Strindberg's Star (29 page)

Under the notice was a stern order that the computers were under no circumstances to be used for anything other than searching the museum’s unique database of war graves.

I
nside the room there was a row of archival cabinets and a few carrels with simple desks and desktop computers. Don soon realized that he was the only visitor. An older woman sat, watching, in a small glass booth, her dyed blue hair tied up in a severe bun.

He could feel the woman following his every movement as he cautiously tiptoed into the dead-silent room. He sat down at the nearest computer, and he could hear her get up with a scraping sound.

The woman came out of her glass booth with a binder pressed tightly to her chest. Above it was a plastic badge identifying her as
1ST OPZICHTER
—1st Supervisor—and she scrutinized him with a displeased expression.

After first trying to get Don to return to the exhibit, the supervisor finally pressed a combination of keys that made the monitor in front of him wake up.

“Name?” asked the supervisor in a shrill voice.

“Titelman,” said Don.

“Army?”

It was a question he hadn’t expected, and he couldn’t think of a good answer.

“Which army did the person you’re looking for belong to?” she asked impatiently. “Belgian, French, English, or German?”

“The … Belgian,” said Don.

She brought up a gray form with the title Casualty Database. Selected Casualties from the Belgian Army and typed in the name Titelman. Clicked on
SEARCH
. No results.

“You’re a Jew, I take it,” said the supervisor.

Don decided not to answer; instead he said, “There are some other relatives I’d like to search for.” The woman waited there, hanging over his shoulder.

“I think I can do it myself, if you’ll just give me some time?”

“Well, okay,” said the supervisor. “We’re closing in twenty minutes.”

“That should be enough,” said Don.

She took a few steps backward and stood there, not letting the screen out of her sight.

“So, thanks,” said Don.

The supervisor tossed her head and walked, with her arms crossed over the binder on her chest, over to her private glass booth.

W
hen he peered up over the wall of his carrel, he could see that she had sat in a position from which she could observe him.

But the supervisor couldn’t see what he was writing, and Don began to tap in the codes to the server in Kymlinge, at Hex’s place. After a while a smiley face appeared, but the corners of its mouth were turned down—the symbol that indicated his sister was temporarily away.

Don wrote a short message about what had happened since they’d traveled away from Stockholm in the freight car. At the end he added a line saying that it would be great if she were to see what she could
dig up about a certain Camille Malraux, born in the late 1800s in a small French city called Charleville-Mézières. Then he cast a glance at his watch and saw that only five minutes had gone by.

O
utside, the rain was still falling, streaming in long rivulets along the leaded panes of glass. There was a faint smell of cleaning agents in the room, and the silence began to be oppressive. When Don sneaked a look over at the supervisor, he saw her raise her eyebrows. Still, he thought that he would try to linger until she physically threw him out, in hopes that Hex would come home and log in.

To pass the time, he browsed the Internet.

With one of the Swedish evening papers’ lead stories was the picture of a colleague whom Don had always despised. Under it, the headline screamed at him in bold:

A FRIEND SPEAKS OUT:
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE NAZI EXPERT

After he had clicked on the article, he could hardly handle skimming through all the distorted quotes.

It had only taken a day or so, but apparently he had now been promoted from a researcher of history to a pill addict and an essentially condemned assailant—morbidly obsessed with Nazi myths and symbols. He hit the mouse to remove the text from the flickering screen of the computer.

Then, with misgivings, Don went to the Web sites of the morning papers. It was almost worse there, and now he realized that the attorney had been correct.

The National Police said that they had cast a wide net, including outside Sweden’s borders, and they claimed to find themselves in an intensive phase of the investigation which made outward silence absolutely necessary.

“Oif tsores,”
Don mumbled. Not good.

T
hen he linked into Hex’s server again, but his sister still didn’t seem to have come back to her home under the subway. Without daring to look toward the glass booth and the supervisor, Don assumed that he could linger for at least a few more minutes. As he sat there, he thought of the words about Baudelaire in the city archive, and to pass the time, he typed the poet’s name and the phrase “l’homme vindicatif” into the Internet search engine.

The very first link proved that the gum-chewing girl had in fact been right. It led to poem 178 on the Web site The Flowers of Evil,
fleursdumal.org
.

Alongside the poem was a short author biography, which Don scanned in the hope of finding some idea that could lead onward. But when that hope had faded, he returned to the poem, which seemed very long.

His French had never been anything to brag about, but as far as he could tell, what he was reading was a description of a necrophile: a man’s longing to have violent sex with the corpse of a woman, rich with details, bordering on pornography.

H
e found the phrases from the postcard in the third and fourth stanza from the end:

After a big of digging on the Net, he managed to find a translation:

Compliant, lifeless flesh that soothes the heat of desire, Don thought. The man in the mine must have been
toit meshuge,
not right in the head.

“Feverish hands and cold teeth,” Don mumbled to himself, moving his fingers to click it all away.

But then, although it was probably all just hopeless
narishkeit,
idiocy, and a dead end, he clicked on
PRINT
after all. A printer a few yards away started spooling and droned to life. The sound caused the supervisor to get to her feet surprisingly quickly inside the glass booth, and before Don had time to react, she had grabbed the long lines of poetry that the printer had spit out.

“Now I think it’s time for you to go,” said the supervisor.

Then she began to read the page on top.

