The Pearlkillers Read online

  And then at last there was a letter, or rather, a brief note. It came from Portugal, where it had been brought by a cargoboat from South America. It was from Anders. All he would say was that the expedition had suffered privation, sickness, death and massacres. They had re-formed themselves several times, using local labour and studying the unmapped interiors of several different countries. They had been through epidemics, battles and accidents. And he was the sole survivor. He was shipping out as master on a Dutch freighter and hoped to be home shortly before the end of the winter.

  Lina prepared to travel with Anders’ sister, Elsie, to Cherbourg, where he was to land, but another letter came to forestall them: Anders had had luck – the ship had achieved record time and he would come overland and then by ferry and so on to Stockholm. They were to stay and wait for him.

  ‘Well,’ Lina said, ‘we’ve had enough practice.’

  ‘He still doesn’t say anything about Ib,’ Elsie said. ‘Or even Johann.’

  Lina stood with her hand on the strap of her basket trunk. She murmured that he didn’t say much of anything and that it wasn’t like him: he was usually so mindful of others and had a thought for everyone.

  She didn’t stop to consider as she talked. It had been ten years without a word. They had had him, she only now remembered, officially declared dead – and the others. Sophie had married someone else three years before; what would she do now if Johann came home?

  ‘They’re dead, Elsie,’ she said.

  ‘Anders is alive, at any rate.’

  ‘I mean the lawyers. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Oh, good Lord.’

  ‘And I sold most of his grandfather’s library – the books with all the French bindings. Elsie, what am I going to do?’

  ‘We just wait, dear. That’s all we can do. He’ll understand that you acted for the best.’

  Lina wasn’t sure. The children, at first so delighted by the news, picked up her apprehension. The two daughters, Hannah and Astrid, now twenty and eighteen, were told, as if still children, to go off into the park and amuse themselves somehow, while their mother and aunt discussed matters of business.

  *

  The three girls strolled down to the boathouse, which had been converted into a study for Erika.

  Johannah, the eldest, was positive that her father had come back with a wonderful secret about the fountain of youth or the herb of life, or something along similar lines.

  Astrid wanted the treasure to be gold, or pearls at the very least.

  Erika expected him to have brought back a knowledge of the customs and languages of the people who lived in the region of the Amazon. She hoped for an advance in scholarship and some kind of national or international recognition of his work: a medal, or a citation or award, a special degree issued to him by the universities. ‘But the others?’ she asked.

  ‘All dead,’ Hannah said. ‘They wouldn’t let us look at the letter, but Ingrid was listening at the door.’

  ‘All of them?’ Erika said.

  ‘Well, in ten years. A lot can happen.’

  ‘Or all at once,’ Astrid suggested. ‘Eaten by cannibals.’

  ‘Mother’, Erika said, ‘was interested in Uncle Anders’ best friend, Martin Brandt. She doesn’t say anything, but I wonder if he’s alive. I can still remember him.’

  ‘I remember the party when they left,’ Astrid said.

  ‘All of them. All dead,’ Hannah repeated. ‘That’s what Ingrid said.’

  ‘Well, we’ll have to wait and see,’ Erika told her.

  *

  He arrived late in the evening, brought by the two-horse carriage that worked from the train station. He didn’t say hello to anyone, nor did a single person greet him. He went unrecognized. The porter and cabdriver loaded his three large trunks and two boxes at the back and on top, and they started off. The driver made some conversation about the weather, but that was all.

  It was still cold. At the Viking stone landmark Anders stepped down and rode the rest of the journey inside, braced against an old cord-bound bootbox that was being delivered to some house in the neighbourhood. He closed his eyes. It had taken him a long time, nearly two years, before he could decide to come home. For a while he had really wondered whether he might not stay away for ever. He’d been living under a different name, he was speaking another language, he’d read the announcement of his presumed death. He looked different.

  He looked so different that old Ingrid at the door failed to recognize him. He asked for his wife, stepped into the flagged hallway, and stood alone there as the old woman’s footsteps went on, fainter, behind closing doors. He knew exactly where she was going and what she would pass by: all the corridors, the paintings hung along them, the rooms, chairs and tables.

