Strindberg's Star (15 page)

An irritated breath from the Toad in the darkness.

“I only met Erik Hall once,” Don continued in his rough voice, “and the only object I know of is that ankh. Other than that, all I know is what has been in the papers.”

“It’s too bad we had to start our conversation like this,” said Eberlein.

“Is it?” said Don.

“Yes, because from what I understand, you’re not telling the truth.”

Don squirmed in his chair, as though he were adjusting his jacket.

“No, let us start over instead,” the German continued. “As I understand it, you had long telephone conversations with Erik Hall the week before he died. And we have heard that there were notes on Hall’s hard drive that said that he found at least one type of document down there in the mine, and that he told you about it.”

“That doesn’t really sound familiar,” said Don.

“We’ve also learned that Erik Hall spoke of some type of ‘secret’ that he brought with him out of the shaft. Whether he meant the document or some other object by that, we don’t know.”

“Some object other than the ankh?”

That was the attorney’s voice.

“That’s what we’ve come here today to attempt to clear up,” said Eberlein.

Don let his eyes slide over toward the Toad, who was sitting with his wide face leaning backward, looking up at the ceiling. Then he heard Eberlein’s voice again.

“Did Erik Hall mention anything to you about an object shaped like a star, or an area north of Svalbard?”

Don shook his head.

“And no other documents?”

“No, like I said …”

“So what did you talk about?”

“He only called late at night,” Don said, squirming again. “He mostly nagged me to come.”

“I would like to ask you to think very carefully now,” said Eberlein. “Something that might seem utterly meaningless to you might be of great interest to us. The slightest clue …”

Don managed to avoid the German’s eyes by looking down at his lips. Somehow they were too red to fit with the rest of his face.

“But like I said. Nothing.”

Eberlein snapped the fingers of one hand, and the Toad got up awkwardly and waddled up to the table. In his hand he held a paper with faded blue handwriting.

“Does this remind you of anything?”

Looping curves, by the same hand that had written the text on the postcard in Don’s pocket.

“No,” Don said and tried to shrug his shoulders, but they suddenly felt heavier.

At this point the attorney broke in.

“I am having a very hard time understanding the point in continuing with this. It is perfectly clear that my client doesn’t know anything, and furthermore, he has no interest whatsoever in speaking to you. A conversation, you said—in this country this is what we call an interrogation. Now you must see to it that the police from the Security Service take us back to Falun immediately.”

The attorney shoved back her chair and stood up.

“And furthermore, Eberlein, or whatever your name is, a great deal of what you have confronted my client with is protected by investigational confidentiality. I can’t understand what the Swedish police are thinking to let outsiders have access to this sort of information.”

Though Don had also stood up by now, Eberlein remained sitting at the table with his head lowered. It seemed as though the German were thinking about something. After a long time he turned his gaze back to Don.

“Imagine that, I believe your attorney is right.”

“She is?” said Don.

“Yes, she’s quite right that this should not be considered an interrogation.”
The inward smile spread again; red lips, gray teeth. With a few lithe steps Eberlein came around the table and laid his hand on Don’s shoulder.

“This is no interrogation, and in addition I completely understand why you are reluctant to say anything, the way your situation looks. But since you seem to be the last link …”

The German absentmindedly fingered the corduroy fabric of the shoulder of Don’s jacket, as though he were thinking it over one more time.

“Since you seem to be last link to Erik Hall and his discoveries, I suppose we can take the time to turn it around and see if we can come to a greater understanding of each other. I’ll tell you a story, and you can help me with the end.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“We’ll figure that out when we get there. You’ll see.”

Eberlein patted Don’s arm and said in a slightly lower voice, “I actually think that you, as a researcher, will quite soon come to be as interested as I am in trying to find an answer to this mystery. I mean, once you’ve come to see it in the right light.”

W
hen Eberlein had gotten Don and Eva to sit down again, he walked over to the Toad, next to the bookcase. He crouched down and whispered something. Then the Toad got up with a displeased grunt and disappeared from the room.

