Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  A click of the mouse made the figure rotate.

  “Isn’t that the broken piece, the one in the mount?” Peter said excitedly, indicating one of the polygons with the cursor. “Except here it really does look thirty-five hundred years old!”

  A strip of icons had appeared across the top of the screen; Peter clicked the little picture of a flashlight. Polygons brightened and came into sharper focus, one after another, until the whole pot shone like new, a sturdy but shapely vessel decorated with thorn branches as sprightly as a zenga ink painting.

  All but for a single section. Yes. The final piece waiting to be restored by the computer animation was the one still resting in the mount on the bench.

  Which excited their curiosity.

  They rummaged in the computer files. Other objects were pictured in other files, some restored, some still represented as unretouched assemblies of ancient sherds.

  In shallow drawers beneath the computer bench, Peter and Anne-Marie found the sherds themselves, material objects they could hold and feel. Some were dim with age. Some were bright as new.

  Peter pulled the crumpled and stained sketches from his shirt pocket, the papers Minakis had left him on Mykonos. “See what he wrote here? ‘More is implied by light-speed tunneling than the confirmation of Cramer’s hypothesis—including the possibility that some physical processes may be reversible.’ I couldn’t make sense of that before. Now I think he meant he had found a way to reverse the chemical aging of these surfaces.”

  “Yes,” she said. “He wanted to build a telescope into the past.”

  For three hours they searched the computer files, she translating, he sometimes querying her reading, sometimes moving impatiently to another file, sometimes drifting away for minutes at a time in rapt thought.

  He came out of one such trance with a start. “Those plates you found in the cave—where are they?”

  “I left them in the car. Oh…” Anne-Marie frowned. “They’re worthless. There’s no picture information left on them.”

  “If someone just took an unexposed plate out of its sleeve and waved a torch at it, exposed it all at once, there’s nothing we can do. But if the photographer made a good exposure to begin with and got an image on the plate, and sometime later the plate was exposed a second time, we may have a chance.”

  “How? Either way all the grains have been exposed. That’s why the negatives are plain black.”

  “There’s no physical or chemical difference among them, but there is a time difference. I think we can make the grains that were exposed later revert first.”

  “You are going to try to undevelop an exposed negative?”

  “Well, let’s see,” Peter said. “Let’s just see.”

  Peter plucked out the glass-framed sherd and adjusted the bracket to fit the Voightlander’s film holder, bending its thin metal springs. Then he lowered the hood over the mounted negative, turned, and tapped instructions on the computer keyboard.

  Glass prisms accelerated to a near-supersonic whistle. Starlike points of laser light gleamed on their surfaces—surfaces spinning so rapidly they seemed like motionless, multifaceted columns of glass. Although the laser beams were invisible in the sunlight, their incident stars were reflected on the surfaces of mirrors and lenses along all the paths of the interferometer.

  “This is a different setup from the one you saw—something he didn’t tell me about either. This is his telescope into the past.”

  Peter backed away from the mechanism until he was standing beside Anne-Marie in the rear of the chapel—any flaws in those rotating chunks of glass could cause them to explode. “When a photon in the time-reversed beam hits the objective—in Minakis’s case a scrap of pottery, in our case the overexposed negative—it gets information about the molecule it encounters. The waveguide barrier advances the information a few trillionths of a second backward in time. Then the information goes to the computer, but more importantly it resets the chemical reactions in the object itself.”

  “What are you saying?” Anne-Marie shook her head. “What are you talking about?”

  “Sorry. Just this: we’re causing the past to remanifest itself a few trillionths of a second at a time. Within those few trillionths of a second another wave arrives and sets the chemical-reaction clock back that much more. And another wave, and another after that, and each one ratchets the clock back, instant by instant. And that’s the way we undevelop the picture.”

  The spinning prisms sang, the solenoids clicked, the scanner murmured. They stood watching the monitor screen. The screen was black—plain black, meaning there was no information to be had.