  He remembered the hall itself from his childhood: the hexagonal flagstones, the whitewashed semi-circular wall with the straight-backed wood chairs set against it; the antlers and heads of deer and elk mounted high up on the wall. His eyes travelled to the long curve of the bannister and the first flight of the staircase, which was all he could see from the level where he stood.

  Lina came from downstairs, out of the little room his mother had used to write her letters in: the room off the passage that led from the drawing room to the library. And Elsie was rushing right behind her.

  They both stopped still when they saw him. They thought they must have made a mistake. He’d had smooth, brown hair when he’d gone away; now it was bushy and grey. And he had a grey beard, too.

  ‘Anders,’ Lina said. ‘Oh, my dear.’ She walked slowly to him.

  Everything, he thought then, was worth that moment, no matter what happened. He opened his arms and folded her up in them, bowing his head.

  His sister withdrew for a while, until she could hear that they were moving off towards the drawing room. Then she ran after them and threw herself at him, giving out a cry as if she had suddenly hurt herself.

  *

  There was a big family gathering at which he met and embraced his relatives in almost total silence. At first there had been a laugh or a sob, or a silly remark about how things had changed; but as the minutes passed, a funereal quiet spread through the company. They didn’t know what to say, nor did he. Two extremely pretty young women pounced on him eagerly and wanted to kiss him over and over: they turned out to be his daughters. He shook hands with the servants; one of them said something about what a pity it was that his mother hadn’t lived to see the day. He felt his mind beginning to spin and the room seemed too crowded wherever he moved. He stepped back beside his wife and sister. He motioned them out into the hallway with him and towards the library. He asked that he should be allowed to rest for a time.

  ‘Of course, dear,’ Lina agreed. ‘We’ll have a quiet meal together.’

  ‘Just the three of us,’ he said.

  ‘Lovely.’ She hadn’t thought that he’d include Elsie. ‘But at some point, you must just go up and say hello to the aunts.’

  ‘Aunt Emmelina and Aunt Irmintrude?’ he said, as if hauling the names from memories of a book read in his childhood. ‘I’m surprised they’re still alive. They must be nearly a hundred by now.’

  ‘Aunt Emmelina is ninety-seven,’ Elsie told him. ‘Aunt Irmintrude is ninety-nine.’

  ‘Are they still up and about?’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Lina said. ‘They’re wonderful old dears, really.’

  ‘Getting very doddery,’ Elsie added, ‘and can be nasty as toads when they like. But fortunately most of their energy nowadays is taken up with hating each other instead of the rest of us. Ingrid won’t go up the stairs any more.’

  ‘She’s getting on, too,’ he said. ‘I thought so when I saw her in the hall.’

  ‘But she’s strong. It’s the spiteful things they say that she can’t stand. She says that in her day only peasants had such bad manners.’

  ‘What a shame it is,’ he said. ‘I remember them as such charming ladies. A breath of the old world. As
it was. Before everything changed.’

  ‘I suppose you have to think of it as an illness,’ Lina said. ‘Old age.’

  ‘Ninety-nine is certainly very old.’

  ‘You must just look in. They’d be so pleased.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But first, before anything, I have to talk to you both.’

  *

  ‘As I wrote you,’ he said, ‘the others are dead. We travelled through so many places and lived through such dangers – ten years is a long time; sometimes I wonder at the fact that I’m still alive myself. And sometimes I look back and think: did that happen? There’s another thing, one that frightens me now: I’m actually pretty sure that there are times I don’t remember exactly. Some of them I may even have falsified – not meaning to, but simply in the course of time, as people do – as you’ll notice happens if you ask ten eye-witnesses to describe an accident or even an opera. I realized it first five years ago, when a few of us were comparing notes about the arrival in South America; and we couldn’t agree about anything at all.’

  ‘But why didn’t you write?’ Lina asked.

  ‘Wait,’ Elsie said. ‘Let him take his time.’

