Assignment - Black Viking (7 page)

“She was engaged to marry Olaf before he went East. Olaf worked for both brothers. He was the son of a local fisherman, a college graduate, a dedicated sailor. Dr. Eric, who is interested in archaeology as a sideline to his medical practice, is a noted ‘character,’ you might say. Olaf helped Eric build and sail his Viking boats. All that was before Olaf went to the Orient, two years ago. Hong Kong. A round-the-world cruise on a Swedish yacht. He was skipper and jumped ship and vanished in Hong Kong. I’ve requested British M.6 for data they might have from Hong Kong Security. The people he worked for had to get another captain. It’s a reasonable premise that Jannsen cut across the border into Red China and stayed there for about six months.”

“And he simply returned with no explanation?”

Olaf pointed lugubriously at the dossiers. “He never worked for the Gustaffson brothers again. He broke his engagement to Sigrid and never saw her again, either.” “The beautiful bitch,” Durell murmured. “Ole, Jannsen killed the captain of the
Vesper
, just to get aboard the schooner. Sigrid never let on that she knew him. So Olaf knew about the Bruges meeting even before I was summoned there. But who told him? Sigrid? Or is he following orders he received during his stay in Peking?”

“You’re jumping to conclusions, Cajun.”

“I’m jumping in the dark,” Durell complained. “It’s curiouser and curiouser. I missed my contact with the Russians this afternoon, thanks to the storm. Was a backup arrangement made?”

“Stockholm has instructions for you.” Olsen’s serious expression didn’t change. “They’re terribly nervous. It’s as unhappy a situation for your Soviet counterpart as it is for you, I suspect, having to work together.”

“If it isn’t all a smoke screen to throw us off.”

“No, they’re as anxious to settle this weather disturbance as we are. They’ll act in good faith, we think. You won’t miss them in Stockholm tomorrow.”

Durell put out his cigarette. The cold mist rolled over the hotel grounds beyond the window. The sound of the surf was muffled, and dim, plaintive music came from the orchestra in the hotel dining room.

“We can’t plan,” Olsen said suddenly, “beyond your meeting with your Russian KGB friends. But while you’re here at Visby, you might visit Elgiva Neilsen.”

Durell turned. “The famous Swedish poetess?”

“Yes. She lives in a house here on the channel across from Faro. Not far. An hour’s drive, in the fog.”

“Didn’t she win a Nobel prize a year ago—?”

“She’s the one. A most unusual woman. A great friend of the two Gustaffsons. I telephoned her that you were coming to visit her tonight.”

“How can she help?” Durell asked.

“I don’t know,” Olsen admitted. “But she might fill in some details of Peter’s disappearance. She may even know where he is. Professor Gustaffson is the key to this matter; if we find him, we find the weather-making machine. And we find the people who are working it.”

“Simpler said than done.”

“See Elgiva,” Olsen said. “The Swedish Sappho. She’s a most remarkable personality.”

“I’ll bet,” Durell said.

HE FELT all alone in the world, moving through the fog. Bells tolled, and the white glare of a lighthouse beam revolved atop the high cliffs the road —followed. He took the taxi he’d kept waiting, and the cab with Gino and Mario followed obediently. There are no speed limits in Sweden, and the driver, knowing the road, barreled through the darkness at a wild rate. Durell did not check him. He was worried about Olsen’s tension, but Olsen was reliable enough, and maybe the general disquiet was contagious. And he felt an unease himself that had nothing to do with the Stockholm Resident. The job he had to do was bizarre, and so were the people in it; there were too many threads he had to unravel before he could see a pattern in the web.

They flashed through the tiny villages of Lummelunda and then Irevik, where the coast was carved by ages of erosion into uncanny rock formations like giant pagan stelae thrust up from the sea. The caves of Lummelunda, he knew, with their weird, sea-carved shapes, had given rise among these island folk to innumerable folk tales and songs. Tonight, the dark and the mist added to the feeling of primitive isolation, where anything might be possible.

Beyond Irevik, the road turned east to Farosund. The driver followed dark lanes that twisted across wide moors, marked here and there by old stone towers, a lighted window in a farmhouse, a glimpse of a sheep pasture, then a wild and rocky hillside where the sea thundered below, at work on its eternal rock sculpture.

At last the driver took his heavy foot off the gas pedal and pointed through the white mist ahead.

