‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Why would you do such a thing?’
‘Because it was possible. I didn’t think it would ever be used.’
‘You must have known . . .’ Teschmaker began.
‘How could I? I existed in a laboratory with other scientists, we were excited by the research . . .’ He faltered. ‘Later, much later, when I was given the job of showing the teams how to assemble and arm the devices, then I was concerned. But I was still convinced that they would never be used, except as a threat.’ He took Jane’s hand again. ‘I know I was wrong.’
‘How could you do it?’ She removed her hand, her lips pursed tight in disgust. ‘You, who knew better than anyone what devastation it could cause.’
Her father just sipped at his drink, his hands shaking gently.
‘So you don’t know where they are?’ Teschmaker asked.
Sydney shook his head.
‘Then we have nothing to offer in return for Melanie.’ Jane’s voice was flat and lifeless. The last vestige of hope gone.
But Teschmaker wasn’t ready to give up. ‘Rusak must have been sure you knew, otherwise he wouldn’t have spent so much time tracking you down. And why bring you here? Was that just because he thought threatening Jane would make you talk?’
The old man thought about it for a moment then held out his glass for a refill. ‘It didn’t take too much intelligence to look at the make-up of the teams and then deduce where the likely targets were. America, of course, probably California, New York, Texas, Montana and Minnesota. Paris, London, Geneva and Brussels.’ He paused again, as though struggling to bring himself to keep going.
‘And?’ Jane prompted.
‘Well, I suppose you should know. They have one of the devices planted here.’ He sat back in his chair, his head tilted back, his eyes peering up into the gloom.
‘But that doesn’t make any sense,’ Teschmaker protested. ‘This city isn’t important. It’s certainly never been home to anything of remotely strategic or military significance.’
‘No? Then let me tell you you’re wrong. The very first of the devices was sent here and Rusak knows it. He told me that it had been done to ensure my loyalty, but he was wrong about that. They knew they had my cooperation. My understanding is that if they ever needed to demonstrate to the West that they had such capabilities, then although a detonation here would be horrific, it would be far less provocative than an explosion in upstate New York, say.’
‘Then why not tell Rusak where the damn thing is and let him take it away?’ Jane’s eyes were blazing and she got up from her seat, unable to contain her fury. ‘You leave it here and we are all at risk —’
‘And he takes it away and sells it to the Russian fascists or a terrorist group?’ Sydney sat forward and looked at her. ‘Jane, the simple truth is, I don’t know where it is. It is so small, and anyway, without the remote detonator it is worthless.’
‘Surely a remote would be relatively simple to make?’ Teschmaker asked.
‘Oh for God’s sake, drop it! Give it up, Teschmaker. Can’t you see it’s over?’ Jane looked totally exhausted, her hands folded tightly across her chest as though trying to keep in her remaining energy.
But Sydney shook his head. ‘Each one is coded and sequenced in such a way that only the designated remote can trigger it. The remote control boxes were to be cached separately so even if I knew where the device was . . .’ He collected himself and struggled to his feet. ‘I’m truly sorry, I can’t tell you any more. I have to sleep now.’ And without another word he ambled back into the bedroom and shut the door.
Teschmaker watched him go, wondering bitterly how the man could live with himself. Or how he could sleep, knowing what he had unleashed all those years ago. Certainly he could never have anticipated that it would manifest itself in such a direct way — here, with his daughter and grandchild.
Behind him he heard Jane exhale loudly as though she had been holding her breath. Teschmaker reached out and gently touched her arm. But she didn’t react, instead moving away from him to the cabinet.
‘It’s a nightmare.’ Jane shuddered and poured herself a scotch. ‘I want to hate him so much, but I can’t. All those years spent wanting him to appear again — but not like this.’ Nursing her drink she went through to her bedroom and returned with a blanket and a pillow. ‘I gave your bed to my father. But you should be all right on the settee.’ She placed the bedding down and turned to go.
‘Jane, I’m sorry about before —’
But she cut him off with a wave of her hand. ‘Forget it. I’m stressed out of my mind about Mel, and when they told me they’d killed someone it hit me just how out of control this mess has become. I blame myself. I thought I knew what I was doing and that I would be able to pull out. But that was when it was just a nasty fight with Oliver. Now I realise how deep in the shit I’ve put us all.’
‘You shouldn’t blame yourself,’ Teschmaker began lamely.
‘She’s my daughter, Teschmaker. My daughter.’
‘We’ll figure something out.’ He tried to sound confident but knew even as he said it that confidence was a foreign language to her in this moment.
Jane shrugged and went to her room.
Teschmaker finished his drink and went through to the kitchen to wash the glass. His foot crunched a piece of broken crockery. In the morning, he told himself. I’ll clean up in the morning. Back in the lounge he stretched out on the couch and pulled the blanket up over himself.
