Krysalis: Krysalis (33 page)

“Here, use this. Appropriate.”

“This” was a photograph extracted from Eddy’s wallet. Albert flipped it over to see a color print of Anna’s upper half. She was holding a baby, smiling away from the camera at the child. The snapshot had faded a kind of rusty color and there was a crack across its top left-hand corner.

Albert scribbled a number and handed the photo back to Eddy. “The only other thing I need to know is how I get out of here without your sidekicks taking their revenge on the way.”

“I’ll call ‘em in.”

Eddy picked up the phone and spoke soft words of Arabic. The door opened to admit the bodyguards. Albert put his hand on the Browning in his pocket, but the newcomers concentrated on their master, two dogs awaiting a command or a biscuit, there was no way of telling which.

As Albert reached the door Eddy said, “If you find her …” He uttered a high-pitched laugh, mocking himself. “… You might … give her my love. Or something like that, yeah.”

CHAPTER
25

Anna awoke late on Friday with a blinding headache, doubtless caused by the foul stuff Gerhard had injected her with the night before. The house seemed unnaturally quiet. As soon as she had dressed she went to the kitchen. Barzel was there, reading the book he’d carried off the ferry the previous day. When he put the book down her eyes followed it, to be ensnared by another object lying on the table.

Anna gazed at it, fascinated. The weapon’s surface bore a faint sheen, as if greasy. It was so obviously
metal,
serious. On television, at the cinema, the guns might as well be bits of wood, for all the sense of realism they conveyed. This was different. This had a function.

She looked away to find Barzel examining her with detachment, rather like an attendant in the better class of ladies’ room, standing ready to hand you a towel, aware of what you’d been doing behind the locked door but wholly impassive.

Anna marched across to the sink, meaning to fill the kettle, and in doing so somehow managed to dislodge Barzel’s book. It fell to the floor with a crash. She ignored it. But then suddenly his cruel face was inches away from hers, he had both her hands in an unyielding grip, and she was paralyzed.

He stared at her for a long time, as if she were some particularly repulsive insect. Then he said, in a soft voice she hadn’t heard him use before, “Pick it up.”

He released her. For a second Anna could not think what to do. His stance, his whole manner were so threatening that they deprived her of the power of movement. Then, almost unconsciously, she knelt and picked up his copy of Böll’s novel, handing it to him without a word.

Barzel peered at the jacket until he was sure it had suffered no lasting damage. Anna was about to pass on her way to the sink when he again restrained her.

“Where you come from,” he grated, “it’s just a book.” He paused, as if seeking the words of a magic spell, the only thing that could possibly influence such an alien being. “I know that.”

Anna swallowed, said nothing.

“Don’t…
ever …
touch any book of mine again.”

She wanted to protest that it had all been an accident, but the expression in his eyes prevented her. He was, she saw, on the brink of violence. She stood quite still, waiting for the storm to break or pass, one or the other.

Barzel let go of her and went to sit down at the table, not taking his smoldering eyes off her face. Fortunately, at that point Gerhard entered the kitchen.

“Good morning.”

He spoke in English, so presumably this salutation
was directed at her. Anna nodded curtly. “I need some air,” she said.

“How about the terrace? I’d like to talk to you.”

“We’ll go for a walk.” She nodded at Barzel. “And I think we’ll leave the dog at home.”

When Gerhard sought Barzel’s assent with a silent expression of interrogation, that really shook Anna. In their world, the one she’d shared with Gerhard up until now, he doled out the permissions. He’d given his consent to her practicing as a banister, sleeping with him, marrying David. She remembered the day her father sold his shops to the chain and invited the buyers home to dinner; that night, for the first time, she had realized he now no longer was the boss, he had a boss.

“Don’t do that,” Gerhard whispered warningly as they left the house. “You can’t play games with him, Anna.”

“I know. He’s proved it.”

“What?”

“Forget it. Take me to the church on the other side of the bay, the one you can see from my room. I want to explore.”

“That’s too far.”

“So what are you going to do?” She stopped dead, causing Gerhard to bump into her, and swung around. “Shoot me?”

He stared at her. “No,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t. But …”

“But Barzel could, yes, I know. Don’t worry, I can guess the rules. We’ll walk to the church. If we meet anyone, I won’t try to speak to them. I won’t try to escape. I give you my word. There! Does that satisfy you?”

It satisfied
her,
she discovered, to make a promise
she had no intention of keeping, because by doing that she entered his world on his terms and thereby secured her only chance of escape. When Gerhard reluctantly nodded, she walked away from him without a backward glance.

The approach to the church lay along one of those paths with myriad branches always splitting off and then coming together again to make islands. The church itself stood in a cypress grove. Two or three goats were tearing at the thin grass that sprouted between its damp walls and the surrounding earth; at first Anna wasn’t sure how to deal with them, fearing from their impatient expressions that they might trample her. But after standing still for a while they went back to their lunch.

Between the church and the side of the hill she found a graveyard sheltered by cypresses and one large, shady birch. Anna could see only five graves. Two of them were old, mere grass-covered mounds, but the others looked recent. The biggest had a marble surround. Stone chips of a lurid and, Anna thought, singularly inappropriate shiny green color overlaid it. The stele, surmounted by an Orthodox cross, bore a faded photograph of the deceased, an old woman whose gray hair was drawn back tightly enough to be painful. Her cheeks were not so much sunken as collapsed, making her appear already dead, but the eyes were wide open and unmistakably quick. They contained a hint of challenge, not unmixed with humor. Her own mother’s mother had looked just like that, sometimes.

