Invisible Things

by Jenny Davidson

  There was a Swedish thesaurus, which would do Sophie little good either, but the next book on the shelf caught her eye.

  Tris leaped up onto the table below the shelf and gave a plaintive yowl, as if urging Sophie to get a move on.

  It was a combined atlas and railway schedule, a traveler’s guide to the Hanseatic states and Russia, and Sophie found herself looking up Spitsbergen in the index.

  There was a private airstrip on the island, but it was rare for outsiders to be given permission to use it. More usually one would take the train to Kiruna and travel overland, then get an icebreaker from Trømso to the main port of Longyearbyen. The regulations concerning the airspace were very strict, with the whole region governed by an intricate set of treaties between the Russians, Norwegians, and Finns.

  Elsa Blix had a huge head start, especially since she’d flown north rather than traveling overland. But Sophie would get there sooner or later, even if Arne and Mr. Nobel couldn’t help her on her way. She thought she had enough money to pay for the train herself, in a worst-case scenario, and she would at least have Tris for company. He had settled himself onto the pages of the railway atlas, his rumbling purr sounding louder than ever in the quiet of the small hours. A traveling companion would be welcome, even if it were merely—she regarded him affectionately—an overfed black cat with a muscular build.

  In the end she fell restlessly asleep around five in the morning, waking up a few hours later to the sound of Mrs. McGregor moving about the kitchen. Arne put his head around the door at half past seven to say that the car would come for them at nine and that there was plenty of time for Sophie to have a bath and eat breakfast. It might be the last hot water she got for a long time, she thought, repressing a shudder. She was not in favor of rustic travel, believing hot water to be one of the great benefits of civilized life and anyone who chose voluntarily to forgo it for more than a day or two in the way of pleasure rather than punishment possibly actually insane.

  They met up in the hallway ten minutes before the car was expected. Arne looked Sophie up and down and nodded his approval, but only until his eyes fell to the basket.

  “Sophie, you’re not bringing the cat with you, are you?” he asked incredulously.

  “Of course I’m bringing Tris!” Sophie said, staring at him. It had not even occurred to her that Arne would be surprised—Trismegistus went where Sophie went; everybody knew that.

  “No!” said Arne. “It’s wildly impractical. Wouldn’t you rather leave the creature here? He’ll be perfectly safe—Mrs. McGregor will look after him, won’t you?”

  “Yes, indeed,” said the landlady, who was looking worried. “It will be no trouble at all—I’m very fond of cats!”

  It was true, Sophie knew. The landlady had cooked Tris a number of delicious fish meals even in the short time they’d been staying with her. But the cat had begun to meow, and Sophie held firm. She could not help contrasting Arne’s manner unfavorably with his brother’s—Mikael had grumbled often enough about Tris, but in reality his approach to the cat had been something more like cheerful resignation, and in fact it was thanks to Mikael that Tris had even come with them from Scotland in the first place.

  “Oh, all right,” Arne said irritably, looking at his watch. “Is he going to keep up that racket in the car, though?”

  Sophie leaned over to look in through the mesh at the end of the basket. She clucked to Tris, who settled down on his haunches and fell silent. She breathed a word of thanks.

  Just then the car honked outside, and they scrambled down the stairs and into the backseat of a spacious black chauffeured limousine.

  “It’ll be a few hours of driving, Sophie,” Arne said. “Nobel’s house lies at the outer rim of the Stockholm archipelago, and though we will not need to take a ferry, the roads narrow as we go farther out of the city and we will sometimes need to stop at a bridge. You might try to get a bit more sleep, if you can.”

  “Oh, I can never sleep in cars,” Sophie said. She settled into the corner and leaned her head against the window, tucking an arm protectively over Tris’s basket and closing her eyes, which felt grainy and dry. Despite her words, she drifted off almost at once, her dreams a strange muddle of Great-aunt Tabitha and Alfred Nobel courting and war planes dropping bombs and Mikael’s ghostly figure separated from her by an immense gulf of ice lit from beneath by flames.

