‘Or something else …’ Michael pointed out.
Ben smiled.
‘As I said, we’ll take that risk.’
Sheere, Ian and Ben arrived outside the gates that guarded Chandra Chatterghee’s house shortly before midnight. To the east, the narrow tower of the Shyambazar was silhouetted against the moon’s sphere, projecting its shadow over the garden of palm trees and bushes that hid the building.
Ben leaned on the gate of metal spears and examined their threatening sharp points.
‘We’ll have to climb over,’ he remarked. ‘It doesn’t look easy.’
‘We won’t have to,’ said Sheere next to him. ‘Our father described every inch of this house in his book before he built it, and I’ve spent years memorising every detail. If what he wrote is correct, and I have no doubt that it is, there’s a small lake behind these shrubs and the house stands further back.’
‘What about these spears?’ asked Ben. ‘Did he write about them too? I’d rather not end up skewered like a roast chicken.’
‘There’s another way of getting into the house without having to jump over them,’ said Sheere.
‘Then what are we waiting for?’ Ben and Ian asked together.
Sheere led them through what was barely an alleyway, a small gap between the railings surrounding the property and the walls of an adjacent building with Moorish features. Soon they reached a circular opening that looked as if it served as the main sewer for all the drains in the house. From it came a sour biting stench.
‘In here?’ asked Ben sceptically.
‘What did you expect?’ snapped Sheere. ‘A Persian carpet?’
Ben scanned the inside of the sewage tunnel and sniffed.
‘Divine,’ he concluded, turning to Sheere. ‘You first.’
They emerged from the tunnel beneath a small wooden bridge that arched over the lake, a dark velvety mantle of murky water stretching in front of Chandra Chatterghee’s house. Sheere led the two boys along a narrow bank, their feet sinking into the clay, until they reached the other end of the lake. There she stopped to gaze at the building she had dreamed about all her life. Ian and Ben stood quietly by her side.
The two-storey building was flanked by two towers, one on either side. It featured a mix of architectural styles, from Edwardian lines to Palladian extravaganzas and features that looked as if they belonged to some castle tucked away in the mountains of Bavaria. The overall effect, however, was elegant and serene, challenging the critical eye of the spectator. The house seemed to possess a bewitching charm, so that although the first impression was one of bewilderment you then had the feeling that the impossible jumble of styles and forms had been chosen on purpose to create a harmonious whole.
‘Is this how your father described it?’ asked Ian.
Sheere nodded in amazement and walked towards the steps leading to the front door. Ben and Ian watched her hesitantly, wondering how she thought she was going to enter such a fortress. But Sheere seemed to move about the mysterious surroundings as if they had been her childhood home. The ease with which she dodged obstacles, almost invisible in the dark, made the two boys feel like trespassers in the dream Sheere had nurtured during her nomadic years. As they watched her walk up the steps, Ben and Ian realised that this deserted place was the only real home the girl had ever had.
‘Are you going to stay there all night?’ Sheere called from the top of the stairs.
‘We were wondering how to get in,’ Ben pointed out. Ian nodded in agreement.
‘I have the key.’
‘The key?’ asked Ben. ‘Where?’
‘Here,’ Sheere replied, pointing to her head with her forefinger. ‘You don’t open the locks in this house with a normal key. There’s a code.’
Intrigued, Ben and Ian came up the steps to join her. When they reached the door, they saw that at its centre was a set of four wheels on a single axle. Each wheel was smaller than the one behind it, and different symbols were carved on the metal rim of each, like the hours on the face of a clock.
‘What do these symbols mean?’ asked Ian, trying to decipher them in the dark.
Ben pulled a match from the box he always carried with him and struck it in front of the lock mechanism. The metal shone in the light of the flame.
‘Alphabets!’ cried Ben. ‘Each wheel has an alphabet carved on it. Greek, Latin, Arab and Sanskrit.’
‘Fantastic,’ sighed Ian. ‘Piece of cake …’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Sheere. ‘The code is simple. All you have to do is make a four-letter word using the different alphabets.’
Ben looked at her intently.
‘What is the word?’
‘Dido,’ replied Sheere.
‘Dido?’ asked Ian. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s the name of a mythological Phoenician queen,’ Ben explained.
Sheere smiled approvingly and Ian was momentarily jealous of the spark that seemed to exist between the two siblings.
‘I still don’t understand,’ Ian objected. ‘What have the Phoenicians got to do with Calcutta?’
‘Queen Dido threw herself on a funeral pyre to appease the anger of the gods in Carthage,’ Sheere explained. ‘It’s the purifying power of fire. The Egyptians also had their own myth, about the phoenix.’
‘The myth of the firebird,’ Ben added.
‘Isn’t that the name of the military project Seth told us about?’ asked Ian.
His friend nodded.
‘This whole thing is starting to give me goosebumps,’ said Ian. ‘You aren’t seriously thinking of going inside? What are we going to do?’
Ben and Sheere exchanged a determined glance.
‘It’s very simple,’ Ben replied. ‘We’re going to open this door.’
The librarian’s eyelids were beginning to feel like slabs of marble as he faced the hundreds of documents in front of him. The vast sea of words and figures he had retrieved from Chandra Chatterghee’s files seemed to be performing a sinuous dance and murmuring a lullaby that was sending him to sleep.
‘I think we’d better leave this until tomorrow morning, lads,’ Mr de Rozio began.
Seth, who had been afraid he would say this for some time, surfaced immediately from his jumble of folders and gave him a pious smile.
‘Leave it, Mr de Rozio?’ he objected in a light-hearted tone. ‘Impossible! We can’t abandon this now.’
‘I’m only a few seconds away from collapsing over this table, son,’ replied Mr de Rozio. ‘And Shiva, in his infinite goodness, has granted me a weight, which, the last time I checked it, in February, was somewhere between two hundred and fifty and two hundred and sixty pounds. Do you know how much that is?’