She sat down on the marble tomb, suddenly overcome by memories. When Gerhard finally caught up with her she glared at him, resentful of the intrusion. “Do you remember Nan?” she asked him.

“Of course.”

“I was thinking how she helped me. After that awful business at school.”

“Yes.”

“Only she died soon afterward.”

“Oh, Anna …”

“Leave me alone. I want to think.”

But that was hard, when memories of her grandmother would insist on forcing their way through.

Nan had taken some of the sting out of being an Elwell only child. She always resolutely sided with Anna, infuriating Anna’s mother. Then one day Lydia had come to the new school, the one Anna had been sent to after the debacle at the convent. It was lunchtime; Anna found herself dragged from the table, into the headmistress’ study, wondering what fresh misdemeanor was to be laid at her door. There was no crime, however, only punishment. Nan had died in the early hours of the morning, of a heart attack. Anna could go home now.

From her seat in the shade of the cypresses, a cool sea breeze ruffling her hair, she could not quite recapture the flavor of that day, no matter how hard she tried. She had been dreading afternoon school, because it was netball and she hated netball. As she ate her lunch she was thinking she would do anything to get out of it. Anything … but not kill Nan. She felt confused now, as she had done then. She knew in her brain, because Gerhard had shown her, that Nan’s death preceded her desire to be let off netball, knew also that she must have realized it at the time, but something more powerful than any brain would insist on muddying the waters. If it had not been for her desire to escape the day’s sport at any cost, Nan would still be alive.

The man standing with his back to her, hands in pockets, had patiently explained, many times, that this was a normal reaction. But also he had, she felt, ever so gently derided her feelings about the incident, breaking his pattern of treating what she said with serious concern.

She had only one aim now: to escape from this island and its infernal Prospero. Nothing else mattered a damn.

“We’re going to straighten a few things out,” Anna said abruptly, and Gerhard turned toward her.

“Of course,” he said. “That’s what I’m here—”

“No. You’re here to do the opposite. That’s been your plan all along.”

“I don’t—”

“When I first met you, I was suffering from postnatal depression, right? A bad case.”

“Yes.”

“And you said all my problems went back to guilt, and you were going to cleanse me of guilt. I felt guilty because I’d been given away at birth and I saw it as my fault.”

“Yes,” he agreed again. “You felt, quite literally, guilty for having been bom. Born substandard.”

“And guilt, for me, had become a habit. I was screwed up because I saw myself as responsible for having had those girls expelled, and for killing Nan, do you remember that?”

“Certainly. You may recall I told you so, at the time.”

He had told her so many things, at different times. She would have to examine them all again, sorting out those that were valid from the lies that formed part of the web of deception with which he’d ensnared her.
But that could wait. A specific memory was struggling for mastery in her head.

After Nan’s death there had been a funeral at which she was present without being present. She had been kept outside the crematorium chapel, in the car, with her father, unable to say good-bye properly, stuck for life with an overweening impression of death as something sinful from which children ought to be protected. She was nine, old enough, she felt, to mourn. Perhaps being made to stay outside was part of the punishment for having murdered Nan.

She’d never cried for her grandmother’s death. Even now, she could not cry.

The cold marble hurt the undersides of her calves. As she shifted physically, so her perspective changed also, enabling her to see a hitherto concealed link between Nan’s passing and one of Gerhard Kleist’s more poignant insights.

“I want to ask you something,” she said. “To check something, if you like.”

“Yes?”

“Do you remember telling me about the most difficult problem a therapist has to face?”

“Not offhand. Remind me.”

“Death without a corpse.”

“Oh.
That.”

“Someone disappears, for good. Is he dead? Suffering from amnesia? Or has he just abandoned his family, crushed by pressures they couldn’t understand. Yes?”

“Yes. There’s nothing for the therapist to seize on, you see.”

“The survivors always feel
guilty,
don’t they? They think they’re to blame, they drove the missing person away, by not measuring up.”

“What’s prompted all this?” He was genuinely at sea.

It was the not knowing that brought these hapless souls to Gerhard, ignorance compounded by feelings of wholly unjustified guilt. Anna was beginning to perceive something until now kept at bay: just as Nan had gone with no good-byes on either side, so, by giving her up for adoption, her real mother too had “died,” without affording her daughter an opportunity to mourn. And both women had thus caused her to feel guilty, for different but related reasons.

She’d always felt she had failed them in some mysterious way. But how, Anna wondered, could she have failed her mother while still a child too young to know evil, let alone do it …?

There was only one possible answer. She hadn’t failed at all.

The adoption was not her fault.
And—another blinding flash of light—
it might not have been her mother’s fault, either!

She studied this revelation for a long time. “You didn’t even try to erase my guilt over Nan’s death, did you?” she said suddenly. “You
nurtured
it.”

“You really mustn’t let things distress you to the point where—”

“You wrecked me.”

“Wrecked
you?”

Gerhard had come to stand in front of her and was reaching out to grasp her shoulders, but on hearing these words his body became as immobile as if she were the Gorgon reincarnate.

“You knew I felt guilty because I’d been adopted, knew I blamed myself for not being good enough for my real mother. But you took my guilt and stood it on its
head, until it wasn’t
my
guilt anymore, it was my mother’s.”

“And why not? Wouldn’t most people see that as a natural way of regarding it, of trying to come to terms with it?”

“‘Most people’ haven’t got the first idea of what my real mother went through before she decided to give me up, any more than I have. The agony. The fear. Suppose she was poor, rejected by her parents … my God, I don’t even know
why
she had me adopted, and if I don’t, you certainly don’t. You just pretended to.”