Strindberg's Star (33 page)

I
n the light from the flashlight, the Frenchman’s face seemed strangely well preserved. Parts of his parchment-thin cheeks remained, and from his cheekbones ran yellowed sinews that still kept his jaw in place.

“Doesn’t he have any injuries?” Eva whispered.

“Probably died from the gas,” Don whispered.

He gestured to her to keep shining the light over the face, and with his free left hand he cautiously pried open Camille Malraux’s mouth.

And there, in a mouth where all the flesh had long ago rotted away, lay something white that gleamed in the beam of light.

Don stuck in his fingers and worked out the object. It seemed to be made of metal, and it scraped against the dead man’s teeth. Then he held it up to Eva.

It was the color of ivory under the yellowed film of grime: the five-pointed star from Eberlein’s photographs, what the German had called
seba.
The other part of Nils Strindberg’s navigational instrument.

“Give it to me,” Eva whispered.

B
ut Don kept holding the star in his hand, and he asked her to aim the flashlight at Malraux’s open sarcophagus again. There was something
else in there … fumbled along the corpse’s rib cage and felt himself reach something that was still held by bony fingers.

He shook it from the dead man’s grip and pulled his hand out to see what he was holding. A folded piece of paper. Don held it up so Eva could see it too.

“Come here now!” she said, louder. “You might drop it all at any time.”

Don looked down at the white star and the paper in his left hand. He felt the weight of the skull in his right hand. He might be able to reach.

“Here!” he hissed to Eva.

Don realized far too late that he had moved too far toward the stairs, and now he could feel the slippery top of the skull start to slide from his grip.

Without support, Malraux’s neck slowly bent backward until the back of his head hit the concrete wall under the opening of the burial compartment with a hollow sound. The Frenchman was looking over at Eva with an upside-down face and empty eye sockets. But she was so occupied with the piece of paper that she didn’t notice.

“It’s some sort of letter,” she said. “It’s …”

Her sentence was interrupted by something that sounded like a chain snapping apart. Don looked over at the opening of the niche and saw that the vertebrae could no longer support the weight of the skull. They snapped one after another, like a string of beads, and when he tried to move, his legs no longer obeyed him.

For an instant the skull remained hanging from one last yellowish sinew, but then Camille Malraux’s detached head fell down into the brown sludge with a dismal plop.

The air bubbles from inside the skull caused the surface of the water to roil for a few short seconds.

T
he sound of the lunch rush at Langemark’s outdoor seating area trickled in through the gap in the window up on the fourth floor. Inside the hotel room, it stank of the grave, and Don’s suit pants and socks lay in a muddy pile on the floor. His boots, which he had made a desperate attempt to rinse off, were in the bathroom, drying in the bathtub.

Last night’s rainstorm was long since over, and soft sunlight came in through the thin linen curtains. But Eva and Don hadn’t awakened yet. They lay motionless, side by side, under a terrycloth blanket.

Then the blanket began to move as Eva twisted to the side and tried to sit up with stiff joints. When the beam of light from the window shone on her face, she blinked and then shook her head to try to remember where she was.

She remained sitting on the edge of the bed for a while to gather her strength and tried to breathe quietly so that Titelman wouldn’t wake up. Finally Eva managed to get her aged body to stand, and she walked with bare feet toward the bathroom.

It all came back to her in there: the feeling of the ivory-colored star she got to hold in her hand down in the crypt, along with the small
piece of paper that Don had managed to work out of the Frenchman’s grip.

Titelman had been seriously hypothermic after the long time he’d been in the water, and he’d had fits of shivering during the taxi ride back from Saint Charles de Potyze. She had pulled him close to her and held him like a child to try to transfer some human warmth. It felt as though it was the least she could do after everything he’d had to endure.

When Eva had put on her clothes, she walked up to the chair on which Don had hung his jacket. She took the paper from the inner pocket of the jacket, unfolded it carefully, and read the words once more:

Your Olaf

Her hand was trembling slightly as she slipped the piece of paper back into Titelman’s jacket pocket.

She pulled on her Italian boots, swept her trench coat over her shoulders, and cast one last glance back toward the thin figure in the double bed. He still hadn’t wakened from his dreams.

Out in the cramped entryway, she pushed down the handle and closed the door of the hotel room behind her as silently as she possibly could. The brass railing on the stairs was poorly attached, and she balanced with one hand against the wall down the steep steps toward the lobby of the hotel.

The red flags of the museum were waving outside Cloth Hall.
But Eva wanted to get away from the open area and turned onto Boomgaardstraat. As she walked between the storefronts and the cars, her eyes searched the side area for a quiet corner. On a small street she caught sight of a protruding sign that said
CHERRY-BLOSSOM TEAROOM
in ornate letters.

The window of the café was covered by white lace curtains. A bell over the door tinkled, and a young woman behind the curved counter turned around to face her. Eva ordered a cup of hot chocolate with cream and a waffle. Then she sat down at a table in the back to avoid all eyes.

W
hen she took her cell phone out of her handbag, she was surprisingly gripped by a vague feeling of shame. She dialed the international prefix anyway, and the long number that she had memorized so thoroughly.

Prolonged, echoing rings.

Just when she was about to give up, someone answered. Someone who had the right to know what had just happened.

V
ater had been spinning his spiderweb of contacts for many years. But nothing seemed to have worked this time, even when he’d pulled on all its threads.

Besides the sloppiness of the police in that little border state up in the north, he was most irritated by the apathy and lack of cooperation from the German security service. But then, there had always been a whiff of incompetence behind all of those abbreviations, whether they called themselves BfV, Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, LfV, BND, or why not the SS or the Gestapo.

