by Bill Napier
‘I’m sorry, Prof, but you have to write it yourself. Sir John’s instructions.’
From the back of the taxi, Petrie looked out at the bars, the cafés and the bookshops lining the congested streets, but he saw none of them. His mind was elsewhere, grappling with questions.
And his stomach was churning.
4
Bratislava
Vienna!
Petrie had seen Vienna on TV. Some documentary about Mozart. Vienna was all crinoline-dressed ladies dancing with tailors’ dummies, and prancing horses and elegant cafés.
But Freud and Turing are dead and the Vienna Circle is history and the real talent left for the States after the war. There’s nobody in Vienna.
The mystery consumed Petrie all the way over the Irish Sea. Why Vienna? The place is a desert!
In Terminal Four at Heathrow, he was astonished to hear his name being called over the tannoy: ‘Would Dr Petrie, on the British Airways flight from Dublin, please come to the information desk?’
At the desk a small fat woman in traditional Indian sari said, ‘We’ve been asked to give you this.’ The envelope she handed him was addressed to: Dr Thomas Petrie, 158 Rock Walk, Dublin.
‘Who sent this?’
‘The caller left no name, sir. She delivered it about ten minutes ago.’
‘She?’
‘It was a female, very English.’ The woman was trying not to give Petrie a knowing smile; she was seeing secret assignations, lovers snatching time in exotic places.
‘Okay, thank you.’
Petrie opened the envelope. It was empty. At a departures screen he checked his Vienna flight. He had a couple of hours. Back to the information desk. The sari lady directed him out of the airport, along a road near the bus stances and into a small, plain building: the airport chapel.
Petrie didn’t live in Rock Walk. He’d never heard of a Rock Walk in Dublin. For all he knew, Rock Walk was the name of a pop group. But more likely the Rock was pietro, petra, Peter.
Down spiral stairs. A man in a long green gown was standing at a table covered with a white linen tablecloth and candles, engaged in some ceremony which had no meaning for Petrie. A handful of people stood around the pews. Petrie was in luck: there was a lectern at the back of the chapel, and on it was a large Bible. He turned the pages to the First Epistle General of Saint Peter, chapter five, verse eight.
Be sober, be vigilant; because your
adversary the devil, as a roaring lion,
walketh about, seeking whom he may
devour
Some sort of warning. Petrie felt a slight tingling in his spine, like a mild electric current.
He made his way to the departure lounge and sat with his back to a wall, surveying his fellow passengers with deep suspicion, at the same time feeling vaguely ridiculous. None of them showed the least awareness of his presence.
Beware of strange women. Petrie looked for unattached females. Maybe the blonde girl, in her early twenties, with the golden Scandinavian hair and long skirt and boots. Petrie knew the type: Miss Lonely Planet, uncommitted and free as the wind, doing Europe and beyond on a shoestring. But she was too conspicuous, apparently attracting the attention of half the males in the lounge. Maybe the mousy little creature sipping from a paper cup and reading a paperback. She was so inconspicuous that she had to be a candidate. Or maybe it was the plump Hausfrau with the heavy-framed spectacles, the sandwich and the Cosmopolitan opened on her knee. She caught Petrie’s eye and smiled; Petrie looked away in alarm.
It was cloud all the way until, over Germany, he glimpsed forested hills, covered with white.
Through the Customs at Vienna airport, not knowing what to expect. In the public area a lean, thin-faced man was holding up a white card with Herr Craig printed on it in red crayon. Petrie followed him to a silver top-of-the-range BMW with an Austrian registration. There was no conversation. The man took him along a motorway lined with high-rise flats and sprawling pharmaceutical factories, and on to a quiet, straight road leading away from town. The car was silent, its suspension smooth, and Petrie’s imagination was becoming steadily wilder.
In an hour another city appeared on the skyline. There was a border. The policeman at the Kontrolla scarcely glanced at Petrie’s passport. A long bridge took them over the Dunaj, which Petrie took to be the Danube. A sign said Bratislava. He looked out on tall grey buildings, buses and trams, cobbled roads, churches with an Eastern look. Not Vienna, then, he thought. Bratislava.
