Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (13 page)

“Yeah? Where to? You gonna walk back to Reykjavík?” He shook his head. “Shit, it doesn’t matter. Water under the fucking bridge. I did want you. I thought maybe you were dead, too.” His skittery laugh echoed through the house. “Cute couple, huh? ‘Most likely not to live past thirty.’”

“Well, we beat the odds.”

“So you got my letter and just hopped a flight to Reykjavík?”

I toyed with my glass. “Not really.”

I gave him an edited version of what had happened in the last few days—no details, just that I had some business in Helsinki and decided to make a side trip to Iceland.

“What kind of business?”

“Some photographs a guy wanted me to look at.”

“Was it Anton?”

My hands went cold. “What?”

“The guy who hired you—was it Anton Bredahl? Norwegian guy.”

“Uh, yeah,” I stammered. “Yeah, it was Anton.”

“That’s good,” said Quinn, almost to himself. “He mentioned a few weeks ago he was looking for a second opinion on some pictures. I read you were like this punk culture hero or something, you had that book. Turned out he knew who you were; he even had a copy. I told him I knew you when we were kids and he should get in touch with you. He throws around a lot of money, I figured you might as well get a taste. I went through all my old stuff to see if I had a letter, and all I found was that photo you took of me. Whatever happened to all those? But I thought, what the hell, I’d mail it to your old man’s address in Kamensic. I didn’t even know if he was still alive. I hoped maybe you might end up here,” he added hesitantly. “If you got what I sent you.”

“But—this is all just too fucking weird, Quinn.” I stared into my glass. “How do you know Anton?”

“We move in the same circles. I’ll tell you a little secret, girlfriend: You get out of the U.S., it really is a small world. For some things, anyway. Me and him go back a ways, before the Wall fell. Anton was in Leipzig; he was big into hardcore. Music.” He laughed. “The other stuff, too. But music—everyone there wanted music, and they couldn’t get it except on the black market. I was living here with Emma by then, so I’d go to Germany and arrange to get him stuff. No Internet—you had to do everything the old-fashioned way, smuggling in records and tapes and shit. But I knew this girl in West Berlin, her grandparents were in the East. Every time she visited them she’d hide some albums under the floor mat of her car.”

“Jeez. Was she ever caught?”

“No, though once the heat from the engine melted them. I lost about a grand on that run. Whatever. After the Wall fell, Anton moved back to Oslo and opened a club. I was still establishing residency in Iceland and needed to keep it clean, so I started selling old vinyl by mail. When Kolaportið opened I got a stall there. Went online once the Internet came along. I had dupes of some seventies and eighties stuff; The Residents went for a lot. Thomas Dolby, not so much.”

“Where’s all your Chuck Berry?”

He smiled, and I glimpsed the seventeen-year-old Quinn behind the scrim of tattoos and scars. “Oh, I still have those: You don’t fuck with Chuck. I get by. Anton’s thrown me a bone or two over the years. And as you can see, I don’t have a lot of overhead.”

He stood to get another beer while I sat and tried not to be freaked by the fact that he knew Anton Bredahl. Though he hadn’t shown a lot of curiosity about my own dealings with Anton—or about me, period—which fit with the Quinn I’d known, whose interests had never expanded much beyond junk and vinyl and sex. And maybe he was right; maybe the world got smaller and weirder when you lived abroad, the way downtown New York had gotten smaller and blander.

Still, in Reykjavík you’d have to move a lot of vinyl to make rent, and I suspected it wouldn’t be enough to keep him in cigarettes and beer. Back in high school he’d sold dime bags of pot, along with Quaaludes and whatever he could get his hands on. Those scars suggested he hadn’t spent a lot of time in an office cubicle before relocating to Iceland.

“Hey.” Quinn set his beer down, and reached to touch the scar beside my eye. “This looks new.”

I said nothing. He leaned forward, drew my face to his, and kissed me. His lips were cracked, his hand on mine larger and rougher than it had been. But he smelled the same—smoke and sweat and beer—and his voice was the one I remembered from another world, another century.

“Cassie,” he murmured.

It had been years since I’d been to bed with anyone, maybe a decade since I’d been with a guy; thirty-three years since that guy was Quinn O’Boyle. We were both drunk, so it took a while.

