The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller Read online

  Or the elephant head, I thought. In our zoo of identities.

  Pinto hoped this provided the closure my family needed and wished all the best for us. He would keep me informed of further developments if I wished, but he suspected I would not want to be reminded of events by such details. If there was anything more he could do for me, however, I was not to hesitate to call. He thanked me (for what, I don’t know), I thanked him, and that was that.

  A nice tidy end to the chapter in our lives.

  That didn’t account for Portavora.

  That somehow didn’t send me rushing to cancel my plane ticket.

  That failed to mitigate in any way the deeply seated terror.

  Quite the contrary.

  THREE

  GLIMMERS

  11

  Every frequent flyer has an extraordinary flight experience in their repertoire. They may have met a celebrity on the plane, or witnessed a person having a heart attack; discovered the man sitting next to them is a distant relative, seen a potential hijack thwarted. Mine happened on the Frankfurt-Munich leg of my Bavarian trip, and while less dramatic than the above examples, was perhaps every bit as meaningful, though I wouldn’t say so to the family of the heart attack victim. My experience came in the form of two pleasant, attractive ladies next to whom circumstances placed me on the plane. We were not assigned the three side-by-side seats in the middle section of rows, but ended up there after we did some shifting to accommodate a family separated in its seating. I wound up in the aisle seat, with the two women sitting to my right, and the rest, as they say, is history—one fragile and arcane thread of it anyway.

  Because of the shuffling, I found myself in conversation with the two sooner than I might otherwise have been, considering the mood I was in, thoughts still with the dreams that had plagued me for much of the Condor flight from Fairbanks to Frankfurt. If asked I’d have said that the discomfort of traveling seemed to bring the dreams out, but I’d had three seats to myself on that flight, a luxury I’d utilized to its fullest, and I knew the disturbances were more attributable to the progression of waking events than anything else. Varying in clarity and severity, some more meaningful than others, dreams were becoming part of the fabric of my existence—each its own separate square in the patchwork, but all contributing thematically to the tapestry. If I’d been visited by any during the past weeks that did not relate in some way to recent events in my life, they weren’t recallable ones.

  My mood slowly turned, however, beneath the striking features and refreshing openness of the pair with whom I sat. Those features, along with the complementary nuances of expression, proved an obstacle for me at first, but once I got past the one’s startling ice-blue eyes and the other’s darkly alluring, almost Middle Eastern demureness, I was able to join them in their obviously natural ease. Thirtyish, fit, and dressed like Crocodile Huntresses in their khakis and hiking boots, the two had just returned from Nepal and an aerial expedition of the Himalayas and Everest and were on their way to explore the Alps. Before I’d a chance to comment on how interesting a parallel, that I too was heading for the high country—and I’m not sure I was ready to broach the subject anyway—they added that they’d had a hell of a time getting out of Katmandu because of a bomb threat at the airport, but they were now safely back into their patterns and couldn’t wait to get their hands around a couple German beers. No time for refreshments at Frankfurt because the original six-hour layover had been reduced by the situation at the Katmandu airport to a forty-five-minute one, and they’d had to pick up their luggage before putting to use the next set of round-trip tickets. Frankfurt, they said, was always their base when taking multiple flights in this region of the world. Among other things, it was one of the few large airports you could maneuver in so short a time.

  “You travel often then, the two of you?” I asked, unnecessarily. Unnecessary not just because the remarks preceding the question made the answer obvious, but also because their English bespoke knowledge of more than the language alone. They knew the cultural backdrops, both British and American, I thought.

  “The world is our proverbial oyster,” replied the dark one, with the coyest of smiles.

  At that point, as the captain came on, belatedly, to say we’d leveled off at our cruising altitude, they were still the light one and the dark one to me. The former, who sat directly beside me, was European. Her accent suggested Germany, but her appearance hinted at colder, northern climes. Her long luminous hair, pulled around in front of her so that it fell over her breast, was that white-blonde common to Scandinavians, though her lashes and complexion were dark enough to accentuate her translucent eyes. The eyes, though, were her most prominent feature. They were as light and clear a shade of blue as you could imagine, and engaged you very directly, very candidly, and seemed to see into places, spheres those in her company could not. There was a softness about her too, however, one lent distinction by her stirring facial characteristics. The contrasts were exemplified in her quiet and assured voice, which failed to conceal an underlying toughness, the sort normally got through hard experience but which in her case might have been innate. I’d the sense she could be a woman to be reckoned with.

  The dark one, judging as much by the designs of her scarf and jewelry as by her features and skin tone, appeared to be Indian. She was at a separate latitude of exotic, the emphatic sun to her companion’s snowy hills. Her eyes were large and almost as dark as her luxuriant cascading locks, and she too had a commanding gaze . . . when it suited her. First, it seemed to me, she liked to establish her power as a dark beauty. Where her partner’s ice-blues captivated, her sables controlled by temptation, shyly parting with your gaze almost upon contact, only to return again to let the effect, the promise of treasures beneath the veil, sink in. As with her friend, and maybe all of us for that matter, her voice, her manner of speaking, the words that came out of her mouth tended to contradict other traits. Hers definitely seemed a happier personality than her friend’s, the latter impressing me as somewhat serious even when a smile was present. Despite that, both women exuded a certain warmth and appreciation for life that allowed me to shed the weight I carried for that little while.