The driver stopped in front of a large grey-fronted hotel and opened Petrie’s door without a word. By the time Petrie had reached the foyer, driver and BMW had gone.
Sir was expected.
His room was plain, wooden-floored with an embroidered rug. He tossed his holdall on a chair and left. On the first floor he navigated a crowded bar, its air thick with Turkish cigarette smoke, and reached a restauracia. It was pure Belle Époque, with oil paintings of Old Bratislava lining its walls and clusters of lights hanging like chrome and glass snowdrops from its high curved ceiling. Wooden partitions separated the tables, ensuring privacy for husband and wife, husband and mistress, businessmen making deals in the post-Communist market. Behind the nearest one, he heard snatches of conversation between a man and woman, in an unfamiliar tongue. The clatter of trams came through the window, and dark shapes like Lowry figures were crossing a slushy cobbled square. Wisps of the heavy tobacco smoke were drifting through from the bar.
By now Petrie was strung up like a cat. He felt somehow surreal, as if he was inside a dream; if a crocodile had slithered into the room it would hardly have seemed out of place.
A little waiter appeared. He had a dinner suit, bow tie, moustache and passable Slavic-tinted English.
‘I’d like some fish,’ Petrie said.
‘What kind of fish?’
‘What do you have?’
A shrug. ‘Much fish.’
‘What’s local?’
‘Štika. From the Danube this morning. It has sharp teeth.’
‘I’ll have that.’
‘With cheeps?’
‘Potatoes.’
‘And to drink?’
‘A white wine.’ Petrie paused, and added: ‘A carafe.’
‘You can have zee house wine.’
‘Fine.’
A boroviçka and a coffee later, he signed a chit and made his way, bloated, back to his room. He made sure his door was locked. He lay on the narrow bed and tried to analyse the sense of unease, anxiety even, which was now washing over him.
There was the sudden transplantation from the routine to the weird, from the familiar to the alien. There was the bizarre warning: Be sober, be vigilant. Beware of what? Roaring lions? Strange women? Slithering crocodiles?
But most of all, he realised, his tension was being driven by something else, by the conundrum still defeating his restless mind: What am I getting myself into? And what happens next?
* * *
Petrie wakened with a start. The telephone, its ringing tone unfamiliar. Disoriented, it was a second before he remembered he wasn’t in his Dublin flat. He fumbled for a light switch, knocking over a tumbler. His watch said 5.30 a.m. ‘Dr Petrie? Your car is waiting.’
5
The Castle
The icy air had a freshening effect on Petrie, even at twenty to six in the morning. It was the same silver BMW and the same wrinkled driver. The cavernous boot swallowed up Petrie’s rucksack like a whale devouring a minnow. He kept a canvas bag with papers beside him, and settled into the back seat.
The car drove a few hundred yards along the road and turned into the front of the Hotel Europa.
Miss Lonely Planet.
The driver heaved her rucksack into the boot as if it was full of rocks. As she settled into the car beside him, Petrie saw that she was lightly made up. He caught a whiff of scent. She had an open, almost naive smile.
‘I do planets.’ Her voice was soft and curiously graceful. She wasn’t a native E
nglish speaker.
The car took off, the driver muttering something under his breath.
Petrie said, ‘I saw you at Heathrow.’
‘I saw you too. I spotted you at Vienna airport and then on the streets here, last night. It was too much of a coincidence.’
‘I’ve been warned not to speak to strange women.’
She gave a wicked smile, stuck her legs out and wiggled her feet. She was wearing walking boots and her slender ankles made them seem over-large.
‘And then I got another warning. It was vague but I took it to mean I might be followed.’
She asked, ‘How do you know I’m not a strange woman following you?’
‘You weren’t trying to look inconspicuous.’ She was in fact extremely conspicuous but Petrie didn’t want to mention that.
She gave a worried little nod. ‘Should we be trusting each other?’ Her voice had a slightly sing-song quality – Scandinavian, he thought. It fitted with the pure blonde hair.
‘Who says I trust you?’
‘This is like something out of a spy movie. Any idea what it’s about?’ She tilted her head slightly.
