The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

and bounced and jostled all the way to the subway station fifteen minutes away. It was an inconvenience, living on the outskirts, but the only habitation he and Emilio could afford was a fifth-story walkup on the south-east end of the city.

Once he entered the subway station, it was warm and placid. The stray dogs were coming home from the city’s center – they took the subway, riding up and down the escalator with the expression of quiet and standoffish dignity, so that they could spend their days begging by the restaurants and robbing tourists of their hotdogs. Now the dogs poured out of the outbound trains with the rivers of ruddy, white, and black fur, as the human passengers stepped carefully around them. The prince smiled as he waited on the platform, surrounded by beige and yellow marbled columns, and wondered if the sheer numbers of stray Moscow dogs gave them the sort of elevated, exuberant intelligence rarely seen in these beasts elsewhere in the world. He wondered if they possessed some sort of a collective mind, and the thought itched again in the corners of his eyes and between his eyebrows, and he rubbed the bridge of his nose. The Bank manifested much today.

As soon as he boarded the train, largely empty, the Blackberry in his pocket buzzed, urgent. It took him a moment to tilt the screen away from the overhead lights’ glare, and even then he read the name of the message several times, just to make sure that the crack on the screen wasn’t deceiving him somehow. The message was from the widow Almadao. The prince’s heart pulsed in his fingertips as he tapped the screen and read her stumbling words.

‘My dearest one,’ she wrote, ‘it is such a surprise to read your message – words of a man who knows both suffering and hope, and I envy you your dignity and humility. I cannot tell how I cried and howled, and threw myself against the walls, how I broke my fingernails on the frozen cobblestone of these streets, on these icy embankments.

‘Yes, my dear unknown friend, I am in the same city as you are – and it is getting dark at 4 p.m., and the shadows stretch, long and blue, in the hollows between snowdrifts. There’s slush on the roads and sidewalks, and my black shoes have permanent salt marks, like a wrack line.

‘None of it matters – only that the fate has brought us to the same city, too peopled and desolate for words, just as it is fate that we can perhaps salvage what we can from the Bank of Burkina Faso – together, if only you would help me.’

The prince’s eyes misted over, and he brushed the unbidden moisture from his cheekbone with the edge of his hand. He had never met her, and yet as he read her email, he anticipated every word before his eyes had a chance to take it in, and every heartbeat doubled in his chest, as if it became an echo chamber.

‘If the fate has brought us together,’ he wrote back, ‘perhaps it will let us find each other; perhaps we shall meet among the dust and music and musty odor. Meet me at the House of Music in an hour.’

The House of Music, a relatively small building housing a decent orchestra that offered a small but reliably good range of classical music, and was rarely sold out. Today was no exception – the prince paid his admittance, checked-in his embarrassing coat, and wandered down the raspberry colored carpet in his thin-soled and soaked shoes toward the lobby and the concession stand.

He recognized her from afar – she was tall, even taller than him, and the saffron frock loosely gathered at her dark shoulders draped as if it was made when her figure was fuller and younger, its tattered hem splayed on the carpet like feathers.

She recognized him too: she smiled and waved as she lifted the glass of lemonade to her lips painted the color of the inside of a hibiscus flower.

The concert started with the obligatory Pachelbel’s Canon and Bach’s Fugue and Sonata, but they were barely aware of the music, delirious with happiness at having found each other and muddled by the habitual fog that always accompanied any attempt to think about the Bank of Burkina Faso in a logical manner.

Yet, together and with the help of the strings and the organ, undeterred by the bellicose glances of other music lovers, they managed to tell each other what each of them knew.

*

The problem with the Bank was the inability of anyone who had deposited money there to get it back. Phone calls resulted in requests for foreign nationals, and playing of recorded strange music. And the physical location of the bank remained unknown – Burkina Faso has been scoured from border to border by millions of those who had no hope now of returning their fortunes or rewarding the long-lost nexts of kin. It was concluded then that it must be present elsewhere in the world, and in all likelihood the bank did not have a permanent area of residence – hence the constant demand for foreign nationals, since if it moved around, everyone was a foreign national. That made sense, even through the muddled thoughts.

The prince had developed a hunch that the bank’s existence itself was not a permanent or assured thing. ‘You see,’ he told the widow Lucita Almadao, ‘once I dreamt about that Bank, and I saw it in my mind – clear as day. I saw the porticos and the red bricks of its facade, even the tiny cracks in the cement between the bricks. And the next day, I received a letter from someone I knew, who was able to claim his money that night. He never returned my emails where I asked for locations and details, but I’m sure that my dream helped him somehow.’

Lucita Almadao clapped her hands once, and caught herself as