The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [202]
“How accurate do you think this is?” I asked Klim.
He shrugged. “As accurate as it was in 1611 at any rate. There does not seem to be a car park and lemonade kiosk there, so perhaps your well is still lost.”
I called Crosetti again and told him what I wanted him to do. It took quite a while. What a lot of cleverness and effort expended on a fraud, how many nice people would be disappointed! A perfect symbol of my life.
20
Carolyn Rolly wept for what seemed like a long time after Crosetti told her what had happened to her kids and to Harlan P. Olerud at Crosetti’s mother’s house in Queens, and then she insisted on calling there to talk to them until Crosetti managed to convince her that it was late at night in New York instead of the early morning it was in Zurich. Then his cell phone delivered a call from a man from Osborne Security Services who said that a plane was waiting at a local airport and they said good-bye to Amalie, with whom Carolyn had struck up a surprisingly warm relationship, surprising given the differences in their backgrounds and general approach to life. Perhaps, he thought, it was the commonality of motherhood and the peculiar situation of both sets of children bearing a similar horrible stress. With his usual curious eye, Crosetti watched the two women exchanging embraces. They did not really resemble each other physically, but both presented to the world the same air of solid particularity. He couldn’t imagine anything really changing either of them: Carolyn and Amalie, what you saw was what you got, although Amalie was honesty incarnate and Carolyn lied like a snake. Had Carolyn been blond, he concluded, they might have been two sisters, the good one and the bad.
A short flight on a tiny powerful Learjet, the pilot uncommunicative, efficient, moving his craft through angles eschewed by mild commercial aviators. Midflight, Rolly got through to her children, or so Crosetti imagined: she did not share but sat damp-eyed, staring out at bright whiteness. But she let him take her hand.
Landing at some Midlands airport whose name Crosetti never caught, they were met by Mr. Brown of Osborne, dressed in yellow coveralls and work boots. Mr. Brown conducted them to a white Land Rover painted with the insignia of the Severn Trent Water Board. On the motorway he explained the plan: go right in, bold as brass, find the thing, if it were there to find, drive off. Another plane waited near London to take them back to New York. Crosetti asked him if he knew what they were after.
“Not me,” said Brown, “no need to know, I’m just the help. There’s a rental van behind us with all the equipment and a couple of lads to run it, ground-penetrating radar, resistivity gear, the lot. If there’s a well there they’ll find it. We’ll all do the digging, I expect.”
“This is pretty expensive, all this,” Crosetti observed.
“Oh, yes. Money no object.”
“And you’re not curious?”
“If I was the curious type, sir, I’d be long dead,” said Brown. “That’ll be Warwick up ahead. We’ll be able to see the castle in a bit.”
It rose white above a line of trees, hung there for a while, and then vanished when the road dipped, like a vision in a fairy story. After some driving through anonymous suburbs it appeared again on their left, huge, looming over the river.
“Not like Disneyland, is it?”
“No, that’s the real thing,” said Brown, “although Tussaud’s have tarted it up like mad. Still, there’s real blood soaked into the stones. A horrible time, of course, when that was the last word in military technology, but still…”
“You would’ve liked to live back then?”
“On occasion. A simpler time: someone got on your nerves, say, you put on your tin suit and chopped away at ’em. Half a sec, I think we’re just on our mark.” He pulled over to