“Murder,” Justine said.
Vienna blinked, feeling that Justine had manipulated her. “You knew?”
“I may not be broken, but I’m reasonably bright.”
Vienna let it go. “The “HTE” that appears just before it is an odd combination of letters, yeah?” she said. “I can think of only two words that fit in the nine-letter space we have. One is ‘tightened,’ which makes no sense.”
“And the other?”
“Righteous.”
“Righteous murder,” Justine said.
“I think so.” She gave the laptop back to Justine. “I don’t like your code.”
“I don’t either.”
“Where do you think Sinoro found it?”
“I don’t know. But ‘righteous murder’ sounds like something an anarchist would threaten.”
Vienna saw words from a poet named Yeats. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. She didn’t say them out loud because they’d always scared her, and she didn’t think poetry was supposed to be scary.
The steward stopped at their seats. “I’m sorry, miss, you have to shut off the laptop. We’re close to final approach. Please stow your tables.”
“I can get more of it,” Justine whispered as she folded the laptop closed. “You have to promise me not to think about it.”
“Okay.” She’s afraid I’ll go eppy before landing.
It was dark by the time they stepped from the Keflavík airport into the SUV limo waiting to take them to Reykjavík. Justine gave the name of the hotel to the driver, another Radisson SAS.
“Pierre-Esprit Radisson’s explorations of Hudson Bay in 1668 formed the impetus for the Hudson’s Bay Company,” Vienna said. The words came as the thought did—something that seemed to happen with Justine. Because I’m not ashamed when she hears?
“More important, they have a good restaurant.”
The car drifted through sparse traffic. Vienna saw little from the windows, except that once outside Keflavík there were few lights breaking the night. A series of isolated crofts, calling out their presence. It seemed unnatural after the yellow-white brightness of London and Brussels.
Estimating the car’s speed from highway signs, Vienna saw that their car traced bases of shifting triangles that reached to each light. Distances and angles flooded through her. Calculus as perfect trigonometry. She closed her eyes tight, but she was so tired and her thoughts were trapped.
“I’m here, Vienna.”
“Do you see the sliding triangles? Distances in the lights, derived by speed. That’s all there is.”
Justine reached into her bag and pulled out what looked like an oversized phone with a large screen. She turned it on. “Show them to me.”
“You’re supposed to say they aren’t real. That’s what my doctor in London always said.”
“I’m betting your doctor was wrong.” The screen lit up and a map appeared. Vienna realized it was a GPS.
“One of Grant’s old toys,” Justine said, showing a half smile that vanished as soon as it formed.
Vienna looked at Justine. “If you can’t see them, how do you know they’re real?”
Justine pointed to a distant glow. “How far away is that light?”
“It will be easier when we’re even with it.”
“Tell me when we get there.”
Concentrating on a single light, Vienna found the pain receding. When they were level with it, she said, “One-point-three kilometers. Assuming our speed hasn’t changed and the road has been straight and the land is flat between us and the light. I’m using that bright star for a background, so I suppose its apparent movement caused by the Earth’s rotation should be taken into account.”
“Miles, hun.”
Vienna found a conversion table. “Just under point eight—but it’s probably way off! I need more time to get it right.”
Justine smiled. “The GPS shows a structure zero-point-seven-four miles away. How can I say your triangles aren’t real?”
Vienna felt calmness enfold her. A trick Justine could somehow turn, even when doctors could not. The triangles faded, as if they had nothing left to prove. “It’s flatter than I thought it would be,” she said.
“There’s a delta on the southern coast so flat that you can’t tell where the land ends and the sea begins. Ships used to run aground there.”
“How did they fix it?”
Justine laughed. “They put up a lighthouse.”
Vienna blushed. “That was a stupid question wasn’t it?”
“It was a delightful question.”
“But the answer is obvious.”
“So is the fact that pickles come from cucumbers.”
Vienna thought that over but could make no sense of it. “What?”
“I didn’t realize pickles came from cucumbers until I was nineteen. Until that moment, I assumed there were pickle bushes.”
Vienna found herself laughing before she could help it. With a start, she cut it off. “That was mean.”
Justine shook her head. “It’s a secret lovers share.”
Why would you purposely embarrass yourself in front of someone you loved?
“Anyway, Miss Almanac, I need your help.”
Vienna let the jab go. She was building a new idea wherein being in a relationship meant ignoring some of the things your partner said. Or even most of the things. “Yes?”
“I need a seven-letter word that begins ‘T-H-E’ and ends in ‘A,’”
“Does this have to do with the code?”
“I’ve been thinking about the keyword—a shortcut that might make the path easier for us both. We almost have it.”
“I need to see the letters.”
Justine fished in her bag for a scrap of paper and a pen.
“I’m sorry,” Vienna said as Justine whispered in frustration looking for paper.
“No reason to be sorry. I keep forgetting how differently we see the world. I make mistakes,” Justine said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Lord Davy told me the halves of your brain don’t communicate well with each other. Speaking and writing are not the same for you as for me. I should have remembered and written the letters to begin with.”
Vienna gave up on the whole ignoring idea. “Everyone else avoids talking to me like that, just so you know.”
