Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (18 page)

“Yeah, stupid just about covers it,” I said at last. “Why were you at Baldur’s place?”

“It’s on my way home.”

“To here? This your squat?”

He said nothing until the shovel poked him again. “Only for now. I lost my job, and then we lost our house. We have no family in Reykjavík, so we moved in here. The buildings are just going to waste. We haven’t damaged anything.”

“The girl’s your daughter?”

“Élin. She’s just a girl, please—”

“Anyone else here?”

“No. In some of the other places, maybe. People move in and out, squatting. I try to keep Élin away from them. It’s difficult.” He pushed a hank of blond hair from his face and looked at me beseechingly. “We’ve lost everything.”

“Yeah? Ilkka and Suri and Bredahl lost more. Who killed them?”

The beseeching look hardened into an obdurate glare. I shifted, keeping a tight grip on the shovel. My skin was starting to itch from the crank. I raised my foot and pressed my boot’s steel-capped toe against his groin.

“In the parking lot where Baldur died—you were holding something. What was it?”

He remained silent, then finally pointed at the table. I leaned over and saw an object behind the bottle of Pölstar, a wooden bowl with a lid, about six inches in diameter. Its lid was ornately carved with abstract swirls that, when I looked more closely, resolved into three interlocking, skeletal hands with a ghostly face in the negative space between them. I stuck the shovel under my arm and picked up the bowl.

“What is this?”

“An
askur.
An antique ash bowl. Very old. Five hundred years, maybe.”

I ran my fingers across its carved top, over the whorls smoothed from god-knows-how-many other fingers over five centuries. The lid was hinged with silver and fastened by a tiny silver latch. I weighed it in my palm. “Is there something in it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t open it.”

I slid my fingernail beneath the silver hasp, then carefully raised the lid. Einar gagged and I covered my nose as a putrid stench filled the air.

The box contained a wad of red-and-white paisley cloth. I picked it up gingerly, saw that it wasn’t paisley but the remnant of a white T-shirt, clotted with dried blood. I grimaced, then unfolded it.

Inside was a clenched human hand, its flesh the color of milky ice. The nails were painted indigo; there was a ring on the third finger, a thick silver band inset with a moonstone. Several blond hairs had snagged on the stone’s setting. I raised the hand to the light and saw where the bone had been severed, frayed skin wrapped around tendrils of vein and tendon. She’d had delicate wrists; it wouldn’t have taken much of a blade. Just a very sharp one. I bound the grisly relic in its soiled wrappings and replaced it in the wooden bowl, leaned on the shovel handle, and stared at Einar.

“Did you know whose that was?”

He shook his head without looking up.

“I do. Her name was Suri. She lived in Helsinki. I saw her there two days ago. She was murdered after I left. What is her hand doing in your antique bowl?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” He lifted his head, his face stricken. “I didn’t open it; I didn’t know it was there.”

“Did she?” I pointed at Gilda, still out cold.

“No! Of course not. I just arrived here; we hardly spoke. She wanted me to turn off the music and talk to her; we were arguing.”

“About what?”

“About nothing! We were always arguing. About Élin; she was always worried.”

“Did you hurt her?”

“What? No, of course not!” He stumbled to his feet, cheeks splotched with anger. He was younger than I’d thought, maybe thirty-five. With a better haircut and shave, he’d be someone you’d trust with your money, if you’d never seen the movie
Wall Street.
“Who the hell are you? Why are you here? Why did you follow me? Answer me!”

“I was with Baldur’s sister. She’s talking to the cops now. Either you tell me what happened, or I’ll call them. Then you and Gilda will have something else to argue about.”

His face went slack. After a moment he leaned back and gazed at the ceiling.

“It’s my brother,” he said. “Everything in the car—it’s his. He’s mentally ill. Schizotypal—it’s a milder form of schizophrenia. He’s supposed to take medication for it but he never does. He lives on his own in the highlands. I hadn’t seen him in a while, almost a year. Then he called early this morning and asked if I’d pick him up at the airport. He wanted a ride to Kolaportið. He said he was going to meet some friends. It wasn’t open yet but he said that was okay, so I got him at Keflavik and dropped him at the market and left. He said he’d call me later but he never did. I saw he’d left some things in the car but I didn’t look at them; I was busy, I had some work to do downtown. Then when I was on my way home tonight I saw there had been an accident. I was curious, and…”

“Did he know Baldur?”

