CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

THE TROUBLE WITH TORQUIN

“THE COLOSSUS SITE should be somewhere just past these restaurants…” Aly said, walking briskly along the wharf.

Marco and I trudged behind her. We had gathered a bunch of brochures at a tourist stand and read them over eggs and toast at Niko’s—well, Marco, Aly, and I read them. Torquin had been busy pounding on the tracking device. By now he had mangled it so badly it couldn’t possibly be repaired.

It was a hot morning. Sweat was already pouring down my forehead. I had to talk to Aly. Alone. To find out what was in her pocket. And why she was keeping it secret.

As we passed a boat rental place, Torquin stopped. “Boat. Here. Into harbor.”

Aly turned, a glossy brochure in hand. “Wait. According to this, the Colossus was never over the water at all. Modern scholars believe the Greeks couldn’t have built a stone statue that size, straddling a huge harbor. It would have collapsed of its own weight. Even if it were made of bronze, it would have been logistically difficult to anchor its feet on the two harbor points.”

Torquin stared at her blankly.

“Pay attention, dude,” Marco said. “There will be a quiz later.”

I looked out over the water. If a griffin had been here at the harbor, we’d know it. People would be freaking out. Cops would be all over. So it couldn’t have been here.

But searching the entire island of Rhodes could take days. It was almost fifty miles long. We didn’t have that time. Even if Cass was alive, he was due for a treatment at midnight tonight. If we didn’t get him back in time for that, he was doomed.

“They think the Colossus actually stood on the western shore,” Aly said. “Right about…here.”

We cleared the last café. To our right, a stone wall lined the harbor. To our left, the road wound up a slight hill, to where Aly was pointing.

Her face fell.

My eyes followed the path of her finger to a building that housed a supermarket and a bank. Outside the supermarket, a clown was handing out balloons of all different colors to a group of bored-looking kids.

Marco watched one of the balloons float off into the cloudless sky. “There goes our Loculus.”

Torquin let out a sarcastic snuffling sound. “We look in dairy section?”

Aly stormed away, walking up the street. The city of Rhodes was hilly when you got away from the wharf. We passed a bike shop on a triangular corner, where a clerk eyed us curiously as we passed. “Aly, wait!” I called out.

I jogged ahead to keep up with her. Now we were about a half block ahead of Torquin and Marco, who were locked in some kind of argument.

“Don’t be angry,” I said.

Aly looked back, then leaned in to me. “I’m not angry. I just needed to get away so I can use this.”

She pulled a cell phone out of her pocket, keeping it shielded from the sight of Torquin and Marco. “When I jumped into the taxi after Torquin stiffed the driver, I took this off the front seat.”

“You stole the phone!” I pointed out. “That’s worse than stiffing him!”

“I borrowed it.” Aly turned a corner onto a narrow side street of boxy apartment buildings. Moms and dads were emerging through front doors, blowing kisses to their kids who waved from the windows, in the arms of black-clad grandmothers. “I have Taki’s business card. I’ll call the taxi company. We need him to drive us around anyway, right? I’ll return the phone and tell him it was a mistake. Look, Torquin isn’t going to let us near a pay phone. This is our only chance. I just want to make contact with my mom, tell her I’m okay. It’ll take me a few seconds to block the caller ID. Then, after I’m done, you can take a turn if you want.”

My heart jumped. Dad probably thought I was dead. I would be able to hear his voice for the first time since I left.

I looked over my shoulder. Marco and Torquin hadn’t made the turn yet. Aly took my arm and ran toward a dark alley between buildings.

My mind was racing. I imagined the call. I pictured what Dad would say. How we would both feel.

And what would happen afterward.

As we slipped into the narrow alleyway, she flipped the phone open. “Wait. You can’t, Aly,” I said.

She looked at me in shock. “Why not?”

“It will just make things worse,” I said. “Look. You’ve been missing for a long time. Four of us have disappeared under the same circumstances. The police must be searching for us. Maybe the FBI. Which means they’re in touch with our moms and dads—chances are they’ve wiretapped our families’ phones. If we call them, Aly, they’ll run a trace. They will find out where we are. And when they do, they will come get us. We’ll never return to the Karai Institute. To our treatments.”

Aly looked at me with pleading eyes. “You’re the one who doesn’t believe in that!”

“Here’s what I believe,” I said. “We have this gene that makes us sick. And Cass needs us to rescue him. Look, I don’t mean to give Bhegad a free pass. I don’t believe he told us the whole story. But after what we’ve seen in the past few days? We can’t just blow it off, Aly. No one wants to call home more than I do. I wish Dad could pick me up and I could forget about what has just happened to us. You don’t know how much I wish that. But we’re in the middle of something we have to finish.”

