Chapter 24
Just as Admiral de Champs was being led away, Aldercreutz’s Norse vessel ran up onto a little Lake Vattern beach, its lower bow slicing and hewing a straight faultless scar into the dark hardened soil beneath. The advent of nightfall was half an hour old, and the rising plumes that had once been his guide, his sort of paradoxically mystical lighthouse, were now masked within similarly colorless surroundings; camouflaged more perfectly and efficiently than one could hope for some precious treasure monumentally and benevolently cherished. It was as if daylight had been ordered suddenly ceased at some shady megalomaniac’s commanding whim; as if he had placed a seal over the entire vicinity either trying to lock Aldercreutz out or close some fanciful doors of shadow behind him. Perhaps, the Intelligence Minister was being drawn in at someone’s horridly beckoning call.
He placed a solitary boot atop the cool soil; the sole pressed a smattering of tiny pebbles into shallow little graves of frost. He was freezing, not only because he had neglected to put on heavy clothing but because he was still wet after having fallen into the water before departing. This made him all the more eager to find the source of the smoke. Warmth! Blessed warmth! A pile of white hot burning embers! He could feel minuscule drops of lake water adorning his nose. He wiped them off, but the supposition that his skin was fast turning a toxic blue could not be shaken and only intensified as the wind picked up and every gust penetrated into his torso like a cruel scalpel, prompting an ever intensifying refrain of twisting grimaces. He whispered curses, clenched his fists. His whole body hunched over and hardened in reaction to the gales. Trudging forward became more arduous as the legs’ joints began to stiffen. He braced himself against the short gnarled timbers in his painful advance, praying for survival and wondering how he could fall so physically low in so short a span of time; he had, after all, been out for a good deal less than an hour. But then it dawned on him; he saw a broad ray of wildly violet light penetrate through the naked canopy above and sparkle on a little bed of pine needles ahead, though the former wasn’t really there. He was being punished, he thought, and if not quite that then he at least deserved to undergo this trial given what he had done.
So he continued with this thought entrenched in his mind. In a way, it comforted him for he knew he couldn’t die; he hadn’t suffered enough. He could endure an entire hellish night of this torment and still, it wouldn’t be enough. Likely, a few limbs would be lost, perhaps some other debilitating condition suffered, but still it could not be sufficient to outweigh his secret shame, his miserable guilt which had been as a stone around his neck for so long. Nevertheless, he would accept this, but the burden soon became so intense that as he struggled mightily through the forest which seemed to have abandoned all vertical and horizontal norms in terms its dimensional makeup (it was like an utterly random maze whose passages shot outward and inward, haphazardly and in every direction) he asked himself: What does it matter whether I go further? I may as well collapse and bear this. I can’t go on anyway. Thus his weary form, no more visible than a shadow slightly more radiant than its surroundings, slipped to its knees, the black smoke’s source forgotten in spite of the blissful comfort it promised and the left profile of his face plunging headlong into the bitter ground. He lay there fully conscious. The frigidness became even more intense, though Carlos could not fathom how this was possible. He had never known cold to be so torturous. He couldn’t stand it. He had to walk. He had to escape. He stood erect, struggling as an advanced arthritic in the process, tears streaming down his cheeks and solidifying into ice before slipping from his chin. A few steps were covered painfully. Then a powerful sensation of abnormal, almost feverish, warmth took hold over his entire body. It gave him the desire to remove what little clothing he had, but alas! - he deduced it was only a ruse of nature; perhaps the temperature was so abysmally low that its affect now felt like fire!
He launched a plea toward heaven and pressed onward, wailing in pain as he lurched through a shallow layer of fallen snow that seemed to lead him along in the darkness. It formed a twisting path through the thicket and somehow coiled into a vast clearing where the clear sky tossed white starlight on a cottage, a quaint wooden house with a pointy roof only a few dozen meters away. Aldercruetz’s pains hindered him no more in his determination. Seconds later, he rapped loudly on the door, and collapsed on the porch as soon as he recognized the sound of locks unlatching and the brass doorknob being turned.
Carlos sighted, with the first indistinct reconnaissance of awakening eyes, a lumbering whale, soaked and teal green, flying in a precise mathematical arc above his weary head; the back of which, he felt, was resting sharply pained and generally ill at ease atop a feathered pillow. And then there was a peacock tail, stationary, resembling a lady’s fan sewn with the approximate pattern of a Russian taiga fatigue. Within an almost non-existent span, the tail bloomed and swept under a Turkish cat’s startled paws like a sliding green and brown carpet, its silken tendrils sweeping forward like thin flailing arms. The cat, quite snowy in coloration though capped with numerous swaths of evening fur, jumped with extended claws which seemed to graze Carlos’s arm though he felt nothing as if his limbs were characterized by terribly frozen nerves. Then the feline slunk quietly from view, uttering a slight meow upon exiting across the threshold of Aldercreutz’s sight, while the whale splashed through the peacock’s taiga screen causing everything to blur…
The whale transformed into a banana-shaped patch of uniformed paint with three triangular protrusions; the whole of it resting on the ceiling directly above and resembling a suspended puddle of green or yellow tea made thick by the cold. The Russian taiga faded into an intricate work of art, a scheme of an expansive impressionistic sky surrounding the patch, as if the freshest paint of the later section had peeled away. Finally, the blackish circles that had insinuated the presence of at least a single specimen of peacock if not more, morphed into four pairs of squalid human eyes, all of theme staring down at him, disturbingly unemotive. Their gaze, such as it was, struck him as nearly wrong enough to warrant an automatic cry of despair from his lips, given what he had already endured. But he was silent, and remained so as one of the onlookers thrust his own face in very close. Alderceutz’s eyes were still adjusting to the new light, but with the passage of every second he noted the mounting visual attributes of the stranger; all the while, he held a radically relaxed brow as if challenging this gradually emerging phantom by a show total aloofness in spite of his present situation. The man had a pear shaped head, capped with a medium-sized brown bowler, beneath which, several strands of rusty blond hair were extending like twisted sunbeams. His cheeks were exceptionally ruddy, his mouth a soft pink and his eyes a materializing blue. He was a man of great round girth, perhaps aged fifty years, and wore a classic back suit accompanied by a cream white tie that corresponded closely with his fair undershirt. Lastly, he was smiling unlike the others and doing so as a newborn babe. Oddly enough, his sentiment seemed genuine.