For what felt like a long time he lay unable to sleep, his mind going over and over Sydney Morris’s horrific story, trying to understand the kind of person who could justify such experiments as a theoretical challenge. It was incomprehensible to him that anyone could engage in such work without confronting insurmountable ethical problems. And actually teaching the teams how to arm these devices . . . ? It was years ago, and the times were different, he rationalised unconvincingly. He tried to imagine the Cold War mind-set, the fear and paranoia that must have infected those who had worked in the closed cities, whose only view of the world was shaped by Soviet propaganda. Could he, in the same situation as Sydney Morris, have done what Morris did? The answer, he had to admit, was yes.
Finally he drifted off to sleep, his head still filled with troubled images. Huge cold steel walls pressed in on him. Grey shapes, phantoms in dark uniforms, watched. And somewhere, always out of reach, a solid shape, a trunk, that Teschmaker knew he must open even if to do so meant death. Voices called to him. Hands, rising above thick swirling mist, reached out for help, but he was unable to save them. More voices, softer now, both distant and near, telling him to turn back. But he couldn’t move. The mist solidified around his legs and ankles and sent a numbing cold up towards his heart. He began to sink and knew as he did so that the mist was poison waiting to claim him. Below, his legs corroding, flesh dry and dead, flaking away to reveal bones bleached and white. Long dead. Another voice, pleading. Somewhere a scream descending into darkness. Black ice replaced the steel and deep within it he could see the faces of the dead contorted with pain and terror. Eyes frozen open. He looked around and in every direction stretched a vast plain of black ice. Not all the bodies were yet encased and from the ice, as from the mist before, a limb, an arm, a hand reached up, striving to evade the inevitable. The air itself was beginning to freeze and he held his breath, knowing that if he allowed such cold inside he would succumb, his throat and lungs crystallising, shattering. He called out — the sound became mist, poison. And he realised that as he sank he too would become part of this dark vaporous world. The voice again, closer. The hand that reached out not grey and lifeless but warm. Alive. And all he had to do was open his eyes and he would be free of the nightmare.
‘Will you stay with me?’ The hand reached out and tentatively touched his arm. Jane.
She was standing beside the couch in a plain white nightgown, her face wet with tears.
‘Just for a while? Please?’
Teschmake
r took her outstretched hand. It felt so warm. He followed her back to her room and, still fully dressed, lay down on the bed beside her. She rolled into his arms and clung to him as she let herself surrender to the pain and fear, her body racked by the sobs that arose from deep within. She buried her face in his neck and let them come, long low keening sounds. Animal sounds.
For a long time they lay like that, until eventually the sobbing subsided. But still she held him. Then Teschmaker felt her fingers, which had been digging so deeply into him, relax. She still held on to him but more gently now. Her fingers moved to his shirt. ‘Martin, please? I want to.’ And so did he. They undressed each other with care, as if both were carrying wounds that they feared to touch. She slid underneath him and guided him into her and quietly they nourished each other.
Later Teschmaker looked back on it and knew it was the most enfolded he had ever felt. For Jane too it was both reassurance and comfort. And having been replenished and comforted they began again and let themselves expand into the more familiar realm of pleasure. But they kept to softness, taking their time as though it were fragile or ephemeral, as insubstantial as an oil slick on water, swirling peacock colours that could vanish with the slightest ruffling of the calm.
Then, as she snuggled into his side, she started to talk, her voice only a whisper louder than her breathing.
‘The sad thing is, I loved him so unconditionally and yet I never knew him. The father I loved so much was my own creation. I took the void that he left and filled it with my imagination. My mother had a photo album which I’d never seen her look at, and which she certainly never showed me. When I discovered it, I took it to my room and sat up late into the night studying the old photographs she had collected. They were all black and white, some quite faded, others creased and torn as though they had been rescued from an older album. They were held in place by those funny little corner things that had to be licked and stuck on the page. I remember there was one picture that I liked particularly. He and a friend were leaning against the mudguards of a chunky sports car. Their trousers were baggy and they wore short-sleeved shirts, open at the neck. I used to imagine that it was the car he had driven off in, and that one day he would return in it.
‘There were other ones I liked, of him with Mum and me. But I remember thinking that those photos looked posed, as if the presence of the camera had stiffened us all. At the back of the album I found the only really candid shot. It was darker than the others, grainy, taken on a train station. My father had been at the ticket window and whoever had the camera must have called to him, for he was caught looking over his shoulder. It was the eyes. In that photo his eyes seemed cold and cruel.
‘My mother must have noticed that I had my light on and came into my room and found me with the album. At first she looked as though she was going to be angry, but she just took the album away and I never saw it again. I searched the house and eventually confronted her about it and she pretended she’d misplaced it.