“Just wait a little bit,” Eberlein said, smiling at Don again. “I believe you will think it is worth the trouble.”

I
t was in her early teens, when her special talents had subsided and disappeared, that Elena had learned to never again make any demands. But on her eighteenth birthday, one of the lower section leaders at the foundation had handed her an apartment key. The key had led to an attic apartment a few blocks away from the large banking hall.

Tall timber-frame houses with bricked gables that were shaped like stairs around a cobblestone square with a walled-in well. Behind one of the solitary windows, at the very top, she had been able to lock the door after herself for the first time.

At first she had interpreted the key as an indication from Vater that he was going to release her to a different life. But everything had stayed the same. It had only been a fifteen-minute walk from the attic apartment to his management office, and work had continued there as it always had, in the shadow of the castle’s north tower.

W
rapped up in a blanket in her kitchen alcove, she tasted a spoon of honey out of the jar she must have accidentally left on the table when she departed so hastily for Sweden.

The movement of her arm up to her mouth was the only sign of life
in the dreary two-room apartment. She had assumed that furnishing it was pointless.

She could make out her bedroom in the dark on the other side of the door frame in her kitchen alcove. The bed, which she hadn’t had time to make, the bureau with the narrow mirror, and the portrait of the Holy Madonna. Otherwise nothing. But in the other room, she had made more of an effort, hung up the boxing bag on a chain and screwed her training equipment onto the wall next to the weapon cabinet.

E
lena licked the shaft of the spoon with her tongue. A taste of golden sugar and summer,
miele di acacia.

She still hadn’t had time to catch up on sleep after the long journey back down toward the mist of the Teutoburg Forest, bordering the stinking industrial valley of the Ruhr. For twelve hours, she had watched the asphalt rush past beneath her, lain with the cross glued between her heart and the snow-white tank of the motorcycle.

She thought, as she took another spoonful of honey, that the ache in her thighs from the long hours might be good for her somehow. It was so seldom these days that physical pain affected her; her training with the cheerless men from Sicherheit had at least had that result. Nothing was capable of affecting her anymore.

O
n the road from Denmark down to Westphalia, she had called the management office once more and was met with questions about Hall and someone they’d called Titelman. Elena had tried to remember everything that had been said in the summer cottage in Falun, and now, at her kitchen table, she went through it yet again to see whether there had been something important she might have missed after all.

She got stuck as soon as she thought of her first encounter with the diver, when she’d said she was a journalist with
La Rivista Italiana dei Misteri e dell’Occulto.
Not even in that instant had she been able to push aside her longing for what she had lost. And she had chosen
the name of an Italian New Age magazine just because they had once, so long ago, published a little news item about what they called her astral gifts. But had she really been able to read back then? Like everything else from her first years, that memory was blended with the sensation of dreaming.

W
hen Elena had finally gotten enough of the sweet flavor, she screwed the lid of the honey jar into place and let the blanket slide from her body. Then she got up and walked past the drawn curtains in the window, up to the mirror above the bureau.

She followed the boyish lines from her cheekbones down to her makeup-free mouth. Tousled her short hair, and although she immediately tried to push away the thought, she knew very well who she resembled.

Miele de acacia,
the honey’s flowery vanilla flavor.

She leaned her forehead against the mirror to push away the thought of the solitary woman who had once had to leave Vater’s banking hall, denied by her own six-year-old daughter.

But now, behind the honey, came the familiar taste of ricotta; honey and ricotta, the floury cookies she and her sisters had used to take along to the beach. The taste of lemonade, the heat of the Gulf of Naples, and all the smells. The stench of the mountain of garbage that trickled in through the gap in the balcony doors in the run-down apartment complex. She remembered that she had tried to reach up to close them when the smell had been at its worst. But the door handle had been far too high on the balcony door for a child’s fumbling hands.

And then her mother’s face came toward her; that bright oval above a rayon dress, like an extra shimmering skin around her body. When Elena heard her sisters’ laughter, she searched in vain for some way to turn herself back through time in a spiral, so her life could go in a different direction on that particular day. The day when her gifts had been put to the test for the first time.

