Strindberg's Star (34 page)

“Miss Strand! You have something in there that belongs to us.”

L
ater, when Eva thought back to the incident, she was surprised that she hadn’t moved away from the peephole when that first, adamant punch came. But there was something about the teenager out in the hallway that made it impossible to tear her eyes from her: tremendous energy that had been boiled down into a much-too-small body.

The next double punch was so violent that the hammering sound must have spread throughout all the floors of the hotel.

Again Eva heard her name being called loudly, but now it was as though the young woman’s voice had placed itself in the very center of her head. The waves of sound vibrated with such power that Eva’s hand, as though of its own accord, began to move down toward the handle of the door.

But just before she reached the handle, the teenager turned around in a kick that was aimed directly at the peephole. Eva just had time
to sense how quickly the motorcycle boot was moving before the brass cylinder was kicked right through the hotel room door.

The blow caused Eva to collapse onto the plastic floor of the entryway with her hand against her eye, and she felt something flowing between her fingers. Then she blinked up at the door and was surprised to realize that she could still see. But the cylinder had sliced a deep gash in her eyebrow, and the blood was flowing down onto her face.

Above Eva’s head, a smoky green eye looked into the hotel room through the drilled hole where a metal cylinder had once been glued in. Then she heard a soft voice:

“Miss Strand? Is everything all right?”

Eva shook her head down on the floor. Then she quickly began to crawl backward toward the bathroom, where she pulled down a hand towel to at least temporarily stop the flow of blood.

W
ithout really being able to see, she made her way to the hotel room telephone, which she knew was on the nightstand. She held the receiver to her ear, but there was no tone, and it wasn’t until that instant that Eva realized how she had been traced. Damn all the cell towers and this continually updated modern technology.

She heard another furious kick outside the door, but the lock seemed for some incomprehensible reason to be withstanding it. The bright voice said something that sounded like an order, and just after that she heard a heavy thud. It was followed by another thud. The hinges were already starting to come loose.

T
o get as far away from the entryway as possible, she made her way over to the window on the other side of the room. Then she pulled the curtain aside and opened the topmost latch out toward Grote Markt.

Eva could see the wood splinters reflected in the leaded windowpane, and she realized that the hotel door would soon topple in.

“We only want what belongs to us, Miss Strand,” the voice whispered, very close.

Eva finally got the lower latch loose, and the window swung open to the inside. She could smell garbage and heard the fans from the outdoor seating down on the square.

She thought that she might be able to scream out into the night, but then Eva cast a glance back at the entryway and lost her voice. A shoulder-size hole had split in the middle of the door, and now the face of a teenager was looking in.

“Miss Strand,” said the woman.

Eva was already on her way up into the window in bare feet.

“I’ll jump!” she called.

But when she saw the cobblestones fifty feet below, she thought that maybe it wasn’t time for that yet.

Instead Eva turned around on the windowsill and started to fumble with her left hand against the brick facade of the hotel. The space between the stones was just large enough for her to get her fingers in the gaps. Her toes could find footing on the protruding tin ledge that continued over to the window of the neighboring room. Eva moved her left foot out and felt her fingers find a grip. The September night breeze swept through her thin blouse.

Balancing with her fingers and toes, Eva cautiously began to clamber sideways with her body pressed as close to the wall as she could get it. A human cross moving high up between the windows on the facade of Hotel Langemark.

When she had managed to turn her face so she was facing forward, with her right cheek scraping against the brick, Eva saw that the tin ledge she was balancing on ran past the next window and over to a drainpipe, which she might be able to climb down.

It was about the same distance there as the drop to the cobblestones of Grote Markt was, but now, hanging by her fingers and toes on the wall, she didn’t seem to have a choice. Her wrists had already
begun to ache, and her calves shook as she took another small step forward. Eva thought that she was far, far too old for this.

From behind her she heard a bang, which was followed by a crash as the hotel room door cracked. Eva didn’t turn around; she just kept taking short, tiny steps. The voice said something again. Something about trying to turn back. But now really wasn’t the time to turn around, because Eva had just managed to climb over to the window post of the next room.

She grabbed its upper corner with her hand and felt that it was large enough for her to be able to get a good grip. She managed to wiggle her left foot over onto the wide window ledge, and then her right, and after that she could finally rest.

S
omething that sounded like breathing made Eva turn her eyes back in the direction she’d come from. She realized that she had to hurry when she saw that the teenager had also climbed out.

But before she continued her escape toward the shining goal of the drainpipe, Eva took a deep breath and happened to glance in through the windowpane. There, just behind the glass, she saw a young man with a pointy, shaved head. As he waved at her, she recoiled, and one foot took a step straight out into the emptiness.

She was far too late in trying to fend off the mistake, and as her body was about to fall, she grabbed an outdoor thermometer that was screwed onto the window frame. But the thermometer was too poorly attached to hold even the weight of a frail woman. Eva swayed, the streetlights glimmering on the stone fifty feet down.

T
hen she felt herself falling.

B
ut she didn’t have time to fall very far before a claw caught her arm. It lifted her gently up toward the window, where she landed again.

As Eva once again balanced on the window ledge, she tried to shake
herself loose and get the claw to let go. Then she discovered that the claw was actually a rather small hand. The woman who was holding her so steadily seemed completely unfazed by the situation. She was hanging calmly along the brick facade in her black motorcycle outfit.

“Where is our star?” the woman asked gently.

Then she took a small hop forward and landed next to Eva as though she had suction-cup feet. Bent down and whispered, “And where, Miss Strand, is your friend Don Titelman?”