“Ah, but have they slept with you?”
“Does that give you the right to demean me?”
“Did I demean you?”
“You said my brain doesn’t work right.”
“I said it was different and that I made a mistake, not you. Don’t expect me to overlook how singular you are. Now, I want you to consider something.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe that difference is part of why I am here with you.”
Vienna tried again to sort through the words, but it was easier to let Justine choke on her own medicine. “At least the halves of my brain talk to each other enough to figure out pickles.” She marveled at the light tone of her voice—how the words had just come out that way. She wasn’t sure what would happen.
Justine laughed so loudly the driver looked briefly back through the glass that separated them. “Very good,” she told Vienna.
“You’re not mad?”
“I’ll make you a deal. You don’t tell anyone about the pickles and I won’t tell anyone you’re broken.”
There was so much wrong with this reasoning that Vienna started to object. She caught herself and settled for a nod.
“Good! Now, look at this.” Justine found a crumpled receipt and wrote on the back: THE_ _ _ A.
Vienna looked at the letters, saw the shape of words. “Thecata, thecoma, thelema, themata, theorba, Theresa.”
“Remind me to talk to you next time I try a crossword puzzle,” Justine said. “At least I know the last word.”
“The first two are medical terms. I don’t understand the definitions.”
“Skip them for now.”
“Unlikely to be our key. What of the others?”
“A themata was an administrative unit of seventh-century Byzantine.”
“That has to do with government, so keep it in mind. Was that all?”
“There was thelema.” Vienna searched for the word, finding it in several places. “It means ‘will.’ It first came to prominence in the works of a sixteenth-century monk named R-a-b-e-l-a-i-s. I don’t know how to pronounce that.”
“Me neither. What did he say about it?”
“He named a town after it in one of his stories. It’s associated with the phrase ‘Do what thou will.’ The Hellfire Club of England nicked it in the eighteenth century. It was a hedonistic society led by Sir Francis Dashwood.” Vienna looked over several drawings associated with the text. “The society’s ‘nuns’ were prostitutes.” She crossed herself.
“Old as the hills and not what we’re after.”
“The word was used again in the nineteenth century by various anarchist societies.”
“Now we’re cooking.”
Whatever that was supposed to mean. Vienna looked again at the code, seeing groups of seven that Justine had numbered. Shift each letter in the code by the letters of “thelema.” “A” was the first letter of the alphabet, so there was no shift for it. That explained why letters in the seventh position stayed the same. “T” was the nineteenth letter …
She felt the acid seduction of the pattern, flowering in her mind like a virus. Night faded away under a shifting matrix of letters. There had never been anything else—never would be anything else. Stop, stop, stop …
“Vienna. What do you see?”
She couldn’t answer. The message was there, she knew it but she couldn’t say it. Her thoughts swimming in pain. She felt her hands being grabbed by someone.
“Write it out, Vienna. You have paper and a pen. Don’t speak. Just write.”
She felt the pen set in her grasp. As if controlled by a mad genie, the hand with the pen stuttered across the paper.
thatalloppressedmightonedayrisefromtheplaceofrighteousmurdertothesignofpowerthesearethemeasuresstartwiththesunandintheorderoftheplanetsandalwaysastheplanetsmoveonetomeasuredistanceonetomeasuretimeinthecityofthewhitewallsdidmeneswearthestarofhorusaroundhisneckhispowerisoursdowhatthouwiltpeacebrothersandsistersbelieveallmightbemadelevel
The lights of Reykjavík slid around them, blurred through tears. She was afraid and tired and she felt very far from home, but then she really didn’t have a home, did she?
“Damn it.” Justine’s voice, so soft. “Vienna, it’s okay. Let it go. I’m here. Let it go.”
It’s a thing lovers share.
The lights compressed into a tunnel with a bright spark at the end. A lake where girls drowned themselves for their goddess. A villa of limestone and dusty halls. Palladian windows comprise paired pilasters upon which rests an entablature … Vienna smelled the musty scent of old paper. She heard music, echoing from stone walls. Bach, she thought. Arpeggio. Lord Davy, eyes closed, conducting a phantom orchestra. Behind the musical scales, the sound of wind through trees.
“Will she be okay?” The accent was strange.
“She needs to sleep.” Arms around her.
“There is a hospital nearby.”
“It’s a seizure, but not a serious one. A hospital would only increase the chance of recurrence. How many more miles to go?”
In miles, hun …
Americans didn’t use metric. Should have remembered that.
.247 ounces Hg and .035 ounces Au. Emily Holt’s copy of Sinoro’s notes.
Seven grams of mercury. One gram of gold.
But you never listen.
Lord Davy sitting in an old chair, reading a book. The hushed light of the Cart House.
She saw that the high window above the massive television was a gothic rose of twenty-seven elements. It depicted Christ as the Sower. His disciples looked on in confusion while all around them grains and fruit sprang from the soil. The pagan goddess Nerthus imagined as a man. And he said unto them, Know ye not this parable? And how then will ye know all parables?The sower soweth the word.
