The Lost Labyrinth (33 page)

They drove through the shadow of an overpass, then by a long line of parked bikes and motorcycles. Short-term parking was to their left; they followed the van in. There were berths for perhaps a hundred and fifty cars, but it was nearly full. The sheep were flying home for Easter. The van slowed ahead of them, found a place to park. Zaal pulled in nearby. When he’d put on the handbrake, Mikhail passed him Nadya’s noose. ‘You know what to do if she makes trouble?’ he asked, as he made to get out.

Zaal nodded confidently. ‘You know it, boss,’ he assured him.

The afternoon was drawing on, so Gaille began her search for Petitier’s darkroom outside, taking advantage of what daylight remained; but the
greenhouses and outbuildings all leaked far too much moisture and light, and she couldn’t find any trace of photographic supplies.

Her ankle was throbbing badly from all the walking she’d done. She didn’t want to exacerbate the injury, so she decided to give it a rest, maybe run the idea past Iain when he returned, see what he thought. But going back into the house, she caught a faint reprise of the vinegary smell she and Iain had both noticed that morning. Vinegar was used as a fixing agent in photographic dark-rooms, Gaille knew. Or acetic acid was, at least. Surely that meant the darkroom was somewhere in this house. She checked the kitchen and larder for vinegar, just in case, then went room by room, searching cavities and closets, pulling books from the shelves to look behind them, tapping the walls for hidden spaces. Nothing. Her puzzlement grew. She stood in the middle of the main room with her hands on her hips and stared around her.

Her ankle was still throbbing. She sighed and sat down in the armchair. It was only then that she took proper notice of the rugs thrown negligently around, particularly the largest of them, the one beneath her feet, with its flamboyant if faded motif of Theseus and Ariadne standing at either end of a fiendish labyrinth, and the golden thread that connected them through it.

Lying on his side in the rear of the van, his wrists tied behind his back, Knox heard the roar of a take-off, and knew they’d reached the airport. A speed-bump was like a jab in his ribs, still aching from the water-boarding. They stopped and then reversed, presumably into a parking bay. He didn’t have the first idea how to play this. He looked up at the big man; his arms folded, he stared implacably down. He’d get no joy there.

The passenger door opened and Mikhail climbed inside. He knelt on the passenger seat and reached back, grabbing Knox by his hair and pulling him towards him, then up onto his knees. ‘I’m going to take off your gag now,’ he said, touching his knife against his throat. ‘You’re not going to make a sound. What you are going to do is tell me
exactly
where this key is. Do you understand?’ He waited for Knox to nod, then he loosened the gag, allowing him to spit it from his mouth, so that it dangled around his neck like some macabre medallion.

‘Well?’ asked Mikhail.

The corners of Knox’s mouth were dry and sore. He licked some saliva balm onto them. ‘I need to be able to see,’ he said. Mikhail swayed back out
of his way. He leaned forward. The Metro and railway lines were to Knox’s left, the gleaming terminal building was to his right, and directly ahead and above was the enclosed walkway connecting the two. And, around the lot itself, a wide but well-trimmed hedge, much as he’d remembered.

‘Well?’ asked Mikhail.

‘We were over the other side,’ he said, nodding at a stretch entirely taken up by parked cars. It was just his bad luck that a 4x4 chose that moment to pull out, leaving a slot free for Boris to drive in to.

‘Well?’ asked Mikhail, once they were parked again.

‘I can’t see from in here. Let me out and I’ll get it for you.’

‘Sure,’ scoffed Mikhail. He increased the pressure on his blade. ‘I’d advise you to start remembering.’

‘Augustin hid it, not me,’ said Knox.

‘But you were with him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, then.’

‘It’s about two thirds of the way along this side,’ Knox told him. ‘It’s by the base of one of the shrubs. He scratched his initials in the bark.’

‘And his initials are?’

‘AGP.’

Mikhail nodded. ‘Go,’ he told Davit and Boris.

‘Yes, sir.’

Knox watched with a sinking heart as they walked off on their futile search, while Mikhail’s knife pressed cold as ice against his throat.

Gaille dragged the armchair back against the wall, then pulled the rug aside. And there it was, a wooden trap-door embedded in the cement. The wood had warped and swollen over the years, so that she had to give the rope handle a hard tug to open it on its hinges. It threw up a soft fog of dust and detritus as it came, then released a gentle but reassuringly vinegary aroma.

