Strindberg's Star (23 page)

Here sat the young assistant with his freckled face and chalk white hair. He gave her a measured look; she was expected. Elena looked up at the oil paintings above his head, matte black in their golden frames. Generations of severe faces, all their sharp looks directed down at her, as she took the last steps up to the handle of the door. Then, without the slightest sound, the door to the management office swung open.

T
he oak-paneled walls, the polished surface of the parquet, and the rows of safes where the lead capsules with the sparkling dust had long been closed up in the dark, waiting.

Elena stopped a bit away from the desk at the panorama window. Although Vater had his back to her, she knew that he was listening to her breathe.

As always, his eyes were fixed on the castle. Above the oversize
north tower, the clouds were moving in. It had started to become overcast; iron-gray clouds against the white sky.

His thin body stretched so high above the back of the electric wheelchair that it looked unnatural, as though an adult had been placed in a piece of furniture made for a child.

“Elena …”

“Yes, Vater.”

She was speaking to his back.

“You have performed a vital service for the foundation, but you also made several big mistakes.”

“I realize that, Vater.”

“It was a great show of confidence for us to send you. The task was simple but of vital importance. And you couldn’t keep from … making a mess.”

He paused so that she could attempt an apology, but she realized it was better to remain silent.

“So what is the ankh without the star, Elena?”

There was a squeak as the rubber wheels of the wheelchair began to move, turning him around toward her, while he continued.

“Only junk. A completely worthless antique.”

He rolled past the edge of the polished leather surface of the desk and came out onto the shiny floor. Then Vater tilted the lever on the arm of the chair backward, and the hydraulics in the electric wheelchair’s seat and leg rest brought him to a standing position.

She had never truly been able to get used to his oblong face, which was completely hairless, or his flat cheekbones and closely set teeth in a mouth that was way too small. In order to avoid the hazy reflection in his unseeing eye, Elena looked up at the other one, which was black and piercing.

She had always thought that his sickness had made Vater like a spider, with wire-thin arms and legs. But never as much as now, as he rolled even closer and directed his one eye down at the backpack, which she held open in front of her.

“Only junk,” he said again. “A knickknack.”

With his long fingers spread out like a rake, Vater stuck his hand into the backpack.

“Es weigt ganz leicht
,
ja?”
He held the ankh up in front of him. “I said it would be light, didn’t I?”

His spider fingers turned the shaft of the ankh as Vater mumbled his way through its inscriptions.

“I call on you, divine creator, invoker …”

“… the giver of fortune,” she filled in.

The cataract-filled eye, and then the other one, sharply looked down at her.

“That remains to be seen, doesn’t it?” he said. “There is only silence from Stockholm so far.”

“Titelman …” Elena began.

“We ought to have forced the Norwegians to keep it safer,” Vater interrupted. “It cost us ninety years. Ninety years, or many more, if this really is all that was down in the mine. Although if the son was so attached to the ankh that he carried it with him until he died, then he can hardly have thrown the star into the sea.”

“Hall said …”

“Of course he did!” said Vater. “Erik Hall
said
something. That he had found something more. Perhaps we should ask the Swedish police to ask one more time. A few more details, maybe, without having to take a detour through that Titelman?”

Elena looked down at the floor.

“The Swedes have placed Hall’s body in a morgue, I’ve heard; perhaps you would like to go back yourself and conduct an interrogation. If you can awaken your delicate senses, maybe you could even get something out of him.”

Elena pressed her lips together and said nothing. In the silence of the room, she could still sense the sound of the night voices inside herself, but it was too weak to be worth mentioning to Vater.

“We have lived as though in slumber, Elena.” Then Vater turned
the lever and the electric wheelchair angled him back into a sitting position.

“And soon our entire advantage will be gone. These last years have been borrowed time. You must understand …”

From the door came the sound of loud knocking. Vater stopped talking. Then the handle was pushed down and the assistant came in.

“Ein Anruf aus Schweden,”
said the assistant. A call from Sweden.

“Ja, bitte?”

Elena saw that the freckled man was squirming. Then the assistant finally gathered his courage: “Something has happened.”

E
va Strand tried to sink back into the forgiving sleep, but the pain had grown too severe.

Eyes still closed, she wanted to pull her leg toward herself in order to determine the extent of her injury, but it was as though the signals didn’t get through.

She grasped her left thigh with both hands and managed to pull her knee up to enough of an angle that she could feel along the back of her calf. The tips of her fingers brushed some sort of cloth, a bandage that had been wound so tightly that it almost cut off all circulation. When she carefully pressed along the four-inch wound, she could feel the contours of the small pieces of tape someone must have put there to hold the edges together.

At that moment it slowly began to come back. Titelman being thrown down on the granite terrace and the thin-haired policeman’s back just about thirty feet away from her. Stuck in the side of his neck, a pink syringe that bobbed in time with his pulse.

Who that woman who performed the next action was, she didn’t know. She herself had never done anything reckless in her whole life, but still the images in her memory said that she, Eva, was in fact the
person who had gotten up out of the shrubbery along the wall of the villa and, in one decisive movement, pushed in the plunger of the syringe with her palm.

When the thin-haired man had collapsed and, surprisingly enough, lost consciousness, her legs had given way too. She recalled thinking that this was hardly what one should expect of a law-abiding Swedish lawyer.

After that, the pain had taken over, and her last memory after having swallowed those pills was of the car’s jerky escape across the Djurgård Bridge, and then everything had faded away.

