“A quick coffee,” said Dana Scully.
She didn’t say it out loud. Not quite. She said it in that controlled, precise tone that Fox had come to regard as more dangerous.
Fox closed the foyer door behind them, shutting out the swirling snow.
“Technically speaking,” said Fox, “there’s bound to be coffee somewhere around here. But it’s even more likely that we’ll still be getting tea from Dutch Guiana here.”
Dana slowly turned her head towards him.
Fox raised both hands. “Probably bad coffee. But coffee.”
“You said we’d just stop quickly at a motorway service station.”
“I said we could interrupt our journey home for a quick coffee.”
“Mulder.”
“Scully.”
“We’re standing in the middle of a village of five hundred people in front of a dilapidated local ice rink with a gala-style paint job.”
“That sounds as though you have no appreciation for American regional charm.”
“I do have an appreciation for regional charm. I even have an appreciation for bad heating systems when they’re found in medical archives. What I don’t have is suitable evening wear.”
She looked down at herself. A dark suit, simple pumps, a coat that would have been perfectly adequate for a return journey to Indianapolis but seemed, in a very polite way, entirely out of place at a gala in Chestnut Mountain. Around her neck hung a narrow silver cross, cool against her skin, familiar and yet, in this room, almost too honest. It was not jewellery for the flash of cameras.
Fox watched the guests as they stepped through the entrance: men in wide velvet ties, women with fur stoles, sequinned jackets, high hairstyles, cufflinks that were too gilded, a hat with a feather that had been waiting for its second spring since at least 1974.
“I’d say,” he remarked, “you’re dramatically overdressed in terms of taste.”
“That’s no consolation.”
“I know. But I work with the material I’ve got.”
Dana took off her gloves. The wind outside the door came from the mountains, cut across the car park and crept under the collars of those waiting. It was a wilder cold than Riga.
Riga.
Dana hadn’t expected the memory to come back so quickly. A former warehouse for spent nuclear fuel, where *The Flying Dutchman* had been performed as if Wagner were the most healing thing that could stand between civilisation and gleaming concrete. The space had been huge, grey, cold and imbued with such a deep industrial melancholy that the music seemed to freeze the air within it. The Dutchman had been a tragic figure there: he was guilt with sails. A man who kept sailing on because no one wanted to hear his old truth or sacrifice their lives for his salvation.
Dana had thought back then that some places weren’t haunted because the dead remained there. Some places were haunted because the living kept too much to themselves.
Fox noticed her gaze. “It’s at least more opulent than the old torpedo test site in Riga, isn’t it?”
She looked at him. “You read me too well.”
“No. You only get that look when it comes to operas, Catholic boarding schools and unexplained deaths.”
“That’s a very specific list.”
“I keep index cards.”
“Not just for your collection of pornographic gems from the 1980s.”
Dana regretted having been more snarky than she’d intended, but she disliked the unwanted interruption and the thought of spending hours on the street that night.
Dana took in the old, strained heating system, which had joined forces with perfume, mulled ginger ale, floor wax and damp woollen fabric. The foyer was surprisingly large. Too large for the village.
Dana stopped and surveyed the room.
“In this hall,” she said, “there’d probably be room for every living inhabitant of Chestnut Mountain.”
Fox picked up a programme from a table. “Perhaps that’s the plan. A village meeting with compulsory skates.”
She took the programme from his hand, because he would have been scanning it for UFO references anyway. On the cover, a silver boar leapt over a frozen chestnut. Dana opened the first page.
Closing gala and international youth tournament in aid of the Sports Centre for International Democracy Education.
She read on, and her eyes narrowed.
“Mulder. It says here that the closing gala match is to be played between a Japanese and a Soviet youth team.”
“Soviet and Japanese youngsters in an old ice rink. That’s either sports diplomacy or the start of a very belligerent children’s choir.”
Dana ignored him and scanned the list of teams. “Soviet Union. United Kingdom. Japan. Ottoman Empire. France.”
Fox leaned over her shoulder. “The entire Security Council in sports uniforms, how chic. That’s quite a guest list for a place whose car park lamp is currently sending out Morse code.”
