Invisible Things (17 page)

It was nice and warm inside. They checked their coats and scarves and gloves at the cloakroom, where the attendant was also so obliging as to take custody of Mikael’s sled, and walked quickly through the rooms. There was not a great deal to see, but it was of considerable interest, especially the pictures of so many people they knew from the institute: Pauli, Dirac, Hevesy, Meitner. Sophie felt a surge of pride at this irrefutable evidence that intellectual eminence in physics was not exclusively the preserve of men, and spared a thought to hope that Lise Meitner and her nephew had arrived safely at their destination.

Afterward they bought cups of cocoa at the small tea-room in back of the museum, but Mikael was keen to get back outdoors. Sophie went to use the ladies’ lavatory, then sought out her friend in the central hall. She found him near the exit and gazing at an almost ceremonial spectacle taking place some feet away. Perhaps as many as a dozen executives from the offices upstairs—one could tell they were important people by the way their suits were cut and from their curiously uniform, fair, pink, prosperous look—were gathered in a sort of pack around the figure of someone Sophie guessed must be a visiting dignitary.

“Look at her!” Mikael breathed. “Why, she’s utterly magnificent!”

The object of his admiration was a tall woman—over six feet, and slender as a birch tree—dressed in a long white fur coat over a white trouser suit and white leather boots. From behind, she looked like an apparition from a modern fairy tale—indeed, she could easily have been the Snow Queen of Mikael’s childhood. Her gleaming bronze hair was partly covered by an immaculate white fur hat in the Russian style.

And as she turned, her face came into view and Sophie gasped. There was no doubt—it was Elsa Blix!

The woman was moving quite purposefully in their direction, the pack of gentlemen in suits following in her wake.

“This trip has been a complete waste of time,” she announced in English.

Her eyes passed over Sophie, then came to rest on Mikael. She looked him up and down, then said, “I wonder if something might be found to make it worth my while. . . .”

There was no doubt Elsa Blix was a strikingly good-looking woman—a strikingly good-looking woman with a pronounced interest in Mikael, who stepped forward now and shook Elsa Blix’s hand with an eagerness that made Sophie feel bitter and mean-spirited.

“Mikael Petersen, at your service,” he said. He seemed almost hypnotized by the woman’s nearness; the air was full of her scent, a strange, pure, cold fragrance like the taste of biting on a twig in the woods in winter.

Elsa Blix kept Mikael’s hand in her own right hand and raised her left one to brush his face, sweeping along the crest of his shoulder and the top part of his arm where he had been hurt in the attack.

“Yes,” she murmured, “I see: most interesting, most convenient. Do I deduce that you were at a certain birthday party the other week?”

Now even some vestigial notion of politeness couldn’t stop Sophie from staring.

Elsa Blix raised her left hand again, this time with her fingers drawn up into a loose fist so that the large colored stone on her ring finger was level with the bridge of Mikael’s nose. His eyes took on a faraway look, and to Sophie’s absolute dismay, as the Snow Queen—it was impossible not to think of her that way—moved her hand first to the right and then to the left, Mikael’s head moved with it.

“Have you heard mention of my ice palace?” said Elsa Blix. Mikael was following her words intently; she let her hand fall to rest on his cheek. “I have made my home in Spitsbergen for some years now. You will find it pleasant there, despite the cold. The only danger is that you will find it so beautiful you will never want to leave. . . .”

Sophie coughed. She had to do something, and it was the only thing she could think of.

“Perhaps you, too, will come and visit me in Spitsbergen?” said Elsa Blix, turning to Sophie and smiling, her hoarse voice low enough that only Sophie could hear her.

“Never!” Sophie said. She was by now so upset and angry that she was ready to knock the woman’s hand to her side and drag Mikael away from her, but Elsa Blix retracted her hand herself. She snapped her fingers, and Mikael shook his head like a wet spaniel, some modicum of awareness returning to his eyes.

Elsa Blix cocked her head at Sophie.

“Not even if I have something you want?” she asked Sophie, her voice unpleasantly insinuating.

“There is nothing I want so much that it would make me come to you,” Sophie answered, though she felt the lie in her words: Elsa Blix could tell Sophie things about her parents known to nobody else alive.

