Strindberg's Star (47 page)

Before Lytton could answer, Eva whispered:

“My brother never forgave Father for murdering the Swedes. The fact that Father shot Frænkel in the back and let Strindberg die is the only reason we’re sitting here today.”

“Olaf never forgave anyone for anything,” Lytton hissed. “Above all, he never forgave himself for accidentally shooting at Engineer Andrée. For a long time, we thought he would regain his reason and come to his senses. That he would help us to make use of everything we had found down there. But the boy didn’t want to have anything to do with the opening; he seemed to believe that it was a limbo before hell itself. As soon as we got back to Svalbard, he left and severed all contact.”

“Niflheim,” Don whispered.

Lytton grinned.

“We never let him disappear completely. Olaf was still my son, after all. He was allowed to live his life, discreetly monitored, so he didn’t start to spread rumors about the foundation’s and our secret. After a while he got back on his feet, and he became a teacher of Old Norse at the Sorbonne in Paris. Because he seemed completely uninterested in our business, we gradually reduced our monitoring. So we never heard anything about any Camille Malraux, or that Olaf had become so upset when he learned who manufactured the gas that was released over the trenches in Ypres.”

The old man stuck out the grayish black tip of his tongue and moistened his lips. Then he continued, fumblingly.

“It was at the end of the war … he showed up in the middle of January 1917 at our base at Spitsbergen.”

“Olaf?”

Lytton nodded.

“He wanted to join the business again, he said. And you see, Señor Titelman, that was just what I had been waiting for all those years. After our successes in the war, everything looked so bright. The business had just kept growing, and we dared to do more and more. Our researchers had found hints about the mystery of aging down there in the depths: the double helix of nucleic acids that are the basis of modern science’s primitive theories of DNA. But instead of helping us advance science, Olaf stole Strindberg’s star and ankh. The boy must have planned it carefully, because in his flat in Paris he had left enough clues to drive us all mad.”

L
ytton got up from his easy chair and walked over to the writing desk, which was reflected in snow-covered windows. There he paged through the piles of paper until he found what he was looking for. Leaning forward, he read:

The memory of the front page of an evening paper that was nearly black. Erik Hall’s pixelated photograph of straggling lines of chalk on a wall far down in a mine shaft.

“Niflheim,” Don said again.

The old man turned to him.

“Yes, isn’t it strange? You look through all the literature in the world, all the myths of the world, but forget your own. Niflheim, the realm of Hel, the portal to the Nordic hell of cold. The thing was …”

Lytton looked out at the long row of windows. The snowstorm raged, the winds of the Arctic sea tore and howled.

“The thing was that Olaf left us one last challenge. He knew that we would search through his flat in Paris. There, among the piles of documents and maps, was a sort of will, a final mystery addressed to his own father. There he wrote that he had given the ankh and the star two different graves so that they would always be separated. And if I wanted to look for these tools of the devil, then I could search for them at one of the many gates of hell, where they would lie until the end of time.”

“The many gates of hell,” Don mumbled. “Did he give any directions?”

“Diabolically enough, Señor Titelman, you could say that he actually did. In his flat there were notes about Etruscan necropolises, the Mato cave in Brazil, Rama in India, the entrance under Mount Epomeo on the island of Ischia outside Naples, a well in Varanasi, the Great Pyramid of Giza, Cueva de los Tayos in Ecuador, the passages under Mount Shasta in California … Yes, he gave us endless alternatives where we could hunt for the opening of a tunnel down to hell. But not a single word about Niflheim, Falun, or a French second lieutenant by the name of Camille Malraux. And we searched, Señor Titelman. God knows we have dug, detonated, and drilled without ever having found the right gate.”

“The star in the mouth of his beloved in a grave at Saint Charles de Potyze,” Don said. “The cross in his own hand at the gates of hell in a mine shaft outside of Falun.”

