Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (3 page)

Another weirdo. I started to delete it but stopped when I scanned the end of the message.

I would of course not expect you to perform this service gratis and would be happy to discuss it with you as regards generous remuneration for your time.

With respectful regards,

Anton Bredahl

I had better luck Googling this guy. He was the owner of an Oslo club called Forsvar, a former air-raid shelter that specialized in industrial music, death metal—stuff like that. From its Web site, it seemed like a lot of his customers hadn’t gotten over the bad news about Ian Curtis. The rest looked like they’d just come from Anvil’s anniversary tour. There were a few underlit photos of the club’s interior but none of its owner.

I sat for a minute and wrote my response.

Anton,

Sure, let’s discuss.

CN

I hit reply and went to pour myself a drink. When I returned, another message had already popped onto the screen.

Can you talk now? What is your phone #?

I stared out a gray window glazed with sleet. I finished my Jack Daniel’s, thought
What the hell,
and typed in my number. A minute later the phone rang.

“This is Anton Bredahl.”

“You’re quick.”

“I am more comfortable in conversation. First let me say I know your work—I have a copy of
Dead Girls.
”

“You and twenty-five other people.”

He laughed. The connection wasn’t great, a cell phone or Skype. He sounded younger than me—late thirties, maybe. Not much of an accent.

“Yes, it was hard to find,” he went on. “An American friend told me about it. I bought it from a dealer a few years ago, someone in Oslo here who specializes in photography. It is a valuable book now, did you know that?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“I paid one hundred and forty euros. The exchange rate was not so good, so—it was expensive. I should have waited until now, right?” He laughed again. “Someone should bring it back into print. It’s a good book. That is how I recognized the photo in
Stern.
The same eye, I thought. It’s good you’re taking photos again.”

“It’d be better if I was getting paid for it.”

This time he didn’t laugh. I finished my drink, wondering if I’d pissed him off.

“Yes, that is why I wanted to talk to you. I collect photographs.”

“The
Stern
photo isn’t for sale.” I’d already stuck the negs in various books around the apartment, a half-assed attempt at hiding them. “None of my stuff is for sale, sorry.”

“Oh, no.” He sounded slightly embarrassed—for me, I realized as he continued. “Actually, I was wondering if you would be interested in looking at some photos and perhaps assessing them. Not my own photos—I’m not a photographer. Photos I am thinking of acquiring for my collection. I think there is some overlap in our taste.”

“I kinda doubt that.” I paced to the kitchen and poured another drink. “I haven’t done anything since
Dead Girls;
you know that, right?”

“You did the
Stern
photo.”

I had a spike of paranoia—he was a cop, the whole
Stern
thing had been a setup to implicate me in Aphrodite’s death—but before I could hang up, he added, “Joel-Peter Witkin—I bought his work very early on. But it is his later photos that I find most beautiful—the ones of the cadavers, before they became too camp. I have a number of other photographs as well. Weegee, but also—well, my taste is fairly … esoteric. You understand?”

“Right.” I relaxed and knocked back the whiskey. “Yeah, I sure do.”

“Esoteric” has roughly the same relation to my camera work as “erotica” has to porn. This guy liked the photographic equivalent of rough trade—very rough trade, as in dead people. Witkin’s most notorious pictures center around cadavers and various body parts gleaned from morgues and hospital freezers, rearranged and posed to evoke images like the martyred St. Sebastian, or surrealist tableaux that would give Buñuel the creeps.

Bredahl said, “You like Witkin’s work?”

“Yeah. Some. The stuff that isn’t trying too hard. It’s beautiful.”

“Isn’t it?” His voice lifted. “So many people don’t perceive how beautiful it is, the way he sees the world. That image of the severed heads kissing is sublime.”

“I wouldn’t hang it in my kitchen. But yeah, it’s an amazing photo.”

Joel-Peter Witkin was definitely a somewhat esoteric taste. Also an expensive one: After Jesse Helms denounced his work as degenerate, prices went through the roof.

All this made me wonder why Bredahl needed me to take a look at his photos. Witkin was way out of my league. If I hadn’t flamed out in the 1970s, you might have found my name alongside his in the Wikipedia entry for transgressive art. As it was, I was barely a footnote. Still, I needed to eat. Or drink, anyway.

“So you want me to authenticate some stolen Witkin photos? I’m not a curator; I couldn’t give you an estimate of how much they’re worth or anything like that. But I could take a look at them.”

“No.” Bredahl paused for such a long time I thought the line had gone dead. “I don’t want you to make an assessment of their value. I would like your opinion. I would like the use of your eyes, as a consultant, someone who will tell me whether these pictures are authentic or not. The particular sequence I would like you to review is not by Witkin. These are a slightly different kind of photo. As I said, very specialized, very—”

“Esoteric?”