  “If there’s a picture on that negative, it was taken seventy years ago,” she said quietly. “I don’t think I want to wait that long.”

  “For most of those seventy years that plate was in the pitch dark,” Peter replied. “Photochemically, nothing happened. We’re skipping the time nothing happened. When nothing happens, going back in time should take no time at all.”

  As he spoke, the black on the screen softened almost imperceptibly to a mottled gray, in which shapes like distant clouds suggested themselves.

  “I forgot to reverse the polarity,” Peter said suddenly. He leaned over the keyboard, tapping commands, clicking the mouse, peering at the screen, and tapping and clicking again. “Damn it, I don’t know how to do this.”

  “I can read a negative, Peter.” Anne-Marie gazed at the screen in near reverie.

  “I can’t,” he said, still trying. “I want to see it too.”

  Meanwhile the image grew clearer every moment, emerging from the bright chaos on the screen. An arch like a halo appeared above a pale luminous oval with stark little ovals set into it: they were eyes, with gray irises like gemstones and white lashes under thick white brows, and a mouth whose curved white lips were delicately closed—a human face framed in hair that glowed unearthly white.

  Anne-Marie could see the crisp resolution of the image and its fine gradation of tones, growing crisper and finer with each passing moment, but despite her claim that she could read negatives, she could not read the subtleties of expression on this young woman’s face—until Peter found the right keys, and the image reversed with a tingle of electricity. Everything bright was now dark; everything dark was now bright.

  “My God!” he whispered.

  Anne-Marie said nothing but only stared at the portrait on the screen. The woman was very young indeed, although she had a serenity of purpose that seemed older than her years. Her wide pale eyes under dark brows looked deep into the eyes of the watchers, and her mouth enclosed a secret in its gentle smile, and her cascading dark tresses curled about her cheeks and glistened in the artificial light. Her shoulders were bare under loosened hair; behind her, soft chiaroscuro suggested the interior of a cave. On her slight bosom rested a gold pendant depicting two kneeling kri-kri.

  None of these details had caused Peter’s exclamation. “Is that really…?”

  “That’s Sophia, Minakis’s mother,” Anne-Marie said. “She was only fourteen.”

  “But you see the resemblance. Surely you see it.”

  Anne-Marie reluctantly nodded. Time adds the marks of experience to a face, but it does not change that face beyond recognition. The picture on the monitor screen was an exact likeness of Anne-Marie herself, at the age of fourteen.

  Peter hastily struck keys in hopes of storing the image in computer memory. Then they could only watch as the image clouded over and brightened to white while Minakis’s busy time probe, looking ever farther backward, erased it from the negative that had first captured it almost seventy years ago.

  Within a few seconds the camera negative was as fresh and blank as it had been when it was new, never exposed.

  Anne-Marie said, “I didn’t think of that.”

  Peter raised a brow. “Didn’t think of what?”

  “I wasn’t surprised that it can bring back the past. But it hadn’t occurred to me that it can erase the eviden
ce.”

  28

  The only things not covered with dust in Alain Brand’s cramped and windowless office were the telephone on his desktop, on which he had just taken a call from his sister, and the audio equipment on the shelf behind him, playing a version of Schubert’s Winterreise recently remastered to compact disc, on which the piano accompaniment was provided by the late Eric Brand. Alain owned every edition of his father’s recordings, but only in moments of stress bordering on panic did he listen to them. After Anne-Marie’s call he’d brushed aside his ledgers and his correspondence and pressed the CD into its tray, and now he sat enveloped in a chill landscape of sound.

  She’d done as he’d asked; she’d found Minakis’s collection of Minoan artifacts; she was already in Geneva; she was on her way over to give him the details. Not a word of apology for being four days late in calling—and every minute of that time Alain expecting a visit from Karl. He didn’t have the courage to tell her the deal was off, that he’d completely lost his nerve, that not hearing from Karl was almost as frightening as facing him across the desk—that he was afraid to walk home alone at night. He’d assured Anne-Marie that he looked forward to her visit. Then hung up gently. Then swore.