‘No.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a mathematician. Nobody understands me, I work on ferociously specialised stuff.’
‘What sort of ferociously specialised stuff?’
‘I suppose you’d call it pattern recognition. At the moment I’m doing knots.’
‘You mean like in string?’
‘Yes, only I do them in four-dimensional space.’
‘I can’t visualise that. No wonder nobody understands you. Anyway, it sounds useless.’
‘Don’t you believe it. I’ve found links with quantum theory and cryptography.’ He patted his canvas bag as if it contained the secrets of the Universe. ‘And you?’
‘I’m a planetary scientist. Again a specialised area: extrasolar planetary systems.’
The car was warm and Petrie unbuttoned his jacket. ‘Planets and patterns. I wonder how they connect?’ He gazed out of the window at the dark mid-European streets and the unfamiliar skyline. Then: ‘This is the car they collected me in from Vienna.’
‘I had a Mercedes. But we were on the same flight. We could have shared a car, and even had the same hotel.’
‘Exactly. Someone didn’t want us seen together.’
The car had now taken them clear of Bratislava on to a broad four-laned highway. The dark sky was lightening to grey. After ten swift minutes, the driver slowed and turned on to a quiet side road, lined with snow-covered fields. Here the headlights lit up a wall of fog, limiting visibility to a couple of hundred yards.
‘Do you think he speaks English?’ Miss Lonely Planet whispered.
Petrie said, ‘You’ve exposed a breast,’ while looking at the man’s eyes in the mirror. They didn’t flicker.
‘No, he doesn’t. Sorry about that.’
She laughed.
‘I’m Petrie. Tom, Tommy or Thomas depending on how you feel. From Dublin. So which part of Scandinavia are you from?’
‘Freya Størmer,’ she said, and they finally shook hands. ‘From north of the Arctic Circle. Tromsø, to be exact.’
Petrie looked out uneasily at the fields and woods. In his imagination, he saw black bears roaming the forests. He wondered again what was bringing him out to these hinterlands. The trees looked black against the white snow and he had a brief, unsettling illusion of living inside a photographic negative.
Patterns and planets. Planets and prime ministers. Don’t speak to strange women. A strange woman at his side. Beware of devouring lions.
How do they connect? How?
His new companion was smiling at some private joke. ‘You do planets. What exactly?’ Petrie asked.
‘At the moment? I’m part of ESA’s Darwin team.’
‘Darwin?’
‘A space-based interferometer. The European Space Agency are due to launch it next year. They’re big mirrors with a long baseline which should be able to make out gross features like continents on Earth-sized planets round the nearest stars.’
‘That’s still not quite exact.’
‘They want me to predict biological signatures for Darwin to search for.’ They were into a village and running a gauntlet of neat, small houses, each one managing to be different from the others.
‘Like what?’
‘Like spectrum lines belonging to ozone or oxygen. Best seen in the ultraviolet. Oxygen is so reactive that if we see any at all on a planet there has to be biology at work producing it. Another…’
Suddenly, heavy metal blasted their ears from eight speakers. Startled, Freya shook her head and shrugged, and by mutual consent they attempted no further conversation. The driver switched off the big car’s halogen beams.
Presently the road, now covered with compacted snow, began to climb steeply through a forest. The driver switched the heavy rock off and concentrated on a series of hairpin bends. Petrie found that his ears were ringing. He was now shaking slightly, whether due to nervous anticipation, or the driving, or the aftermath of the ACDC explosion, he couldn’t say. On the next bend, the driver turned to the couple and said, ‘Malé Karpaty,’ in a cigarette-hoarse voice.
The Little Carpathians. Dracula country. Petrie had a brief, movie-driven fantasy about isolated villages, Frankenstein monsters and grim, isolated castles.
The road levelled, there was a little lodge house and cables stretching up into the mist, and then the mountain pass was plunging steeply and Petrie’s ears were popping with the swift change in altitude. At the foot of the pass the driver turned left on to a narrow lane.
Petrie sensed that they were reaching journey’s end, realised that his fists were clenched with tension. By contrast, the young woman at his side seemed relaxed.