  Something about the dark one that struck me was the admiration she demonstrated toward her companion, casting frequent, almost fawning glances the other’s way, touching her arm when she made a point to either of us. This behavior, combined with the fact that neither wore wedding or promise rings, led me to speculate they might be a lesbian couple. But I didn’t spend any time in that arena. Their sexual orientation was irrelevant, as I hadn’t flown all this distance to pick up women, especially women two decades my junior, temporary freedom from the headclutter notwithstanding.

  As I took the opportunity to lead the introductions and ask where they were from, I was proved not such a bad judge. Dianna was Swiss Austrian, and her friend Maya was from Sri Lanka. When I asked what they did, I learned first that they were companion activists and adventurers and then that Dianna was a poet and naturalist and her friend an outdoors-oriented travel writer. As though their livelihoods, while intertwined with their obvious love of nature, were secondary. If I hadn’t completely fallen in love with them before, I had now.

  When they threw the question back on me, I meant to keep my answer minimal, away from the area I did not wish to go, but the words would not hear of it.

  “I’m a travel writer too, coincidentally, when I’m not writing adventure novels. I’m an avid outdoorsman, and that’s the sort of material I tend to come back to in my fiction. As it happens, I, too, am on my way to probe the majestic Alps. What sort of exploring will you guys be doing?”

  They looked at each other before Maya said, “Backpacking.” She held my eyes a bit longer than perhaps the dark beauty in her preferred, as though preparing for a challenge from the professed outdoors-man she found herself in conversation with.

  “Just the two of you?” I said, hoping it didn’t sound like a goad if she was inde
ed thinking that way.

  “Normally it would be just the two of us,” she said, placing her hand on Dianna’s forearm. “But this time we’ll be on an excursion. In the ‘soaring high terrain’, as the ad we answered so dramatically put it.”

  I stared, forcing myself not to swallow. “Ad?”

  “Strangest thing,” Dianna said, looking through the back of the seat in front of her. “The magazine just arrived in my mailbox one day, already open to the relevant page. No address label or anything else to indicate how it had gotten there. I never found out who it came from.” She relinquished the sightless distance to look at me.

  Shifting my gaze from her to Maya and back again, I said simply, “Neither did I.”

  Now it was their turn to stare, particularly Dianna, over whose features fell a haunted look. Maya was the first to come to herself, forsaking my gaze to search Dianna’s face concernedly. The women clearly did not know what to say. Not to me, not to each other. They were caught in the currents just as surely, as helplessly as I was, and it was only the arrival of the stewardess and drink cart that saved us all from plunging into certain darkness.

  As we sipped our Warsteiners we remained silent, a bond having spontaneously come into being between us. We shared a secret that the rest of the passengers on the plane could not begin to fathom the intricacies of. And this without any knowledge of the roads that had led each other’s party to these three seats on a Lufthansa flight to what might as well have been nowhere, so ignorant were we of our own secret. What had these women been through? Tribulation and terror? Madness? Had their bloodlines been targeted too? Dianna said the ad had been delivered to her. Were hers coveted genes?

  The words that formulated were too saturated with implications to toss into polite company without some sort of segue. Yet, my tongue, again, would not obey me.

  “Dianna, Maya, do either of you have any instances of multiple births in your family?”

  Dianna had been lifting her cup to her mouth as I spoke. Her hand stopped in mid-motion, and her eyes slowly turned from the cup’s foamy contents to regard me, expression so distressed, the creases might have been born then and there.

  “Yes,” said Maya, with the hint of wonder in her voice. “Yes . . . we are both triplets. It’s what originally brought us together.”

  “How so?” I said, feeling ludicrous trying to ease the tension by applying the conversational. This was no awkward moment over a bridge game.

  Maya’s eyes were only for Dianna again, as if permission might be gleaned out of the way Dianna continued to look at me, lines now gone from her brow as she studied, probed, gauged the stranger beside her.

  I said quietly, “I’m innocent in this thing just like you.”

  Her eyes searched mine, and mine hers. Finally she said, “You’ve suffered, haven’t you?”

  I felt movement in my lower lip as I held her gaze for a second longer then turned away so that the surfacing tears were mine alone to know, but she wouldn’t allow it, reaching into my space to gently turn my chin back toward her.

  “Your experience has obviously been different than ours. We have to know before we set out tomorrow. Everything. Are you, too, a triplet?”

  I took a deep breath, would not allow the tears to flow. “I am not a multiple myself. I am the father . . . of triplets.”

  “God,” she whispered. “Dalia suggested that other innocents were involved . . . but I couldn’t be sure they weren’t associations . . . since Maya and I are both triplets.”

  “Dalia?”

  “Dalia is the name my parents were going to give her. She died at birth.”