“He must have relied on sources that placed the entrance to Niflheim right there. He was precise, Olaf was.”

Don closed his eyes. He scanned through the headlines in the newspapers, the prints on the awl that came from the dead man’s own fingers. One question left: “So why did Olaf take his own life?”

Lytton just shook his head, but Eva said quietly, “I think he was looking for a place to be alone with his torment over his beloved. Someplace far from the sun, where outlawed murderers like himself wade in the rivers of the dead without any hope.”

“Yes, who knows what happened down there,” Lytton said curtly. Don sank back against the sofa cushions.

“So when you heard about the discovery in the Swedish mine, you sent your daughter Eva there?”

“Yes, she speaks perfect Swedish and knows the country because she lived with a Swedish attorney in the middle of the century.”

“My husband had to die childless,” Eva said quietly.

“But by the time she got there, Erik Hall had already been murdered, and the ankh was gone, so she …”

“I heard on the radio that a perpetrator had been apprehended, and I assumed that person came from the foundation,” Eva said. “In order to investigate what had happened more closely, I presented myself as an attorney. After that, I just had to remember the correct legal phrases.”

She tried to smile but didn’t get a reaction from Don. Instead he asked Lytton, “That was your idea, Murmansk and the icebreaker?”

“The easiest way to get to the Arctic without attracting attention,” Lytton said. “I would have been happy to pay for your cruise ticket, but from what Eva’s told me, your sister got to take care of that expense. And now …”

Lytton left the window and walked back to the glass table, where he had thrown off his fur coat earlier. After he’d wrapped it over his shoulders again, he turned to Don with one last smile.

“You’ve had twenty minutes, Señor Titelman. And now, if you’ll excuse me, we must end this.”

Lytton picked the ankh and the star up off the table and was just about to let them slide into his pocket when Don grabbed his arm. The old man laughed.

“I don’t think that hold will be enough …”

“You forgot a war,” said Don. “If you were all so capable of making use of the discovery of the underworld—what happened once you had lost the ankh and the star?”

Lytton made an attempt to wrench himself loose.

“It was only a matter of survival, Señor Titelman. Only that.”

“You took over the collaboration with the Nazis once the foundation had left them, didn’t you? In Wewelsburg, Eberlein said that their business transactions with Hitler stopped before the war.”

“Like I said, Señor Titelman. It was only a matter of survival.”

“Your Fritz Haber gave the Nazis Zyklon B. What else did you manage to make for them? The V-2 rockets? The jet motor?”

Lytton wrenched himself loose with a hiss.

“They didn’t want to listen to us! That was the problem. Their never-ending race hatred and the Jewish question. They should have realized that we had come much further than the foundation when it came to controlling the power of the atom.”

Don looked at him skeptically.

“The Nazis never had any atomic weapons. Maybe a test program, but nothing advanced.”

“No, that’s what I’m saying,” Lytton snorted. “They were completely obsessed. They didn’t believe the theories, because there were so many Jewish researchers who were working on nuclear physics. The Nazis wanted to create their own ‘German physics’ that would be completely Aryan. It didn’t matter what we said; our top man, Heisenberg, was harassed by the SS and couldn’t get any funding for his work. When we finally got them to build a nuclear reactor and start up small-scale production of enriched uranium and heavy water, it was far too late. The war had already been lost.”

“So that was why you established Lytton Enterprises in Argentina? To avoid being extradited after the war?”

“Señor Titelman … we established ourselves in Argentina when we broke away from the foundation in 1917. It was a way to go underground. Lytton Enterprises was created as a front, a livestock company, and neither the foundation nor the Allies knew where the Nazis had received their help. Even if they perhaps suspected. But now …”

Lytton placed the ankh and the star in the pocket of his fur coat.

“Now a completely different era awaits us. This time we aren’t just going down into the underworld to try to decipher vague whispers. We are going to open the gate to another world.”

