Drachenerwachen Chapters 30-32: Dragon-Sitting with Spies
I don’t get the
impression that Black West arranged to assassinate Frau Tossilo’s mother, but they
are still spying on the block where she lives, and her absence creates an opportunity
for them. Johann, returning with four
large boxes of cabbages and waiting for Janka to bring the Pink Prince to lug
the vegetables up to Frau Tossilo’s flat on the eighth floor, catches sight of
the mysterious ‘Blanket-Peter’, Frau Tossilo’s sinister visitor from the other
day, approaching, talking on his phone about placing something by Frau Tossilo’s
flat and in the lift.
Johann texts
Janka to warn her not to open the door, but Janka is already standing in the corridor
with a highly recognisable pink suitcase – and the agents from Black West are
already coming. If she doesn’t want them
to know that she is connected with the pink suitcase and therefore with Frau
Tossilo and the dragon, she needs a hiding-place.
Back in Chapter 17, we saw Janka posting rubbish-bags down the waste-disposal chute set into the
walls of the building. Now, we discover
that the rubbish-chute was a Chekhov’s Gun - and that Janka’s circus skills are a Chekhov’s Skill. As she wriggles in through the opening
flap, bracing herself against the walls to stop herself from plummeting down,
the narrator reminds readers that ‘For other children it would perhaps have
been fatal to climb into this rubbish-shaft, but for someone who every week in
a circus cupola practised gymnastics and did tricks, it was just dangerous.’ In other words, Don’t Try This At Home!
From her hiding-place,
Janka overhears the Black West agents discussing what the suitcase outside the
door means, and whether Frau Tossilo is already returned. Janka manages to clamber up the chute to
emerge on her own floor, from which she can quite safely walk back down the
stairs. After all, the men don’t know
her and hadn’t seen her by the suitcase, and if they just see her walking down
from the floor above, they have no reason to connect her with Frau Tossilo. Able to observe, she sees the two men,
dressed inconspicuously in workmen’s overalls, spraying with a can of paint to
mark a spot outside Frau Tossilo’s flat, evidently as a sign for another member
of the team.
Johann joins
her, and the two of them watch as the Black West team attach tiny hidden
cameras to the frame of the door to Frau Tossilo’s flat, and the lift. When the coast is clear, they move the
cameras (with Janka’s gymnastic skills coming into play again, when she needs
to stand on Johann’s shoulders to reach one of them) and use chewing-gum to
attach one to a room at the top of the building, and the one from Frau Tossilo’s
door to a door on the tenth floor. (As
Johann explains, it has to be two storeys up because ‘In this building, the
walls on the even-numbered floors are puddle-coloured, but on the odd-numbered
floors they’re vomit-green.’) For
verisimilitude, they leave the pink suitcase in view of the camera on the tenth
floor. Johann feels pleased at having
had an adventure – even if it wasn’t quite as exciting an adventure as driving
the enemies off with a sword.
I suspect that
moving the cameras is not going to fool Black West for long. After all, whoever lives in the flat on the
tenth floor is bound to come along and open the door, probably kicking the
suitcase out of the way, and the people watching the footage are bound to
realise that their cameras have been tampered with. But, as with the reconstructed egg, it buys
time.
The first time I
read this section, I didn’t quite follow the plot, and thought that there were
only two hidden cameras. In fact, there
were three: the one monitoring Frau Tossilo’s door, the one in the staircase
(which was the one Janka needed to stand on her brother’s shoulders to reach)
and the one in the lift (which they hadn’t had time to move before the time when
filming would start). So they text Frau
Tossilo to warn her that when she comes home, she needs to take the stairs
rather than the life.
As Kurmo
explains to Frau Tossilo later, the most frustrating aspect had been that they
still needed to get all thirty-six cabbages upstairs, which was a tiring job
without a lift, and so Johann had resorted to using his laptop to space the
boxes of vegetables up the stairs to save carrying them. As spacing is quite noisy (moving something
out of one space creates a vacuum, into which the surrounding air molecules all
rush and collide with each other), the noise had summoned the caretaker, who
was startled to see a boy with a computer teleporting a box of cabbages, but
Johann just explained that it was a school project.
PDB11 pointed out that it was worth including
a link to Randall Munroe’s discussion of what happens if a glass is literally half-empty, and why it is vitally important to specify which half is empty.
Although Frau
Tossilo wasn’t there, she seems to be the one most shaken by the intruders’
visit, coming so quickly after her mother’s death, and the realisation that she
and her mother had barely known each other and that now it is too late. That night, she has uneasy dreams: being lost
in a stone labyrinth; being told she should be ashamed to keep a dragon in her
flat instead of a boyfriend like any normal woman (somehow, I expected the
sentence to end, ‘instead of letting him fly free’!); and of having to defend
Kurmo with a sword that is much too heavy for her to lift. Waking from her nightmare, she needs to
snuggle under Kurmo’s wing for comfort to be able to sleep in peace.
These could be
just anxiety dreams, of course. But with
what we have been told about someone building a rocky enclosure for Kurmo, they
look suspiciously like prophecies.
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