“Carlos,” he called out softly. “May I call you Carlos?”
Aldercreutz nodded without lifting his head from the pillow. He was disappointed to find that he could only make this slight movement with great discomfort. In fact, his entire body felt an overall tinge of numbness interspersed with sporadic flares of agony.
“Carlos,” the man resumed softly. “Don’t worry. You’ll be all right.” He spoke, Aldercreutz noticed, with a strong accent resembling that of either a Russian or a native of some other European Soviet republic. The man perhaps anticipated this realization, or at any rate, noticed it for his next words were:
“My name is Tymon Gorski. I’m a Byelorussian and your deepest friend.” As he said this, he took Aldercreutz’s frigid right hand between his own monstrous palms and squeezed as if attempting to will away the gnawing frostbite that the intelligence minister believed was rapidly setting in among his digits which were dyed a light blue.
“You are our contact, are you not Carlos?”
Aldercreutz winced at these words. A beige parchment stamped with a blood-red insignia, the image of a slithering eastern dragon, was then presented before his face; his eyes examined it briefly. “Somehow, you’ve led me here,” he said quietly. “Without even physically doing so, you’ve entrapped me and taken me to this place.”
It looked as if Mr. Gorski was about to throw a glance to the stern-faced trio, but an imperceptible flicker of the pupils withstanding, his gaze was fastened upon the man lying in his bed. He smiled more radiantly.
“Even if that is true, you wouldn’t be here if not for your own convictions and past deeds.” He spoke, as previously mentioned, with a foreign intonation, but somehow his voice exuded a distinguished mastery of the Swedish tongue. “I see by your drooping face, that you must undoubtedly acquiesce to this truth.”
Aldercreutz batted his eyelids as if to grudgingly say I do.
“You know, I have met with your ambassador to Japan, Mr. Westman is it? Mmm, he was quite elusive, wouldn’t tell me the slightest thing about how he discovered the German-Japanese connection regarding the Nazi influence that pushed the Japanese government to provide asylum to the Jaakons. Had he not realized I was up to something, I would have compelled him with greater force. Nonetheless, my organization must have the answer to that mystery. If there is a traitor within our ranks or those of our associates, he or she must be smoked out and destroyed. We will continue to pursue that matter as time and opportunity permits. But for now Carlos,” Gorski shouted, much enthused and with clap of his hands. “I will be content with having the information that you keep within the recesses of your grand mind.”
The bedridden man, suffering from numbness and likely more serious ordeals, was still.
“You know,” reminded Gorski pleasantly. "the military intelligence data that you’ve promised us in exchange for our organization continuing to keep the veil firmly tucked over your past. I wouldn’t like to open your closet of skeletons Carlos.” The last sentence was said with a contrasting gravitas and a grin communicating very subtle cruelty. The Byelorussian’s gaze had turned black.
“It’s true that I’ve allowed your people to blackmail me, but this ends now. I won’t tell you anything.”
“I you refuse, you know what our response will be. The Pandora’s box that is your early life will be opened for the entire world to see.” The Byelorussian spoke fairly serenely but with the essence of the nightmare in which Carlos presently found himself.
“I still won’t,” Aldercreutz moaned with such resolve that he startled himself, and he cowered and simultaneously soared at the thought of his defiance.
Gorski contemplated for a few seconds. “I am not a man who asks twice, at least not before the subject of interrogation has had some sort of new motivation offered to him.” The round man shifted his bulk so as to face his comrades, two men and a woman; Aldercreutz had great difficulty in distinguishing the features of any of them, and they were all strangers as far as he was concerned so what did it matter? Why should a man take note of his jailers when he can barely move and there seems no chance for escape?
“Strip him,” Gorski barked. “And open the window.” The trio began to move like militantly obedient ants. “Pour a bucket of ice water on him as well. Then we’ll turn out the light and let you sleep my dear Carlos. Shall I chant you a lullaby? If you survive the night, we’ll speak again in the morning.”
Save for the moonlight, which lay placidly as a little pool atop the rough wood of the windowsill, Alderceutz was shortly alone with his sufferings. The room, the strange ceiling, all the rest of it had vanished like a lost love; strange that he should miss it so. He was in an empty dimension. There was nothing there but he, his sorrowful physical torment, the moon’s luminance, and a bright Turkish cat which, at that moment, ascended to nearby the ajar portal without aural disturbance and sat within its reflection’s grasp, apparently impervious to the extremity of the outdoor air, watching him throughout the night like a benign guardian.