Strindberg's Star (25 page)

Once his sister had unlocked the doors, Don helped Eva into the rotted-out backseat. Hex had forced her way behind the wheel and turned the keys in the ignition, and after a few hissing attempts, the motor coughed to life. Only one of the windshield wipers worked, and to the sound of its stubborn squeaking they rolled off along the forest road in the darkness.

They came up onto the highway next to a gas station, and through the drops that ran down the side window they could see the Råsta garage, where the red Stockholm city buses stood in a line, waiting for the morning service to start. The lanes spread out empty before them, which Eva thought was lucky, since the brakes hardly worked as they turned off onto the little road toward Solna and the Råsunda Stadium.

They passed a bridge across double railroad tracks, and then she saw a cream-colored building through Don’s window. High up on its facade was an illuminated sign of corrugated metal with the words
SOLNA TENNIS CENTER
.

The car slowly rolled into the tennis center’s parking lot. The hand brake was pulled, and Eva removed the flimsy strap that had once been a working seatbelt.

H
er high heels were on the asphalt, and her arm was once again across Don’s shoulders. Then Eva looked over toward the trunk, where Hex was lifting out two large plastic cans.

They limped behind Don’s sister toward a café, where there was an outdoor faucet for watering. Hex stopped at it, took out a small tool,
and began to fill the two cans. When she was finished, she heaved one over to Don and turned off the flashlight, and then they prowled on along the wall of the sports center. They stumbled up over the top of a hill full of trees that had grown wild, and they slid down the other side until they were stopped by a tall fence. Hex searched along one of the fence posts, and after a while she found a wire hook. She lifted the wire and threw it aside, and a gap opened in the mesh.

“They use dogs, so move as quickly as you can,” Don’s sister whispered before she slid through the narrow opening with her plastic can.

Don helped Eva to follow her, and while she tried to put weight on her painful leg, she looked out over a large field of gravel that was crisscrossed by railroad tracks in an extensive, irregular pattern.

About a hundred yards farther on, they could see the long chains of railroad cars, and a lone locomotive moved slowly through the veils of rain. A sharp yellow light shone over the freight yard, and the far-off roar of a semi was audible from up on the highway.

D
on put down the heavy can to rest. But then Hex whispered that there wasn’t any time, and after she had looked to the right and left, she disappeared, crouching, across the first track. With her arm twined fast around Don’s shoulders and her eyes directed downward so as not to stumble, Eva limped as fast as she could across the rows of concrete ties and puddles of water in the gravel. When she managed to look up now and then, she could see Hex swinging the can at her side to gain extra speed. The swaying shadow of Don’s sister moved expertly across the series of tracks.

The first row of railroad cars had open platforms, and metal pipes were piled on them in shining pyramids. Hex set a course for the end of the row, where she stopped in the shadow of the protruding cylinders. When they reached his sister, Don tried again to put down his can, but Hex nudged him and pointed. In the yellow light, two tracks
away, stood a lone freight car. Its sides were painted bright green, and the black name stretched across the green:

GREEN CARGO

Lines marking the sides of a door cut through the last two letters in the company name.

T
hey looked small as they approached the heavy car, whose metal side stretched out a hundred feet on either side, with a roof that was twelve feet high.

Hex went first, a thin figure in a raincoat with the hood pulled over her head. Eva followed her in her gray-speckled two-piece suit, with one foot dragging in the gravel. She still had her arm across Don’s shoulder, and she could hear him employ a long string of expressions in Yiddish to curse the weight of his can.

When they stopped, Eva released her grip on Don and looked up at the words above the freight car’s massive axle:

Hex took a thick key from her jacket pocket. She stuck it into the lock of the sliding door, and there were two creaks as she turned it. Then she took hold of the lower edge with both hands and pulled so that the door rolled to the side.

“How will we fit?” Eva heard herself say.

A compact wall of dark brown Masonite crates towered in the opening. They had been stacked from floor to ceiling, and they appeared to fill the whole car. The metal fittings on the sides of the crates shone in the light from the freight yard, and it looked as though it would take a forklift to move even the top one.