W
hen the bartender at the gloomy little pub on Minneplein was no longer merely hinting that it was time to go, Don groped for his aviator glasses and slipped down off the tall, rickety barstool. Then his knees immediately gave way, like rubber, and he had to grab the bar just to be able to stay upright.

That last Belgian beer had been absolutely unnecessary, and he had long ago lost count of how many antianxiety barbiturates he had munched on.

With the chipped metal frames of his glasses hanging crookedly on the bridge of his nose, he got his newly purchased velvet jacket off the stool. And as the bartender turned his back on him to start counting the night’s takings, Don had enough presence of mind to make sure the star was still in the inner pocket of his jacket.

D
uring his hours in the bar, he had made a few awkward attempts to figure out the inscriptions on the metal. The bartender had let Don borrow a plastic pen to sketch the symbols he thought he could make out in the dusky light of the bar. But it seemed that Nils Strindberg
had been right to use a magnifier and a microscope to study the star, because there was only a jumble of lines that mostly looked like abstract art on Don’s scribble-covered paper napkin. He had left the short letter to Camille Malraux in the darkness of his inner pocket. There was no reason to read it again, because he could recall its cryptic contents from memory whenever he wanted to:

Your Olaf

Those Norwegian words about closed gateways had, in his drunken state, caused Don’s thoughts to become self-pitying. If he were just to give up and hand the star over to Eberlein, then surely everything with the Swedish law would work out simply enough. A few weeks in jail, and then they would realize that the man who had been staggering around under the influence of narcotics down by Erik Hall’s dock was completely innocent. Someone who had nothing at all to do with the sudden death of that diver. Being indicted and convicted because of an unlucky coincidence—that was something that simply couldn’t happen in Sweden.

When Don had gotten this far in his speculations, he heard some sort of snuffling sound in his memory, which came from the Mustache at the police station in Falun. The sound had led him to punch out a few more capsules filled with phenobarbital and decide not to make any hasty decisions, at least not this evening. Besides, he had never heard of anything good having come from a person placing his trust in Germans.

A
fter the bartender had finally pushed him out the door, Don began to walk unsteadily from Minneplein back in the direction of Hotel Langemark. Dressed from head to toe in a brownish black velvet suit, he blended in with the night as he wandered along beside the darkened Gothic windows of Cloth Hall.

When Don looked across Grote Markt at the narrow brick facade of the hotel, his first thought was that some sort of renovation must have begun. Because between two of the windows up on the fourth floor hung a construction mark in the shape of a white cross.

Then, as the white cross slowly began to move to the left, Don blinked to get his eyes under control. He thought about his past experience with antianxiety barbiturates, but this particular hallucination was truly new.

A bit closer to the hotel, Don could see that the illusion had now acquired both arms and legs. Fifty or sixty feet up, someone was clambering along the stones of the facade in a blouse and fluttering white pants. Although Don knew very well who it was, he didn’t want to admit that it was Eva who was swaying and about to lose her grip.

His legs began to move him forward instinctively, and he ran toward the hotel’s outdoor seating in the hopeless, shortsighted ambition of shouting to the attorney to come down.

But when he had come close enough that Eva might be able to hear him, he saw a shadow pop up in the open window behind her back. It was a thin figure dressed in shiny black, and it got a grip on the brick facade and clambered after Eva. It moved elastically and remarkably quickly toward the attorney, like a spider on its way toward its catch.

Eva had managed to make it to the next window when Don held his hand up to his mouth to bellow out a warning. At that very second, the attorney faltered suddenly, and he could feel in his own body how she lost her balance and fell.

Yet the hair-thin shadow somehow had time to dance its way up to her in a leap along the brick wall. It grabbed one of her two wildly
windmilling arms and caught the attorney like a hooked fish. The doubled body weight didn’t seem to be a problem; it was as though the shadow’s hand and foot had been drilled fast to the stones of the facade.

With a swinging movement, Eva was pushed back up against the window again, and Don let out his breath until he heard her loud scream. She had gotten loose and caught sight of him, and now she was waving her arm in a signal that he should take off. Then Eva was sucked backward; she disappeared inside the hotel, and Grote Markt was once again deserted and quiet.

The shadow in the shiny black costume was still there, and it turned its face in Don’s direction and then began to move rapidly down the brick facade. With two stories left to the ground, it prepared for yet another leap.

D
on turned around on wobbly legs and began to run as fast as he could, his breath catching in his throat. Cut in onto Rijselsestraat, right on Burchtstraat, followed the glowing trails on the tourist map in his memory. He closed his eyes and rushed between honking cars across the four-lane Oudstrijderslaan.

He didn’t stop until he’d reached the tourist buses that stood in the parking lot on the other side of the road. Sank down into the shelter behind the gaudy coaches and looked behind him for the first time. After he’d waited for several clusters of headlights to pass, he realized that no one was following him any longer.

With some sort of half-jogging movement, Don began to move back toward the southern parts of the city. He held his shoulder bag under his arm, pressed against his body like a protective amulet.

D
awn hadn’t yet come when he finally reached Ieper Vrachtterminal after an hour or so. He crouched down and slid under the black and yellow gate next to the sentry box, which still seemed to be unstaffed.

He continued forward, half crawling across train tracks and gravel, wondering how long it would take before Eva would be persuaded to tell her abductors about the terminal and the position of the freight car on track number seven.

The bright green Green Cargo car stood deserted in the streams of light, and when Don saw the black letters of the logo on its side, for the first time in a long time, he truly longed to go home.

After unlocking it with his key, he rolled the sliding door a bit to the side and climbed in. He lingered there, quiet for a minute, in the space between the Masonite and the dirty inner wall of the car. Gave a start at the Flemish voice from the loudspeaker, and then he heard a roaring train whistle approach from far away.