Strindberg's Star (43 page)

H
e looked for David Bailey, to find out where his backpack would end up and whether it would be searched, but had to get in line behind another passenger who also seemed to want to keep his luggage.

He could glimpse the lines
AGUSTO LYTTON
and
ARGENTINA
on the old man’s name tag. He had a few long-haired men with him; they had stern faces and angry eyes. They seemed to follow the South American’s every wave, and they were vigilantly guarding the group’s baggage. There were several heavy crates, and printed on the metal were yellow warning symbols that said
FRAGILE
. While the old man argued with David Bailey in a mixture of Spanish and English, Don became more and more taken by how strange he looked.

Lytton’s face was like a bare skull, with skin so thin that it could have been painted on and transparent enough to show the triangle of his nasal bone and the cartilage that still formed the contour of a hook nose. The color of his eyes was so pale there in the sockets that at first Don thought it was due to blindness. But once Lytton had gotten what he wanted, he immediately began to indicate where the crates should be placed. The surly men freed themselves from the wet snow and started to carry them, and David Bailey turned to Don with
a long, drawn-out sigh. After having assured Don that the backpack was in good hands, the guide led him in toward the elevators that would carry them aboard. There he pushed on a switch box that was hanging loose on cables, and with a clatter they left the safety of Murmansk.

A
hundred feet above the swells of the sea, on the quarterdeck of the icebreaker, stood a helicopter. It had drooping rotor blades and was painted in Russian colors: white roof, blue cabin, and an underbelly of flaking red.

When Bailey came out of the elevator, he explained that the helicopter would be used to scout for cracks in the Arctic pack ice to ensure a comfortable journey.

Then the guide raised his megaphone like a flag and took all the retirees in toward
Yamal
’s towering superstructure. Don could see the radar masts and a satellite dish sticking out on the roof, some sixty feet up.

Inside the giant ship, the corridors turned out to be claustrophobically narrow. Bailey pointed out a shabby relaxation area where they would find a sauna and a small pool. A low-ceilinged dining room with plain long tables awaited them farther on. There was also a small bar with a printed plastic sign that displayed the limited Russian menu for the next few weeks.

The control room for the icebreaker’s nuclear reactor was on the next deck, and it had out-of-date monitors. After that came airless walkways with cabins, where the passengers’ names had been stuck on in stamped tape. Don’s door was right across from Eva Strand’s.

On the fourth floor, Bailey pointed out the captain’s suite, which had wide windows that looked onto the icebreaker’s foredeck. Then came a wide staircase up to a tinted glass door that fit tightly in front of
Yamal
’s navigation bridge.

After Bailey knocked a few times, a man who had a bearlike physique
and black sunglasses opened up. There were badges on the epaulets of his naval shirt, and his beard was scrubby and gray.

The guide introduced the man as Captain Sergei Nicolayevich. The captain just mumbled something inaudible in reply, but after him came the thin chief engineer of
Yamal,
who gave a mini-lecture about the icebreaker’s ten-year tradition of being a charter ship, followed by a short safety demonstration.

In order to lighten the mood, the guide ended by mentioning the small motorboat for zoological expeditions. On previous journeys, they’d seen walruses and polar bears, and perhaps the passengers would have that kind of good luck this time.

Don found his way to his cabin as fast as he could to see where the Russians had put his backpack. On the other side of the door he found a room that smelled musty and didn’t seem to have been cleaned.

The light came from two windowpanes and a fluorescent light on the ceiling. He immediately caught sight of his backpack alongside the bolted-down legs of the sofa. He opened it on the plastic floor and dug around for the ankh and the star. Then he felt the objects and could finally let out his breath.

Behind a purple-striped curtain was a small sleeping area. On the bed was a blanket that was the same shade as
Yamal
’s orange hull. There was a sign above the pillow stating that the light inside the cabin couldn’t be turned off. But the Russians could offer full-coverage eye masks if the curtain wasn’t enough.

Inside the bathroom hung a robe that was embroidered with the text
—
Yamal.
Russian Muzak hummed through the loudspeaker system, and it was like being locked up in a cell.

The air in the cabin was thick as syrup, and Don could feel the walls pressing in. He sat on the sofa and tried to get something calming out of the pockets of his shoulder bag.

But then he caught sight of the map of the Arctic Ocean that lay in front of him on the side table. The icebreaker’s route from Murmansk up to the red point of the North Pole was drawn out on it.

As he traced the winding line with his finger, he tried to remember the last X he’d marked on his own Arctic map. He began to suspect that the distance between the icebreaker and the opening at the eighty-third parallel would be far too great.

A shudder went through the floor of the cabin. Don went to the window and realized that
Yamal
had already begun to be hauled out to the open sea.

V
ater was sitting in his electric wheelchair in the management office of the bank building, in front of the panorama window. It was difficult to tell that he was smiling because one side of his face was completely blotchy, burned beyond recognition by an exploding star.

Under the suppurating blisters on his eyebrow was something that looked like a gray stone, while the eye on the uninjured side of his face was alert and black as coal.

It was directed down toward the desk, where there was passport documentation indicating that a Mr. and Mrs. Goldstein had just passed the seventy-seventh parallel on their way to the North Pole. The woman’s picture was conspicuously blurry, but the man’s face had immediately been identified by the computers’ image search. The profile of the nose, the tired eyes, the weak jawline: Don Titelman.

V
ater hadn’t slept very much during the past few weeks. He had devoted all his strength to searching for the foundation’s lost ankh. Because of all his burns, the doctors had said he ought to take it very easy. But he refused to let himself be ruled by anything as frail as his body.

