Lord of All Things Page 26

  “There have been studies like this before, of course,” he said. “But so far the research focus has always been on how existing flora and fauna change when spring comes earlier, or when maximum temperatures are higher—that kind of thing. I’m interested in something else, though. I’d like to go to an island that has been completely covered in ice for hundreds of thousands of years and that is only now losing its ice shield as a result of global warming. What happens next? How does nature reconquer such an environment? What kinds of plants take root first? What kinds of animals will settle there? That sort of thing.” He took a sip of coffee and made a face. It had gone cold. “That could give us some very interesting perspectives on what happened at the end of previous ice ages.”

  “It sounds fascinating,” Charlotte said and suddenly felt the urge to take part in an expedition herself. Wasn’t that what she had always wanted? Instead, she had spent all her years at Harvard in dusty seminar rooms. “When are you setting off?”

  Adrian gave a wry smile. “Oh man! You have no idea the kind of preparation goes into an expedition like this. It’s just unbelievable. Talking to sponsors all the time, mountains of paperwork, thousands of telephone calls—most leading nowhere…I don’t even know yet which islands might be suitable.”

  “If you want a paleoanthropologist along on the trip—okay, a part-qualified paleo person—just let me know,” Charlotte said.

  He looked like he was seriously considering it. “You can certainly give me your e-mail address,” he said.

  The day after the baptism Brenda took Charlotte to the airport—on her own this time. Just the two of them, friends from way back. A light fog hung in the air, but it didn’t seem to have affected the flights. It affected Charlotte though. Every time she saw fog in Boston, she thought of Hiroshi.

  “You’re not worried about Thomas going off to Buenos Aires?” she asked Brenda.

  Her friend just laughed. “Not at all. I tease him about it, of course. You know, he was single for so long I think he sometimes still needs to feel he’s a free man despite his wife and child.”

  The airport was busy. An announcement repeatedly came over the loudspeakers that Mr. Schwartzing should kindly report to the information desk.

  “Six weeks, though. That’s a long time.”

  “Well, sure it is. It’ll give him a chance to see how good he has it at home with me. Anyway, apart from all that…” Then Brenda gave a start and suddenly grabbed Charlotte’s arm to drag her off in another direction. “Hey! Let’s go this way. What do you think?”

  But it was too late; Charlotte had already seen the magazine. Five copies of it lined up in a row in the news racks of the kiosk in front of them.

  James was on the cover. James being led out of a building by police officers.

  “My God,” Charlotte murmured. As though in a trance, she stepped up to the newsstand, picked up a copy, and opened it. James in handcuffs. His wife Terry with a black eye, her expression furious and her lawyer at her side.

  Brenda sighed. “I was so hoping you wouldn’t get to hear about it,” she confessed. “I told the whole family to steer clear of the topic. I threw away all the gossip magazines in the house…”

  “What happened?” Charlotte asked numbly. She leafed through the rest of the magazine. It seemed to be a local rag with listings, ads for restaurants and nightclubs, and a few news features about the Boston jet set.

  “Oh, what can I say? When he married that Terry Miller, he got more than he bargained for. They’ve been married for—what?—two years now? And for a year and a half, they’ve been at daggers drawn. The whole town is talking about it.”

  “Goodness.” Charlotte took a closer look at the photo. He looked dissolute. Bloated, old before his time. Unhappy.

  Brenda put an arm around her. “It’s not your fault, Charley. None of it’s your fault. It’s the money that turned him bad, nothing else. It was all that money.”

  Surprisingly, it wasn’t snowing in Moscow. Instead, it was raining, pouring down torrents.

  “That’s climate change for you,” her mother said as she met Charlotte at the airport, using her diplomatic passport to get her past the lengthy immigration procedures. “Everyone’s talking about it these days. Over in Siberia the permafrost is melting for the first time in centuries, and anything built on top of it is sinking down into the mud—pipelines, roads, houses. It’s a huge problem.” She pulled up the hood of her raincoat as they left the building. “I’m just fed up with all this rain. You would have done better to come in the summer.”

