Strindberg's Star (40 page)

A
s the hours passed, she heard Eberlein’s voice nonstop on the other side of the emergency room wall. Against her will, Elena had been forced to listen to his vain attempts to bring some sort of order into this chaos.

Half of his phone calls seemed to revolve around what it was that had exploded down in the vault of the crypt. The other half involved trying to stop the news reports, which had already started to skid out of control.

A dozen highly placed businessmen involved in Nazi rituals at Schloß Wewelsburg was already a reasonably good story. A dozen businessmen who got
blown up
was truly noteworthy. All of Germany seemed to have come to its feet, although it was still only dawn. The live reports echoed from the TV in the corridor, with continual updates from Brüderkrankenhaus St. Josef in Westphalia, district of Paderborn.

Eberlein’s attempts to cite old loyalties, the threat of terror, and the responsibility of the press seemed only to add fuel to the fire of the journalists’ enthusiasm. In every report there were speculations of new potential perpetrators, and with each hour, the theories grew wilder and wilder.

But Elena didn’t have the strength to wonder about what had caused the crypt to be torn to pieces. She had been forced to perform Vater’s errand with the knife like a puppet, with no willpower of her own, and she knew the plans for Titelman and the woman if the ceremony had reached its intended conclusion.

The explosion had been a fitting resolution, and the only thing that bothered her was that her body still so stubbornly refused to give up.

T
he victims’ burned skin was being washed with chlorhexidine to get rid of the debris from the explosion, and now their wailing screams were crowding out the noise from the TV once again. Keeping the
wounds clean and moist was of the utmost importance for future plastic surgery.

E
lena heard someone go in to Eberlein, and she soon recognized the nasal voice of the senior physician. It seemed to be yet another report about Vater’s condition: the old man was getting specialized care in the ICU, burns on his face, full of tubes and needles. The shock had caused his heart to stop, until someone had foolishly gotten it to start pumping again. She let the conversation run on without listening, and if, as his daughter, she was expected to visit him, they would have to drag her there.

T
hen Elena’s thoughts were hacked to pieces by all the sharpness that was cutting deeper and deeper into her ear canal. And she felt that this was exactly what she wanted: that the point of the scissors would short-circuit her life.

She raised her hand to the IV pump that controlled the supply of morphine and increased the rate of infusion as much as she could. Then she sank back with her head on the pillow, waiting for the numbing wave that would wash over her and sweep her away forever.

T
hey had already cleaned all the surfaces in the freight car once, but Don still felt anxious. He poured dish soap on the rag and opened the spigot of one of the water cans. Then he began once more to polish the counter in the pantry inside the mahogany cabinet. He tried to stand with pliant knees to negate the rocking of the train car.

They were traveling as the last car in the long freight train, which had left Mechelen in the direction of Berlin at dawn. Eva had said that it was better to keep moving, even if the journey would force them back into Germany, past North Rhine–Westphalia and the foundation’s castle. They had promised to notify Hex before lunchtime what their destination would be after that. This way Don’s sister would at least have a few hours to once again manipulate Green Cargo’s archaic logistics system.

D
on did actually understand that the cans weren’t more dangerous now than when he had taken them off the shelves in the paint store. Still, he picked up the plastic bags marked Boca-Paint, in which the cans sat with their screwed-on safety caps, very cautiously.

“So what are we going to do with all of this?” he asked, turning to Eva.

She was sitting in one of the club chairs in the lounge with a map of the rail lines of northern Europe in her lap. An atlas of the world was open on the round table at her side.

“Throw it all out the window,” she suggested, without even bothering to look up.

Don looked at the glazed teak walls and felt his mouth shape itself into a grimace.

“A bisel komish,”
he muttered. Funny.

“Stop worrying,” said Eva.

S
he had been saying that ever since they managed to get back to Hex’s car without being discovered, even though they should have been easy to spot in the freight terminal at Mechelen, in clothes that had been colored ochre yellow from the dust of the explosion.

