Invisible Things (23 page)

“The device,” Sophie said. “The weapon my father was working on producing—the one Nobel believed would be so powerful that it would put an end to war. The one for which you have the plans!”

“Events are proceeding so quickly just now,” said Elsa Blix, “that your father’s device may soon be superseded, at least if the work Bohr and his colleagues are now pursuing comes to fruition. But the plans themselves still have more than ordinary interest, especially insofar as they may speed up progress toward actually building a bomb, detonation mechanism and all.”

“Nuclear fission?” Sophie asked.

“Is that what they have decided to call it?” Elsa Blix said with interest. “It has also been called splitting the atom.”

She fell silent, and Sophie ventured the timid observation that she did not really understand why she was there.

“I know you do not,” said Elsa Blix. “Where to start, though?”

“I want to know what happened at the factory when my parents died,” Sophie said, a little more boldly.

“Ah, yes,” said Elsa Blix, “well, you are certainly aware of the fundamental issues, Sophie. I am not sure how much you know already, but perhaps I will begin by telling you that you know far more than you think you do, but that there is also one very important thing you do not know.”

“All right,” Sophie said impatiently, “tell me what that thing is, then.”

“That is exactly what I intend to do,” said Elsa Blix. “Sophie, you believe that we are enemies, but I can assure you that we have more in common than not.”

How could that be?

Elsa Blix stood up and began pacing.

“I have been following the revelations in the Scottish papers about your great-aunt—your grandmother, I should say.”

“So you know about that,” Sophie said wretchedly. Gosh, how Tabitha would have hated the thought of Sophie having this particular conversation with someone like Elsa Blix! “I have not seen a Scottish newspaper for over a month; did they get hold of the story about Tabitha’s relationship with Alfred Nobel, and put it all out there for everyone to see?”

“They did,” said Elsa Blix. “It is now widely known that she gave birth to Alan Hunter herself, that he was Alfred Nobel’s child, and that you, Sophie, are the grandchild and sole living heir not just of Tabitha Hunter but of Alfred Nobel.”

“He did not have any children from his marriage?” Sophie asked.

“No,” Elsa Blix said, sounding pained. “It happens he did have one other child, also outside of wedlock, but the fact of that child’s existence is not known to him.”

“He had another child?” Sophie said, surprised.

“First, a confession. Sophie, as soon as I began looking into this business of Tabitha Hunter and IRYLNS, I learned about your own visit there this past summer. You made your way in by a subterfuge—you had an appointment with a doctor next door and concealed yourself about the premises and then climbed over the wall to get into IRYLNS through the garden.”

“Yes, that is correct,” Sophie said. “Why does it matter to you, though?”

“It occurred to me that I might well be very interested in what you had said to that doctor.”

“To Mr. Braid?” Sophie asked.

“He is a neurohypnotist, Sophie; do you remember that he put you into a trance and asked you questions about what you remembered of the accident that killed your parents?”

“How do you know this?”

“I had one of my people infiltrate his office and recover the records of your visit. He asked you questions, and you wrote down your answers; my agent photographed the pages, and we have had them transcribed. Sophie, your penman-ship leaves much to be desired!”

Sophie looked at her with outrage. To be criticized for messy handwriting by a woman presumably responsible for all sorts of atrocities! But curiosity got the better of her.

“So what did I say?” she asked.

“You provided a very full and clear account of the incident—your language was childish, perhaps because you were so young at the time of the explosion, but I must admit that my own puzzlement as to how you survived was relieved by these passages.”

“You have to tell me!”

“I will tell you, though you will likely be very angry with me indeed once you learn how it all happened.”

“Were you directly responsible for the explosion?” Sophie asked. She did not know whether she would receive a straight answer, but she felt she might as well come out with the question.

“Not directly,” said Elsa Blix, “but indirectly, yes, and morally you would certainly say I caused it.”

“Did you pay that laborer to set the bomb, and then arrange for him to be killed afterward?” Sophie asked, thinking of what Nobel had told her about the Russian man who had fallen into a quarry.