“Miss Elgiva’s place. The road ends here.”

Durell saw nothing through the fog, and said so.

“There is a dip in the clifftop,” the driver said. “The house is sheltered from the wind, just above the sea. But one must walk the rest of the way from this place.”

“All right.”

Durell got out as the second car halted behind them. He, looked through the window at the peasant face of Mario Ginelli and the sullen handsomeness of his nephew.

“Wait here. I’ll send the other taxi back.”

“Si, signore,” said Mario.

The boy said: “It’s a waste of time. This is the end of nowhere.”

“Be quiet, Gino. Must I always have my hand ready to teach you manners?”

The boy was still truculent. “How long we got to freeze out here?”

“Until I come back. I don’t expect trouble, but if you hear a shot, come running. If anybody has followed us, take them. Stop them. And one of you must let me know.”

“We understand,” said Mario.

Durell struck off along the lane that curved north toward Farosund. White fence posts guided him through the mist, and the thunder of the sea shook the ground underfoot. In a moment, the waiting car was swallowed by the unearthly white fog. Durell wondered if Olsen had sent him on a wild-goose chase, and decided simply to play it by ear.

In five minutes he saw the lights of the house, a modem glass-and-stone aerie perched on the lip of the cliff above the sea. Through the huge windows he could see a cheerful fire on the granite hearth. The house was not large, and consisted mainly of one big room and a gallery at one end that probably contained the sleeping quarters. It was a solitary hideout, built cleverly to conform with the irregular cliffs and grottoes of the area.

The door stood open.

“Please come in,” a woman said.

The voice was deep and throaty, with a quality of dark music in it. Durell paused on the threshold.

“Come in, Mr. Durell. I am expecting you. Mr. Olsen phoned to say you were coming. I do not welcome you, because you are not welcome. But since you are here, I will give you some time, which is the most precious gift of all.”

He saw her then, seated in a sling chair to the right of the foyer. The house was cold, as if the chill mist had crept into it; the fire, for all its crackle and glow, did nothing to help.

“Do not step any farther,” the woman said. “This house is private, and I resent intrusions.”

“Miss Elgiva Neilsen?”

“I am she. What do you want of me?”

She did not rise or offer to shake hands or even take her huge, dilated eyes from the fire. Durell felt a little catch in his throat as he regarded her. He had rarely seen a woman more beautiful, and yet he knew at once she was untouchable, a thing of the spirit, remote from the reach of ordinary men. She was in her late twenties; her face was gaunt, with fine bones under pale skin, but her mouth was rich and wide, and her figure, glimpsed under the folds of her dark cloak, promised a voluptuous contrast to her thin, angular face. Under the cloak she wore velvet slacks, a blue denim shirt; her feet were bare, and they looked practical, not overly large, but firm and evenly callused and somewhat grimed by dark granitic sand. She saw him notice them and her generous mouth might have smiled, but he wasn’t sure.

“I walk a great deal on the cliffs and beaches. It helps with my poems. Have you read my poetry, Mr. Durell?” “Some,” he said.

“And as an American, what did you think of them?” “Do Americans think differently than others?”

“Ah, you are sensitive. So unusual. But did you not find my wording—archaic?”

“You evoke a time long past and long dead.”

“The glory never dies,” she said firmly. “We are chained to the past, to the sea roads, the wind and the stars, to the blood of our ancestors.”

“The Vikings shed plenty of blood.”

She ignored his comment. “And did you understand the kennings, the ancient figures of speech? The art of skaldic verse is lost today. Some say my poems are not distinguishable from those of Ari Thorgilsson’s
Landnamabok
, or the skald Snori Sturluson. Have you read the
Heimskringla
, Mr. Durell? Or the
Starlunga
saga?” She did not wait for his reply. “The language is one of metaphorical compounds, and requires explanation to comprehend the poetry.” She smiled wryly. “They have called me a modern skald, a bard who is closer to the past of nine centuries ago than to the world of today. Perhaps so. Perhaps the world was better then.”

“I doubt it, Miss Neilsen.”

“Everyone calls me Elgiva.”

“Elgiva was the wife of Sweyn Forkbeard,” Durell said quietly. “And he was a man with much blood on his hands, too, long ago.”

“Call me Elgiva.” She smiled again. “And come walk with me. I love to walk in the mists.” When he hesitated, she added, “There is no danger. I know every step of the way.”

