shook his head as he surveyed the wall of books. “What were you up to, Stephen?”

She looked through the section in front of her. “I’m also seeing stuff on Newton and Boyle. I know Newton, who’s Boyle?”

“Early modern chemistry.” He walked slowly, his head cocked to the side as he moved down the wall.

“So, chemistry, languages, philosophy, religion…what wasn’t he studying?”

He snorted. “Alchemy is a very twisted subject. It blurs lines between science and superstition. Chemistry and magic.” He heaved a sigh, and she could see the air stir in the light of her small flashlight.

“Gio?”

“Sì, tesoro?” he asked, absently bending down to the far corner where something appeared to have caught his eye.

“Why don’t we-”

“Beatrice, look at this.”

She walked over and knelt down next to him.

“What?”

Giovanni pulled out a small book. It was a black and white composition book, like the ones she remembered using in high school. It had no label, only the number “1” written on the front cover in black marker. She pulled it from his hands with trembling fingers, knowing somehow that this book was different from the others.

Beatrice sat on the floor, cross-legged in the corner as Giovanni knelt next to her. She opened it to the first page.

“‘August 20, 1996,’” she read in a shaky voice. “‘Dear Mariposa, I had to say goodbye to you tonight-’” She choked on the sob that tore from her throat and before she could blink, Giovanni had picked her up and was rocking her in his arms on the floor of the lonely cottage.

Beatrice wept, deep, gut-wrenching sobs that tore at her heart and shook her small frame. Giovanni held her as she emptied her sorrow, fear, and frustration into his chest. He didn’t try to calm her, only stroked her back as she let six years of anger and grief pour out into the still night air.

“Why isn’t he here?” she finally choked out. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he dead? Is he hiding again?” She shook her head and clutched at his neck. “I want my father! I want all this to be worth it, somehow. Carl and the other bodyguards, and-and the blond girl in Greece. And all the people he killed. And Ioan and Jean’s granddaughter and who knows how many other people who had nothing to do with this,” she practically yelled. “Why is this happening to me? To us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why?” She raised her tear-stricken face to him, but he could do nothing but cup her cheek and wipe at the tears that fell fast and hot. “I’m past sad. I’m just pissed-off now! I want this to end so I can get on with my life-with our life. Is this ever going to end?”

“Yes,” he pressed his cheek to hers. “This is going to end. I told you six years ago that I would find your father, and I will, Beatrice. We will find him.”

She sniffed, and he reached down to hand her a handkerchief from his pocket.

“Why do you always carry handkerchiefs? You never need them.”

He didn’t say anything, but she could feel him press the cloth to her cheeks as she lay her head on his shoulder and allowed him to hold her up.

“Beatrice, don’t read the notebooks here,” he murmured. “There are too many of them. Take them back to Houston. I know your grandmother would want to see them, too.”

She clutched the notebook to her chest and nodded. “Okay.”

“We should go. I don’t think there’s anything more.”

“Will you remember all the books? Should we make a list?”

“I’ll remember.”

“Okay,” she said before she paused. “Let’s go then. There’s nothing here.”

She sat with her back against a chair as Giovanni pulled out the stacks of composition books. She didn’t stop to count them as she dried the last of her tears and piled them by the door along with the few personal items she’d found in the bedroom and small bath.

“Tesoro, look at this.”

She glanced over to see Giovanni standing over the same blue atlas that they’d used to play the string game sitting out on the small cafe table near the kitchen.

“Where was that?”

“Behind the notebooks. Tucked against the wall.”

She looked at his raised eyebrow and then back to the book.

“There’s something in there.”

“I believe you’re right.”

Beatrice walked over to the table and started paging through the atlas in front of her. She grew progressively more frustrated with each map she turned, only to find it devoid of any clue to Stephen’s whereabouts. Finally, she felt Giovanni’s hand still her own.

“Let me. I have an idea.”

“Fine,” she muttered, ready to leave the small, empty cottage and go home. He opened to the large map at the center and pointed to Greece.

“He has already studied the roots of alchemy.” His finger slid east. “And he told Tywyll the manuscript he took from Lorenzo was Persian.”

He looked at her, locking eyes for a moment before she heard his finger move across the page again. This time, it slid farther east, through the heart of the Middle East, past northern India, and over to the far edge of China.

“He had books about Asian alchemic traditions and study, and another that related to Bön. I know of one vampire who is revered for his knowledge of both.”

“One vampire? You think my father would have looked for him? Who? Where?”

He frowned and flipped to the page showing a larger map of the Northern Chinese coast and pointed to a small gulf east of Beijing. She leaned down to look closer and her mouth fell open when she saw a lone pinprick in the center of the Bohai Sea.

“What is that?” she whispered.

He stared at her for a moment before he looked back to the atlas Stephen had left for them to find.

“That, tesoro, is Mount Penglai. That is the residence of the Eight Immortals.”

“Who?”

He sighed and closed the atlas.

“Tenzin is going to kill me.”