The only truly professional organization he had come across, after the Imperial Police of the German Empire, was the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the East German security service, the Stasi. Unfortunately, that had been dismantled long ago, and it had been a big job to remove traces of the foundation from their archives.

H
ow the federal intelligence agency, Bundesnachrichtendienst, had managed to miss the short telephone call was a mystery. Thanks to a complicated legislative process, they now had the same ability to perform
radio intelligence as the French did, but they seemed to be completely incapable of doing it.

In a global world, it wouldn’t matter where the towers were, they had told him, but still he had to haggle all morning with the bureaucrats at Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure to get them to send over information from Paris. As usual, he had been met with arrogance and superiority, despite all the help the French military industry had received from the foundation throughout the years.

N
ow the information was finally lying here in front of him, with the coordinates noted in black marker on a satellite image. Rust-colored brick roofs, a cathedral like a supine gray cross, near an open area called Grote Markt. The tower that the cellular signal had passed through was noted with a line consisting of apparently random letters:

Vooruitgangstraat

Where her telephone had gone after that would have to be investigated at the scene. But at least at that point the foundation’s agents would be free to act on their own, without any heavy-footed government officers at their side.

E
va lay alone in the dark of the hotel room on the double bed. The bells of Cloth Hall had just struck midnight, and because it was Sunday, Grote Markt had long been closed down and quiet.

She had sat there at the little café, warming herself with Belgian hot chocolate, for several hours. Lost in memories of the time that had been, and all the hopes she had had for her life that had never come true.

When she had succeeded in shaking off her melancholy and had returned to the hotel room, it had been empty, and Titelman had disappeared. His jacket with the letter and the star had also been missing, and he hadn’t left a message about where he’d gone. Eva had asked at the reception desk, but they had only shrugged and hadn’t been able to give her an answer.

For the first few hours, she wasn’t particularly worried. Just waited and assumed that Titelman had wanted to get new clothes to replace the ones that had been soaked with the smell of Saint Charles de Potyze.

But as time dragged on, she began to wonder anxiously, and then night had fallen without any news. By that time it was too late—she
didn’t like the idea of going out into the darkness to start looking for him. Instead she decided to get some hours of sleep and wait for the morning light.

E
va closed her eyes and tried to rid herself of the feeling of intense uneasiness. It had sneaked into her in the dreary war museum in Cloth Hall and hadn’t really gone away since.

She wanted to stop seeing the flickering black-and-white images from the newsreels inside her head. All those bodies that were torn to shreds time and again. The two maimed and bleeding wax models that lay unconscious in the green cloud of gas in the glass case.

A few steps away, there had been a cold account of the surprisingly quick development of weapons during World War I. One example was grenades with burning white phosphorus, and she recalled the ability of that substance to dig its way through skin and bone in garish color.

S
he looked up at the ceiling and tried to bring her thoughts back to Titelman. She tried to envision him, bending under the shoulder strap, walking through the alleys of Ypres. Had he been allowed into the small, cute boutiques when he smelled so terribly of graves?

Eva felt something like a smile, and she turned over to lie on her side.

It was impossible for her to fall asleep on her back. There was a painful spot, an area between her fourth and fifth vertebrae, that would never, ever be able to be whole again.

That was where the large needle had been thrust in when the doctors injected the violet liquid into her spinal canal. The scar was still there, even though she had gotten the first injections when she was only fifteen years old.

They had told her that what happened had been only for her own good. Eva felt her hand make a fist over her midriff, where everything had been left lifeless and empty.

B
ut then, finally, a forgiving peace had descended over her. She heard drips coming from the bathroom, but she didn’t have the energy to get up. She drifted drowsily into the darkness, and the pitter-patter of the drops of water disappeared more and more until they blended with something that was knocking faintly.

For a brief moment Eva awoke, trying to hear what it could be. She decided she must have misheard, mumbled something to herself, and adjusted the pillow under her head.

T
hen she heard it again, a heavy knock this time, and it was coming from the door of the hotel room.

“Yes?” Eva had time to say before her mind sharpened enough for her to realize that it would have been better to remain silent.

T
here was another knock.

E
va sat up as carefully as she could and avoided turning on the lamp by the bed. She thought about where she had placed her boots and her trench coat and caught sight of them over on a chair. She placed her bare feet on the floor.

Without shoes she could sneak silently over the plastic mat, over to the entryway of the hotel room. On her way, Eva had time to consider how long the door would hold if the person who was knocking really wanted to get in. She tried in vain to remember whether the hotel door had felt heavy or light when she had closed it behind herself this morning. The only thing she remembered clearly was that the lock had seemed sturdy, at least.

A
beam of light fell into the dark entryway through the peephole in the door. Eva placed her right eye against the round opening and looked out.

Through the distortion of the glass she saw a pair of smoky green
eyes looking back. A young woman was standing there, and she seemed to know that Eva had dared to approach.

“Miss Strand?” the woman said in a bright and remarkably friendly voice.

Eva was about to open the door, but then she saw the other shadows out in the corridor: a heavy man in a military coat and another with a pointed, shaved head.

But it seemed to be the woman who was in charge. She was dressed in a motorcycle outfit that was so tight it looked as though it had been painted onto her thin body. She had a shiny integral helmet hanging under one arm and raised her other arm to knock once more, very firmly.

“Miss Strand? Please, open up.”

What kind of accent was that? German? No, not German … French? Italian? Eva didn’t have time to think any further than that before the small hand out there had been tightened into a fist, and the woman banged the door with tremendous strength.