‘As I went to sleep each night I would conjure up the image of my father standing in front of the sports car and dream that he was going to take me with him. Then after a few months I couldn’t remember his face any more and I asked Mum for a photograph. We had a huge fight about it. She told me that the men who were looking for my father had taken all the photographs, but I refused to believe her. I’m not really sure what happened to them but there was never a picture of my father in the house again. So from then on I created my father from all the things I was missing. Whenever I liked something in someone — you know, an attribute or personality trait — I added it to this composite I was building. And, though I didn’t sense it at the time, I started gravitating towards older men. My first real lover, when I was only eighteen, was thirty-six. He was married of course, but he had a sports car and he treated me like a daughter. When it was over I thought it was the end of the world and I blamed myself. If I’d been better he would have left his wife. If I wasn’t such a clumsy lover he would have stayed with me. I was so confused by this discovery of passion and heartache that I didn’t learn from it at all. In fact I repeated the same mistakes with all my boyfriends. In the end I became infatuated with one of my lecturers at university and I threw myself into my studies simply to impress him. It had no effect at all on the poor man. I doubt he knew why my work improved so dramatically. He certainly didn’t know he was the main character in my masturbation fantasies. When it finally dawned on me that he was never going to respond I took refuge by going even further into my work.
‘I graduated with first class honours and after the run-in with Foreign Affairs I told you about, I found out the truth about my father’s disappearance. I was shattered but again threw myself into work and further study. I promised myself I would have nothing further to do with men and for almost two years it was true. Then I had an affair with a younger man, which was a weird experience for me. I’d never been on the receiving end of such unbridled adoration. He was nice enough in a gauche way. He took me dancing and he had a motorbike which I really enjoyed riding on. So I was having a good time. The affair had been going on for about a month when I was invited to give a paper to a business conference on the investment possibilities that might emerge from the former Soviet republics. I knew it was a great opportunity for me to advance my career and so I put everything else aside and spent weeks preparing. I called my presentation “Kalashnikov Confederalism and the fragmenting of the Russian Federation” and by all accounts it was a success. There was a cocktail party after my session and though I usually avoided them like the plague, I had an hour before my boyfriend could pick me up and so I went.
‘I didn’t notice the man straight away. It wasn’t some bolt out of the blue or a cocktail-hour flirtation. I was talking to one of the other academics when I noticed him glance over his shoulder at me. I’d never seen him before. He appeared to be in his forties and there was something about him that made him an unlikely person to be attending such a conference. He was dressed casually, coloured shirt and rather crumpled linen jacket. He turned away and I remember thinking that I’d never seen such a handsome man in my life. He vanished into the crowd and for a few minutes I didn’t see him again. Then I noticed he was talking to somebody by the door. I had more time to study him and on taking a second look I realised he wasn’t as good looking as I’d first thought. But there was something. Then I felt this shiver go through me and my stomach churned. It was his eyes. He had the cruellest eyes — the same eyes I remembered from the photograph of my father.
‘I was thrown into turmoil and tried to convince myself that it was simply because I’d drunk too much. I had been talking with someone and so I excused myself and went to the bathroom and washed my face. I recall standing there trembling in front of a mirror and rubbing off every bit of make-up. I have no idea why, other than I was scared of this man. I collected my coat and left the party straight away. As I came out on the street I saw my boyfriend leaning against his motorbike on the opposite side of the road. He waved his hand at me and started to put on his helmet. Then just a few yards along the road I saw the older man. He was standing, holding open the rear door of his car. His eyes were fixed on me but he didn’t gesture or say anything. He simply stood there and waited. Without thinking I walked over and got in. There was a click as the door shut and then he went around and got in the other rear door. There was a glass partition between us and a uniformed driver. The man leaned forward and rapped on the glass and we drove off without a word being spoken. I half expected to see my boyfriend ride up alongside on his motorbike, but he didn’t. I can’t remember what was going through my mind other than my determination not to say a word until this man spoke. But he didn’t.
‘After what seemed like a long time we drove up to some high steel gates which opened as we approached. There was a short avenue of trees and then the car stopped in front of a large house. The driver got out quickly and opened the door for me and I followed the man up the steps. I have a vague recollection
of someone opening the door for us, but all my attention was on the man. Not once did he hesitate or pause to see if I was following. He seemed absolutely confident that I would follow. And I, though my mind was racing with questions, obstinately stuck to my vow not to break the silence between us.
‘There was a flight of stairs at the other side of a small entrance hall and he went straight up. As I followed I heard the door shut behind me, and for a second I had a rush of panic. Then I remembered those eyes and I knew that I was going to climb those stairs no matter what lay in store for me. The room we entered was obviously his bedroom. It had a distinctly male feeling about it. There was a jumper tossed over a chair, a pair of shoes beside a cupboard. I tried not to look at the bed, but I was damned if I was going to show this man what I was feeling. There was only a small amount of light coming in from the landing and I stood and watched as he walked to the other side of the bed and switched on a small bedside light. He’ll have to talk now, I thought triumphantly. But he didn’t and neither did he approach me and attempt to touch me or undress me. Instead he pulled back the bedcovers and fixing me with his eyes started to undress.
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