  The next thing Sophie knew, they were drawing into a grand driveway and up to an enormous house. Really, it looked more like a palace!

  She was still so tired and worried that the first hour passed in a blur. Arne said that they would see Nobel after lunch, which would be brought to Sophie on a tray in her room so that she could rest. A silent uniformed servitor showed her to a lovely guest bedroom with its own private bathroom, and Sophie very gratefully washed her face and let Tris out onto the little balcony to stretch his legs. She lay down on top of the spotless white coverlet, but she had slept for long enough in the car that rest eluded her now.

  She could think only of Mikael. Would Alfred Nobel help her and Arne get him back? The matter of Sophie’s parents suddenly seemed quite secondary—and yet this might be the only time she ever had access to Nobel in person. She must keep everything in her head; the mere thought of forgetting something important made her heart race and her chest feel tight and constricted. She took a few deep breaths and tried to relax her muscles, but she could feel her hands reverting almost at once to tight bunched fists, and her buttocks were clenched.

  When a knock came at the door, Sophie sprang guiltily back upright: one somehow felt a transgressor lying down fully clothed in the middle of the day on a bed in a stranger’s house.

  But it was only a maid bringing her a beautiful little lunch tray: open-faced smoked-salmon sandwiches on soft brown bread, a miniature tureen of leek-and-potato soup, a bowl of berries and yogurt, and a little plate with two iced petits fours that were so much exactly what Sophie liked that she experienced a sudden fit of paranoia. Had this visit been planned down to the smallest detail?

  She felt quite a bit saner once she had eaten everything and drunk the pot of tea that accompanied the meal. She draped the snowy cloth napkin over the empty dishes and set the tray outside her door. She thought she would just lie down for a moment, Trismegistus tucking himself by her side in a tight, comforting ball, but the next thing she knew Arne was saying her name and she was struggling to rouse herself from deep sleep.

  She frowned and rubbed her eyes. Looking at her watch, she saw it was after two o’clock.

  “Mr. Nobel will see us in a few minutes,” Arne said. “You will perhaps want to freshen up first? I’ll wait for you on the landing; come and find me when you’re ready, and we’ll walk over to the other wing of the house together.”

  Sophie quickly brushed her teeth and washed her face with a flannel dipped in very hot water. The enormous tub, with its lavish supply of sea sponges and soaps and brightly colored bottles of scented elixirs and fluffy bath towels, elicited a longing glance. But a hurried bath was not a worthwhile bath, in Sophie’s book, though she would not turn down the opportunity to have a really leisurely one if there were time later on. She combed her hair and scrunched up her nose at her face in the mirror, then took a few deep breaths and went to find Arne in the hall.

  They walked down the main staircase and along a sort of gallery with spacious rooms on either side of it. They came to a green baize door, and Arne took a set of keys from his pocket and inserted one of them into the lock.

  He paused before turning the doorknob.

  “Sophie?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “I should have said something sooner—do not be alarmed when you see Mr. Nobel. His appearance is . . . well, let us say unusual—but he retains a very warm concern for you and your doings, and he has already promised me that he will do everything in his power to help us find Mikael and bring him home again.”

  The hallway on the other side of the door was plainer than t
he front part of the house, almost institutional in its fittings. Sophie could not help thinking of IRYLNS; there was even the same sort of vaguely medicinal smell in the air, the astringent scents of disinfectant and surgical dressings.

  Arne led her past several closed doors to one that stood ajar. He pushed it the rest of the way open and motioned to Sophie to follow him.

  It was a large room, the floor-to-ceiling windows covered by heavy navy-blue drapes. The room was dimly lit, with pieces of medical equipment standing in the corner, but Sophie’s eyes were strongly drawn to the figure in the middle of the room. The body lay suspended horizontally in something that was more like a shallow fish tank than a hospital bed. The man had no clothes on, other than a sort of cloth covering his private parts; through the glass sides of the container could be seen the slight undulation of white limbs in the bright blue liquid medium (Sophie could not tell if it were more watery or gelatinous) that covered his entire body, with only the face projecting above the liquid surface.