“I arranged for someone to blow the place up,” Elsa Blix said—how could she admit it so calmly? “But it was not a Russian laborer, Sophie, and it was not a matter of paying a bribe.”

“So? Who was it, then?”

“Your mother, Sophie, had been having great difficulty sleeping in the months after you were born. She had become virtually unable to rest, and I offered my talents as a hypnotist to see if I could help her with relaxation exercises.”

“She let you hypnotize her?” Sophie said, bemused but getting a very bad feeling about where this might be going.

“We had sessions two or three times a week for that whole autumn,” Elsa Blix said. “I would put her under, and then give her a set of instructions. I had known for some months that I would have to leave; Alan and I did not share the same notions as to what should be done with the weapon, and I had begun to find working for Nobel almost unbearably constraining.”

“What did you do?” Sophie asked, working hard to keep her voice level and unemotional.

“I gave your mother, while she was under hypnosis, a set of instructions that would be cued by the simplest set of words—all I had to do was put a telephone call through to her while she was on the spot at the factory, and say to her, ‘The snow is falling heavily now, Rose,’ and she would pass into the trance state. Once in that state, I could tell her exactly what I wanted her to do, and she would not question any part of my instructions. I telephoned that day, and she did just as I told her to—she went and found a stick of dynamite and set it up with a detonator and blew the place up.”

Sophie stared. The woman must be a sociopath. How could she describe this to Sophie so calmly?

“Aren’t you going to ask me how you survived, though, Sophie?” said Elsa Blix.

“I don’t want to have anything to do with you!” Sophie said, feeling quite sick.

“You have no choice,” said Elsa Blix, sounding faintly confused.

Sophie suddenly wondered whether the Snow Queen might not have much less firm a grip on reality than Sophie had previously supposed—one could become very odd, she guessed, living in this kind of isolation.

“Your mother saved you, Sophie. This is what you described to Braid; your conscious self seemed to have no memory of it, but to your second self it was as clear and vivid as if you had seen the incidents earlier that day on a newsreel at the cinema. You described to Braid your mother picking you up but not responding at all to your cries and actually throwing you out of a window, with more strength than you imagined possible—and even as you landed on the ground outside the window, the thump of a massive explosion could be heard behind you. You had traveled just far enough from the building that you were quite safe, with only a broken leg; one of the workers in the outer area of the factory came and carried you away before the flames could reach you. The power of the maternal instinct had defeated even the most modern and scientific form of brainwashing in the world.”

“What am I supposed to say?” Sophie asked incredulously. “Do you think it is all right for me to stand here and talk to you, as if I might ever forgive you for what you’ve done?”

“I look on this story as cautionary,” Elsa Blix said, ignoring Sophie’s question. “I should have made sure you would die. I did not know it then, but I had a very good reason to want you off the face of the planet.”

“Why did it matter to you whether I lived or died?”

“I did not know then that your father was Nobel’s son,” said Elsa Blix. “If I had, my animosity would have run even deeper than it did—for I, too, am the child of Alfred Nobel. . . .”

“You are not!” Sophie said, though the words were more expressive of shock and surprise than of actual disbelief. She remembered Nobel’s having mentioned his acquaintance with Elsa Blix’s socialite mother. It was at least feasible, she supposed, to imagine a liaison leading to the production of a child.

“The only thing I want, Sophie, is for you to go back to Nobel—thus far he has refused to admit me to his presence—and tell him this. Tell him he had another child, and that he needs to write a place for me into his will. You and I are the two heirs of Alfred Nobel, Sophie; I will not harm you, but you must go and plead my case. I will come with you, and you will persuade him to see me—a father cannot deny his child, can he?”

It was the most extraordinary thing Sophie had ever heard, and yet in a strange way she could see the justice of it.

“Why didn’t you tell him before now?” she asked.

“I did not know it when I met him all those years ago,” said Elsa Blix. “My mother told me only on her deathbed, though the man I have always known as my father was very cold to me in a way that made me suspect something was amiss, and of course my mother committed many later infidelities. But, Sophie, I think you cannot imagine the depth of the rage I have felt for Alfred Nobel, ever since he turned on me those many years ago. He hired me, he made me think of him as a sort of mentor, and then when push came to shove he took Alan’s side against mine.”