D
usk had begun to fall, and a drizzle came in over the green-glazed brick roof on the hill, wrapping the crowns of the oaks and the rugged rocky knolls of Skansen in a cloak of moisture. But inside the windowless heart of the villa, the crypt-shaped library, you couldn’t tell night from day. Warm incandescent light came down from the glass lamps above the table, and all that could be heard was Eberlein slowly drumming his fingers against the lid of a large metal box. Between the German’s well-manicured nails, Don had just managed to make out the label that was riveted in place:

Strindberg 1895–97

The Toad, who had just brought the metal box in, had once again sat down on his stool over by the bookcases, and his face was half-hidden in darkness. Next to Don, Eva Strand had leaned backward with her arms and legs crossed, her mouth drawn into a line. Then the fingers stopped drumming and Eberlein broke the silence.

“Now then, to help you see the matter in the right light … may I begin with a question: Are you familiar with the Taklimakan Desert?”

There was a displeased sigh from the Toad over in the corner.

“The Taklimakan Desert,” continued Eberlein, taking no heed, “is an ocean of sand that stretches from the roof of the world, the Pamir Mountains, 115,000 square miles straight into northwestern China. Arctic cold in the winter, and once summer comes, the sand can be transformed to a kiln on certain days, with heat that can reach over 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Hell on earth, it is said. In any case, it’s a place that’s impossible to live in, and up until the end of the 1800s, the area was only marked on maps with a white spot, a
terra incognita
as large as Germany. At that time no one knew anything about its interior, not even those who lived near the desert. The only information about it was a few lines in the manuscripts Marco Polo left behind in the 1300s; fanciful stories about ancient cities buried under sand dunes hundreds of yards high. The first person who ventured out in that absolute emptiness came from a remote place up in northern Europe. His name was Sven Hedin.”

There was a creak as Don changed position in his chair. His mind was still somewhat numb and sluggish from the sleeping pills he had taken in the car, and being in this library gave him the distinct feeling of having tumbled down Alice’s rabbit hole.

“You are familiar with Sven Hedin’s journeys, I presume,” said Eberlein.

The faint smile of the German, which followed this question, was so annoying that Don made an effort to sober up: “I maintain a deep and indelible memory of Adolf Hitler and consider him to be one of the greatest men in the history of the world.”

There was yet another mumble from the Toad, but Don just shrugged his crooked shoulders. “That’s what Sven Hedin wrote about Hitler at the end of the war. ‘I maintain a deep and indelible memory of Adolf Hitler and consider him to be one of the greatest men in the history of the world.’ He was ennobled—Hedin, that is.”

“Well, where Sven Hedin stood politically has nothing to do with this. I can assure you of that,” said Eberlein.

Then the German pushed the box aside and leaned forward over the table.

“No, this is about something that occurred long, long before the war, when Hedin had barely turned thirty and was still a young explorer. In the beginning of 1895 he stood at the edge of the Taklimakan Desert. In order to get there, he had traveled by railroad car from Saint Petersburg to Tashkent in Russian Turkestan, and from there he continued across the frozen steppe in a fur-lined horse cart, and then he went by foot, along with Kyrgyz nomads, through the eighteen- or twenty-thousand-foot mountain passes of Pamir. That in itself was a truly remarkable journey at the time. On the fifth of January 1895, he finally reached the oasis city of Kashgar, the site next to the Taklimakan Desert where the caravan routes of the Silk Road have converged since thousands of years ago. With his one-man tent, his tools, and his weapons, he disappeared into the sea of sand on the twenty-second of January with a few camels and some servants and donkeys. At that time, he knew nothing about the violent sandstorms that can redraw the desert in a few hours with their whirling sand, nor had he heeded the warnings he had heard in Kashgar about the supposed existence of strange voices out in the emptiness; voices that bewitched wanderers and caused each one to get lost in the labyrinths of the desert.