  “But your birthday’s in November,” Charlotte reminded her.

  “You still could have come in summer.”

  Charlotte raised her eyebrows. “I’m not that fond of Moscow.” She didn’t find the rain that bad, though. So far at least. It made for a change.

  “By the way, we have another visitor from France at the moment,” her mother said as they drove along the M-10 from Sheremetyevo airport into downtown Moscow. “He’s your third cousin, André Faucault. His father is Pierre Faucault, son of Marie-Claire Baratte, who is…now let me see…yes, she’s your great-grandfather’s sister’s daughter. On your father’s side, of course.”

  “André Faucault?” Charlotte pondered this news. It sounded a lot like one of her mother’s regular attempts at matchmaking. “Do I know him?”

  “Oh, you’ve met before. It was at Aunt Sophie’s wedding.”

  Charlotte groaned aloud. “Maman! I was five years old at the time!”

  “Well, quite. And André must have been seven.” She was bubbling over with enthusiasm for this André. “He’s studying in Strasbourg, at the school of government there, and he has a very good chance of getting a post on the supreme court. He’s the best student in his class. And such a nice young man, I can hardly believe it.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he is,” Charlotte responded dutifully.

  “I’m sure the two of you will get along beautifully,” her mother said happily.

  As it turned out, they would at least never have a single argument—since try as they might, they would never agree on anything to argue about. André was a preppy young man with a prominent Adam’s apple and the manners of an aide-de-camp. His favorite topics of conversation were his studies and knotty legal problems. Whenever Charlotte said anything, he would listen attentively and then agree with every word. She could have told him she had very different ideas about conversation, but she got the impression he wouldn’t have understood. Other than that, the birthday party passed quite cheerfully. Even her father took the day off, acting as though he had no idea what the words “pressing appointment” or “binding obligation” might mean.

  The next day they were invited to the private viewing of an exhibition by several young French artists, supposedly the face of the twenty-first century. Charlotte’s father was sponsoring the exhibition, so they all had to go along and listen to him make a speech. Then the Russian secretary of state for cultural cooperation would make a speech. It was all high politics; the artists stood around uncertainly at the edge of the room, looking just as irrelevant as they really were. Charlotte was surprised to see the Russian speaker was none other than Mikhail Yegorov, who had been ambassador back in Tokyo.

  “Mikhail Andreievitch!” she said to him once the speeches were over and the buffet had begun. “Do you remember me?”

  He did. “Charlotte? But of course! I had been wondering—isn’t that my old friend Jean’s charming daughter, I asked myself? And indeed it is!” He sketched a bow. “And I can’t help but notice that you speak excellent Russian.”

  “A little bit,” Charlotte corrected him. She no longer found it quite as easy to pick up a new language as when she was a child.

  “You know each other?” her father asked in surprise as he brought two glasses of champagne.

  “From a reception in Tokyo,” Charlotte
said, switching to French. She looked at Yegorov. “If I recall correctly, you were talking about some place called Devil’s Island at the time.”

  Yegorov frowned, remembering. “Ah yes. C’est vrai.” He pointed a finger at Charlotte’s father. “I had just been telling you about my grandparents when your daughter joined us. She told us about some island as well, didn’t she?”

  Charlotte nodded. “The Island of the Saints. A Shinto shrine.”

  Father laughed awkwardly, obviously not remembering. He pressed one glass of champagne into Yegorov’s hand and the other into Charlotte’s. “I’ll go fetch one for myself.” With that, he vanished into the crowd.