“Really?” said Elsa Blix.

She snapped her fingers carelessly, then turned to the retinue of businessmen. They had been standing some meters off, in bewilderment and barely suppressed impatience, waiting for her to finish this mystifying colloquy.

She swept out of the museum, down the steps, and into her car, a magnificent white behemoth whose uniformed chauffeur stood to attention beside the passenger door at the back. When she had gotten into the car, he closed the door after her and saluted the group at the top of the stairs, then got into the driver’s seat.

Sophie looked around for Mikael, but he had gone to get their things from the cloakroom. He appeared a moment later and flung Sophie’s coat at her; he had already carelessly buttoned his own around him, though the buttons were out of step with the holes, giving him an asymmetrical, disheveled look. He had the sled under his arm and he strode past Sophie without a word.

She fought her way into her coat and scarf and ran after him. What on earth was he doing?

Now he was bending down behind the car’s rear bumper; he had put the sled down on the ground and was fiddling with its tether. As Sophie watched, he tugged experimentally on the cord, then mounted both feet on the sled and hunched down in an aerodynamic position.

One of the men in suits was going down the steps to try to get Mikael away from the car. But the vehicle was already pulling out and away, towing Mikael behind on his little sled as its speed increased.

“Mikael!” Sophie shouted. “Come back!”

He lifted his hand to show he’d heard, but did not turn around to look, and a moment later he had vanished around the corner.

Mikael’s bizarre departure struck Sophie as an absolute calamity. The only tiny grain of consolation she could find in the situation was that clearly the others, without knowing at all who she and Mikael were, shared her sense of the utter undesirability of this development.

The most senior-looking man in a suit had run out into the middle of the square in his dress shoes. He stood now with the slush and snow up almost to his knees, uttering words that Sophie could not understand, because they were Swedish, but which almost certainly meant something like, “What the
hell
just happened here?”

Temperamentally, Sophie might have chosen to endure the horror of Mikael’s disappearance on her own rather than surrounded by perplexed but kindly businessmen. When she was upset, she preferred to inflict herself only on herself, as it were, enforcing a stringent emotional
cordon sanitaire
until the storm was over. But there were certainly benefits of a practical sort to having it happen this way.

Even once the gentlemen had taken Sophie behind the scenes and sat her down and begun asking questions, though, it was difficult to know what to say. She had no grounds, really, for asserting that Elsa Blix had just kidnapped Mikael. To all intents and purposes, he had gone with her quite willingly. Only Sophie’s gut told her that Elsa Blix was the villain in the piece. What a strange coincidence, too, that just the person with whom Sophie had been hoping to talk about her parents should be conducting some kind of business with Alfred Nobel. . . .

None of the people she spoke to could make any sense of the allusion to the attack on the Mansion of Honor, but it made Sophie wonder whether Miss Blix might have been able to hypnotize or even brainwash Mikael especially easily as a consequence of some agent to which he had been exposed that night. Just as some unknown natural immunity had protected Sophie from the initial effects suffered by Mikael, so she seemed relatively invulnerable to the force of a personality to which Mikael had shown himself deeply susceptible.

She had mentioned Niels Bohr early on, with a noticeably positive effect in terms of the quality of attention the men paid to her. There were three of them now: the senior gentleman—who had replaced his wet shoes with a pair of carpet slippers for whose impropriety he had several times apologized—and two quite young ones, one of whom had given Sophie a funny wink that made her feel she was among friends. But the name Arne Petersen, when she finally thought of saying it some interminable minutes into the conversation—Mikael could be
anywhere
by now!—was like a magic key.

“Arne Petersen!” the senior gentleman said, then conferred with the two others in a rapid burst of Swedish.

“Yes,” said Sophie hurriedly, “Mikael is Arne’s younger brother, and we have been staying at his lodgings—oh, please will you telephone him and see what can be done?”

They tried to put through a telephone call to Mr. Petersen, only he could not be reached. Then they made a series of other phone calls, Sophie sitting all the while with a cup of coffee and an iced pastry she could not force down, though it looked very nice, and an awful sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She could almost
feel
Mikael traveling farther and farther away, as though they were attached by a stretch cord whose tensile strength was being tested to its utmost limit. If only it could twang him back to her!