  ‘We wrote. Of course we wrote. All the time. But, after the initial flow, we wrote sporadically. And then, some of the others stopped. Wait, and I’ll explain why.

  ‘We hit calms, we ran into storms, we foundered off a cluster of islands not far from the African coast. We lost our navigating instruments, our wonderful special equipment for jungle travel and research; we lost some of our men. We almost lost our lives. We took to the boats in a big sea.

  ‘Then we were on the beach for about a week. And damn thankful to be there, I can tell you. Better than drowning. But eventually it did begin to seem that we might never get back to civilization: that we might die out there, forsaken. A ship went by in the distance and we signalled like madmen. They let down anchor, put out the boats for us and, hey presto! we’d been captured by a gang of desperadoes, the like of which I’d thought hadn’t been seen on the high seas in a hundred years at least. We were prisoners.’

  ‘Good heavens,’ Lina exclaimed.

  ‘My gracious,’ Elsie said. ‘In this day and age?’

  ‘We were chained. Yes. And nobody was writing letters. We stayed on that rotten tub for over a year. The pirates quarrelled and fought among themselves so much that at first we hoped they’d kill each other off and leave us to take over the vessel. But then our own men began to die; of disease, of bad food and water, of being wounded – getting in the way when the fights were raging. At last the captain – if you could call him that – made for the West Indies and there the pickings were so good that they over-reached themselves: they took too many prisoners. While they were drunk, we mutinied and gained control of the ship.’

  ‘Ib and Count Hellstrom?’ Lina asked.

  ‘They were both still alive. But Cousin Gustav’s servant, Sten, had his head taken clean off with a cutlass and Gustav was wounded so badly in the leg that we thought we might have to amputate. He was ill for weeks. And when he recovered, he walked with a limp. He wasn’t much use after that – I think the death of his servant unhinged him slightly. He’d been very fond of the boy.’

  ‘I always remember Gustav joking and laughing,’ Elsie said. ‘I don’t like to think of him in pain. He wasn’t meant to lead a serious life.’

  ‘We decided to try to mount an expedition anyway. We had quite an amazing store of gold and pirate treasure on board, and we put in at Venezuela to set about outfitting another team.’

  ‘But you didn’t let us know anything,’ Lina said.

  ‘Of course we did. I don’t know what happened – letters go astray all the time, boats sink every day. And I wasn’t thinking clearly or I’d simply have gone to a consulate at the beginning and told them everything – or had advertisements put in the papers. That’s how I found out that I’d been declared legally dead: from reading a newspaper.’

  ‘You can’t blame us for that,’ Lina said. ‘We never heard.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you. Not at all. It could have been worse. You could have remarried.’

  ‘Sophie married somebody else finally.’

  ‘But Louise never did,’ Elsie told him. ‘It’s ruined her life.’

  ‘If he hadn’t been a Count,’ Lina said, ‘Sophie would have found another man much sooner.’

  ‘But you didn’t,’ he said.

  Lina looked down at her hands. She said, ‘No.’

  ‘Well, if I’d been thinking, as I said, I’d have done it through the papers. But we waited too long, so that soon it was no use calling on the official bodies, because we’d broken the law in so many directions, we weren’t sure how far we could be protected. We had contraband goods that we were in the process of turning into equipment for scientific exploration, we’d taken part – although against our wills – in piracy, we’d committed murder. There’s a limit to the lengths your country can go to in giving you assistance among foreigners, even if you’re a bona fide gentleman. Wherever we went after the first week on land, and whatever we did, it seemed to us likely that if we notified any ambassadors from home, the local governments would find it much more to their taste to shoot us as outlaws and confiscate our possessions. We couldn’t. We didn’t dare to.

  ‘It was a terrible time,’ he said. He bowed his head. The two women could see that his hands, gripping each other tightly, were trembling. ‘The sense of isolation’, he said, ‘was appalling. The impression that it’s never going to end.’

  Lina and Elsie had also suffered from what he called a ‘sense of isolation’. But they said nothing. They didn’t even bother to exchange a look. It was over now.