  ***

  Dreams. They were part of the fabric of not just my existence, but also this woman’s whose path had converged with my own. This woman from another land, with another history, another life, another set of motivations and ambitions and hopes and fears, this stranger who was not a stranger. I thought about her as I stared at myself in the mirror of my hotel room, the harsh bathroom light bringing out every flaw, every line of suffering, in my otherwise unknowable face. I thought about the differences between her road and mine, about the claim, which I’d no reason to disbelieve, that sleeping communications with her dead loved one had begun decades before my own, when she was a little girl. The trip from Frankfurt to Munich had been a short one, but we’d had sufficient time to touch on that aspect of her longer yet less violent journey to Bavaria. And to seal for me the notion that the tide had been sweeping its subjects toward their fates long before the elephant man had placed his cold blade against a young leaf gatherer’s throat.

  “It doesn’t excuse you,” I told myself as I applied shaving cream to my face while the pores were still open from the steam-hot shower.

  That’s where the thought process had started—out of the guilt associated with allowing myself to be led like a pawn into what my deepest instinct told me was the seething heart of this business and its imminent climax. The discovery that other sign-ons to the expedition had also been selected all but rendered ostensible my noble mission to go forth and rescue my daughter from the void. Emotion found me questioning my honesty with myself. Worse, my worth and depth as a human being. Could it be that I’d boarded the plane in Juneau—risking being an accessory to the facilitation of a terrible future for the human species—purely out of the consuming desire to know? To have an early glimpse of what the next evolutionary stage was going to look like? Like some existential rubber-necker . . .

  What saved me, I think, as I slowly and methodically razed the hair from my face, was the gap I’d created between myself and the events that had acted as guideposts in my path. I had ventured into the throat of oblivion, but the cry of my daughter, through her mother, had brought me back. The overpowering desire to know was not a compatible drive for my propulsion. If I was a slave, it was to external forces, not internal ones. Guilt be damned for what it was—useless expense, free fodder for an elephant’s amusement. Fuck him. This was as much my business as it was his. It was my right, not my misfortune, to be on a mission that belonged to me, not to him.

  Face clean, I put on casual clothes and phoned down to the desk to have them call a taxi. The plane had landed around noon, which left the three of us the luxury of experiencing Munich a bit before the morning’s train ride to Berchtesgaden. We decided rather than to drag around the Old City wishing we were tucked away under the covers in our hotel rooms, we’d devote the afternoon to sleep and then meet for dinner in the Altstadt at a Biergarten recommended by the taxi driver who delivered us to our respective hotels. The restaurant was scarcely a kilometer from Der Tannenhaus where I was staying, walking distance for me, but I was ten minutes late already and wasn’t precisely sure which street the driver had pointed out to me as we passed. Best to leave it in the hands of the professionals.

  The restaurant proved to be even closer than my jetlagged compass had placed it, occupying a convenient corner of the cobblestone Walkplatz. The taxi let me out on the street side, directly in front of the garden, whose semi-busy terrace extended from the side of the building, grapevines and roses woven into the latticework of its whitewashed wooden archways. Dusk hadn’t arrived yet, the tables and their occupants visible from the street, but my dinner dates didn’t appear to be outside where I would have expected them to be. Just to be sure there wasn’t a table tucked away among the foliage, I climbed the three steps so that I could view the area corner to corner. I was about to check inside the restaurant when a passing waiter stopped to ask if he could help me. I told him I was to meet two lady friends here, but they must be inside.

  “Pretty ladies? One Eastern?”

  “Those would be they.”

  He pointed behind me to the street. I turned and there they were, stepping out of their taxi.

  As I waved down at them, I said to the gentleman, “I guess we’ll be needing a table then.”

  He chuckled pleasantly. “Please seat yourself. I’ll be by shortly.”

  Good humor
equals good vibe, I say. We could do with that.

  We took a more secluded table beside a long-fronded, fountain-like plant that I could not name. An oak, leaves still not returned to full verdancy in the Bavarian climate, provided shade from a sun which broke out of clouds intermittently as it descended. The air smelled of flowers and frying pork, and had a slight nip to it. Fortunately, we had all brought along our light hiking jackets.

  “So,” Maya said after we were settled in. “Here we are in famous München, where the streets are paved in beer. Has a charm to it, doesn’t it?”

  We followed her gaze across the Walkplatz to the irregular row of adjoining half-timbered buildings on the opposite side, roofs steep and fairytale-like as they met each other at odd angles, bowing inward at times before flaring out in Grimm-esque eaves. The foot traffic was busy, the locals easily distinguished from the tourists by the urgency in their step as if whatever was so important on this pleasant spring evening couldn’t wait one more minute. The occasional polka dancer and Bavarian barmaid outfit passed on the way to the night’s duties, but we seemed to be on the fringe of activity at our corner spot. What music filtered through the city noise seemed to come from faraway places.

  “Quintessentially German,” I said. “Have neither of you been to Munich before? That would surprise me in your case, Dianna, you being from Salzburg.”