When she asked them what Elsa Blix was doing at the Nobel Museum, the gentlemen said that she had been in town for a set of negotiations that had broken down, after several days of butting heads, when Elsa Blix flatly refused to talk to anyone other than Nobel himself. Told that his health would not permit it, she had chosen to withdraw from the conversation altogether.

Nobody said as much, but Sophie felt fairly certain that they harbored just as much suspicion and hostility toward Elsa Blix as Sophie did herself.

The trouble, it emerged, was that nobody could actually say what crime had been committed. Mikael was a minor, it was true, but of an age to be fully capable of making choices. Who was to say he had not followed Elsa Blix of his own free will? Because it had taken them a good half hour to sort out who was who and the basic facts about the situation, they had lost the chance—were such a thing even possible—of asking the police to set up some kind of roadblock to detain Elsa Blix before she could leave the city.

“Where do you think they have gone,” Sophie asked timidly, “assuming Mikael is still with Miss Blix?”

The men looked at one another, and then the nicer of the two young men leaned forward and said, “Sophie, there is no way of knowing whether or not your friend is still with her, but to the best of our knowledge she was to be driven directly to an airstrip north of the city. Her private aero-plane had been precleared for takeoff. She made a telephone call from this very office to check that there were no delays; I put the call through for her and was able to hear every word. . . .”

“Her aeroplane, you say?” said Sophie, feeling a little sick.

“It is entirely possible,” added the senior gentleman, exchanging looks with the others, “that she has taken the boy onto the plane with her.”

“Where are they going?” Sophie asked.

“To Spitsbergen, unless her plans have changed.”

“To Spitsbergen!”

When Arne finally telephoned, in response to one of the half a dozen frantic messages left for him anywhere his presence seemed even remotely likely, the chief businessman told him quite succinctly what had happened to Mikael. Sophie felt very relieved that she was not the one to have to explain, though she knew Arne in no sense considered her responsible for Mikael’s safety; it was more the other way round.

When he asked to speak to her, she took the telephone receiver with a mix of relief and trepidation.

“Are you all right?” he said urgently.

“Yes, I think so—but, Arne, how are we going to get Mikael back?”

Arne’s silence told her what she knew already, that it would not be simple or easy.

“Sophie, the first thing will be for me to take you to see Alfred Nobel,” he said.

Even in her distress, Sophie felt a surge of frustration and anger that it should take something so dramatic as Mikael’s disappearance to precipitate the long-awaited meeting with Nobel.

“What should I do right now, though?” she asked.

“The people at the museum will send you home in a taxi,” Arne answered. “Tell Mrs. McGregor what happened, and ask her to help you pack. Don’t wait up for me—it may be very late by the time I get home; I still have to visit several factories and confer with their managers about the new security precautions—but we will leave first thing in the morning for Nobel’s estate in the archipelago.”

He rang off without saying anything else of substance, and the most junior businessman shepherded Sophie to another, much smaller office and made the call to the taxi company.

Almost the worst thing about telling Mrs. McGregor was the subsequent outpouring of her sympathy, which took the form of incessant and highly annoying offers of tea, biscuits, cake, etc., until Sophie finally snapped at her and told her to go away. Sophie was deeply impatient to talk to Arne again, but it had been clear from their telephone conversation that he did not expect to arrive before midnight at the earliest, and possibly rather later. She could not face trying to put a call through to Fru Petersen—Arne would have spoken to her by now anyway—so she began to sort through her possessions.

It seemed nearly impossible to travel light in northern climes during the winter. She put on as many clothes as she could fit over one another in layers, having decided it would be sensible to sleep in them—they might be leaving very early in the morning, after all—and packed her school satchel with a few essentials: her sponge bag, emptied of almost everything other than her toothbrush and tooth powder and a small flannel for emergency face washing; the leather wallet with her passport and other travel documents and bankbook, with a quite thick wad of bills in several currencies tucked inside the pages of the passport (she had left untouched the money Fru Petersen had sewn into the hem of her coat); a few pairs of clean underthings and a spare blouse.