She stood up and walked out without looking to see if he followed. Durell had no choice but to go after her. The impact of her strange personality did not lessen when they left the house. He was acutely aware of her; she emanated a tingling aura. Her walk was a smooth, gliding motion, her legs invisible under the cloak she now tightened about her. She lifted her face to the fog and said, “Come, follow me,” and went down a flight of steps to the stony beach.

A half light lingered in the southern sky even at this hour, due to their northern latitude. It came through the mists over Faro Sound to make the night oddly luminescent, as if the rocky beach were touched with phosphorus. The steps twisted steeply down to the water’s edge. The sea thundered and filled the air with the sharp iodine smell of salt and kelp. Durell’s eyes adjusted quickly to the uncertain gloom. The combers raced toward the beach in white smoky lines, like charging stallions.

“This way, Mr. Durell.” Elgiva’s voice was vibrant, alive. She pushed back the hood on her cape and shook her long hair free. It was pale brown, like the amber that once brought trade from the Mediterranean through the savage Germanic tribes to the civilizations of the North. Her eyes were almost the same color, but there was a mystic, impassioned light in them. “This is my favorite walk.”

“Do you stay in Gotland much of the year?”

“I write here. I walk, I think, I dream. They call me a witch, locally. Elgiva the Witch.” Her throaty laugh was a bubble that broke in her long throat. Her bare feet moved over the porous stones of the beach without noting their roughness. “But I go to Stockholm now and then. It is necessary, when I finish writing, and must return to the twentieth century, so to speak. They accuse me of awful things when I release myself from the mood of the skalds. They call me a bad woman. In Sweden, that is difficult to achieve, for women here are equal in ah ways, Mr. Durell. But when it is over, I always come back here. I am happiest in this place.”

“Are you happy now?” he asked quietly.

“Such a typically American question!”

“I was thinking of Professor Peter Gustaffson, who has been missing for some months.”

“Ah, yes.”

“You know I have been sent to look for him?”

“He is not here, of course.”

“I didn’t expect him to be. But I wonder if you’ve heard from him. You were a good friend of Peter’s.” “And Doctor Eric, too,” she said bluntly. “I loved them both.” She paused. “They were both my lovers, Mr. Durell. Both wonderful men, whom I adore, each in a different way.”

“I’m more interested in Professor Peter’s weather modification control experiments.”

“Yes, there are rumors—things have been so strong— so wonderful—"

“Wonderful?”

“I do not mind winter. It is part of me. I feel united with a storm of wind and snow and ice.” She paused. “It is serious, about Peter?”

Olsen had not said how much this woman could be told. He wondered if she really meant it when she said she’d been the mistress of both men. They came to a place on the beach where the sea had carved a great bowl of rock out of the cliff. The dark salt water surged and bellowed and then sucked out of the crevice with a long, angry sigh. A narrow ledge led them around the bowl to a cave entrance, where she paused.

“This is the place, according to legend, where a great battle was fought, and they say that far inside this cave are the bones of Viking warriors who were buried here. But no one has ever found them. Eric and I often explored here. It smells of the age of heroes and mighty deeds. Eric and I have much in common, loving the past. But Peter was the man I usually preferred. He dreamed of creating the olden days, in fact.”

“How do you mean?”

“It was a world of ice and snow and bitter wind, and men had to be strong to survive. They had to be giants.” “Peter wanted to bring back that world?”

“You sound incredulous.”

“I am.”

“Peter thought that if he could change our climate, we would all be better for it. Warm air thins a man’s blood, makes him effete, weak, languid. Only in the cold, conquering nature, has man developed to his highest peak.” “It’s a matter of opinion,” Durell murmured. “Was Peter serious?”

“He made it his life’s work.”

“And was he successful?”

“He told me so, the last time I spoke to him.”

“When was that? And where?”

She faced the dark sea, her amber hair agleam with drops of salt spray. The night mists shrouded the clifftop and cut them off from all the rest of the world.

“What will you do to him, if you find him?”

“We’re not sure he’s responsible for what has happened.” Durell told her briefly what was known and suspected. Elgiva listened attentively, with a small smile. She was strikingly elemental, and he could understand why the local people thought of her as a witch. “We don’t even know if Professor Peter is alive. If so, we think he must be an unwilling captive of people who use his genius for political ends.”