“We’re meeting him in here?”
“Who?” Janachkov asks, still looking away.
“This Greek guy.”
“Of course!” Koulin starts bouncing as he walks. “By Hvězda. The hunting lodge.”
“Hvězda? Doesn’t that mean star?”
No answer. It does, though. He remembers learning it: hvězda, fem. noun, type 1; hvězda, hvězdu, hvězdě, hvězdy … Star. Are they that high up? They’ve reached the wall now, and are about to pass through a small door in it when Milachkov stops, tssks and announces:
“I’ve forgotten the thing in the car!”
Koulin and Janachkov nod gravely. Anton asks:
“What thing?”
“Oh, the … thing. The, you know, the records of our past dealings with this Greek guy. I’ll just … I’ll catch you up.” He turns round and heads back beneath the circling toy plane towards the car. Anton, flanked by Koulin and Janachkov, passes through the door in the white wall.
Inside, a long, broad avenue cuts through the woods. It has a really classical perspective: evenly spaced benches punctuate his eye’s passage down the avenue’s sides, shrinking as the two lines converge towards their own resolution at infinity, their vanishing point — a point not quite reached due to the presence, in a circular clearing perhaps half a kilometre away, of a large white building.
“Oh! What’s that?” Anton’s never been here before.
“Hvězda. The hunting lodge,” Jana informs him, his eyes scouring the woods on either side.
“Is that where we’re …”
“Near there. In the woods.”
Small footpaths lead into these woods, splitting and criss-crossing as they cut through a web of birch trees, sycamore trees and giant evergreens. Some of the trees have markings on them, little red or white lines: must be for guiding walkers around — although it seems to Anton that the trees are so thickly packed you’d need a ball of string to find your way back out again, like Helena’s guy in his Greek labyrinth. Or was it Minoan? Greek guy in a Minoan …
“Hey, what’s this man’s name?”
“Well, it’s Jerémiah.”
“Jerémiah? What sort of a Greek name is that?”
Janachkov shrugs. “He’s sort of Greek, but not completely. He’s Greek originally, but he’s from all over the place.”
Two more kids run out of the woods, shooting at each other with cap guns, and race past them, heading for where they’ve come from, to the door in the wall. Anton bought Kristof a gun like theirs once, but Helena disapproved and took it away again. They’re perhaps two hundred, two hundred and fifty metres from the white building now. It’s strangely shaped, neither round nor square but kind of jutty: its walls head in, then out, then in again. Beneath a grey slate roof that seems to fold and crumple, irregularly positioned windows peep from between red-and-white shutters, as though monitoring their approach. Ten metres further, and the building’s surfaces fall into place. The walls jut in and out to form a kind of pentagon, a star shape. Of course. Hvězda: star. The hunting lodge is star-shaped: named after one, built like one. Anton stops walking, turns round and lets his gaze run back along the avenue they’ve been shuffling up like worshippers up an aisle towards an altar. It’s a surveyor’s dream, straight and orthogonal — as though the building, like a real star, exercised such an intense and overpowering force that all space around it fell into shape in concordance with the lines and vectors of its field, its pull. Even the tiny footpaths through the woods, for all their splitting and gyrating, lead to the building: he’s sure of this, sure that the red and white marks on the trees are daubed on in the same phosphorous mixture as the shutters’ red and white and are orbiting the latter, like a belt of tiny asteroids. Mila’s being drawn back towards the building too: Anton can see his diminutive figure re-entering the area enclosed by the white wall, through the doorway that looks like the doorway to some kind of mausoleum, heading up the avenue towards them, towards it. He’s carrying a large object: looks a bit like a surveyor’s pole although Anton knows he’s only thinking this because of the perspective and the straightness, the converging … He turns back towards the star and starts walking again.
“Wait!”
Janachkov here. He’s still peering into the woods — looking, presumably, for this oddly named Greek, Jerémiah. Eventually he points to the left and says:
“This way.”
Janachkov trudges in first; Anton follows him; Koulin brings up the rear. They have to walk in single file because the footpath’s narrow. Beside it, little white flowers are pushing through the wood’s floor, a whole army of them. Ilievski’s exit from the car was so bizarre. Right by the flower shop, too. Perhaps he’d had bad news from Sofia, some family death that he was keeping to himself. Chrysanthemums are funeral flowers: when Anton’s father died, his aunts and uncles all sent chrysanthemums, white ones. Stoyann even managed to phone in an order from Philadelphia — a feat his sister, Anton’s mother, never got her head round, enquiring, even after Anton had explained it to her several times, whether Stoyann could have grown them in his garden: she’d heard that the climate in America was agreeable, much milder than Sofia … They pass some plastic bottles strung up from the lower branches of a tree to hold water for birds. There’s birdsong all around them, really loud. Robins, thrushes, finches, magpies maybe. He can’t see them: must be hiding in the mesh of trunks and branches with this Jerémiah. Half a million, Koulin said. What’s that in Greek? Miso hil … no, hiliariko is a thousand; half a million’s miso ekatomirio. Miso ekatomirio. Janachkov’s stopped and turned to face him; he’s ushering him off to the track’s right, waiting for him to go first, like a well-trained footman …
“We’re meeting him right in the middle of the woods?”
Janachkov nods.
“Jesus! What’s wrong with cafés these days?”
Janachkov shrugs. Anton steps past him and negotiates his way around twigs and stumps. It’s really dense here: the trees’ trunks all rise straight up, the tall birches and the sycamores and then the taller fir trees, their main branches falling across one another and smaller, higher branches and their even smaller offshoots madly networking against the clouds’ white. Anton’s feet crunch twigs and leaves as he walks. He’s trying not to step on the white flowers, but it’s difficult: they’re everywhere, just like the birdsong was until a moment ago when this plane, this real plane, started flying by, eclipsing bit by bit all other noises. It must be low: the whole wood’s moaning, singing with the sound of metal flight and speed and distance. A twig’s prodding him from behind, digging into his ribs: makes him think of Ilievski for some reason. Anton drops onto his knees and inspects the ground more closely. There are so many layers: first ferns, then leaves — large sepia-toned leaves whose skeletons loom through their decomposing flesh, and then those straight leaves he used to throw up in the air and watch helicoptering down towards the pavement when he was a child; then, below these, pieces of dead wood with insects crawling over them. Then, even lower down, moss, more twigs, earth. Looking at it from this close is like being in a plane or helicopter flying over a landscape: tiny sprouts of fern become tall trees, green canopies erupting high above a forest roof …