  A host of tubes was connected to all the parts of the body, but the strangest thing was what had been done to the head. Sophie was so fascinated by the mechanics that she did not feel even a twinge of the revulsion she might have expected. The man’s neck and shoulders were held in place by a mechanical frame, his face visible over a cone-shaped collar rather like the ones worn in Shakespeare’s day. But the whole top part of his skull had been cut away, and the flap of scalp folded over the edge of the bone; over his head was a protective dome-shaped plastic bubble through which could be seen the delicate folds of the brain within. It was interpenetrated with the filaments of a sort of net, wires running out of it to an elaborate machine that presumably regulated the electrical impulses in the gray matter.

  A nurse sat on a stool beside the tank and periodically opened a window in the dome to dab the saliva from the corner of the man’s mouth. The face beneath the glass was motionless.

  “Mr. Nobel,” Arne said, stepping forward not in the direction of the bed as such but toward the machines beside it, which Sophie now saw included a device along the lines of an old-fashioned ear trumpet as well as a pair of gramophone speakers.

  Crackling emerged from the speakers.

  “Is that Arne?”

  The words came in a sort of whisper, hardly louder than the susurration of leaves on a breezy evening. Arne moved closer to the equipment and fiddled with a dial.

  “Yes, it’s Arne Petersen,” he said calmly as he tinkered. “I’ve brought Sophie Hunter to see you, Mr. Nobel; she’s standing right here beside me. Sophie, will you say hello to Mr. Nobel? He can’t see you, but with mechanical augmentation, his hearing is much better than that of an ordinary human being, and his English is also exceedingly good. He will be able to hear and understand everything you say. Do not be fooled by the lack of expression in his facial muscles— they are paralyzed, and the technology serves only to amplify the small amount of movement he retains in the mouth and throat.”

  “Sophie,” said the disembodied voice from the speakers. “Welcome.”

  She stared at the body lying before her. The first thing that came to her mind was the impossibility of imagining it, albeit in a younger and healthier incarnation, in naked proximity to Tabitha’s. But the face was unmistakably that of the man in the photograph. This was Sophie’s grandfather, incomprehensible as the notion might seem!

  About to speak, she stopped herself and cast a glance at Arne, who said quietly, “I am here exclusively as an intermediary. You will let me know if I can facilitate communications in any way, but I do not consider myself properly a party to the conversation—I am bound by as strong an obligation of confidentiality as the priest in his confessional. The nurse must remain, but I promise you she speaks no English. What is said here will remain within these four walls.”

  “Sophie,” the voice said again, this time more urgently. “I learned of Tabitha’s death only a few days ago—did she leave you a letter?”

  “She left me a letter,” Sophie said somberly, casting another glance at Arne and wondering whether he really would understand the importance of keeping Tabitha’s secret. “A letter, a birth certificate, and a pair of photographs.”

  “I have seen the birth certificate,” said the voice; the face above the collar was absolutely remote and impassive, as though it had been carved from marble. “I can imagine, at the very least, what the letter may have said. What were the photographs?”

  “One was a picture of two young people, a photograph taken in San Remo in the 1890s.”

  The sound might have been nothing more than a glitch in the amplification, but Sophie couldn’t help interpreting it as a sigh.

  “The other picture,” she continued, “was a photograph of my parents in the company of Elsa Blix.”

  “Elsa Blix!” Arne exclaimed. “But how can this be? Elsa Blix is the one who’s taken Mikael—what does that have to do with this bit of ancient history, if you will forgive my calling it that? However much it may matter to Sophie to find out what happened to her parents, Mikael’s safety is far more important.”

  “Elsa Blix used to work with my father,” Sophie said.