For his part, Don had been thankful that the freight car was still there at all. He hadn’t taken Hex seriously enough when she warned him about the risks of the explosives. A small pile of the white crystals had still been scattered on the counter when they returned from Wewelsburg. He had quickly poured water over them and hoped that they would somehow dissolve.

I
t had been his sister’s idea, all of it. She said that they ought to teach the Germans a lesson if they made trouble. On the other hand, if everything went well, his sister continued, they could always inform them that their rediscovered star should be washed off.

She hadn’t even wanted to discuss the purely moral aspects of handing over an object covered in explosives, and as usual, Don had quickly let himself be convinced by her quarrelsome argument.

He had followed the instructions Hex had sent as well as he could. He had found all the necessary ingredients at the paint wholesaler in the industrial area outside of Ieper Vrachtterminal. And the salesman
at Boca-Paint hadn’t had any objections to selling hydrochloric acid, acetone, and hydrogen peroxide all to one customer.

B
ack in the lounge of the freight car, he had skimmed through the many discussion sites that Hex had recommended. Making the explosive hadn’t seemed very chemically advanced; more like a game for bored teenagers who wanted to see at least something in life sparkle. Following Hex’s advice, Don had made ten times the amount of his chosen recipe. The white crystals of explosive looked like coarse grains of salt.

At this point, he had been so stressed that he didn’t care about the warnings that TATP could explode at the slightest vibration. Instead he had pressed Strindberg’s star against the still-wet crystals that lay on the counter, and they had stuck to the metal like a fine layer of dust.

When the star was dry, he had placed it in the cardboard box, and then he vibrated away in the taxi toward Wewelsburg’s city hall square and the outdoor seating at Alter Hof.

T
urned away, next to the tips of Eva’s boots on the floor of the upper room of the north tower, Don hadn’t seen the stairwell flash with the explosion. But the tearing boom from the crypt had taken his breath away.

He had instinctively curled up to shield himself from the shock wave’s cloud of stone splinters and blast debris. Afterward, once his deafness had begun to recede, he had been able to hear the distant ringing of an alarm.

He would have liked to think that it was an instinct from his time as a doctor that caused him to find his way down into the cloud of smoke in the steep stairwell. Yet he hadn’t cared about the twisted bodies that had once been two uniformed men.

He recalled a few shreds of red fabric that must have been torn from the young woman’s evening gown. She had been lying there as
pale as a corpse with blood dripping out of her ear and one hand locked on the railing of the stairs in a death grip. There, if anywhere, he really should have stopped to help.

Instead he had staggered farther into the crypt, where there was a strong odor of burned meat. He had hardly been able to see in the yellow haze of pulverized brick and had begun to fumble forward, hunching down.

When he had reached the stone pool, where a gas pipe had once protruded, the air in his lungs was already nearly gone. But then he had caught sight of the shining objects, which lay there side by side. It was as though they had gently floated down to the floor without being affected by the detonation in the least. And when he had picked up the ankh and star, he could feel that they were still as cold as ice.

With the objects thrust under his jacket, Don had rushed back up the stairs. He caught sight of Eva, lost in the growing chaos of the upper room. In the settling smoke from the blast, her face had been covered with small, bleeding wounds where burning splinters of stone had torn her skin open.

They shoved their way through the stone halls of Wewelsburg, past all the ambulance crews and their stretchers. The inner courtyard of the castle was already filled with people who had been lured by the roar of the explosion. By chance he had caught sight of a young man who was standing next to his Vespa with a few girls and pointing up at the tower. Don had dragged Eva up to the small group, which backed away, frightened, leaving the Vespa.

When he had gotten up onto the seat, he turned the key, and the attorney climbed up behind him. She clung to him, her arms around his waist, and Don twisted the throttle toward himself and hurled them away on screeching tires.

“N
ow it really is clean enough,” said Eva.

