In an hour another city appeared on the skyline. There was a border. The policeman at the Kontrolla scarcely glanced at Petrie’s passport. A long bridge took them over the Dunaj, which Petrie took to be the Danube. A sign said Bratislava. He looked out on tall grey buildings, buses and trams, cobbled roads, churches with an Eastern look. Not Vienna, then, he thought. Bratislava.
The driver stopped in front of a large grey-fronted hotel and opened Petrie’s door without a word. By the time Petrie had reached the foyer, driver and BMW had gone.
Sir was expected.
His room was plain, wooden-floored with an embroidered rug. He tossed his holdall on a chair and left. On the first floor he navigated a crowded bar, its air thick with Turkish cigarette smoke, and reached a restauracia. It was pure Belle Époque, with oil paintings of Old Bratislava lining its walls and clusters of lights hanging like chrome and glass snowdrops from its high curved ceiling. Wooden partitions separated the tables, ensuring privacy for husband and wife, husband and mistress, businessmen making deals in the post-Communist market. Behind the nearest one, he heard snatches of conversation between a man and woman, in an unfamiliar tongue. The clatter of trams came through the window, and dark shapes like Lowry figures were crossing a slushy cobbled square. Wisps of the heavy tobacco smoke were drifting through from the bar.
By now Petrie was strung up like a cat. He felt somehow surreal, as if he was inside a dream; if a crocodile had slithered into the room it would hardly have seemed out of place.
A little waiter appeared. He had a dinner suit, bow tie, moustache and passable Slavic-tinted English.
‘I’d like some fish,’ Petrie said.
‘What kind of fish?’
‘What do you have?’
A shrug. ‘Much fish.’
‘What’s local?’
‘Štika. From the Danube this morning. It has sharp teeth.’
‘I’ll have that.’
‘With cheeps?’
‘Potatoes.’
‘And to drink?’
‘A white wine.’ Petrie paused, and added: ‘A carafe.’
‘You can have zee house wine.’
‘Fine.’
A boroviçka and a coffee later, he signed a chit and made his way, bloated, back to his room. He made sure his door was locked. He lay on the narrow bed and tried to analyse the sense of unease, anxiety even, which was now washing over him.
There was the sudden transplantation from the routine to the weird, from the familiar to the alien. There was the bizarre warning: Be sober, be vigilant. Beware of what? Roaring lions? Strange women? Slithering crocodiles?
But most of all, he realised, his tension was being driven by something else, by the conundrum still defeating his restless mind: What am I getting myself into? And what happens next?
Petrie wakened with a start. The telephone, its ringing tone unfamiliar. Disoriented, it was a second before he remembered he wasn’t in his Dublin flat. He fumbled for a light switch, knocking over a tumbler. His watch said 5.30 a.m. ‘Dr Petrie? Your car is waiting.’
5
The Castle
The icy air had a freshening effect on Petrie, even at twenty to six in the morning. It was the same silver BMW and the same wrinkled driver. The cavernous boot swallowed up Petrie’s rucksack like a whale devouring a minnow. He kept a canvas bag with papers beside him, and settled into the back seat.
The car drove a few hundred yards along the road and turned into the front of the Hotel Europa.
Miss Lonely Planet.
The driver heaved her rucksack into the boot as if it was full of rocks. As she settled into the car beside him, Petrie saw that she was lightly made up. He caught a whiff of scent. She had an open, almost naive smile.
‘I do planets.’ Her voice was soft and curiously graceful. She wasn’t a native English speaker.
The car took off, the driver muttering something under his breath.
Petrie said, ‘I saw you at Heathrow.’
‘I saw you too. I spotted you at Vienna airport and then on the streets here, last night. It was too much of a coincidence.’
‘I’ve been warned not to speak to strange women.’
She gave a wicked smile, stuck her legs out and wiggled her feet. She was wearing walking boots and her slender ankles made them seem over-large.
‘And then I got another warning. It was vague but I took it to mean I might be followed.’
She asked, ‘How do you know I’m not a strange woman following you?’
‘You weren’t trying to look inconspicuous.’ She was in fact extremely conspicuous but Petrie didn’t want to mention that.
She gave a worried little nod. ‘Should we be trusting each other?’ Her voice had a slightly sing-song quality — Scandinavian, he thought. It fitted with the pure blonde hair.
‘Who says I trust you?’
‘This is like something out of a spy movie. Any idea what it’s about?’ She tilted her head slightly.
‘No.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a mathematician. Nobody understands me, I work on ferociously specialised stuff.’
‘What sort of ferociously specialised stuff?’
‘I suppose you’d call it pattern recognition. At the moment I’m doing knots.’
‘You mean like in string?’
‘Yes, only I do them in four-dimensional space.’
‘I can’t visualise that. No wonder nobody understands you. Anyway, it sounds useless.’
‘Don’t you believe it. I’ve found links with quantum theory and cryptography.’ He patted his canvas bag as if it contained the secrets of the Universe. ‘And you?’
‘I’m a planetary scientist. Again a specialised area: extrasolar planetary systems.’
The car was warm and Petrie unbuttoned his jacket. ‘Planets and patterns. I wonder how they connect?’ He gazed out of the window at the dark mid-European streets and the unfamiliar skyline. Then: ‘This is the car they collected me in from Vienna.’
‘I had a Mercedes. But we were on the same flight. We could have shared a car, and even had the same hotel.’
‘Exactly. Someone didn’t want us seen together.’
The car had now taken them clear of Bratislava on to a broad four-laned highway. The dark sky was lightening to grey. After ten swift minutes, the driver slowed and turned on to a quiet side road, lined with snow-covered fields. Here the headlights lit up a wall of fog, limiting visibility to a couple of hundred yards.
‘Do you think he speaks English?’ Miss Lonely Planet whispered.
Petrie said, ‘You’ve exposed a breast,’ while looking at the man’s eyes in the mirror. They didn’t flicker.
‘No, he doesn’t. Sorry about that.’
She laughed.
‘I’m Petrie. Tom, Tommy or Thomas depending on how you feel. From Dublin. So which part of Scandinavia are you from?’
‘Freya Størmer,’ she said, and they finally shook hands. ‘From north of the Arctic Circle. Tromsø, to be exact.’
Petrie looked out uneasily at the fields and woods. In his imagination, he saw black bears roaming the forests. He wondered again what was bringing him out to these hinterlands. The trees looked black against the white snow and he had a brief, unsettling illusion of living inside a photographic negative.
Patterns and planets. Planets and prime ministers. Don’t speak to strange women. A strange woman at his side. Beware of devouring lions.