Einar ran a hand through his hair. “Of course. Everyone knew Baldur. Everyone here knows everyone. They did business together sometimes.”

“Vinyl business?”

“
Nei.
Cocaine, mostly. Baldur knows people in Norway and Estonia, and my brother has trouble with drugs. He thinks they work better than his medication. Maybe they do, I don’t know.”

“Why would he kill Baldur?”

“How would I know?” Einar ran a hand through his hair and groaned. “God, this is horrible! Some drug thing?”

“What’s your brother’s name?”

“His given name is Jonas Broddursson. But since university, he calls himself Galdur.”

Help Galdur.

The breath froze in my throat. “Galdur?”

“It’s not his Christian name,” Einar went on. “It’s an old word that means magic, sorcery. But Jonas made it his name, declaring he is now a sorcerer. He went to university in Oslo to study astrophysics. Jonas is a kind of genius. But he got involved with the black metal scene there, and that was when he began to act strangely, maybe fifteen years ago. He was nineteen or twenty. I am a year younger, and I went to visit him once. He and his friends, they would all be at Helvete—you know, the store where all the famous black metal musicians would hang out. Before they were all dead.” His mouth twisted slightly. “Back then, everyone wanted to believe in the Black Circle, black magic. Most just pretended to.

“But Jonas really did—he really thought it was true. He told me he had risen the Devil by sacrificing a man. He said he could kill people by looking at them. At first I thought he was just making it up, and then I thought maybe he was doing a lot of drugs. And he was. But really, it was the illness. They did a genetic study here; it showed that brilliant mathematicians are more likely to become schizophrenics. Our great-uncle, he went mad; he was a biochemist. In Jonas it was simply less severe. Or so it seemed.”

“What about you?”

He bared his teeth in a humorless, vulpine grin. “I was also good at mathematics, but I went into the banking business. It would have been better for Jonas if he had done so as well. He went to prison in Norway for killing a man. He claimed it was self-defense, that the man had attacked him at a club. There were witnesses, people who tried to catch the man, but he ran away. He followed Jonas back to his flat and jumped him again, but this time Jonas beat him unconscious with a guitar. He broke his neck, then drained the blood from his throat and kept it in the refrigerator. That is where the police found it when they arrested him. Jonas said the blood was to raise the dead man, so he could use him as a sending—a ghost that would do his will.”

“What kind of guitar was it?”

Einar scowled. “I don’t know! An electric one. Obviously he was mad, so they hospitalized him, then sent him to a minimum-security prison on Bastøy Island. When he was released he returned here. He gets a disability from the government and lives in the interior, so he bothers no one. He is very antisocial. I was surprised when he called me from the airport.”

I thought of the sixth photo, of Baldur’s corpse, and the bodies in Ilkka’s house. My stomach knotted. “Quinn—does your brother know him, too?”

“I’m sure he does. He has the stall with Baldur, yes? Jonas might have seen them both at Kolaportið.”

“Would they have gone willingly with him?”

“Of course, yes—why not?” Einar raised his hands. “You have to believe that I had no idea about this or that Jonas would kill someone now, after all he’s been through. I simply can’t believe it.”

“You just said he killed someone in Oslo!”

“That was manslaughter, not murder.”

“When you picked him up at the airport—where’d he been?”

“Helsinki.”

I swore furiously. “Is your brother rich?”

“Of course not. He lives on disability and a little money we inherited from our parents. But it’s not expensive to fly to Helsinki. And he is permitted to travel. Within the Scandinavian countries you don’t even need a passport if you’re a citizen. You think he murdered Baldur for money?” Einar laughed. “He’s not that crazy. Baldur has no money. No one here has money anymore.”

So who was willing to pay half a million euros for Ilkka’s photographs? For a minute we were both silent.

“Have you tried calling Quinn?” said Einar.

“I don’t have a cell phone,” I admitted. “Or his number. He said he’d come back for me this afternoon at Brynja’s. He never showed up, and he never called there.”

“He’s your lover?”

“A long time ago, when we were in high school. We hadn’t seen each other since then.”

Einar shook his head. “My brother’s friends, the only people he remained close to—they were from when he was young, in Oslo. Something ties us to the past.”

He looked at Gilda, still out cold, then at me. His gaze fell upon my wrist, and he frowned. “Where did you get that?”

