Strindberg's Star (42 page)

Then the door of the car rolled shut before Don’s face in a single, forceful motion, which ended in a noisy good-luck thump from the outside. And it wasn’t until the soldier’s steps had disappeared off over the gravel and were replaced by the sound of his own breathing that Don began to realize that this delivery had been the soldier’s only errand.

W
ith Eva’s help he managed to squeeze the wooden box into the lounge. It stood there on the red wall-to-wall carpet like a sealed and ominous mystery.

It was elaborately secured with white plastic bands, and the metal seal on its lid was still unbroken. Don and Eva hesitated for a long time, just standing there and observing the wooden box skeptically at a distance of a few steps.

Finally Don gave a resigned sigh and went to dig a knife out of the drawers of the mahogany cabinet. With it, he cut away the plastic strips so that they fell to the floor in coils, and with a final cut he broke the seal.

He placed the knife under the edge of the lid, cracked it open, and
backed away so that Eva would also be able to see what it contained. But all that was visible was protective black plastic, which seemed to be covering something puffy and soft.

Eva moved back as he began to slit open the plastic inch by inch with the tip of the knife. He hesitantly took hold of a flap and ripped away the protective cover, and up poked a fluffy polar jacket made of neon-yellow Gore-Tex.

He found yet another jacket packed down tightly on top of rolled-up winter clothes. He took out long underwear, hats, and gloves and spread them on the floor of the lounge car. There was an ice axe, ice cleats made of stainless steel, and after that a couple of flashlights and a small box of tools. Wrapped tightly in several layers of plastic wrap lay a pale green loaf of dollar bills in shockingly high denominations.

At the very bottom was something that could have been stolen from the chemistry room of a school: a Bunsen burner with a chromium-plate base, an air regulator for fine adjustments of the gas, and a cylinder of propane with a rubber hose fastened to it.

When Don had lifted the Bunsen burner out onto the floor and looked down once again, he caught sight of the envelope that was still lying on the bottom of the wooden box. It contained two expertly falsified Swedish passports and a short letter written in remarkably poor handwriting.

M
urmansk. The sixty-eighth parallel. Northwestern Russia, on the coast of the Kola Peninsula, north of the Arctic Circle. A city surrounded by low mountains that were already covered by snow. The great harbor that opened out to the black water of the Arctic Ocean. The wide piers that were only lit here and there in the predawn darkness.

A single trolley bus clattered its way along a dilapidated row of apartment houses, the last remains of Soviet Communism, broken by the facade of a skyscraper. Hotel Russlandia was completely dark in the early morning, until a window on the tenth floor emitted a flickering glow.

The flame illuminated Don Titelman’s face; then he lowered the lighter toward the Bunsen burner’s hissing gas. At first the flame flickered golden yellow, but then he expertly adjusted the regulator and the burning gas changed to a hotter white.

He lifted up the wire gauze on which Strindberg’s star lay resting on top of the ankh, and placed it on the tripod so it was in the very middle of the flame. Then Don took a step back and waited. And after
a minute or so came the reaction that he would never truly be able to get used to.

Nils Strindberg’s sketches had proven to be largely correct. But they couldn’t do justice to the beauty that was appearing here: the star sinking into place in the crossbar of the ankh when the metal fused together, and how the object became transparent so that it looked as though it were made of blown glass.

Then the first star lit up above the ankh, and the sparkling arc of the Little Dipper. The North Star at its apex, which grew into a ball of fire a half inch in diameter. Don thought that the celestial sphere, which Nils Strindberg had drawn as bluish gray, was more like a winter night, frosty and black.

Under this winter night, the shadow of the northern hemisphere would soon be visible, and it always began with the single point of the North Pole. The point expanded into an ice cap out toward the sea and turned into the spiny silhouette of Greenland. The coastline of Svalbard, the fjords of northern Norway, and the creamy yellow tundra of Siberia, which ran over toward the Bering Strait. And just then, when the dome of the hemisphere had finished expanding, the North Star flashed, as it always did, into a ray of light.

It seemed that the tip of the ray was hot, because when it hit the ice outside of Svalbard, there was a sizzling sound. Then it stood still and continued to indicate its position. Don looked down at his open map of the Arctic. Took the red ink pen to draw in another X.

They had been staying at Hotel Russlandia for almost a month now, and each day they had lit the Bunsen burner and done the same experiment. The ray had moved at three-day intervals, just as Nils Strindberg had predicted in his laboratory notes, and Don and Eva had been able to follow its jumping steps on their Arctic map.

Don let the pen move over the grid of the map. Then he placed the tip at the eighty-third parallel, twenty-eight degrees and forty minutes east. The X ended up in the middle of the area just north of Svalbard that was already covered in red ink marks. Through this area, Eva had
drawn a line in marker that ran all the way from Murmansk to the North Pole of Earth.

Don looked up from the map and saw the spheres mirrored in the window of the hotel room. He shut off the gas, and the flame went out with a clicking sound. He let the crystal-clear ankh remain on the bed of wire gauze, and there was a clink as the star came loose from the middle of the crossbar.

The star and the ankh were once again white and cold as ice when Don placed them among the tightly packed winter clothes. Then Don wound the rubber hose around the gas cylinder and the Bunsen burner. Stuffed it all down in the backpack together and pulled the straps tight.

He threw a glance at the X he’d just marked on the Arctic map. It would be the last X Don would draw in while they were still in Murmansk. The next time they lit the Bunsen burner they would already be far out over the bottomless water of the Arctic Ocean. When the attorney was finished with her morning shower, they would leave Hotel Russlandia to go aboard.

D
on took a few steps up to the window and looked down at the Russian icebreaker. It was sitting there in the harbor like a floating high-rise, under cones of light.