  Fifteen minutes passed before the intercom buzzed. “Monsieur? Votre soeur est ici.”

  He flung open the door and swept into the shop through aisles of books, all smiles, his lips already pursing for a kiss. “Anne-Marie!”

  She raised her camera and aimed it at him, snapping a frame as he stumbled to a halt.

  “Put that away!” He wiped the lank hair off his forehead with a motion that turned him away, his hand half hiding his face.

  “Oh my. You said you admired my photography, Alain,” she said cheerily, and dropped the camera into her bag. “Where shall we talk? Here? Or somewhere darker?”

  “In my office.” Alain glanced nervously at his clerk, not last week’s tall, haughty brunette but her successor, a tall, haughty blonde with plucked eyebrows and bright red lipstick, who stared back at him in wide-eyed puzzlement. “We are not to be disturbed,” he told her, too loudly.

  He led Anne-Marie into the office and closed the door behind them, squeezing behind his desk. She stood a moment, listening to the music. “Winter Journey? Excellent choice. Pure self-pity.”

  Alain twisted in his chair and savagely hit the power button, killing the sound.

  She sat opposite him and withdrew a map from her bag, leaning forward to spread it across his desk—a German topographical map of Crete, four feet long, with tattered edges.

  “Do we really need that?” Alain asked, barely glancing at it.

  “You’ll need it. Did you suppose Minakis kept the artifacts in his house? They’re in a cave on a mountain. No roads for miles. A strenuous climb.”

  He looked where she was pointing, at the elevation lines that bunched and meandered, indicating rough country. “And just how is anyone supposed to pay a discreet visit to a cave on a mountain-top on Crete without every goatherd in the neighborhood watching every step?”

  “It’s a challenge,” she agreed cheerfully, “but consider the rewards.” She took a handful of color prints from her bag and spread them over the map. “You will recognize these. Three Middle Minoan painted cups…a carved alabaster vase…a Late Minoan labrys. The pieces you showed me.”

  He looked at the pictures. They were the same objects as in his Polaroids, but in sharper focus, better lit. Her work.

  “And these, that you didn’t show me.” She fanned more prints. “A necklace of gold and faience beads. Two clay statuettes of the goddess. Bronze and ivory votive figurines. More painted pottery. Another gold labrys.”

  Alain fished in the detritus on the shelf behind him and found a magnifying glass. He took up the prints and peered at them one by one. They displayed an unprecedented treasure, far richer, because far rarer, than any unexcavated tomb in Tuscany or Sardinia, the sort of plunder with which he was familiar.

  She let him look at them in silence until she was sure she had his attention. “And nobody knows where, except you and me.”

  “You forget Minakis.”

  “He’s dead. Didn’t you read about the earthquake?”

  Alain gaped. “He’s dead?” Perhaps there had been news about an earthquake in Greece; it hadn’t made an impression on him. “You’re the only one who knows about this cave?”

  She nodded. “I’ve done what I promised. And you promised, in writing, to give me your affidavit.”

  His fear came racing back. How could he know if she was telling the truth? “I’m afraid that…Anne-Marie, I…Anyway, no court in the world will uphold an illegal agreement.”

  She looked at him without expression, so coldly and openly that his heart shriveled. Clearly she had expected nothing better. “I want my boy back, Alain. If you won’t honor our agreement, I’ll make you a different proposal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She pushed another color print across the desktop. “You told me not to steal. I ignored your advice.”

  His chest tightened involuntarily. “You stole this?” he whispered. It was the one piece whose picture Karl had given him that he had never shown her, the one piece against which his greed had no defense.

  “It’s in a safe-deposit box in a vault at the Berthelier Bank, ten blocks from here. Come see it for yourself.”

  His smile was desperate, as brittle as dry clay. “How can I possibly refuse?”