Eva’s eyes looked to Don for an answer, but he was already on his way up to Hex to help her onto the tiny strip of empty floor in front of the piles.

It sounded as though his sister were undoing some catches, and a moment later she had managed to work the middle walls of crates aside. Behind this secret wall was a pitch-black corridor that was only about eight inches wide.

Hex turned around and crouched down. “Come on now, hurry up!”

Eva hesitantly took Don’s sister’s outstretched hand, and with help from Don she managed to climb up onto the edge of the car. Hex showed her how to move sideways so she would have room to squeeze into the corridor between the crates.

Her chest hit the walls of the passage as she tentatively began to move into the opening. For a short time, there was still light from out in the freight yard, but then she heard a rattling noise as the sliding door behind them rolled shut.

Without being able to see, Eva let her fingers slide along the crates as she carefully kept going forward. When she ran into the far wall of the car, the space was too small for her even to be able to turn around.

“Up to the left,” Hex whispered.

The words must have been directed at Don, because now Eva could feel him stretching up to the ceiling above her, and then she heard a metallic click. There was a scraping sound from an edge dragging across the floor of the car as the left side of the Masonite wall was moved away tug by tug. Then there was a familiar sliding sound, like an old-fashioned train door being pulled aside.

Don’s fingers around her wrist; he pulled her to the left, in through a doorway. Eva’s heels sank down into something soft, and then Hex’s voice: “Where the hell is it? There!”

A pleasant incandescent light was switched on, and Eva thought that she must have fallen into a time warp, because it was like coming home somehow.

A thirty- or forty-foot-long train lounge stretched out before them, with walls of close-set panels of glazed teak.

At this end of the deep red wall-to-wall carpet, next to a round table with mother-of-pearl inlays, were two chocolate-brown high-backed club chairs. Farther away there was a dining-room suite in ornamental cedar, with six comfortable chairs. Framed copperplate engravings of Indian palaces and patrician villas hung on the long wall on the left side, and along the wall on the right ran a sleek hardwood bookcase. It was crammed with tattered paperback thrillers.

Eva took a few steps forward and loosened a book from the bookcase.

“Agatha Christie,” she said to herself.

“Yes, but it was a hell of a job.”

Hex’s voice made her turn around. Don’s sister was still standing in the doorway.

“
Murder on the Orient Express
,” Hex said. “Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, Lauren Bacall …”

Hex knocked on the frosted glass of the compartment door, above the brass bolt fitting. Then she slowly walked along the left-side wall of the lounge, and one after another she lit the wall lamps that were mounted alongside the copperplate engravings.

“And Albert Finney, of course, as Poirot. A hell of a job to re-create.”

“I can see that,” said Eva.

She pushed the Christie thriller back into the bookcase and tried to collect herself.

“Those were very special years—the thirties,” she said then, and smiled.

A
t the very end of the wagon, along its short wall, stood a large mahogany cabinet, and now Hex opened its doors. Inside the cabinet was something that looked like a kitchenette: a small counter with two hot plates, shelves of spices, china, saucepans, and at the very bottom, two brushed-steel refrigerators.

Don had followed his sister, dragging the two cans along the carpet, and now he heaved them into the refrigerator on the left. When he opened the one on the right, Eva could see a few bottles of wine and several rows of jars and canned goods.

“It’s been sitting here for a few months, but there’s no time for you to get more,” said Hex. “And use the water sparingly.”

Then she walked back through the train lounge and opened the compartment door out onto the narrow Masonite hallway. From out in the darkness, they could hear snapping sounds, and yet another secret wall opened, and a light came on on the other side of the car.

Eva looked at Don, but he just nodded at her to follow.

When she reached the right side of the car and had pulled another frosted train door aside, she entered a cozy compartment.

Two sleeping-car bunks had been folded out from the wall. Alongside the lower one was a nightstand with a laptop on it. Both of the beds had reading lamps of orange porcelain, and as in the lounge, the floor was covered by a wall-to-wall carpet of the deepest red.

Hex had sat down on the edge of the bed with a thin leather briefcase on her lap. She opened the zipper, took an envelope from inside her jacket, and placed it in the briefcase.