E
va turned her head, opened her eyes, and blinked a few times. In the dim light she could make out looping golden embroidery on silk fabric; petals and stalks in Indian style, stretching up toward a concrete ceiling.

She moved a bit closer to be able to reach out and touch the tapestry. It quivered, hanging loose against the wall in front of her.

When she looked down at her feet, she saw a wrought-iron bed frame and more embroidered fabric. Above her head she could feel silk as well, and her palms were stopped by another wall. Between the bed and the far side of the room lay a thick Oriental carpet, exactly the right size to cover the floor, which was perhaps thirty feet square. More Indian fabrics in soft colors, and over by the door stood small crystal dishes with burning candles and sticks of incense. That explained the scent of sandalwood, but behind that there was a faint odor of something else. It smelled somehow like burned … rubber?

E
va felt a stabbing sensation in the back of her lower leg as she managed to sit up on the edge of the bed. She noticed that her high-heeled shoes had been placed neatly over by the doorway, and the carpet felt unsteady under the nylon-clad soles of her feet as she made a first attempt to stand up.

It didn’t go particularly well, and she sank down again among the
pillows. She sat still, waiting for the pain to subside. But then, in the sound of her own moaning breaths, there was suddenly something else: a metallic thumping noise that came closer and closer, and she thought it was impossible, but it was as though something very heavy was rushing straight toward her where she sat.

Eva clutched the mattress with her fingers and tried to push away the instinctive feeling that she had to move immediately to avoid being run over. Then her intuition took over and she shoved herself up off the bed with all her strength and took a few staggering steps on the floor.

She thought her leg could hold her despite the sharp ache, but no matter how much she looked around, there was nowhere to seek shelter from the noise that was now roaring into the room. It sounded as though something were pounding ahead against the joints of …
rails
?

Thundering, rattling, it could hardly be fifty yards away now, and she was about to be
run over
at any second! But how could it be possible? Wasn’t she standing in a room, protected by four walls and a roof?

Then it was as though the sound was transformed into its own detached wall that pressed itself toward her. Eva held her arm up over her face and cowered.

For one eternally long second, the sound crashed by just above her head, and a few clouds of sand came loose from the concrete slabs of the ceiling down toward the epaulets on her blouse. Over on the floor, next to the doorway, the flames flickered from the rush of air, and then the roar rushed off.

In the silence that followed, Eva shivered.

The blue arm of a shirt fumbled its way in along the wall covering beside the door, and suddenly the room was flooded with light. With squinting eyes, Eva saw a short figure approaching her at the bed. The figure placed Eva’s arm around its thin shoulders and helped her out.

“Sorry about that. Must be some sort of signal problem.”

The voice was bright and feminine.

“But you did have to wake up sometime, after all, right?”

Eva couldn’t think of anything to say as she staggered out through the doorway with her arm over the woman’s shoulders. In front of them opened a weakly lit corridor with even more hand-knotted rugs: Kashmar, Shiraz, Karachi, Afghan. Once, a very long time ago, Eva had learned to recognize the Oriental patterns, and this was like stumbling through an auction hall.

The woman looked up at her. “For the noise,” she said. “Sounds like hell in here otherwise, when some schmuck in the traffic routing office gets it into his head to redirect the lines.” The curly black hair wasn’t as gray as Don’s, Eva thought, and there was a different calmness in her eyes. But the pale face, the pronounced wings of her nostrils, and her slightly bent walk …

“He’s been sitting up waiting for you. It’s almost seven o’clock.”

“Seven,” Eva repeated, and tried to comprehend the time. “In the morning, you mean?”

The woman stopped next to a doorway at the end of the corridor. She had a small nose ring, and the front of her shirt said
MAJORNAS IK
in white letters.

“Seven in the
evening
.”

The woman made a face.

“You’ve been lying there resting ever since your friend got the exceptionally idiotic idea to bring you here.”

Then she helped Eva across the threshold into a stripped storage room, where the cement shone bare and white.

I
t was like walking into a workshop: industrial metal shelves that ran along the walls, hard drives, cables, cardboard boxes, power supplies, projectors, boxes, broken motherboards, tangles of cords, empty PC chassis, circuit boards, binders, well-worn charts and plans … And in the middle of this chaotic computer warehouse was a bench with five flickering monitors, and the farther in they came, the louder the whirr of the fans was.

E
va was amazed at the relief she felt as she approached Titelman, who was sitting crouched down on a low office chair in front of one of the computer keyboards.

A pair of plastic cup-shaped headphones arched over his head, and he didn’t seem to have noticed that she was standing behind him. His eyes were still fixed on the closest monitor, which displayed the text version of the radio news:

The dark-haired woman gave Don a rough shove in the back, and he turned around, irritated. But then he caught sight of Eva, and a weak smile spread over the lined face.

“Run over by the train?” he said.

She looked down at her wrinkled clothes.

“Yes, I guess that’s the least you could say.”

Then she leaned toward the monitor and read the text.

“This forty-seven-year-old woman, that’s supposed to be me?”

“Aiding escape and battery on an officer—yes, I think they mean you,” Don said. “But you’re the one who knows about the legal stuff.” He took off his headphones and gave them to Eva so she could listen to the feature on the radio.

As it started, she began to grope in her handbag for her cell phone. She found it, and she steadied herself with her free hand against the surface of the table to ease the weight on her aching leg. After she had finished listening, she played the feature one more time, and her fingers drummed more and more quickly beside the keyboard. At last Eva put down the headphones and took a deep breath.

“The man from the Security Service who’s helping Eberlein must have been forced to make up a story.”

She started to dial a number on her cell phone.