And her head hurt so bad and they were in one of the Cart House’s long hallways, Vienna pointing at a small drawing. “Ah,” Lord Davy said. “Here is a work by Sophia of the Palatinate. I am not one hundred percent certain what it depicts. Men fishing in the distance? Dinosaurs fighting?” Vienna laughed. “Sophia was a great patron of the arts,” Davy added, “but a lesser practitioner.”
Below that was a painting of a white unicorn, a green plate, and a rose star. Set in faded colors and in that old way where angles didn’t work with perspective. “What does this mean?” she asked Uncle Anson.
“The shame of a forgotten prince. It’s a very boring and very old story and it has no proper end anyway.” He scooted her a step down the hall, to face a glass cabinet holding a tattered strip of leather. “A hunting crop said to belong to Edward the Black Prince,” Davy said. “Though it just as easily might have been the property of Stanton the Unknown. Much of what is in the Cart House was put up during moments of great revelry or great melancholy. Neither is conducive to preserving truth.”
“Then what is the point, if you don’t know if any of it is real?”
Davy gestured the length of the hallway. “The Cart House is not a museum, Vienna. It’s…” He smiled. “It’s an echo. And like all echoes, it can be hard to tell where it originated. But always there is a tiny bit of the original sound left.”
“Okay.” Though it didn’t explain anything. She pointed to a diagram of a steam engine fit with gears and levers that seemed to be employed in steering a horse-drawn carriage.
“I have no idea what it is,” Lord Davy said, “beyond ambiance.”
“You have to take it down, if you don’t know! You can’t put it up if you don’t know what it is!”
“Enough,” Davy said. “Time to be outside. The oak trees are pretty this fall, don’t you think? Leaves of gold.”
And at first the trees were pretty, but then she was alone. Lost in the nightmare forest and the ghosts of drowned maidens called to her and—
“It’s okay, Vienna. I’m here.” The words somehow fit inside her, and Justine was walking beside her along the Thames.
You’re just like her.
And the nightmare vanished into deep sleep.
19
Reykjavík was built in classic Lego, red and blue triangles over white squares. A rocket ship cathedral claimed the city’s highest hill, flanked by walls of descending stone hexagons. Justine saw it through Vienna’s eyes: trying to overlay the walls to see if they matched. Fearful symmetry.
Instead of the usual European scrawl of political graffiti, here were trippy aliens sprayed to life on powder-blue cinder block. A half-mocking self-portrait of strangers in a strange land, laughing over a bite of hákarl before beaming back to the stars. Above the aliens, square windows marched across square walls. Sheets of glass streaked by rain.
The rigid geometry would be murder on Vienna. Should have left her in London. Justine checked for the hundredth time that Vienna was sleeping easily. Then back to the note Vienna had scrawled out. Justine had separated the words and entered the text on her Sony.
That all oppressed might one day rise. From the place of righteous murder to the sign of power, these are the measures: Start with the sun and in the order of the planets and always as the planets move. One to measure distance, one to measure time. In the City of the White Walls did Menes wear the Star of Horus around his neck. His power is ours. Do what thou wilt. Peace, brothers and sisters, believe all might
be made level.
No mention of Lenin. Frustrated, Justine went back and added multiple exclamation points to the end of each angst-filled phrase. She worried that it read better that way.
Google said the City of White Walls was inbw-hdj, an ancient name for Memphis. King Menes was the semi-mythical founder of the city. Apparently, the Star of Memphis was given to the king by the god Horus as a token of divine favor. Wikipedia seemed to have missed that part.
Hours of empty guessing and nothing beyond rising irritation. But as heavy clouds brightened with morning, Justine realized she’d overlooked the most obvious part of the message: it’s in English.
Had Grant managed to decode it? Did these words somehow reach across a hundred years and put a bullet in his head? How much did Lord Davy know? How had Emily gained access to the code?
Then there was the man at the airport. Coal black hair in a regulation buzz cut and steel blue eyes. A cop with a generous helping of broad shoulders. If his arms were around you, you would know it. He spoke into a silver phone as they left the airport. Meaningless until Justine glanced back as their limo pulled away from the Radisson. The driver on a silver phone of the same make. Probably coincidence. Probably.
And because that wasn’t enough to worry about, there was a tattered career to face. The penultimate Clay to Flesh shoot was in two days, near Gullfoss. Justine would be in Al-Begushi’s sheer silks. It better be warm out. Gareth Kendal would be shooting. A stand-offish ass-hack with a habit of snapping his fingers at every flighty change of mood. He would cram the shoot into one day and depend on the skimpy wardrobe to cover his lack of talent.
“Heather?” Vienna’s voice was unsteady.
“I’m here.” Justine stepped to the side of the bed.
“Where are we?”
“The hotel. You had a mild seizure and slept through the night.”
“Shouldn’t I be in a hospital?”
“You needed rest, not emergency room chaos.”
Vienna rubbed her eyes. “On the plane I said you weren’t very smart. That was a bad thing to say.”
“It’s only fair that I make you want to scream now and then, too.”
Vienna sorted that out in silence and dealt a new topic. “Have you read the message?”
Vienna Page 18