And we were both nearly silent, from shyness, or maybe fear that our voices might betray the younger selves locked inside the creatures we’d become. I traced the lines across his chest, the cross gouged into his scalp; Quinn but not Quinn, trapped within a sarcophagus of scar tissue. I recognized almost nothing except his eyes and the sound of my name whispered in the dark, his voice so soft I might have dreamed it.

But then I felt his hand on my breast. “Cassie. I can’t believe you’re here. Why did you leave me, Cassie?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “You were in jail. It was such a long time ago. People change. Everything changed.”

“I didn’t.”

“No.” I rolled over so that I could see him better. “You never did.” My voice shook, and I looked away.

“It all might have been so different,” said Quinn. “Instead of this. Now it’s all too late.”

“It was always too late,” I said.

Afterward he fell asleep, and I watched the rise and fall of his ruined chest, the intertwined hands marking where his heart beat, his disfigured face even eerier in repose. Like one of those bodies dredged from a peat bog, its lost history tattooed upon weathered skin.

I leaned over to kiss his brow, rose, and crossed the room. I turned on a light and retrieved my camera, placed it on a chair to steady it, knelt, and gazed at him through the viewfinder.

He didn’t stir. He was far more beautiful to me now than he had been all those years ago, asleep in some silent place where he’d escaped from whatever damage the world had written on him. I opened the camera’s aperture and held the exposure for half a second, a lifetime, before pressing the shutter release. It sounded like a pistol shot, but Quinn didn’t move.

I took several more pictures, then stopped, afraid of what might happen if he awoke and saw me once more behind a lens. More than that, I was afraid that this whole half-lit world would shiver into a dream of desire and loss, and I’d find myself back in my dark apartment, alone save for the blinking red eye of the answering machine. I stowed my camera and crept back into bed. When I finally slept, I dreamed of Quinn lying beneath dark water, seventeen again, his hair streaming around his face, and a blaze of pure white light erupting from the scars on his breast.

PART TWO

15

I awoke to a world still twilit, the sound of waves and rattle of sleet on metal. Beside me Quinn yawned. He leaned over to grab a cigarette from a pack on the floor, lit it, and turned back to me.

“What’s this?” He touched the tattoo scrawled above my pubic bone. “‘Too Tough to Die.’”

I told him about the rape, the open wound left by a zip knife when I’d been left for dead. No more details than if I’d been reporting the weather or a timetable. When I was done, he bent to kiss my shoulder.

“That must have been terrible.”

I stared at the black square of window. From across the room his cell phone beeped. Quinn walked over and fumbled in his coat pocket. “Battery’s almost dead. It’s late. You hungry?”

“No. But probably I should eat.”

“There’s nothing here. I’ll grab us some takeout from Aktu Taktu. Feel like coming?”

I shook my head. He dressed and grabbed his coat, opened the door, and stopped. “Lock this after me. No one’s going to come by—but if someone does, don’t let them in.”

I pulled on my sweater, stood beside the window and watched as the car drove away, then drew the dead bolt. The cell tower’s beacon did nothing to illuminate the ground below. If someone crept up to Quinn’s place, I’d never know it. I remembered Anton’s admonition that I buy a cell phone in Helsinki. Too late now.

I finished dressing and drank about half a gallon of water, trying to throw off the shaky sense that none of this was happening, that it was all a dream ignited by jet lag and booze and a photo taken in 1975. When I opened the bottle of Focalin, my hands trembled; I felt sweaty and sick. The face that gazed back at me from the kitchen mirror was as ravaged as Quinn’s. I thought about his tattoos and wondered if murder had become instinctive for him, the way petty theft and lying were for me. I waited for my nausea to subside, then began to look around.

I didn’t find much. A kitchen drawer contained pens, razor blades, matches, an expired driver’s license, a ziplock bag of pot. In the bathroom were filthy towels, an overturned wastebasket, and a metal cabinet that contained several prescription bottles. The labels were in Icelandic; I didn’t recognize the pills inside and decided against popping any. On the floor beside the toilet were old issues of
Record Collector
magazine and a paperback of
The Return of the King.

It was the same copy Quinn reread obsessively in the 1970s, its cover a psychedelic mashup of mountains in flame and monsters in bruised colors. When I picked it up, it fell open to a page filled with sticklike letters. A runic alphabet. The margins held more runes in faded blue ballpoint. Quinn’s name, I guessed, or maybe even mine, written decades ago.