  “In one sense,” said the remote voice belonging to the man in the bed, “the fact of Sophie and Mikael’s happening to encounter Elsa Blix falls under the heading of the onein-a-million coincidence. In another, their convergence at the Nobel building in Stockholm results from a rationally comprehensible set of pressures that make it not nearly so surprising. I do not know precisely why Sophie and Mikael found themselves there, though the onset of war had, of course, brought them inexorably to neutral Sweden, and it was a very natural thing for them to find themselves at the doorstep of a building to which they might be expected to feel some connection. And I have, after all, taken considerable trouble to render the museum attractive to members of the general public. Elsa Blix was there because she had been trying to sell me something: namely, the plans of the device built by Sophie’s father.”

  “But—”

  “What—”

  Sophie and Arne had spoken at the same time; Arne fell quiet, and motioned to Sophie to continue.

  “Your brother’s disappearance,” said Nobel, “may be no more than a random act of malice. But when Niels Bohr alerted me several weeks ago to Sophie’s wish to explore the old connection between Blix and her parents, I knew nothing good would come of it!”

  “Who is Elsa Blix, then?” Sophie asked. “I mean, who is she really? I know she studied with Bohr—he told me she was a research scientist turned weapons dealer. I suppose she must have kept a copy of the plans after she left my father’s factory. But why did she take Mikael, and how will we get him back? Does she really live in an ice palace in Spitsbergen, and will we have to go there to find him?”

  “A woman of many questions, I gather,” said Nobel.

  Sophie was starting to be able . . . well, not to reconcile the voice with the uncanny shape in the tank, but at least to credit it with a full personality and consciousness. She found it made more sense to look in the direction of the speakers than to keep her eyes on that strange, cold face.

  “I will tell you everything I can,” Nobel continued. “It happens that I knew Elsa Blix’s mother—a beautiful socialite, a butterfly flitting around Europe as whimsy took her. As a young girl, Elsa had a fierce intelligence that led her to feel something like contempt for her mother—and yet she herself had little more self-discipline than the mother she despised. I had known Elsa slightly when she was a child. Her mother and my wife were acquainted. I met her again at the institute at the end of her fellowship period—she interviewed for a job with one of my companies, and I interviewed her myself, once she had been thoroughly vetted by the personnel department, to see whether she would be a suitable member of Alan Hunter’s staff in Russia. Her technical expertise complemented his nicely, and he had a high opinion of her brains from the time they’d spent together at the institute; I thought a productive dynamic might arise bet
ween the two of them.”

  “And did it?” Sophie asked. It was mad to linger on the distant past when Mikael even now might be in pressing danger—time now mattered in hours or even seconds rather than years and decades—but the past also seemed to hold the secrets of Elsa Blix’s present motivation, and Sophie supposed it might be worth taking the extra time to find out what she could.

  “Yes and no,” said Nobel, and Sophie thought it might have been another sigh that issued from the machines. “Alan and Elsa did work well together; she contributed a fair amount to the technical specifications, though not, perhaps, as much as your mother did, Sophie. Rose was a quieter woman than Elsa, which led to her being often underestimated.”

  “You speak as if you knew them all quite well!” said Sophie, slightly bewildered.

  “I take an interest in all those who work for me,” said Nobel, “but Alan Hunter’s project was particularly dear to me. I was already quite an elderly man, of course, but I was not the pitiful wrecked carcass you see before you now. I traveled twice to see the factory, and was intimately involved with your father’s plans. He was, after all—Arne, you will pretend you did not hear this part—my only son. And the device he hoped to build was the weapon I had always dreamed of: an explosive device powered by a nuclear reaction so powerful and so profoundly destructive that the mere threat of its use, or so I then believed, promised to end conventional warfare forever.

  “During my first visit, I truly believed the dream was at long last about to come to fruition. The project was going well, with the unmistakable aura of a prosperous and productive workplace. Your father was a very talented manager, above and beyond his intellectual gifts, and both the engineering staff and the manual laborers in the factory seemed devoted to him personally as well as to the project. Of course, there were significant financial incentives for them to stay on or ahead of schedule. Your father would have received a substantial bonus—a mix of company stock and hard cash in a currency of his choice—for early completion.”