III.
ON FRIDAY, at that low hour of three, Miss Huk climbed to the handyman’s room to deliver his linens. She laid the pile of sheets and towels on his cot … soft stuff, so that his sensitive skin would not pucker.
The turret had four windows, one on each side. Three of them looked out on glistening green boughs. From the fourth you could see Sklar in the distance. If you looked directly downward, you saw the kitchen garden and the little parking area. Only the inn’s pickup truck stood there now. The Albrechts’ rented sedan was gone, she saw.
And she saw the stranger: thin black hair combed over a shining pate. She leaned forward for a better look and smacked her forehead on the handyman’s window. She backed away and lifted his binoculars from the dresser.
Flat ears. A tan scarf. A bony face. A pointed black beard.
A scientist, you’d think.
He waited, this seeming scientist, his hands loose at his thighs, beside a birch tree. When Lars crawled into the parking lot the man pursed his thin lips. Lars did not raise his head at the whistle. But he got to his feet. He approached the stranger. He stopped at the usual distance of a foot and a half.
The man’s lips moved in speech. Lars listened. They both squatted, and the man produced his own magnifying glass. More talk, more listening. When the man stood and walked toward the road, Lars followed.
Man walking, boy trailing; and both disappeared from Miss Huk’s view.
She inhaled sharply, producing only a light whistle. She did nothing else. The inn allowed guests to do as they pleased. Children were the responsibility of their parents.
So she stood there, thinking of the stories she had read aloud. The merchant who traded his gold for a pair of wings. She had found that old book a few days ago. The brothers who mistakenly killed each other in darkness. She had offered to read to Lars. The peasants’ sons who went out to seek their fortunes and had succeeded or failed. Lars had given her a hard look and scuttled away. The starling whose song shattered the mirror that was the world, and so the world had to begin again.
She was still at the window.
But the little figure: how brief his stay.
“You move like lightning,” Uncle Huk had marveled.
She could still do that. In a minute she was on the second floor, then the first. The cook was not in the kitchen. The handyman was elsewhere. S. and S. sat in the parlor with their embroidery. The topologist amiably manned the registration desk. “The telephone rang,” he said. “I took a reservation.” Miss Huk, on her way upstairs again, bowed her gratitude. She knocked on Andrei’s door. Oh, he’d hate this. But: “Yes,” he called. She flew in, and there he was, and the kitchen maid was with him, her round face registering Miss Huk’s entry without alarm.
“A man has taken Lars,” Miss Huk rasped.
Buckling his trousers, Andrei sped out of the room. The kitchen maid grabbed his razor and scampered after him. Miss Huk brought up the rear.
On the first floor Andrei plunged into the kitchen, returned with the cleaver; and the three raced down the wooden steps of the inn and through the scrub to the road. They turned downhill. Patches of snow from the last storm still clung to the mud.
Miss Huk ran, and her thoughts ran, too. Perhaps the Americans had arranged to dispose of their child. They could not transform him. They could not cosset him forever. Her heart thudded. Lars would not love. He would not marry. He would not wonder, even; he would recognize and classify. He would learn more Latin names and remember each one. It was a kind of happiness — she could tell them that.
The three reached the shallow steps of Junius Bridge. Andrei raised the cleaver. The kitchen maid waved the razor. Miss Huk slowed to a walk.
The chief Belgian stepped into their path, both arms aloft. “The boy is safe,” he said.
Lars was standing at the railing, near but not next to his father. The phony scientist was also standing on the bridge, his arms tied behind his back. The second Belgian was there, carrying a coil of rope. Beyond them, in the middle of the bridge, stood the Albrecht car, Mrs. Albrecht at the wheel, and next to it a strange green car, the third Belgian at its wheel. The cars would block traffic. When was there any traffic?
The Belgian with the rope marched the bound man forward and pushed him into the backseat of the green car and got in front beside his compatriot. Hikers indeed. The car backed off the bridge, turned, and headed toward Sklar.
Lars was examining something on the railing. She knew what it was. A speckled moth deposited her eggs here. The larva spun a cocoon around itself. The whole process was a biological curiosity — the moth should have chosen wood, not iron — but some ancestress had made the mistake long ago, when the Junius was reconstructed, and the error was replicated generation after insect generation; new moths kept emerging from the bridge.
Andrei and the kitchen maid, their weapons lowered, turned and began to walk up the road. The chief Belgian followed them. Christine Albrecht started her car and drove a few yards and picked up her husband. They sat side by side for a moment, not looking at each other, his hand covering hers on the wheel. Then they drove on toward the inn. Lars, after a final inspection of the cocoon, followed his parents’ car.
When everyone was out of sight Miss Huk lowered herself down the bank. Her boots squelched on the mud. She peered under the bridge.
Blue eyes in a fat face stared at her.
“You know I would never …,” he began. “I sit here of an afternoon, I like the design of the iron …,” he began again.
“I do know,” she reassured him. “Come home now.”
She climbed the bank again. She was catching up with Lars … no, he had lagged behind. “The cocoon on the bridge,” she said.
He turned his head toward her, though his gaze strayed elsewhere.
She kept him waiting. At last he looked at her.
“Hepialus lemberti,” she rewarded him. His eyes locked themselves to hers for a moment, pupils penetrating pupils, like sex she supposed.
IV.
ANDREI DREW RIBBONS of sound from the painted instrument.
Lars sat like a stone on one of the carved benches. In a row of folded chairs sat the other guests and Miss Huk, all listening. The handyman, elbows on the bar, listened. The splotched cook, shoulder against the doorjamb, listened. Somewhere the kitchen maid listened, too.
Christine Albrecht seemed to be only half listening. She looked weary beyond repair. After the applause she slipped away. Robertson Albrecht watched her climb upward; Miss Huk, nearby, watched him. “May we go into the book room?” he said, his eyes still on his wife.
They sat side by side. “I am sorry about this afternoon,” he said, with his tensile gravity. “We are used to kidnapping attempts, we are prepared for them. But I would have spared you.”
She nodded.
“We will leave tomorrow, along with our offensive bodyguards.” Silence lay between them like an animal. “Thank you for the comfort of your inn,” he said. “Lars,” he said, then paused. “Lars is not particularly precocious, doesn’t read anything except entomology, doesn’t even read very well.”
She favored him with her expressionless gaze.
“My brother in New York, my partner, he too is … narrow.” She spoke at last, as loudly as she could. “It is possible that in a century or two the interpersonal will cease to be of value.”