I put a hand on her shoulder, but she shook me off. Her face was desperate. “All phone tracing software takes at least thirty seconds to pinpoint a call. I’ll use twenty seconds, tops, then hang up. Just so she knows, Jack. Please. Go distract Torquin and Marco. Just give me twenty seconds.”

I took a deep breath. I knew she needed to make the call, and I didn’t want to argue. No time for that. We had to get to Cass.

Torquin’s and Marco’s voices were drawing nearer. I ran out of the alley and jogged toward the corner, just as they made the turn.

“Aly?” Torquin demanded, looking up the street. “Where?”

I rolled my eyes. “Where do you think? She had two huge glasses of apple juice at breakfast. Nature called. Now, be nice. Turn around.”

Marco turned his back. Reluctantly, Torquin followed. “Hagrid and I were having a conference,” Marco said, “about where we could find information about the Colossus in a hurry. We passed this building with Greek words carved in stone. And he goes, ‘Library!’ I’m like, ‘How do you know?’”

“You know Greek?” I asked Torquin.

“Perfect,” Torquin said. “Just like English.”

I heard footsteps and turned. Aly was walking toward us from the alleyway. Her face was ashen.

“It’s your lucky day, sister,” Marco said, bounding after her. “We’re going to the library!” He stopped and squinted at her. “What’s wrong? Someone put some moose in your moussaka?”

Aly didn’t answer.

As we walked up the stairs of the blocky stone building, Marco pointed to a small sign in the window with the international symbols for No Smoking, No Radios, No Food, and No Bare Feet. “Did you bring your penny loafers?” he asked Torquin.

Torquin rapped loudly at the door.

I stuck close to Aly. She wasn’t looking at me. I was worried. Something had happened. If she’d goofed up, if there were people coming to get us, we needed to know.

After a minute or so, the door opened slowly and a young woman’s face peered out. “Eimaste kleistoi. Pioi eisaste, eh?”

And Torquin, without missing a beat, replied, “Ta paithia einai Amerikani.”

Immediately the door opened wider. The woman smiled faintly. “I can open a few minutes early for Greek-American visitors,” she said in a thick Greek accent. “I am Ariadne Kassis. Head librarian. Please, come in.”

She took us through a nearly empty reading room, past a set of small offices, and into a spacious chamber. It had dark wooden bookshelves and a worn Oriental rug that covered nearly the whole floor. We sat in five high-backed chairs with thick red padding, arranged in a circle around a tray of sweets and tea. The place smelled of stale coffee, old leather, and ancient books. In the back of the room, a wispy-haired man who seemed more antique than them all was asleep with a book and a plate of green nuts on his lap. He looked as if he hadn’t moved in several decades. Maybe even died without anyone noticing.

“We are researching the Colossus of Rhodes,” I said. “We need to know everything. Where it was, what exactly happened to it, whether or not there are remains.”

“You realize, of course, that you are seeking one of the great archaeological puzzles of all time,” Ms. Kassis said, pouring us each a cup of tea. “But you’ve come to the right place. We have books, scholarly articles, internet resources—”

“Internet, just for me to use,” Torquin barked. “Books, them.”

“And Papou,” Ms. Kassis continued, setting down her tea.

“Who poo?” Marco asked.

Glancing across the room, Ms. Kassis called out to the old man. “Papou! PAPOU!”

The man let out a series of short, sudden snorts. His head lolled around into a vaguely upright position, and his moist eyes opened into baffled slits.

“Sorry to wake you!” she said loudly in English, walking toward him. “But these are American guests! They are looking for Colossus!”

The man grabbed a gnarled cane as if to rise, but Ms. Kassis gently pushed his chair from behind. It rolled toward us on thick rubber casters. “My great-grandfather is one of the preeminent folklorists in Greece,” she announced. “He just turned one hundred and seventeen—isn’t that right, Papou?”

He shrugged. As he looked at each of us with unfocused eyes, he held up one of the shriveled little green things on his plate. “Walnuts?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“The statue depicted the ancient Greek sun god, Helios,” Ms. Kassis said. “It was built around 280 B.C. and destroyed in an earthquake. Meaning well before Papou’s birth, of course. Although it may not seem that way. For years Papou studied an ancient sect—monks of some sort. They were devoted to preserving the Colossus’s memory. Fanatics, really. Not involved with any real religion, per se. Greece, you’ll find, is tolerant of eccentrics, but Papou took them quite seriously. Alas, his memory isn’t what it used to be.” She raised her voice. “Papou—these people are looking for the Colossus.”

Papou perked up, as if just noticing we were there. “Colossus?” he said, his voice a barely audible hiss. He gestured toward a pad of paper and a pen on a nearby desk. “Thos mou…thos mou…”

As I gave him the pen and paper, Ms. Kassis smiled. “This may take a while. Excuse me.”

She went off to answer a question from a staff member—and we waited.

After a few moments of careful writing, he handed us an address.

Bingo.