‘You mean there was more?’
‘Yes,’ said Teresa. ‘Sometime after he first entered the storage area, my father discovered that there was actually a second adjoining area, connected by a steel door, behind which the ceiling had collapsed. The door frame had buckled and he couldn’t open it, but he was convinced that more provisions had been stored there or perhaps even something more valuable. He had all sorts of theories◦– a temperature-controlled room for artworks, a cellar for the finest of the wines, a vault for precious gems. Or maybe nothing, an empty concrete space just filled with tons of dirt. It used to keep him awake at night. He once told me that if even half of what he had imagined lay behind that door was actually there, he could retire off the proceeds. But it might as well have been on the moon, because he couldn’t get to it and the fact was he needed a new source of products. As far as he was concerned, there was only one solution to that◦– the Americans. He knew they were unlikely to deal with him directly, so he needed a middleman, someone who understood how their minds worked and who could speak their language. And that’s why my father picked you. He always said he had an instinct for knowing who to trust.’
Back in the sleeping car the bed had already been pulled down, and a flask of cocoa was set upon the little table, flanked by two cups upturned in their saucers, rattling faintly with the movement of the train.
‘I’ll sleep on the floor,’ said Carter.
‘No,’ she told him, ‘you won’t.’
They sat down, side by side.
‘I ask so many questions,’ said Carter, ‘but you ask almost none of me.’
‘And you wonder why?’ she replied.
‘Of course.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘it is because I am afraid you’d tell the truth, and that I could not bear to hear it.’
Hearing those words, Carter leaned forward, resting his elbows upon his knees and pressing his hands to his face, as if to stop his mask from crumbling to dust. Her hand rested softly on his shoulder. She was so close now. He could feel her presence like static in the air. ‘I wish we weren’t pretending,’ he told her.
‘We’re not,’ she whispered.
He looked up.
She kissed him before he could speak.
And the barricades that he had built to withstand any siege and splintering of bone began to slip and fall, dissolving back into the particles from which they’d been created, like the castles he had built as a child out of the gritty sand at Belmar, when they were swept away by the incoming tide.
…
It took another twenty-four hours to reach Karlovy Vary, passing through Vienna, where they boarded a much smaller train, and then changing again at Prague, travelling in carriages barely half the size of the ones in which they had begun their journey.
The town was nestled in a valley, surrounded on all sides by thickly wooded hills. Instinctively, Carter found himself looking for traces of where the war had left its scars upon the landscape, but he found none here. The sight of burned-out buildings, pyramids of rubble and the skeletons of tanks and trucks lying half buried in weeds beside the tracks had been such a constant until now that Carter felt as if they had travelled not just into a different land, but into a parallel universe where the war had never taken place, and where the lifeless stones still held the memory of those who had gone before.
Arriving at Karlovy, the locomotive groaned to a halt beneath a rusted metal roof that covered only one of the tracks. The station building was a sandy yellow colour, with scabs of plaster showing where the paint had peeled away. Although it looked run down, it seemed that way by choice, surrendering gracefully to time.
The cab that drove them to the Orlovsky hotel was a white Skoda with a narrow, curved front grille. ‘Are you here for the cure?’ asked the driver, as he motored through the narrow streets. He was a nervous-looking man who wore a knee-length canvas coat of the type drivers used to wear in open-topped cars. He sat very close to the wheel, hands gripping the top, and as he steered the Skoda along the narrow zigzag streets, his whole body swayed with the effort.
It was evening now and the tall houses, with their brick red roofs and the same dusty yellow paint as the station, glowed in the setting sun.
The architecture was so ornate and colourful, like something out of a child’s picture book about fairytales, that to Carter it barely seemed real.
‘The cure?’ asked Teresa.
‘The Karlovy Cure,’ explained the man, with a stern patience that implied she must surely know about this but had simply forgotten in the moment. He talked quickly, as if the thoughts were piling up inside his head. ‘It is a regimen of sulphur baths and water from our thermal springs. It was once named the Carlsbad Cure, which had a better ring to it, in my opinion, but the past is the past, and Karlovy Vary is what it’s called today. Whatever the name, most people come here seeking to mend their broken and neglected constitutions. They have done for a thousand years and a thousand years from now, they’ll still be coming here. Sometimes we can undo what has been done, but in spite of everything you see, we do not deal in miracles.’ He studied them in his rear-view mirror. ‘But I see you have not come here seeking those.’
‘Not yet, anyway,’ said Carter.
The driver pulled up in front of the hotel and carried their bags into the lobby. Giant potted ferns made an archway just inside the door and a red carpet stretched towards a wide stone staircase which twisted to the left, passing out of sight beneath a stained glass window depicting a stag looking at its own reflection in a forest pond. Sunlight passing through red and green and yellow chips of glass seemed to fill the air, as if a ghostly flock of birds were flying around the room.
The concierge at the desk was an elderly man with a stiff grey moustache and piercing whitish-blue eyes, like the eyes of a sled dog. He wore a red tunic with a collar buttoned tight against his throat and brass buttons emblazoned with the willow tree logo of the Orlovsky.
He watched the couple approach, his face unreadable.
Carter paid the cab driver, who touched the brim of his cap and walked out beneath the archway of ferns into the almost blinding summer light outside, as if passing into a different dimension.
Then Carter handed his reservations to the concierge.
The man studied the documents. Then suddenly he looked up, and his expression was so stern and fierce that Carter felt sure that something had gone terribly wrong.
But it was nothing like that.
‘The Orlovsky welcomes you,’ the concierge said solemnly. He raised one arm above his head and snapped his fingers with a sound like cracking bones.
A porter appeared from a back room, buttoning his uniform as he dashed out to gather their bags.
Instead of going straight to their room, they walked out into the street and strolled along a boulevard beside the river that ran through the centre of the town. Rows of leafy trees sheltered benches on which people, some of them clearly very ill, sat and watched fountains of water rising from the shallow river. Music drifted from the cafes where some patrons, instead of wine, drank yellowy, sulphur-smelling water from glasses nestled in brass holders.
As Carter walked beside Teresa, his thoughts tripped back and forth with the relentlessness of a metronome between the work he had come here to do, along with all the danger that came with it, and the unmistakable sensation that he and Teresa had emerged from the lifeless twilight that they had once believed was the entire world into a hovering, in-between place where they were both dreaming the same dream◦– which was so real and yet so fragile that if either of them even breathed out of pace with the other, the whole thing would vanish like smoke and they would find themselves once more inside a cage of rust and rock.