She rested the trapdoor all the way on its back and looked down the narrow flight of steep bare steps, cobwebs and motes of dust and gloomy shadows at the bottom vanishing into pure darkness. Something scuttled. A rodent in the basement or a bird upon the roof; she knew which she’d prefer. She shook her head at her hesitation. The house had electric lights powered by the solar cells:
presumably the basement did too, though she couldn’t see any from here. She made her way down, one step at a time, her palms pressed against the cold rough walls on either side. There was a corridor leading to her right at the foot of the stairs, going back along the spine of the house, and there were three doors leading from it, two to Gaille’s left, one to her right. She tried the first left-hand one, fumbling in the darkness until her wrist touched a string that she grabbed and pulled. A single dangling bulb came alight, revealing a small room with a plumbed-in sink and wooden tables against two of its walls. An enlarger stood on one of the tables, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of a darkroom: colour-coded developing trays and tanks, an assortment of light filters, chemical containers, tongs, thermometers, a magnifying glass, boxes of photographic paper. Three lengths of washing-line cord were strung from wall to wall, fitted with clips for hanging photographs up to dry, though there weren’t any there at the moment.

She went back out and through the second left-hand door, found the light-switch. It was a little larger than the first room, and also fitted with a sink, as well as a worktable and a desk and chair too. Beakers, flasks and test tubes lounged indolently in wooden racks. A kaleidoscope of chemicals in glass jars stood on the shelves. And she noted a
gas burner too, an oven and digital scales and filters and what looked to her laywoman’s eye like a centrifuge. A home chemistry lab.

Photographs were pinned or taped against the walls, new ones put up wherever there’d been gaps, so that their corners overlapped, enabling Gaille to deduce the order in which they had been put up, like stratification in an archaeological dig. Some had been there years, to judge from their fading homogeneous greys and the crackled yellow of the sticky tape from which all adhesiveness had long-since gone, so that it clung to the wall by mere force of habit.

Each photograph depicted a different plant or fungus, some in the wild, others in Petitier’s greenhouse, or harvested and in his kitchen. Many of them had handwritten notes attached with a paperclip, instructions on preparation along with scrawled additional information on dosages, experiences and antidotes.

There was a shelf of books, too. A directory of psychoactive mushrooms; a pamphlet on African ethnobotany. Pagan shamanistic cults. Aldous Huxley’s
The Doors of Perception
. Wasson. Ruck. Other half-familiar names. She pulled out and flipped through a field guide to hallucinogens, stopped at an evocative watercolour of
myristica fragrans,
then again at a gorgeous picture of
galbulimima Belgraveana
, a dream-inducing narcotic used by native Papuans.

She went back out and through the facing door into the third room. It was significantly larger, this one, with multiple lights. Most of it was given over to metal shelving on which stood grey archival boxes and racks of folders, dates going back well over a decade written on their outside edges, along with some of Petitier’s incomprehensible hieroglyphics. She opened one up at random, found four seal-stone fragments inside, each individually wrapped in tissue paper, each inscribed with Linear A symbols. She returned the box to its place, continued along the shelves, pulling out another every couple of paces: shards of painted pottery decorated with plants and wildlife; a crude earthenware figurine of a heavily pregnant woman; a small but exquisite polychrome vase; fragments of marble and other stoneware; a bronze dagger with designs wrought upon both blade and handle.

She took this last to the work-table, where the light was better. Her hands trembled a little as she turned it around, her thrill at all these treasures spiced with anger that Petitier had kept them to himself. A dozen or so photographs were pinned in a snaking pattern to the wall above the table. Each was taken outdoors, each showed a different slab of rock, and each rock had at least two symbols chiselled into it. She remembered the symbols she’d seen herself, atop the escarpment. She looked for them among the photographs,
and there they were. A thought came to her: she hobbled upstairs for the replica Phaistos disc on Petitier’s desk, brought it back down. Yes. The symbols on it were similar to those in the photographs, though they formed different clusters. But then she turned it over and felt shivers scurry up her spine.