“You are a sick person.”

She stated this as fact, and Don felt that he couldn’t do anything but nod.

With a sigh, he heaved his bag up onto his shoulder and closed the
Web browser. He saw that the supervisor was moving toward the carrel where he sat, but just as he felt her lean down over his shoulder to force him to log out, he was seized by one last thought.

“You have to let me check one more name.”

He thought she was going to try to stop him, but instead the supervisor took a nervous step back. And now that the Web pages had disappeared, the only thing glowing on the screen was Casualty Database. Don placed a check mark next to Casualties from the Belgian Army. Typed the name into the search field and clicked.

No hits.

The supervisor collected herself again.

“Now I must ask you to …”

Don hesitated for a second, but then he checked Casualties from the French Army instead. Tapped in the name again. Had he spelled it correctly? Yes. He clicked on
SEARCH
.

*

E
va was standing in front of a glass case where one could observe wax models in French uniforms lying and writhing under gray-green, billowing smoke.

One of the models was grasping its neck with its fingers as though it couldn’t get air. Next to the mouth of another was a glittering red pool, to show how the war gas caused vomiting that was full of blood. Eva seemed not to hear that he had come, although Don was now standing right behind her. That was strange, because he was breathing loudly and panting after having rushed through the dim halls of the museum.

Finally she must have realized that he was there after all, because Eva began to speak straight ahead, without looking at him:

“When they inhaled the gas, their throat and lungs were eaten away immediately. The few Frenchmen who managed to keep breathing died later when their lungs filled with fluid and blood. It’s a fight against death, like drowning, even though you know the sky around you is full of air.”

“Eva …” Don tried, but he couldn’t wake her from the grotesque scene.

“The poison gas attack at Gravenstafel was against all rules of warfare,” she continued tonelessly. “The French soldiers didn’t know what was approaching them as they lay down in the trenches. The only thing they saw over by the German positions was a cloud of green smoke that slowly blocked out all the light. It grew to a height of a hundred feet and then began to roll forward slowly with the wind. When the cloud swept in over their trenches, the oily smoke sank downward. It was heavier than air and it ran over their faces, and after a few minutes there was hardly anyone who could see. The gas ate into their eyes, and when they tried to claw their way up over the embankments, they were cut down by machine-gun fire.”

“Eva …” Don tried again.

“It was the first time gas was used on the Western front. A few weeks earlier the Germans had tried artillery shells of bromide against the Russians. Later they developed it further, of course, much, much further, with phosgene, lewisite, and sarin.”

Don tugged her arm, but the attorney shook herself loose and pointed down at the small informational placard that stood level with their knees.

“At five o’clock in the afternoon,” she read, “170 tons of gas was let out of 5,700 metal cylinders. Six thousand Frenchmen dead or dying, and finally a breach in the front. But the Germans were so shocked by the results that they never managed to exploit the gas to its fullest potential. They …”

“That’s enough, Eva,” said Don, grasping her shoulder.

In his other hand, he held the printout he had forced the supervisor to give him before he left her in the room of computers.

“You see,” Don continued, “we had it wrong from the start.” And he finally made eye contact with Eva.

“The postcard was written to a man.”

She stood, silent, then shook her head.

“No, that’s not possible. That lipstick, the kiss …”

“Yes,” said Don. “The dead man in the mine wrote those words to a man he once loved. You can read for yourself.”

He held up the copy from the museum’s database of war graves.

When Eva had read it, she said hesitantly, “But it could still be someone else. Just looking at the city archives, there were two women named Camille Malraux. And I don’t think …”

“I’m completely certain, Eva.”

“I don’t think it fits.”

She let her gaze slide back toward the glass case.

“Eva …”

“No matter what, it’s an incredible coincidence,” she said slowly.

“It could probably still be a love letter; maybe they were lovers. Maybe he considered Malraux to be his woman. Maybe they …”

“No, not that,” Eva interrupted him. “Look at what day your Camille Malraux died.”

Don looked at the date on the paper; then he followed her eyes down to the informational placard next to the display case:

THE BATTLE OF GRAVENSTAFEL RIDGE
22ND–23RD APRIL 1915

“So he was gassed to death,” Don mumbled.

Eva nodded. Then she took a deep breath and shook herself, as though to wake up.

“But I still don’t understand how you can be so sure. As I said …”

Don took the postcard out of the inner pocket of his jacket and gave it to her.

“So?” Eva said when she had read the short lines another time.

“Look at that last number,” he said.

“Yes, the postcard was written in 1913. What about it?”

“The number 1913 isn’t a year,” Don said. “It’s the number of Camille Malraux’s grave.”

“A grave?”

“Yes, the number of his grave. It was listed in the museum’s database, right by his name. They also had records about the specific location.”

“But … ?”

“He’s lying in a war cemetery called Saint Charles de Potyze, outside of Ypres.”

J
ust inside the doors of Cloth Hall, Don was trying to protect himself from the gusts of wind, his thin suit jacket pulled tight around his crooked shoulders. It had already become evening, and by now the rainstorm had blocked out all the light over the large square. It felt as though the ice-cold dampness could sweep right through him at any time.

Out on Grote Markt, the pouring rain whipped back and forth. The grates in the street were bubbling, overflowing with water, and at regular intervals yellowish brown cascades full of cigarette butts and trash washed out over the pavement.