  ‘We still had a long way to go,’ he continued. ‘We had to cross many hundreds of miles to get to the beginning of the lands we wanted to study. And only a few of us wanted to keep going. I knew I had to, for all your sakes, and for the family – naturally. Ib and Johann felt the same. But Gustav was ready to quit. And – he threatened to tell all sorts of things that weren’t true: to say we’d been the ones to attack ships and turn pirate, that we’d – oh, all fantasy. He demanded things: villas, riches, dancing girls – that’s what he said. He seemed to have a picture in his mind of some kind of Turkish harem set in a South American garden. He wasn’t himself, but he wasn’t sick. I don’t know what it was. He sometimes seemed to have gone completely dotty, like his great-uncle Svensen.

  ‘We had long discussions as to whether we could afford to leave him behind. We decided not to; he had to come with us. There was no other way we could prevent him from seeking out an embassy or even the police – no. Everything else was going wrong at that time, too. For instance, the men we still had were getting drunk as pigs every night and going on the town. We didn’t know how much they were talking, or to whom. Martin said they were always too drunk to talk, even in their own languages, but I couldn’t believe that. I wanted to get them out of the cities as soon as possible. Martin had the bright idea that we should pretend there was no more money but that we were going to combine our scientific expedition with a hunt for gold. So, that was what we did. And we persuaded what was left of the crew to come with us, into the jungle.

  ‘Into the jungle, yes. My God, what that was like.’

  Both the women had been thinking and dreaming about the jungle off and on for ten years. Now they were silent. They already knew from the thoughts and dreams what it was like.

  ‘We had it all: mosquitoes, spiders, insects, plagues of boils, Indians blowing darts at us, animals attacking at night, poisonous fish, forest fires. Everyone started to die. Ib first, from a gangrenous thigh – it had been a small cut he’d made by accident when he’d wiped his knife across his trouser leg; then Johann, of a fever. We’d had fevers all the time. When he died, we were stunned.’

  ‘Did you give them good, Christian burials?’ Elsie asked.

  ‘Of course, as well as we could. We didn’t remember all the words, b
ut we recited as much as we knew. I told you, I’m too tired out to go over this a hundred times, so if you could tell the girls, the – everyone in the house.’

  ‘Yes,’ the two women answered together.

  ‘Cousin Gustav was stronger than both of them, in spite of his limp. He even began to apply himself to drawing the shrubs and flowers we encountered – the work that Johann had been doing before he died. And Gustav’s drawings weren’t all that bad. I was surprised. He’d never had any scientific training, only fiddled about a bit in Paris and Rome at the art schools years back. I don’t know why I mention it; all the books are lost. It’s all eaten by beetles and worms by now, down on the floor of the jungle with the rotted leaves.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Elsie whispered.

  ‘He was bitten by something. That was another thing we lived with: infected bites, ulcers, eczemas, insects that bored under the skin and laid their eggs there. I thought I was going half blind myself from a swelling in my right eye. But his didn’t heal. It got bigger, and it opened; it began to ooze pus and to stink. And he was dead in four days. We buried him too; Martin and I.’

  ‘Then Martin is alive?’ Elsie asked.

  ‘No, he was the last. He was killed by the Indians, just near the end, as we got out. They tied him to a rock. It was some sort of ceremony. I’d hidden and followed to where they took him. I was going to creep forward and let him loose in the middle of the night, but when I touched him, he was cold. They must have given him something to eat or drink before they began. It went on for hours, with chanting. I watched from where I was, and waited. I couldn’t do anything until it got dark. When they went away, they left him without a sentry, but they’d put hundreds of little statues around the rock; in rings, like the circles from a whirlpool. I think they were intended to be spirits standing guard over him. I picked one up and took it with me to use as an extra weapon. If I’d known what it was, I’d have taken more than one. Look.’

  He reached for the carpetbag he had carried with him and put down on a chair. From an inner compartment he took out an object the size of a closed hand. He set it on the table in front of them, to the side of the tea tray.