Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (10 page)

I glanced at the soundless TV. A woman newscaster stood in a rainy street, talking to another woman with a drawn face. Behind them a crowd of newspeople and cops mingled among emergency vehicles and flashing lights. A man strode past in a blue
POLISI
windbreaker, followed by another cop with a German shepherd on a leash. A caption crawled across the screen:
FASHION MURDER.

I leaned forward. The TV crowd began to scatter, warned off by a cop with a soundless bullhorn. As people dispersed, I could see where police tape sealed off the perimeter of a tidy front garden. A grim-faced man hurried up the steps behind a tall woman in a gray suit, who, in a movie, would be the chief police investigator.

Only this wasn’t a movie. It was Ilkka’s house.

“What the hell.” I waved at the bartender. “Hey—can you turn that up?”

She hit the volume and walked away. At the other end of the bar stood a youngish, well-heeled blond guy in a D&G pin-striped suit, a dark green overcoat slung across his shoulder. He downed a shot and stared at the screen.

“… after last night’s murder of a former
Vogue
photographer in an upscale Helsinki neighborhood. Police say Ilkka Kaltunnen and his assistant were found dead in his office by his wife when she returned home from an appointment. There are no details as to the murders, no indications yet if burglary was the motivation behind the early-evening slayings, although Kaltunnen’s office and a downstairs work area were ransacked.”

The newscaster signed off, and the screen filled with recent unemployment figures. The bartender picked up my empty glass. “You want another?”

I shook my head and tossed some krónur on the counter. The blond guy turned and looked at me, then back at the TV. I headed for the door fast as I could without breaking into a run, convinced that every hollow-eyed gambler would stare after me and scream for the police.

No one lifted an eyelash. I left the bar as anonymously as I’d entered it, stumbling back into the dark street. I wrapped my scarf around my face and zipped up my jacket as far as it would go.

I knew this was crazy paranoia. No one would recognize me. No one in this city knew who I was; no one cared about a dead photographer fifteen hundred miles away. I had a feeling it wouldn’t just be crazy paranoia for long.

12

I hurried toward the harbor, sleet buffeting me in horizontal waves. I guessed it was mid-morning: The gray sky looked as though someone had turned the dimmer switch up a notch. Above the sea loomed a massive wall of cloud, banded asphalt gray and basalt. I thought of Ilkka, of blood in a blank white corridor, and felt dizzy. Horror, but also desolation at the loss of his gift, that terrible eye for the beauty in extinction.

Something shrieked: I looked up to see the same kind of bird I’d seen earlier with Andrés, luminous white against the lowering clouds. It fought against the gale, eerily suspended in place, until the wind shifted and it shot above the rooftops. When it disappeared, I grimly replayed the TV news in my head.

There’d been no mention of how Ilkka and Suri had been killed, or precisely when. I tried to remember what Ilkka had told me before he left—that his wife was in a meeting, that he’d pick up his son at school, take him to the doctor if he was sick. We would have dinner together later.

Despite the cold, sweat beaded on the back of my neck. Was it supposed to be me dead, and not Suri? Ilkka’s office had been ransacked, and a workroom. I’d bet my Konica that among the missing were the Jólasveinar photos.

Yet Ilkka had insisted that not even his wife knew about those pictures.

I stopped at the verge of the busy road beside the harbor. The sky had taken on an ominous, mineral-green tinge. I waited for a break in the traffic and ran through a slurry of snow and grit, kept running until I reached the water’s edge. I picked my way among rocks and tidal pools, fighting panic. Suri claimed she’d never been downstairs. No one had ever stepped foot into Ilkka’s sanctum but me. No one but me knew those photos were there.…

Anton.

What had I told him?

“
He’s got a whole Batcave downstairs. Nice darkroom.
”

“
… someone else who was interested. A guy, from Oslo, maybe? Someone with very deep pockets.
”

“Ilkka and I have a deal,”
Anton had said.
“You might remind him of that.”

Anton hadn’t made Ilkka a better offer. He’d simply offed him, ransacked the place, grabbed the Yuleboy prints, and fled. That, or he’d planned all along to take out me and Ilkka, hiring someone else who’d mistaken Suri for Cassandra Neary.