Zaal sat sideways in the driver’s seat with his back against the door, the better to keep an eye on Nadya. Late afternoon sunlight refracted through the tinted glass and laid a blurred rainbow on the steel briefcase. All that money! He let his mind drift off on a fine daydream: strutting in expensive clothes down some Riviera waterfront to the larger of his yachts, while beautiful women ignored their men to throw him admiring glances.

‘How much is in there?’ asked Nadya.

Zaal returned reluctantly from his reverie. ‘None of your business.’

‘He must trust you a great deal.’

‘Yes. Because he can.’

‘Still. It’s an awful lot of money.’

Zaal laughed and shook his head. ‘You think I’m crazy? Do you have any idea what he’d do to me?’

Nadya shrugged. ‘He wouldn’t be able to do anything to anyone, not from gaol.’

‘If they ever put him there.’

‘They’ll put him there, all right,’ replied Nadya. ‘Don’t you get it yet? Your friend Edouard blabbed. The police are going to be waiting for you when you board your plane. This is the last bit of freedom you’ll enjoy for thirty years.’

He gave the noose a little admonitory tug. ‘Be quiet.’

‘Mikhail murdered Edouard,’ insisted Nadya. ‘You didn’t. Your friends didn’t.
He
did. But when he goes down, he’ll have all the money in the world for expensive lawyers, to bribe judges and intimidate jurors. He’ll make it seem he’s the innocent one, that you guys pulled the trigger. The police won’t care. The more the merrier, as far as they’re concerned. Think about it. You’re risking the rest of your life for a psycho. You think he’d do the same for you?’

Zaal licked his lips. There was truth in what she said. But Mikhail scared the hell out of him. All the Nergadzes did. ‘They’d come after me,’ he said.

‘Not from where they’ll be. Our president has been praying for the Nergadzes to screw up this badly. You really think he’ll let this chance go? He’ll stamp down hard and keep on stamping until there’s nothing left.’

‘I’ll believe that when I see it!’ scoffed Zaal, giving her noose another little reminder. ‘Even if they
could
put the whole family away, it wouldn’t stop them having money, it wouldn’t stop them from having influence, it wouldn’t keep them from their revenge.’ He gave a dry laugh. ‘Believe me, I know what they’re like.’

‘They can’t take revenge unless they find you first. And they won’t, not if you’re smart. There must be millions in that briefcase. You can buy yourself a new identity, a new life. Live like a king, or rot in a six-foot cell. It’s just a question of whether you’ve got the balls.’

‘I’d be dead before I got out of the parking lot.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Nadya. ‘Not if you had some way of distracting him. Something that he’d have absolutely no choice but to take care of first.’

‘Like what?’ asked Zaal.

‘Like me,’ said Nadya.

Knox sat absolutely still as he waited for Boris and Davit to return, for Mikhail kept teasing beneath his chin with his knife, like a barber with a cutthroat razor. It was five minutes before they reappeared. ‘He’s full of shit,’ said Boris, climbing in. ‘There’s nothing there.’

‘Nothing there?’ echoed Mikhail. He turned to Knox with a frosty smile. ‘Could you explain that to me, please.’

‘They missed it,’ said Knox. ‘They must have missed it.’

‘Of course.’

‘It’s there,’ insisted Knox. ‘Take me and I’ll show you.’

‘We looked everywhere,’ said Boris. ‘It’s not there.’

‘You lied to me,’ said Mikhail, pushing Knox back down onto the floor of the van, switching around his grip on the knife, the better to cut rather than stab. ‘I warned you what the penalty for lying would be.’

‘I didn’t lie,’ insisted Knox. ‘Your men missed it, that’s all.’

‘No,’ stated Mikhail. ‘You lied.’

‘I thought the fleece mattered to you,’ said Knox. ‘Are you going to give it up so easily, just because your guys can’t find the right fucking bush?’

‘There is no right bush,’ said Boris.

‘Let me show you,’ pleaded Knox. ‘For Christ’s sake, what harm can I do while I’m trussed up like this?’

Mikhail nodded, to himself more than to Knox. ‘I want you to understand something,’ he said. ‘If you’re lying to me, you’ll die and the woman Nadya will die. You already know that. So let me add this: your girlfriend Gaille will die too.’

‘No,’ said Knox weakly.

‘Yes,’ said Mikhail. ‘I’ll find her and then I’ll fuck her and then I’ll kill her. You have my word on it.’

‘She has nothing to do with this,’ protested Knox.