  Yegorov raised his glass to Charlotte. “My father was stationed on the coast. Amderma base, south of the nuclear test ranges at Novaya Zemlya. In other words, at the end of the world. He flew Tupolev interceptors and was always on the alert for an attack by the NATO aggressors. I was allowed to go and visit him there once—although by then he was no longer an active combat pilot, he was a trainer. What a desolate place! I remember bare cliffs, ice, a churning sea, and nothing growing anywhere. It’s the Arctic tundra up there. It was hellishly cold, there were storms all the time, and the residential blocks were barely insulated. The airstrip was just a dirt track, and the soldiers used to scratch lichen from the rocks to dry it and smoke instead of tobacco.” He laughed. “The glorious Soviet Army was no place for the fainthearted.”

  “It sounds dreadful,” Charlotte said. She looked at the former ambassador. He had aged. His bushy eyebrows shimmered gray, almost white, and he looked thin.

  He nodded, reminiscing. “Oh yes, dreadful is the word. And I was there in the summer. Even now I hardly dare imagine what it was like in winter.” He took a sip from his glass. “Sometimes I can hardly believe the places mankind has chosen to live. If we ever get as far as building spaceships to travel to the stars, then I tell you one thing, Charlotte: the universe will have to watch out. We humans get everywhere, and once we’re there, we stay.”

  Charlotte had to smile. “You’re a philosopher, Mikhail Andreievitch.”

  He waved away the compliment, although he was clearly flattered. “My grandfather was a silent sort of man, but you always felt he thought a great deal. He wasn’t easily frightened. No matter what the trouble was, he always kept his cool. Except when he came to talk of Saradkov Island. Devil’s Island.”

  “It sounds downright scary.”

  “He had to land there once, because of engine trouble. It was difficult enough landing a jet plane, but beyond that he must have experienced something that frightened him to death. I don’t know what—he never told me much more about it—but he wasn’t the only one. A lot of the sailors who ply the Arctic Ocean would swear on the Bible there’s something wrong with that island. That it’s cursed. They say the devil himself sleeps there, buried under the ice.” Yegorov stared thoughtfully into the stream of fine bubbles rising in his glass. “Interestingly, there’s also an old Siberian legend about a great war between heaven and mankind that lasted until one of the captains of the heavenly host fell and was swallowed by the ice. A black angel. The legend says that if the ice ever melts, the black angel will awaken once more and the war will break out anew—which is why it is always winter in that part of the world. Because the winter came to save mankind.”

  He shrugged. “I suppose it’s a story to reconcile people with fate and with living in eternal cold. It’s such an old story that they carry it with them in their genes, so to speak.”

  “It’s no wonder they’re afraid.”

  Yegorov glanced over his shoulder as though worried they would be overheard. Then he leaned toward her and continued in a low voice, speaking in French. “Shall I tell you something really uncanny, though? A friend who works for our Federal Space Agency showed me some recent satellite images of Saradkov taken by radar, or I don’t know what. Anyway, the pictures show there really is something stuck in the ice there. I imagine it’s not actually a black angel; more likely, it’s an iron meteorite or something along those lines. But there really is something there trapped in eternal ice. And in fact the ice is no longer eternal. It’s beginning to melt. Now that’s uncanny, isn’t it? We may well ask ourselves what the ice will reveal.”

  Charlotte’s father rejoined them just then, and Yegorov was visibly unwilling to discuss the topic any further in his presence. Holding a glass in one hand and a plate full of hors d’oeuvres from the buffet in the other, her father said, “You should hurry. The French artists of the twenty-first century seem to be a hungry lot.”

  That evening Charlotte opened her laptop and wrote an e-mail to Adrian Cazar, telling him that if he was still looking for an island that would suit his criteria he should take a look at Saradkov, in the Russian Arctic.

  The next day André set off home again; he could only get away from his studies for a few days. It was hard to know whether, having met her, he was disappointed; he had been scrupulously polite to Charlotte and continued to act too old for his age.

  There was no doubt, however, that her mother was disappointed. “You must understand one thing, Charlotte,” she told her daughter on the drive back from the airport, pursing her lips. “We women have a sell-by date, so to speak. Even beauty is not enough to protect us. All beauty fades in time.”