By now, they’d know they’d fucked up, and that I was still alive. I stared at the mass of clouds that filled the sky above the North Atlantic.

They weren’t clouds. Above the horizon towered a mountain of jagged flint-gray rock, seamed with crevasses white-streaked with snow. No vegetation, buildings, or power lines, nothing but that menacing promontory and the waste of ice and darkness beyond—the beginning of the end of the world.

13

I have no memory of returning to my hotel, just the heat that enveloped me when I finally got inside. A different guy was behind the counter, a young black kid who stared intently at an iPhone. He glanced up, and I handed him enough krónur to cover another night.

“Is there a computer I could use to check my e-mail?”

He nodded and ducked down to retrieve a laptop. “Just give it back when you’re done.”

I settled on the sofa, booted up, and searched for coverage of Ilkka’s murder.

I found a bunch of news items in Finnish and Swedish, photos of Ilkka, and one of Suri. A brief AP piece; another in
Paris Match
with thumbnails of Ilkka’s fashion photography. Nothing in
The New York Times
or other U.S. press. Too early, maybe, or too much bad news to compete with. I finally hit the jackpot with an article in that morning’s
Guardian.

DOUBLE MURDER SHAKES FASHION WORLD

HELSINKI: Noted Finnish photographer Ilkka Kaltunnen and his assistant were found dead yesterday in his residence in an affluent Helsinki neighborhood, victims of a brutal murder. The bodies of Kaltunnen, 39, and Suri Kulmala, 30 and a former model, were discovered by Kaltunnen’s wife when she returned home from work. Kaltunnen was found in the hall outside his office, his skull crushed by a silver serving dish. A few feet away, Kulmala’s body lay sprawled in the office entrance, her neck broken when the door closed upon it hard enough to sever her spinal column. Kaltunnen’s wife was with their young son at the doctor’s office at the time of the killings. Her husband had returned home to attend to a business matter.

Speculation as to a possible romantic relationship between the two was dismissed as “utter nonsense” by someone close to Kaltunnen and his wife, a child psychologist. Police say that robbery was the more likely motive, but would not confirm whether any valuables were missing. Kaltunnen had amassed a substantial collection of twentieth-century photographs, including masterworks by Robert Mapplethorpe and Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee. A basement darkroom had also been ransacked.

Neighbors professed shock that such a thing could happen in one of Europe’s safest cities, while the fashion world mourned the loss of an icon, albeit one who had kept a low profile for the last decade. “He was a genuine visionary,” proclaimed Grace Coddington, creative director of U.S.
Vogue
, “one of the earliest artists to embrace digital photography and…”

I skipped the rest and sat staring at the screen. Finally I cleared the laptop’s history and returned it to the hotel clerk.

“Nobody left a message for me, right?” I asked. “No one came by or anything?”

He shook his head. “No. It’s been quiet all morning.”

The upstairs corridor was empty, with the same dank odor of mildew and cleaning fluid. I stepped into my room and turned the dead bolt, pulled down the window shades, and collapsed onto the bed.

It had to have been Anton—him or someone he’d paid off. A wealthy collector and dealer of murderabilia would presumably have contact with the kind of people who made his hobby possible. It would take someone a lot stronger than me to bash in Ilkka’s skull and snap Suri’s neck in a slammed door.

Had Anton planned the murders from day one? Or was he just so enraged by the thought of Ilkka selling the photos to someone else that he jumped in before the transaction could take place? Whichever it was, he’d now be aware that Suri Kumala had been killed and not Cassandra Neary. Maybe he’d look for me in New York.

Or maybe he wouldn’t look for me at all. Maybe I was just spinning out the kind of paranoid fantasy you come up with after tweaking or bingeing for a week.

Only thing was, I’d been relatively sober, for me.

I pulled off my soaked cowboy boots and threw them in a corner along with my jacket. I wished I’d thought of finding a liquor store; I was afraid to leave my room, until I came up with something like a plan. That was going to be tough. I don’t believe in safety nets: I believe in trapdoors, and the kind of luck that looks like forward planning only if you’re wasted enough to see a pattern in blood and broken glass.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t that wasted yet. I rubbed my eyes and gazed at the dark window. Would INTERPOL be involved already? Ilkka might have told his wife he’d had a visitor, but she wouldn’t have known why I was there. Suri knew who I was, but she was dead. The bartender had seen me, and so had the cab driver. Neither of them knew my name, though they might remember a tall American woman in a hurry to leave Helsinki.

