The Bronze King by Suzy McKee Charnas

me.
    â€œWon’t your doorman tell your mom we came?”
    â€œYou don’t come through my lobby,” I said, and I explained to him how our building had a service door, adjoining the big co-op next to us that had been a hotel before. Our building had been their annex or something, and if you knew where to find it, there was a door connecting the basements. All he had to do was get into Fudge Tower—that was what the kids in my building called the co-op because it was fudge-colored—take the elevator down into the basement, and come up from the laundry room in our basement on the service elevator, which didn’t get much use because, as my mother said, we didn’t get much service.
    Joel was really intrigued by all of this. I gave him the name of a dentist who had an office in the Fudge so he could tell the Fudge doorman that he and Paavo were going there.
    â€œSmart,” Joel said. “Do people get caught doing this?”

 
    8
Rooftop Magic
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    T HEY DIDN’T GET CAUGHT.
    Which is how, the next afternoon, I was standing in the shadow of the elevator housing on our roof, waiting to hear Paavo’s music-questions and to bring him Jagiello’s answers.
    â€œThis is good,” he’d said, when I came up to meet them both in the bright afternoon.
    I had almost forgotten how terrific our roof was, with a great view of the waves of other rooftops receding all around, and the Hudson River, and the dark outline of the Palisades to the west. I went up on the roof a lot when I was a kid, but then some people moved in who walked their dogs there and everybody got in the habit of not going up there anymore, for obvious reasons.
    The dog-people eventually moved out. Now mostly we got grown-ups sunbathing with their radios on as if they were at the beach, at least if the weather was good. The kids in the building only went up if they thought they might catch a glimpse of something interesting; you know.
    There were no sunbathers that afternoon. It was pretty chilly. Paavo should have been cold in his light jacket, but I guess he wasn’t because he hadn’t even bothered to button the collar of his shirt. He got Joel to stand on the elevator housing and drew on the roof surface the same way he’d drawn on the paving at the park. I stood in the outline and waited.
    Paavo said, “In a new place like this, I better call Jagiello first and get his attention turned this way. He was talking Shakespeare, you said?”
    He shut his eyes a minute, and then he recited, “Virtue he had, deserving to command; his brandished sword did blind men with his beams; his arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings.”
    That sounded like our old Jagiello, all right. Then Paavo began to play on the violin that Joel had brought.
    But this violin wouldn’t sing to me, not in words. What happened was not the dark voice at all, but a huge rush of grinding, roaring noise and shaking, as if the ground was rippling underfoot. Suddenly there was this sharp pain over my eye and next thing I knew I was lying on my back, staring at a lot of sky.
    Paavo hunkered down next to me and put his hand on my head and looked hard into my face with those odd-shaped gray eyes.
    â€œHey,” I said. “I just remembered something.” I sat up, feeling dizzy but okay. “The explosion in the subway! That was just like the explosion in the subway.”
    â€œIn the subway?” Paavo said. “What explosion?”
    We walked along beside the parapet of the roof and I told them about it.
    Paavo laughed. “Sure, the subway! What did Jagiello tell us? Darkness, quiet, and then noise, voices like from a crowd, vibration? There was no explosion. That was just the air being displaced when the statue was suddenly popped down there, boom. Well.” He stopped and braced his hands wide apart on the parapet and frowned down at the street way below. “We got real trouble now.