I returned to the living room. A cheap particleboard chest of drawers held old band T-shirts and corduroy jeans, flannel shirts, a filmy red camisole, and several wadded-up thongs. I picked up the camisole, and a red passport fell out. The photo showed a blond woman, a few years younger but with the same pissed-off expression: Dagny Ahlstrand, born 15 March, 1960, resident of Uppsala.

I searched in vain for another passport or snapshots, notebook or spare set of keys—anything that might suggest a life other than the one conjured up by unwashed clothes and the empty bottles piled beneath the sink. I discovered nothing. No more alcohol, either, except for the Brennivín. I caved and drank some, chasing it with foul-smelling water, and went into the room where the LPs were stored.

It was like a meat locker in there: I could see my breath. I went from carton to carton, pulling out albums in hopes of finding some evidence of the Quinn I’d known.

At last I hit pay dirt. Beneath the room’s sole window were two boxes, covered by a frayed plaid blanket. I recognized the blanket from Quinn’s boyhood room in Kamensic, where he’d jammed it beneath the door when we were getting high. I pressed it against my face, breathing in dust and smoke, the faintest trace of jasmine incense, and settled on the floor, flipping through an alphabetized record of our shared adolescence. The Beatles, Chuck Berry, early Bowie; on through T. Rex and finally The Velvet Underground. I pulled out the original
White Light/White Heat
and tipped the glossy black album cover toward the overhead lamp. Under black light it revealed a skull, but now the ghostly sigil remained hidden. I pulled out the next album.

Spiky red letters spelled the word V
IÐ
AR
,
the letter
I
an inverted cross. The minimalist cover photo showed a winter landscape: black spruce trees, a raven in flight above three young men wearing long black leather coats, black leather pants, high black boots. All tall and broad shouldered, their hair whipping around their shoulders. I’ve seen more cheerful faces in the Bellevue morgue. No corpse paint; just three piercing gazes that seemed to recognize me as an interloper in the northern wilderness. I held the album cover to the light, and sudden radiance leapt from the middle of the sleeve, igniting runic letters.

DOD SVART SOL

I realized then what it was:
Dead Black Sun,
the sole album by a Scandinavian band whose claim to fame, for me anyway, was that Ilkka Kaltunnen had shot their album cover, back in the early 1990s. That was long past the glory days of LPs, but bands still did vinyl pressings for the collector’s market. I wondered why it was misfiled with Quinn’s juvenilia. At least it was less embarrassing than
Frampton Comes Alive!

Or maybe not—maybe this was the black metal equivalent of Gilbert O’Sullivan, and that’s why he’d hidden it away. I removed the record from its sleeve, put it on the turntable, and sank into a chair to listen.

I expected shrieking guitars and jackhammer drums. Instead, horns echoed in a mournful fanfare that slowly died away into ominous silence, broken by an answering flourish of brazen trumpets that soared into a single, chilling note, held longer than I would have thought possible, before it, too, faded.

Gradually I became aware of the same note, even more plaintive and plucked repetitively on an acoustic guitar. Then a second guitar joined the first, and after a minute both were drowned out by two male voices, chanting. The vocals were buried too deep in the mix for me to understand them or even to tell if the words were English or Norwegian. The effect should have been laughable, ersatz worshippers playing at a twentieth-century Black Mass.

Yet the voices, so raw and unpolished, had the opposite effect. One fell out of sync with the other, and I heard a sharp intake of breath, an unintelligible word sung off-key; and this conspired to make me feel as though I were listening to something that was in fact happening now, in this room, rather than fifteen years ago in a recording studio. The two voices grew louder, a litany abruptly silenced by the treble scream of an electric guitar. Beneath the razor chords echoed another sound—a third, guttural voice, grunting, and then a strident whine, like an engine in high gear. I drew my head beside the speaker, straining to hear.

For a fraction of a second it was unmistakable. Not a guitar or synthesizer, but an anguished scream. Almost immediately it was lost amid a cascade of drums and that same guttural voice, shouting hoarsely. The guitars rose to a deafening pitch as the voice faded. The song continued for another thirty seconds, ending in a cacophony of feedback, followed by a thunderclap.