Past a tiny ochre church with a thin green spire. Something massive, dimly glimpsed through the mist and then lost behind trees. Another climb, and then a long, gently curving road through open parkland. A final turn, and through the mist there emerged a castle with conical turrets and low battlements. To Petrie’s distraught imagination it looked like something out of a Bela Lugosi movie. The Dracula fantasies began to harden up.
Petrie and Freya stood with their baggage while the driver did a swift U-turn and took his car back down the hill. They watched it until it had disappeared through the trees, and then turned their attention to the castle.
Petrie knew nothing about castles or history but this one looked like some of the Austrian ones he had glimpsed in the distance on his drive from Vienna. He had a vague memory about the Hapsburg Dynasty and assumed that this had once been Austrian territory and that the castle dated from the eighteenth century. Two warriors, resting their hands on shields, sat on either side of a dark archway. To the right a circular tower was topped by a conical roof looking like a witch’s black hat. Narrow, vertical windows were spaced around the tower giving, Petrie supposed, a clear field of fire in the event of rioting peasantry.
They walked through the archway, which was about twenty feet long, and emerged into an acre of snow-covered garden lightly sprinkled with shrubs and conifer trees. To the left was a parapet looking over open, wooded countryside. To the right, and facing them, were tall grey walls surmounted by steeply sloping roofs, showing red where the snow hadn’t covered them. Between the right and facing walls was a massive rectangular tower, jutting slightly out from the surrounding buildings and half as high again as them. Widely spaced pillars supported a steep roof atop the tower. The roof itself was covered with green diamond-shaped tiles and had tall thin chimneys and a lightning conductor. This tower, Petrie assumed, was intended as a look-out, and a small face was looking down between the pillars. It vanished quickly when Petrie looked up.
Someone had shovelled snow off the pathway and they walked along it, conscious of being overlooked by arched windows which, he noted, were double-glazed. Petrie inferred from this that the interior probably contained modern plumb
ing and central heating. Just past the tower, and hidden by it from the path, was a massive wooden door, covered with an iron grid and studs, and guarded by nothing more threatening than shrubs in huge stone pots. The door was in three parts and the centre one was an inch ajar. Petrie pushed this door open for Freya and followed her inside. By this simple act, he left behind his old world and entered a new one, more bizarre than anything his imagination could have devised.
His first impression was that of spaciousness. There was a high vaulted ceiling and a gleaming marble floor. A half-circle of velvet-covered sofa faced them. Potted palms and plants occupied odd corners. Broad corridors led off to left and right. There was nobody to be seen.
‘What now?’ Freya wondered.
They took to the right at random, and walked into another spacious area with another high vaulted ceiling, this one supported by tall pillars and with gold-coloured chandeliers suspended from it. Here their footsteps were softened by carpets and long strips of rug scattered around the marble floor. At the far end of this enormous space was a curved stone stairway, and trotting briskly down this stairway was a small, moon-faced man with large round spectacles and a grin.
Charlie Gibson. Last seen, half-drunk and upside down in Uppsala Botanic Gardens, trying to scale the tall gates after closing time with his fly caught on a spike and half a dozen equally merry colleagues offering ribald advice about his future sex life.
Gibson’s handshake was firm and warm. ‘Very glad to see you both. Very glad indeed. First let me take you to your rooms, and then I’ll tell you what exactly is going on.’
Gibson led the way up the stairway, continuing past the first floor to an upper floor, ending up on a long broad corridor with a curved ceiling. Along the left of this corridor were recesses with potted plants and glass cabinets displaying stuffed animals and fossils.
He stopped at the fifth door on the right. ‘This is yours, Tom. Freya, yours is the next one on. There are three of us, five now you’re here, and we have the run of the castle for a week.’
The room was large, well-furnished with a double bed and a bright, substantial adjoining bathroom. Petrie dumped his holdall and jacket on the bed and crossed over to the window. Below him was a terrace with metal tables and chairs, all swept clear of snow. The terrace was bordered by a low parapet and more potted shrubs. The fog was lifting and he could see a village a couple of miles away. Then he went back out to the corridor where Gibson was waiting impatiently. Freya had replaced her boots with light loafers and was wearing gypsy earrings.