There were two white ellipses on the black hull; they formed the shape of an atom.
Yamal,
as the ship was called, was driven by a nuclear reactor—the only force that was strong enough to break through the pack ice of the Arctic in October.

The body of the ship was painted orange and had cavernous window openings; they ran in long rows along the superstructure of steel. Really, Don thought, he should be relieved that it was finally time to depart. But the only thing he felt was a dull pain in his stomach, which was completely and definitely due to fear. The treacherous sea was out there, ready to swallow him. He thought that it was just waiting to pull the ankh and star down in its ice-cold belly.

A
month ago, in the freight car, the attorney’s suggestion had sounded hypothetical: hiding up in Murmansk and then maybe trying to go farther north. Far away from all the European police, they would both be able to search for the answer to Nils Strindberg’s secret: the opening down into the underworld that they had now heard so much talk about.

Don hadn’t really taken her seriously, but then Eva had opened the computer and shown him all the North Pole cruises that left Murmansk regularly. The journey that the attorney had finally managed to book them on was the Early Fall Arctic Cruise offered by Bailey Expeditions.

Hex’s dollar bills had been only just enough for the tickets, and after using fake passport numbers, they had received their travel documents via fax. There they could read their new names: Samuel and Anna Goldstein, a middle-aged Swedish Jewish couple. The wife had blond hair and a noticeably blurry passport photograph.

It would take seven days to get up to the ninetieth parallel, but now that autumn had begun, they would be traveling under a polar sky that was always black.

They hadn’t figured out how they would get the icebreaker to stop once they had reached the latitude that the position of the ray indicated. But Eva hadn’t seemed particularly interested in discussing all the problems; the only thing she had been able to talk about in Murmansk was getting on their way as quickly as possible. Don had tried to point out that the Green Cargo car was still waiting on the slushy tracks of the freight terminal on the outskirts of Murmansk. Maybe his sister could send them off to Southeast Asia or somewhere else that the police couldn’t find them and where the climate was considerably warmer. But Eva had just pointed out all the ordeals she’d already had to endure and said that in that case, she would travel up north by herself to search for the answers to the mystery.

W
hen Don heard the shower shut off over in the bathroom, it felt as though the final hourglass had run out. He assumed that the attorney would choose to put on her clothes there in the steam again this time. She had always seemed very careful to hide her body.

And as he stood still in the pitch-black dawn, waiting for Eva to be ready, the only thing Don Titelman could think about was that he never should have traveled to Falun and opened the door to Erik Hall’s glass veranda.

I
t had been one thing to see the nuclear icebreaker from the window up on the tenth floor of Hotel Russlandia. Completely different, Don thought, to crawl along like a puny beetle in the shadow of
Yamal
’s sky-high hull. Way up on the steel-plated prow he could see the grin of a red painted shark mouth, and from inside the vessel came the dull rhythm of Russian marching music.

The harbor stank of rotting seaweed, and the sun still hadn’t managed to come up over the gray-black waters of Kola Bay. Murmansk had already begun to descend into the polar darkness that would linger until the end of the six months of winter. It was with an increasing sense of panic that Don stumbled along there in the snowdrifts. The dawn chill had tightened his throat, and with each breath it became more difficult to get air.

The backpack hung like a lump over one of his shoulders, and over the other he carried his bag of antianxiety medications. With each step forward, the edge of the Bunsen burner dug deeper and deeper into his back, and Don could see the glowing red jackets from far away in the misty light that came from the lights of the quay. There were perhaps fifty passengers standing in a group around the baggage
carts. When he came closer, Don noticed a sunburned man who seemed to be some sort of guide. The man was carrying a megaphone in his hand, and with the other he continually smoothed his fluffy hair.

“I’m David Bailey,” said the man, extending his hand to greet them.

“Samuel Goldstein,” Don said, “and this is … Anna, my wife. We were the ones who booked our cruise so late.”

“Better late than never,” Bailey said with a crooked smile. “Besides, you’re not the only ones who made a last-minute decision.”

Later the guide made sure that Eva and Don each received a red expedition jacket. On the backs and breast pockets was a round logo that said
EARLY FALL ARCTIC CRUISE
. Bailey opened a binder with plastic pockets that contained name tags for all the passengers. Don received one and pinned it to his jacket:
SAMUEL GOLDSTEIN, SWEDEN, CABIN 43
.

A
s they were standing there waiting, Don looked around and noticed that most of the people who were going to be freighted into the dark of the North Pole seemed to be retirees. It sounded as though most of them were Americans, and many of them were wearing baseball caps.

A group of teenagers speaking French and Italian gathered in a circle around their bags with World Wide Fund for Nature logos on them.

Then Don stiffened as he heard the singsong intonation that could only be Swedish. It was coming from a boy with a cell phone, who was now turning in his direction.

They stood there on the edge of the quay for a drawn-out moment, just staring at each other. He looked about sixteen, and he had a knitted cap and a kaffiyeh. He continued his conversation in a quiet voice and just nodded slightly at Don’s Swedish name tag. The boy must have missed all the photographs on the newsbills, or else he didn’t care.

A
t exactly 7:00,
Yamal
’s foghorn let out a roaring whistle. When the sound had finally faded away, Bailey shouted into his megaphone that it was now time to board. The retirees began to move in toward the elevators that would lead them to the icebreaker’s quarterdeck. Eva took hold of Don’s arm, and he hesitantly let himself be dragged along. A member of the crew stopped him brusquely just as he was about to go in. He pointed at the backpack, which apparently had to be placed on the baggage cart. The cart rolled off immediately after Don had bewilderedly handed the backpack over, and Eva asked if he had remembered to take out Strindberg’s star and ankh. Don looked at her vacantly, and then he began to wave and shout after the cart, which was being towed away along the harbor pier. But his shouts disappeared in the wind, and it was far too late.