“And as the literary support act,” Dana continued, “a year group of cadets from Enns. Leopoldine Military Grammar School. Austria.”
“Of course. What would a charity match be without Austrian cadets, who’ll probably be quoting Nestroy or Jellinek whilst forming marching formations?”
Dana looked at him.
“What?” asked Fox.
“You say that as if a humanities education were some sort of suspicious symptom. To my knowledge, no cadet academy in the world teaches more languages than in Austria.”
“I say that as if, as a child, I’d seen too many school plays where someone in a tunic had to recite Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.”
“Some of us,” said Dana dryly, “learned at Catholic schools that discipline, textual comprehension and the seven liberal arts shape character.”
Fox’s face softened. Not much, but enough for her to notice.
“I know,” he said. “Perhaps I’m simply jealous of your downright European education.”
“Education is always universal.”
“Never.”
A waiter offered them mulled ginger ale. Fox accepted, Dana did not. She smelled ginger, cinnamon and the sweet excitement of an evening masquerading as charity. On a neighbouring table, maple syrup tartlets stood in perfect rows. Beside them lay a stack of donation cards featuring the planned sports centre: glass façades, flagpoles, young people with idealised faces, a conference hall with a map of the world.
Dana studied the card for a while.
“A sports centre for international democracy education,” she said. “In a village barely big enough to justify a traffic light.”
“Perhaps democracy begins where everyone knows who drives the snowplough.”
“Or someone uses big words to cover up small bills.”
Fox took a sip and grimaced. “The coffee would certainly have been worse here. Besides, you’re driving, so a small glass of warming alcohol won’t do any harm.”
A hint of unease stirred in the foyer. A woman, strikingly elegant in this room, wearing an ivory-coloured gown, stood by the programme display and spoke with a member of the gala committee. Her necklace caught the light in a way that Dana noticed immediately: moonstones, platinum and something dark and irregular.
Fox followed her gaze. “Do you know her?”
“No, but compared to everyone else, she’s at the other end of the spectrum when it comes to how up-to-date her clothes are,” said Dana.
“Is that a polite way of saying ‘nouveau riche’?”
“No, it just makes it even clearer to me that I’m completely dressed inappropriately for this occasion. We should go.”
Dana continued leafing through the programme anyway. The history of the building was set in gold lettering: Jesuit grammar school, state boarding school, demolition, ice rink, renovation in 1947, decline since 1968. The text was charmingly worded, as if by a copywriter from Spain. It sought to tell a story of progress, yet beneath it Dana saw layers of use, power and displacement. A school became a boarding school. A boarding school was demolished. An ice rink sprang up on foundations that no one wanted to mention. A tourist resort lost guests but retained sponsors, until death took them away.
“This isn’t a spontaneous charity match,” she said.
Fox looked at her with interest. “Why?”
“Because the international line-up is too big. Because the centre being promoted sounds political but is being sold as local. Because a dilapidated hall on the verge of demolition suddenly attracts the Soviet Union, Great Britain, Japan, the Ottoman Empire and France. And because you don’t invite Austrian cadets as a literary support act if you just want to bid farewell to an old ice rink.”
“Maybe they just wanted more sabres on the guest list.”
“Cadets don’t automatically carry sabres.”
“My mistake. More metaphorical sabres, at that age.” Fox winked at Dana, but she ignored his innuendo.
Dana handed the programme back to him. “You wanted coffee or yesterday’s Dutch tea; let’s find some quickly and then get out of this swansong.”
“So, coffee-hunting mode?” Fox whispered, glancing towards the stairs where two men in dark suits were currently escorting an elderly gentleman with white hair through the crowd. “But by the time we’ve found it, things might still get interesting.”
The elderly man stopped beneath the chandelier. His face was narrow, his bearing too controlled for his age. A functionary, perhaps. A doctor. Someone who had learnt to remain silent in rooms where others applauded.
Fox leaned towards her. “Still angry about the service station?”
Dana took the empty glass of mulled ginger ale from his hand, sniffed it, shook her head and set it down on the nearest table.
“Yes,” she said. “But I’m afraid you won’t be getting any more tea or coffee before we’re bored to death with a speech.”