“But it was a question about the weapon, wasn’t it?” Sophie said. “Not a personal question at all, but a philosophical one?”

“Is there any difference between the two things?” Elsa Blix asked.

Suddenly Sophie saw Elsa Blix as another version of Tabitha Hunter, someone impossibly distorted by a set of abstract commitments that in certain respects might have been admirable ones but that led to a kind of separation from the rest of humanity—a separation that negated the real, ordinary connections between human beings in which the ethical life must surely reside. There was some of Tabitha in Sophie, too, and Sophie could even feel that she had some shred of similarity to Elsa Blix, who was her aunt—her half aunt?—after all. Some, but not much—one could choose what kind of a person one would become.

“Even if I tell him this and he believes it,” Sophie said slowly, “and even if he says he will see you, Nobel might not want to write you into his will.”

“It is enough if he sees me,” said Elsa Blix. “I am guessing that in his heart of hearts he knows I am his natural successor. He is a merchant of death—I am just showing him the true face of the work he has been doing all these years. I do not in all honesty care about the money. I will continue to build my own company, if he does not choose to bestow a share of his wealth on me. I want the public recognition that I am his child; only then will I destroy the plans, and if he will not acknowledge me in public, then I will sell them to the European Federation.”

“The plans are for a bomb so powerful it could destroy an entire city, just like that,” Sophie said slowly. “A bomb so small I could probably carry it in one of the panniers of my bicycle! You do not really mean to hand such a thing over to the federation, do you?”

“Nobody knows what I will do,” said Elsa Blix, “not even myself. But once such a bomb has been conceived, sooner or later it will be built, for better and for worse—that is the nature of the human animal.”

Sophie thought she spoke truly.

“Is that really all?” she asked. “I promise to say all this to Nobel, say it in a serious way, and just like that you will let me and Mikael go?”

“That is all,” said Elsa Blix. “So long as you agree to the condition, I will fly you south this very evening. There is one other thing, I think, that I must ask before we go to find your friend. Those plans—do you know how they came into my possession?”

“How?” asked Sophie.

“That was not a rhetorical question,” said Elsa Blix, looking rather puzzled. “I genuinely want to know—I thought you must have had something to do with it, Sophie, at least once I learned of your existence.”

“What do you mean?”

“Around the same time those images appeared on that absurd old-fashioned hunk of machinery in Edinburgh—I was able to obtain them by having one of my agents photograph the document from Nobel’s files—I, too, received a sort of visitation.”

“What was it?” Sophie asked.

“I thought you might have some notion yourself. I had a dream, a dream in which I very clearly saw your mother. Rose—ah, she was the only agent I could use for the destruction of the factory; nobody else would have let me hypnotize him or her so willingly, but I was sorry she had to die!”

Sophie stared at Elsa Blix. The woman was an utter psychopath—did she think Sophie could just ignore this sort of statement?

“In this dream,” Blix continued, “your mother gave me a strangely precise set of instructions. I felt like a madwoman for following them, and the story of my adventures along the way is another tale altogether, but when I woke up I found myself under an almost irresistible compulsion to do just as she had told me. I went to the Fabergé workshop in Saint Petersburg and found a little old craftsman who had been consulted as to the metalworking technology needed for the explosive chamber of your father’s device. After some persuasion—don’t worry, Sophie, there was no violence involved, and it was only a slight stretch of the truth to represent myself as an emissary of your mother—he gave me a safe-deposit key that Rose Hunter had left with him more than fifteen years ago. I went to a bank on the Nevsky Prospekt; I was led to an underground vault, and there in a small metal box were the plans. . . .”

“Had my mother put them there?”

“Yes. Alan thought it too dangerous to have a second set circulating, and fought to keep everything within the factory, but your mother worried that sabotage might destroy all of his work and wanted to have some way of reconstructing it in the event of its being lost.”