Don looked up at the old man’s deep eye sockets with mistrust. Then Lytton turned his face away from him and disappeared toward the doors of the captain’s suite.

T
here was a rattling noise as the lock turned twice from the outside.

J
ust over seven hundred nautical miles north of the North Cape, the German Navy’s submarine had finally caught up with the icebreaker. It had switched from diesel motors over to vibrationless atomic-hydrogen power and then continued to glide forth, sixty-five feet under the hull of
Yamal,
like a silent shadow.

D
own in the submarine, Elena could hear the jets above them cutting through the sheet of Arctic ice and the ship breaking its way forward with heavy propeller blades.

Although they weren’t giving out any radar signal, the crew had advised the foundation’s men not to take any risks at all. It was impossible to know with any certainty what sort of measuring instruments a Russian atomic icebreaker might have on board.

The filtered air and the excess pressure had given Elena a constant headache. She lay in one of the narrow hammocks that stretched like coffins along the concave wall of the mess.

In the other compartments lay the commandos that the German security service had helped Vater pick out. The primary requirement
had been combat experience in Arctic conditions. Beyond that they had judged the men’s ability to remain silent about what they might see.

Elena could feel the cabin tilting as the X-rudder balanced the direction of their journey. Then she turned her head and looked down at Vater and Eberlein, who were whispering to each other over the map table in the middle of the cabin.

They had flown up to the northernmost tip of Scandinavia in a jet plane in order to meet the submarine at the naval base outside of Tromsø. They’d had to hurry, because the icebreaker was fast approaching the area that the spheres indicated. But now, twenty-four hours later, Vater seemed to have begun to doubt that Titelman and Eva Strand were really on board.

From what he was hissing at Eberlein, Elena understood that they were about to pass the eighty-fourth parallel and the icebreaker still hadn’t changed course. And there was nothing to suggest that it was slowing down. Above them,
Yamal
kept on breaking the ice at the same sluggish pace.

Silently, she listened to the increasingly heated discussion. But Elena didn’t say anything, because she no longer wished to offer Vater clues and answers.

T
he hand that had so magically healed her after the explosion had also stirred up other things inside her. Looking at Vater still evoked revulsion, but her fear was no longer as intense. It was as though the bonds that forced her were coming loose, as though that hand had brought to life everything that had been slumbering inside her for so long. Her senses were becoming sharp again, and soon they would be as sensitive as a six-year-old child’s.

Vater seemed to suspect something, because she wasn’t allowed to move freely on the submarine, even though it was only 184 feet long and filled with men in uniform. Maybe he thought she would attempt to sink it as a belated act of revenge.

But he didn’t need to worry about that. On the inside, Elena was roaming in entirely different places.

Her mother’s gentle voice pulled her along all the time, guiding her through the bright rooms that had once been her home. There she listened, like a child, to her sisters’ laughter and voices. There were no troubles there; she was completely safe. Elena knew for certain that the ankh was up on the icebreaker. Because now, when she closed her eyes, she could see its silhouette so clearly before her. It floated about two hundred feet above them, at the top of a ladder, and the person who was carrying the ankh and the star was a very old man. For the past few hours, she had followed the experiments with the flame of the Bunsen burner, and Elena already knew the final position of the ray.

When she closed her eyes like this and listened, her mother’s voice was so close. All the whispers she had heard from the ankh earlier had now run together into one. It had been speaking to her ever since they had begun to approach the icebreaker. And Elena wanted so badly to let herself be swept away, to disappear off into space and time. In her aching head, the tone of the voice was starting to change. It sounded increasingly urgent, as though it were searching for some sort of reaction. Time and again she heard its now so familiar words:

“
Devi portarcela,
Elena, bring it to us.
Questo deve finire,
this has to end.”

But Elena didn’t know what she was expected to answer.

“
Devi portarcela,
Elena,” the voice interrupted.

Her mother’s eyes were sad.

“
Deve finire,
this must end.”