I raised my hand, the spiked band brazen in the dim light. “Brynja gave it to me; she has them in her store. Why? Do you have one?”

“No,” he said slowly. “That was my brother’s idea. His friends—his followers—they all wore them. It was a sign of loyalty, and that you had taken part in an initiation. There were only a few of them. And now Brynja has them in that elf shop?” He grimaced. “Everything is devalued, right? She’s smart to sell them.”

“She says no one buys them.”

“Well, maybe that’s good, too. Listen. I need to see Jonas. If he’s in trouble, if he’s really done this thing—Jonas will talk to me. You have to let me go to him.”

“So call him.”

“He has no phone either. He lives very primitively.”

By now I was vibrating into methamphetamine overdrive. “What if Quinn is with him, too? He and Baldur were both supposed to be at the market, but they never showed up. What if your brother kidnapped them and killed Baldur, but Quinn is still alive?”

“This is crazy.” Einar’s voice rose to a desperate pitch. “Quinn isn’t with my brother! I have nothing to do with any of this. I want only to be sure that Jonas is okay.”

“He is obviously not okay!” Einar stared at his hands, and I prodded him again with my boot. “I need to find Quinn. I’m going with you. You know where your brother is now?”

“You have no idea what you’re doing! It’s a long way from Reykjavík—five or six hours.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass how far it is.”

“Oh, Jesus.” He rubbed his eyes and pointed at the shovel. “Only if you promise not to hit me with that.”

I looked at Gilda. “And she stays here.”

Einar said nothing. I grabbed the bottle of vodka. We both stared at the carved wooden bowl on the table.

“Leave it,” I said, and turned to go.

“No.” Einar picked it up. “I don’t want it here with Gilda or Élin. They know nothing of any of this. We can dump it somewhere in the country.”

“Whatever. Let’s go.”

“Okay. But I need to get—”

I dug the shovel into his back. “You need to get in the fucking car.”

He grabbed his overcoat. With a farewell glance at Gilda, he followed me outside.

20

The snow had diminished to freezing mist. Einar handed me the wooden bowl, hacked the driver’s door free of ice, and retrieved the jumper cables.

“I hope I won’t need them. But it’s a long way if we have any car problems.” He tossed the cables into the backseat, took the
askur,
put it into the storage area at the rear of the car, and covered it with the mat. “Phew! That stinks.”

He slid into the driver’s seat. I kept the shovel, braced to bash him if he looked at me cross-eyed, but Einar was too busy cursing to notice.

“Piece of shit. The defroster never works. And the wipers. And the heat.”

He started to drive, sticking his head out the side window until the defroster thawed a fist-size spot on the glass. There wasn’t much traffic, and no cops. I found myself compulsively counting headlights, something else crank is good for. When we got beyond the city limits, I counted streetlights, then houses, and finally lava formations. After a while I counted just formations that resembled human beings. A lot of these had extra heads or too many limbs or not enough. When it came to hallucinating, this country met you more than halfway.

Away from the city, the night sky cleared. The car’s heat finally kicked in, and I relaxed somewhat. Einar wasn’t much for small talk, which was fine by me. He stared fixedly out the window, his jaw set and expression grim.

“I should have called the police,” he said once. “The
askur
—I should have taken it to them right away. If I did that…”

“Forget about it.”

A glow appeared on the horizon—another city. Then the glow burgeoned into a silver dome and finally into a disk so brilliant it was like a hole punched in the sky: If you put your eye to it, you’d see through to a place that would blind you. I stared at it, amazed. “I’ve never seen a full moon like that.”

“Yeah, it’s beautiful,” said Einar. “
Morsugur
—that’s what they call it in old Icelandic. The moon that sucks the fat from your bones.”

We drove for hours. I felt exhilarated, invincible, more intensely awake than I’d been in my entire life. In the moonlight I could see for miles, all the way to the ocean if I tried, though we were headed away from the coast, toward the highlands. All the bad shit that had come down since I left New York sloughed away. Anton, Ilkka, Suri, Baldur were just names in a newspaper, and who reads newspapers anymore? I pushed away the memory of what was in the carved bowl behind me, glimpsed Ilkka’s white face in the moon, and looked past it to the mountains, leviathans breeching a silver sea. I shut my eyes and saw Ilkka’s phantom novas blooming in the darkness, dead faces more beautiful than they ever had been in life.