“I think you should consider your credit cards to be temporarily deactivated,” she said, zipping the zipper. “You can take the cash I had at home with you, and then we’ll figure out a solution over the Internet.”

Hex nodded toward the laptop. Then she turned around and placed the briefcase in a net hanger that was mounted above the bed.

“But it’s not a gift, Danele,” she said as she got up.

Then she walked up to Don, who had leaned against the compartment wall, exhausted. Hex took hold of the lapels of his jacket with her small hands and directed her gaze up at his face.

“Very soon, probably within a half hour, a locomotive will come tow you out from the Hagalund freight yard to the freight center in Västberga. There you’ll be coupled into the Rail Administration’s Friday
transport to Helsingborg harbor. It will be a slow journey to Skåne; the tracks are usually full of other traffic. Then I’ve ordered a recoupling at 2:45
P.M
.; that will be a French freight transport with lighter cars, so after Helsingør the speed will increase. You’ll arrive after another ten or eleven hours. All the documents are in the envelope.”

It looked as though Don wanted to say something, but instead he bent his bowed back to his sister and gave her an awkward hug. Hex took a step or two backward and smiled, embarrassed.

“You have my log-in info, so we can stay in contact via the computer, and make damn sure that you don’t get caught in any customs check. You have a declared net weight of twenty-one tons plus two tons of cargo. I listed you as recycled goods on the NHM register.”

“You have earned your name, Sarah,” said Don.

Hex stiffened, but then she shrugged her shoulders.

“Yes, it’s unbelievable that it works, but the control is so careless. Schengen is really fantastic. And you also need this.”

She gave Don the key and stood before him, hesitating. Then she placed her hand against his cheek.

“Ich vintsh dir glik, Danele,”
she said. I wish you good luck.

She turned to Eva. “You, too.”

With a final light caress of Don’s face, his sister walked over to the compartment door. Pulled it open and said, “Make sure to buy new clothes when you arrive. You two really look awful.”

She disappeared out into the dark Masonite corridor. A minute or so later, the secret wall was closed from the outside, and then the dull noise as the sliding door slid shut.

E
va sank down onto the lower bunk of the sleeping cabin, and after a while she kicked her shoes off onto the carpet.

“Sarah?” she asked.

“What?” Don had taken off his aviator glasses and was sitting and leaning against the wall.

“You called her Sarah? Your sister?”

“Yes … no, I was just so tired. She doesn’t like that name; it’s an old story.”

“Her name is Sarah?”

“Yes … or Chana Sarah Titelman, to be exact, but if I’d called her that, she would probably have thrown us off, both of us. She has some issues with her Jewish heritage, you could say.”

“But you don’t?”

Don looked away.

“You can’t choose your family,” Eva said softly.

He didn’t answer, just sat there and rubbed his eyes.

“So why the name Hex?”

“It’s the computer thing,” Don said, “It’s some sort of nickname.”

“Have you traveled in this car before?”

“I’m not much for traveling,” Don answered. “And my sister is not a very inviting person, if you haven’t noticed.”

“I really liked her place in Kymlinge, though,” said Eva. “It’s very intriguing, just like her.”

“Yeah, cozy, isn’t it?” said Don.

Then, after a moment of hesitation, he decided to continue.

“When she first found it, it was just an abandoned cellar filled with rubble. She used it as a primitive hideout, a getaway of sorts, after some highly organized series of computer attacks against bank-to-bank transfers that she happened to get involved in. After that experience, she has become somewhat suspicious of uninvited strangers.”

“As a lawyer I can’t …” Eva started, but Don just waved her off.

“Forget about it, it was a long time ago,” he said. “Anyway, by now she seems to have gotten very fond of the place, and I guess she has settled down underground for good. She has always been a loner by default. Almost autistic sometimes, with a certain knack for advanced math and cryptology. Nowadays she claims to have gotten some legitimate use of her expertise as well, acting as a consulting agent in especially troublesome cases of online security. I doubt that
anybody she deals with knows about her real identity, though. Ever since she was a child, she has been obsessed with designing her own private retreats, places where she can be totally self-sufficient and alone. This train, I guess, would be the prime example of that.”