  The bank guard stood by while Anne-Marie removed the steel drawer from the vault. She carried it to the private carrel where Alain waited, outside the vault’s round steel doors—which were mostly for show, but inside a cage of quite practical steel bars. She set it on the table, inserted the key, and lifted the lid. Alain bent to look inside.

  “The animals are kri-kri wild goats,” she said. “According to Minakis it’s a little younger than the bee pendant from Malia.”

  “May I?” He was surprised at his own hoarse whisper.

  “Please.”

  He lifted the kri-kri pendant into the cool neon light. Up close, the workmanship was more exquisite than even Anne-Marie’s photograph had suggested, the animals swelling with naturalistic vigor. “Extraordinary,” he murmured. So extraordinary that it posed a dilemma of the sort he had never faced before, for he knew as soon as he saw it that he was willing to steal it from his own client, even at the risk of his life.

  He laid the treasure back in the strongbox. “What you want is an affidavit?” As if he didn’t know what she wanted.

  “Stating that you believe you are the father of my child.”

  “I don’t see a problem with that.”

  “And a blood sample to back it up.”

  He would have promised her anything. “All right. But how do I know you won’t take my confession straight to those German scandal rags you work for?”

  “I’ll put the box back and we’ll go upstairs. After you cosign for your own key we’ll discuss terms.”

  The high-ceilinged, marble-columned lobby of the Banque Berthelier had been built in a more genteel era; its present owners had cluttered the echoing space with cheap cubicles where computer screens glowed and telephones burbled. The harassed young woman behind the desk made it clear she had better things to do than rent safe-deposit boxes, especially since the rent on this one had already been collected this morning by one of her colleagues. She glanced over Alain’s identification and compared his signature to the one on the card he’d signed, authorizing him, along with Anne-Marie Brand, to have access to the box. It took her only a few seconds to tap the pertinent information into her terminal. She returned his documents and placed the card in an interoffice folder. “Here’s your key, Mr. Brand,” she said.

  As Alain reached for it Anne-Marie deftly took it from the woman’s hand. “I’ll hold on to that for now,” she said. “We have to hurry, Alain; we have an appointment at the clinic.”

  The clinic was a pay-as-you-go commercial health clinic
on the rue du Rhône, three blocks away. The receptionist showed Alain and Anne-Marie to an examination room where a bored nurse in a starched white uniform asked Alain to remove his jacket—just take one arm out of it, that was fine—and roll up his shirtsleeve. Did he prefer the left arm? That was fine too. All he had to do now was rest his arm on the table and make a fist.

  He barely felt a prick as the big needle went into the vein below his elbow and the fat syringe filled with dark blood. The nurse pulled out the needle and slapped an alcohol-soaked pad on his arm and told him to squeeze.

  As she left the room a ruddy crew-cut fellow with a silk suit draped over his considerable bulk came in through the same door. He didn’t pause to introduce himself. “At Ms. Brand’s request I’ve drafted a document for your signature, Mr. Brand”—not a doctor, then, a lawyer—“in your words, first person, so let me know if there’s anything you object to saying. I’ve got my laptop right here and we can fix it up on the spot.”

  Alain read the printout. It rehearsed events he had tried long and hard to forget: “As a boy I often pressed myself upon my younger sister with erotic purpose, and upon occasion sexually assaulted her.”

  The events at Ayios Nikolaos were recounted in more graphic detail: “I struck her repeatedly about the face until she stopped struggling. I forcibly removed her undergarments. Although she still resisted, I penetrated her. While still inside her, I ejaculated…”

  “Christ!” Alain felt trapped, his jacket half off, his shirtsleeve unraveled, his arm clenched to close his leaking vein.

  “Everything all right, Mr. Brand?”

  Alain ignored the lawyer. “What’s to keep this pornographic fantasy from getting into the hands of the press?” he demanded of his sister, but she stood watching him with wordless contempt.

  “As you see here, on the next page,” the lawyer put in cheerfully, “there is an agreement of confidentiality already signed by Ms. Brand to the effect that this document may only be shown to Mr. Phelps—or used in judicial proceedings.”