  “I would rather fade than marry into boredom,” Charlotte shot back. She thought of Brenda, who had got it right. Whatever the world might say, she had got it right.

  Her mother kept quiet for the rest of the drive. Charlotte knew, however, that her silence did not mean resignation; it only meant Mother was thinking up new arguments. So she made sure to get out of the house. No long speeches, just a wave good-bye and out the door while there was a break in the rain.

  And what if it did rain, since she could sit in the metro and ride all day long if she felt like it? The Moscow metro was worth the trip all on its own. Charlotte rode the escalators all the way down and then all the way up again, awestruck by the lavish detail in the stations and on the platforms. She let the stream of passengers carry her with them as they hurried along, stony-faced or laughing, chattering, bored, or thoughtful. Sometimes she had to ask the way, since she still had trouble reading the Cyrillic alphabet. She learned languages by ear, by talking and listening.

  From time to time she went up to the surface. She wandered along strange streets, looking at ramshackle old buildings, restored houses, and brand-new ones. She gave a fifty-ruble note to a beggar in a threadbare, gray-and-white overcoat. She admired the work of a street artist who stoically kept working in the pouring rain with only a sheet of plastic to protect him. She dodged a dog that barked furiously at her. She was lost in thought.

  On one of these trips up to the surface it suddenly began to rain so heavily that all she could do was take shelter in the nearest shop. Hanging bells jangled as she opened the door, and she stood there for a moment with her pants soaked through, gasping for breath as the rain drummed against the windowpane and blurred the world beyond. Smears of light passed by from the cars creeping slowly along through the downpour. She looked around. It was an antiques shop. Old furniture, oil paintings in bulky frames, faded lace, cut glass. Books. Solid silver tableware. She felt the breath of history on her cheek. She felt the fear, the grief, the hard necessity that had led to all these different objects being offered up for sale. It took a while before she realized there were voices talking farther back in the shop. She heard someone with an English accent stumbling along in broken Russian.

  She followed the voices. The next room was full of musical instruments, and an old man with a sour expression on his face—evidently the owner—was standing there listening to another man who had his back to her. The second man had a wild mane of hair and, Charlotte thought at first glance, the same gray-and-white coat as the beggar she had met earlier.

  “Perhaps I can help?” she asked in English.

 
He turned around. She saw a rosy, round face full of freckles, with cheeks like a cherub and cornflower-blue eyes, a gentle mouth, and Cupid’s-bow lips. “I beg your pardon?” he said. “Oh, do you speak Russian?”

  “A little.” Charlotte noticed the man was holding a pocket dictionary. “What would you like to ask?”

  He pointed to the instrument in front of him, which looked something like a piano. “I’m trying to explain that I need a document proving this harpsichord really was built by Christian Zell in 1741. I can only buy it if it’s an original.” He sighed. “He keeps telling me to listen to the timbre, and saying he can sell me some scores to go with it, but that’s not what I’m interested in. And as for the timbre…it’s hopelessly out of tune. It needs an awful lot of repair work.”

  Charlotte looked at the harpsichord. It was shaped like a concert piano but was much smaller. It was a very modest-looking piece, built of wood, and varnished dark brown, the only ornamentation a thin stripe of gold paint. She put her hand on it. All at once it was easy.

  “He’s not telling you the truth,” she said. “This instrument was built around 1960.”

  He goggled at her. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Even when it was built, it was meant as a forgery.”

  All of a sudden the antiques dealer understood English perfectly well. He turned red and unleashed a string of inventive curses. Charlotte took a step back. The young man with the wild hair took her arm and said, “Come on, let’s get out of here!”

  They fled into the pouring rain, running through puddles and gutters as though the shopkeeper were still after them, laughing all the while. Charlotte found herself imagining the antiques dealer waving a musket at them as they ran.