The freight car had just begun to slow down, and they could hear distant warning bells ringing.

“Come here instead.”

Don rinsed the rag clean and threw one last critical glance at the interior of the cabinet. Then he closed its double mahogany doors reluctantly.

Once he had sunk down into the other club chair, she pointed at the railway map, which lay on the table.

“I think we’re about there.”

The attorney had placed her finger just east of Hannover, next to a small village called Edemissen. Don felt a bit lighter inside when he saw that they had at least managed to get past Westphalia.

“And in about three hours,” Eva continued, “we’ll be in Berlin. The question is whether you want to stay in Germany, as the situation looks right now. As a wanted terrorist, I mean.”

She gave him a brief gaze. Eva’s face was still bruised from the explosion.

“I mean, isn’t it quite likely that that’s what it’s going to be considered, a terrorist attack? You just blew up a castle tower and a bunch of innocent people. Who knows how many of them are still alive? I think the search efforts after a terrorist attack in Germany will be considerably more intensive than after an isolated murder in an insignificant country up north. I am quite certain that your picture and information are already in Berlin.”

Don suddenly felt a powerful homesickness, and he looked up at Malmö, Lund, and Stockholm. And besides, he was so unimaginably, horribly tired.

“Aren’t the Germans looking for
two
terrorists, in that case?” he tried.

Eva didn’t answer.

Instead she moved the railway map off of the table. Under it, the atlas of the world was still open, and in it he could see the Polish borders of Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.

“I imagine that they won’t look as hard here as they would in the heart of Europe,” she said. “And up here …”

She turned a few pages and found the outline of a coast that Don couldn’t place at all, at first. Then he saw the name of the city, and the geography fell slowly into place.

“Up here,” Eva continued, “I would imagine that they won’t look at all. And also, from here we can find out whether Strindberg’s objects really work, with their spheres and constellations.”

Don looked at the attorney, but it didn’t look as though she meant her suggestion only as a joke.

T
he morphine had pushed away all light, but still the pain just dug deeper and deeper into her ear canal. The pointed scissors cut tirelessly, with a rasping, scraping sound.

Elena no longer knew whether she was awake. The only thing she was completely certain of was that she couldn’t see anything.

She pressed her hands down by her sides to reassure herself that the hospital bed, at least, was still there. But the only thing below her was emptiness, and the peculiar feeling that she was falling.

W
hen she opened her eyes, she was blinded by intense sunshine that beamed at her from all directions. Squinting, she could make out the horizon like a faint streak between the white sky and the snow. The thin line ran in a half circle around her, but whether it was close or far away, she couldn’t see. Everything around her had transformed into an expanse of ice, which seemed to have neither a beginning nor an end. Then Elena noticed that someone was standing nearby, breathing just behind her back. And in her left ear, where she could still hear, there was a hissing sound that spread into a voice.

“Elena …”

She closed her eyes, and there was another breath.

“Elena.
Devi ascoltare.
You must listen, Elena. You are the only one we can reach.”

“Madre?”

“
Questo deve finire.
It must end.”

“I … don’t have the ankh anymore. It has …”

“
Devi portarcela
. You must take it to us.
Questo deve finire
. You are the only one we can reach.”

A
soft hand moved at her ear. The gentle stroke continued along Elena’s cheek. At the same time, all her pain dissipated, and she finally drifted off into dreamless sleep.

B
erlin, Kostrzyn, Gorzów, Krzyż, Poznań, Kutno, Warsaw, Łuków, Terespol. At the Polish border with Belarus, they were towed into a hut and a few men in work overalls crept under the axles of the freight car in the dark.

Through the bunk in the sleeping compartment Don listened to the hammers striking against the undercarriage of the car, and then the vibrations from the pounding caused the china in the lounge compartment to start rattling.

When the tools had finally become silent, Eva pressed him close to her, while at the same time they heard the jacks pressing the car off of its western European wheels.