Still, I wasn’t in a rush to go back to New York. People were already on my ass about Aphrodite Kamestos’s death, plus Anton might have arranged for his friends to meet me. In Iceland a six-foot blond probably wouldn’t draw much attention. If I kept my mouth shut, I might be able to pass as a native.

I couldn’t stay at this hotel: Both clerks would have clocked me as an American. But I had nowhere else to go. The only thing I knew was that I had to find Quinn and lie low. I downed a Vicodin and hoped that Anton Bredahl didn’t have a lot of friends in Reykjavík.

*   *   *

When I woke I felt better, until I remembered where I was. I’d slept almost sixteen hours. The snow had stopped. I showered and dressed, popped two Focalin, grabbed my bag, and went downstairs. The middle-aged clerk stood outside on the sidewalk, his cigarette glowing in the morning dark. There was no way to leave without walking past him, so I pulled on my watch cap and went out. He averted his eyes as I left.

I walked up to Laugavegur. The wind had died; the raw air felt almost balmy. Church bells chimed as a cop on a motorcycle buzzed past. I went to the place I’d had breakfast the day before, but it was closed, chairs stacked atop the tables inside, a fetid smell of beer and spoiled fish around the entrance. From an apartment across the street echoed a thumping bass line, joined intermittently by drums that couldn’t keep the beat. Band practice.

I kept going. At the end of the next block I stopped to stare at some official-looking buildings. A few lights shone in the windows of Legoland houses and apartment complexes, their architectural details lost in the murk. Everything looked grainy and underexposed. If Reykjavík had been a photographic print, I would have tossed it.

I headed for the harbor, where droning boat engines drowned out the hum of traffic, and an iodine glare stained the sky above blocks of unfinished construction. Skeletal high-rises; piles of black gravel and rusted beams; pits surrounded by scaffolding and sonotubes. Graffiti covered plywood barricades. A tarp hung from a girder like a spiral of blackened skin. It resembled some futurist ruin, all that remained of a city sacrificed to the god that had abandoned it.

I got out my camera and picked my way among chunks of concrete and plywood walkways. The wind stung my face, but I hardly noticed: I was rapt, sucked into that place where the vision inside my head merged with what was in front of me. I shot half a dozen frames, and for a few minutes I forgot about everything except for the world inside my viewfinder.

In the last hour the city had awakened. Molten sunlight set steel girders and I beams ablaze as a decrepit orange bus jounced by in a cloud of exhaust, empty except for its driver. I put away my camera and set out to find the flea market.

Along the shore a couple walked hand in hand, a skein of gulls trailing them like smoke. Live music—more band rehearsals—wafted down streets corrugated with frozen slush. I found a crowded hot dog stand where I waited in line with bleary-eyed kids who passed around cigarettes as they kicked at the broken tarmac. I picked up an occasional word or phrase in their hangover chatter—band names, mostly. I bought two hot dogs and, when I was done eating, approached a boy wearing a pink-and-green anorak and matching Vans shoes.

“I’m looking for Kolaportið.”

He gestured at a nondescript white building that took up most of a block. “Over there.”

I crossed the street, walked through a parking lot filled with people unloading cars and pickups, and went inside. There was already a small mob, so I waited between a wizened man in a cowboy hat and a dumpy woman flanked by three kids squabbling over a Game Boy. Another man guarded a rope that separated us from a cavernous, table-filled space flooded with acrid fluorescent light. People jostled past me, and Cowboy Hat shook his head reproachfully until the rope dropped and the crowd dispersed.

Inside was the usual flea-market crap: fast-food toys marketed as collectibles, pirated slasher movies from Indonesia, homemade jewelry, tapestries emblazoned with dolphins or Michael Jackson, used appliances, old paperbacks. It was like the gods of commerce had swallowed all this stuff, then puked it up again. The only thing that marked this as a flea market in Reykjavík rather than Rockville was the glut of woolen clothing. You name it, somebody’s Icelandic grandmother was perched on a folding chair, knitting it while she kept a cool eye on the competition across the aisle.