He had avoided cooperating with the European police. Giving them Don Titelman’s name would only have caused problems. If they were to arrest the Swede by chance, it would be difficult to regain control, both of Titelman’s continued fate and of Strindberg’s star and ankh.

Instead, Vater had relied on his usual channels, the military powers that the foundation had helped through the years. This way they had also been able to use some resources that wouldn’t have been available to the regular police.

What had finally gotten results was the continual radar monitoring that had been furnished by German intelligence. It had been directed at all vessels that passed the seventy-seventh parallel and then continued to the north.

The passenger lists had been scrutinized carefully, and when in doubt they got out the passport documentation. So now it had become caught in their net—the Russian icebreaker, which, according to the latest information, appeared to be named
Yamal.

H
e hadn’t been able to sleep more than a few hours during the night, despite the small wads of toilet paper he’d stuffed in his ears to avoid hearing all the canned music, which couldn’t be turned off. And the walls were so thin that he had been able to hear the South Americans whispering. A few of Lytton’s men were staying in the cabin next to his, and their words had been woven into his dreams as a mumbling hiss.

Don pulled the bed curtain aside and went to look out the cabin’s window. Through the stripes of dirt he could see that the ship was now approaching the edge of the pack ice. They cruised past broken-off icebergs, which shone in the light from
Yamal
’s spotlights.

He put on his velvet suit and the red expedition jacket and knocked at the attorney’s door, but as usual no one opened it. Eva had become withdrawn during the past few days, and he didn’t really know how she was spending her time on board. When they spoke, she seemed dejected somehow, but she didn’t want to talk about whatever was weighing on her.

O
ut on the promenade deck, it was very windy, and the polar air cut right through the velvet fabric of his pants. Don pulled up the zipper
at his throat and looked out into the darkness toward the infinite wall of pack ice.

The Russians seemed to be looking for a crack where the jets could take hold and blast an opening so the ship could keep bearing north. Over by the railing, an older couple was standing and staring silently off at the mass of ice, and Don could see that they were holding each other’s hands tight.

Finally it got so cold that his body began to go numb, and on stiff legs he found his way back into the ship again. He was in the habit of sitting in the drab library that was in a corner on the third deck. And that was what Don did on this long day, too.

Once there, he took out the letter he’d found in Malraux’s grave and read once again through its short lines of Norwegian. But who this Olaf was, or what he meant by Niflheim—Don still didn’t know.

At lunchtime he sneaked back through the halls. In his cabin he took more Haldol and liquor. Don had just had time to swallow when he heard a knock. As he opened the door for the attorney, the whole ship shook. Then the floor under them suddenly began to vibrate.
Yamal
had just begun to push its way through the wall of ice.

D
on had hidden the Bunsen burner under the bed, and now he set it up on the table in front of the sofa. The gas pipe fell over several times before he managed the trick of securing its base.

The attorney lit the flame and then all they could do was glumly establish that the ray still hadn’t moved. Don opened the notebook and wrote:

Eva had brought along a scrap of paper with the ship’s most recent coordinates. On the map she drew out its planned route. Using
a ruler, she tried to estimate the distance to the opening. Finally she said:

“We’re going way too far east. We’re going to pass it at a distance of at least fifty nautical miles.”

Don repeated her measurement, and he could only nod.

“It’s not even one hundred kilometers,” Eva said. “How much time could the icebreaker lose? A few hours?”

“No, we’ll just have to go up to the command bridge and ask the Russians to change course,” Don said.

Eva turned down the flame of the Bunsen burner and it went out.

“Maybe we can wait,” she said. “Maybe the ray will have time to change position again, and there’s no point in talking to David Bailey and the Russians before we know exactly where the opening is.”

“Presumably it won’t just end up right in front of the icebreaker,” Don said. “So what had you planned to do to convince them?”

But the attorney just shrugged. Then she pulled on her jacket and left his cabin.

A
s usual, Don sat alone at dinner, picking at his borscht. It was hard to get any beet soup down in the mournful noise as the icebreaker pushed its way through the ice. The retirees were sitting in silence, as were the WWF teenagers. The grating sound lay over the dining room like a dull, grumbling threat.

The only people who could be heard speaking were the South Americans over with Agusto Lytton. Don recognized Moyano and Rivera, the two men who were staying in the cabin next to his. Moyano had a long torso and scarred cheeks. A tattoo wound across Rivera’s throat like a long, narrow demon.

Like the other men who surrounded Lytton, they had coal black hair that fell far down onto their backs. Native American looks, with broad cheeks and copper-colored skin. This made the pale old man, in his elegant suit, stand out in a way that was almost comical. But
there was no doubt about who directed the conversation at the South Americans’ table.

The only thing available to drink, besides water, was Russian Stolichnaya. Don poured another glass of vodka, for his seasickness. After a while he began to feel quite intoxicated and staggered up out of his chair. Despondently he made his way back to his cabin again.

I
n the narrow room, Don felt infinitely exhausted, and in his drunkenness he heard himself sniffle. He made a vain attempt to hold back his tears, but it was like finding himself in a tunnel with no end.

To calm himself, he took two clonazepam, which he hoped would make everything go dark within a few minutes. But after several hours, he was still awake, and then, late at night, he happened to think that perhaps the ray had changed position by this point. His hand unsteady from the liquor, he managed to get a few sparks out of the lighter, and in an instant the gas transformed into a lick of fire.