The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,184

walnut trees. The countess was very proud of her jardin anglais. She taught us to call everything by its proper name. In English, yes, English. Another member of her household drilled me in this language. Illana enjoyed addressing people in English, as if she were living in a British country house, and so we learned." She looked oddly serene. "That English garden. The smell of freshly mown grass, the fragrance of roses, and hay - it was like Paradise to me. I know people say I live in the past, but it was a past worth living in."

Janson recalled the ruins that were visible farther up the hill: all that remained of the vast estate were jagged remnants of walls that rose only a few feet from the ground, barely visible through the tall grass. Eroded brick mounts of once grand chimneys protruded through the scrub like tree stumps. A castle that had stood proudly for centuries was reduced to rubble - not much more than a rock garden. A lost world. The old woman had entered an enchanted garden once. Now she lived in the shadows of its ruins.

The wood fire cracked and hissed quietly, and for a minute no one spoke.

"And what about the scampering of little feet?" Jessie asked finally.

"They had only one child. Peter. Would you like a drop more palinka?"

"You're real kind, ma'am," Jessie said. "But I'm fine."

"Peter, you said," Janson repeated, deliberately casual. "When was he born?"

"His naming day was the first Saturday in October 1937. Such a beautiful boy. So handsome and so clever. You could tell he was meant to be a remarkable human being."

"Was he, now?"

"I can picture him still, walking up and down the long mirrored hallway in his Peter Pan collar and his little plus fours and his sailor's cap. He loved to watch his reflection reflected back and forth between two facing mirrors, multiplying forever, smaller and smaller." Her smile drew with it a trellis of wrinkles. "And his parents were so devoted to him. You could understand that. He was their only child. The birth was a difficult one, and it left the countess unable to conceive." The old woman was in another place, another world: if it was a lost world, it was not lost to her. "One day, just after lunch, he ate some pastries the cook had made for tea, like a naughty little boy, and the cook berated him. Well, Countess Illana happened to overhear. Don't you ever talk that way to our child, she told her. And just the way she said it - little icicles hung off her words. Bettina, she was the cook, her cheeks flamed, but she didn't say anything. She understood. We all did. He was ... unlike other boys. But not spoiled, you must understand. Sunny as the first of July, as we Hungarians say. When something pleased him, he'd smile so hard you'd think his face would split. Blessed, that child was. Magical. He could have been anything. Anything at all."

"Peter must have been everything to them," Jessie said.

The old woman stroked her dog's flank again, rhythmically. "Such a perfect little boy." Her eyes lit up, briefly, as if she were seeing the boy in front of her, seeing him in his knickerbockers and sailor's cap swanning in front of the mirrors on both sides of the hall, his reflections trailing off into an infinite regress.

The crone's eyelids fluttered and she closed them hard, trying to halt the pictures in her mind. "The fevers were terrible, he was like a kettle, tossing in bed and retching. It was a cholera epidemic, you know. So hot to the touch. And then so cold. I was one of those who attended him on his sickbed, you see." She put both her hands on her dog's face, gaining comfort from the creature's steadfast strength. "I can never forget that morning - finding his body, so cold, those lips so pale, his cheeks like wax. It was heartbreaking when it happened. He was just five years old. Could anything be sadder? Dead, before he truly had a chance to live."

A heaving sense of vertigo, of utter disorientation, overcame Janson. Peter Novak had died as a child? How could that be? Was there some mistake - was this another family the old woman was describing, another Peter?

And yet the accounts of the philanthropist's life were all agreed: Peter Novak, the beloved only son of Janos Ferenczi-Novak, had been born in October