“Yes. Some people might find them quite offensive.”

“Listen, if this is some kind of kiddie porn—”

“No, of course not. But I must be—how do I explain? Circumspect. More than anything, I need to know if these photos are … authentic. You understand?”

“No.” I swallowed the rest of my Jack Daniel’s. “Look, I don’t think this is going to work, okay? I have to—”

“I will cover all your expenses. Not in Oslo—Helsinki. And I will pay you six thousand euros.”

I did the math in my head.

“Yeah, well, okay,” I said.

“I’ll arrange your flights. Is Thursday too soon?”

This was Wednesday. “Thursday?” I’d only been out of the country once, on an ill-fated trip to Belize. I frantically rifled my desk until I found my passport under a stack of ancient contact sheets. It was valid for another year. “Yeah, Thursday’s great.”

“Excellent. Now…”

I gave him the info he needed to arrange the flight.

“I’ll e-mail you a link so you can look at a few things in my archive.” I heard him light a cigarette, then inhale. “What I’ve put online, anyway. Probably it would be good not to share this with your friends.”

I promised not to share it with my friends. Not that I have any. I had a sudden bad thought.

“Hey—you know a guy named Phil Cohen?”

“Phil Cohen? No.”

“You’re sure?”

“I think so. Is that a problem?”

“No. That’s good. I’ll wait for your e-mail,” I said, and hung up.

4

Bredahl worked fast. In moments another e-mail arrived: a link to his Web page, with instructions to click on the icon of a raven, follow that link to a second site, where I should click on a rainbow, then on to a site where I should sign in pseudonymously and, after receiving a password, type in the long string of numerals that he provided.

All this took me to Anton’s site. No photo, no personal information of any kind; just a white screen crowded with totemic-looking animals—wolves, whales, puffins, eagles, serpents. It took me a minute to find the raven, which brought me to a page that looked as though it had been created by a fifth-grade girl, all pastel clip art of unicorns and fairies. I clicked on the rainbow, which drew up a spreadsheet for the accounting office of a furniture company. There was a place to log in, and I did, under Cam Lucida. I entered the numeric password and found myself staring at a screen deep in the darkweb.

Plukke rune

I hesitated, then clicked an icon. Up popped a black-and-white daguerreotype of a wizened infant, swaddled in a christening gown and lying on a bed. The baby’s eyes were shut, its tiny hands like a dead bird’s claws.

A Victorian postmortem daguerreotype. Photographers cranked them out in the early days of studio work, memento mori that were handed to the grieving family for display in the parlor or family Bible. They were highly collectible, though not particularly valuable: Too many had been produced by anonymous photographers eager to make a buck when the art was still new. I couldn’t afford to turn down Bredahl’s money, but this kind of macabre kitsch was definitely not to my taste.

I clicked another link. Up popped a second postmortem photo, of a dark-skinned young woman lying in a coffin surrounded by tall vases of white roses. Billows of lace and satin frothed down the sides of the casket; her clasped hands held an immense bouquet of white lilies. She’d been buried in her wedding dress.

James Van Der Zee, 1920s

This was more like it. Van Der Zee was a black photographer who shot tens of thousands of photos in the early twentieth century. I had a copy of his
Harlem Book of the Dead
I’d nicked from the Strand when it first came out. That book would cost you five bills and change now. Van Der Zee was almost a hundred when he died, and kept shooting nearly to the end—celebrity portraits, mostly. I could only guess what one of his early Harlem photos would go for.

If this online archive was for real, Bredahl owned several. He also owned a bunch of photos by Weegee, the notorious New York newspaper photographer who earned his nickname because of a seemingly supernatural ability to arrive at a murder scene while the corpse was still warm, usually before police or ambulance.

I had one of Weegee’s books, too, but I’d never seen the pictures that Bredahl showed here. A naked woman splayed upon the boardwalk at Coney Island, torso split from throat to groin so her skin flapped like soiled bedsheets. A headless man slumped on a barstool, his spinal column protruding from a polka-dot shirt. A black Chihuahua lapping at a pool of blood beside a severed hand. There were also several Witkins I didn’t recognize, as well as contraband photos from the FBI’s Body Farm that showed cadavers scattered across a bucolic landscape.

I now had a good suss on Bredahl’s esoteric taste. Also of how much discretionary income he had. Enough to invest in legitimate works, some of them one of a kind, and to subsidize runners who specialized in black-market pictures that had probably been stolen. I should have asked for more money.

I wrote him an e-mail.

Interesting site. Where’d you find those Weegees?

Bredahl’s reply was terse.

www.saatavissatumma.com

I thought the URL might be for a private auction site or gallery. Instead, the link took me to a screen pulsing with silvery light.

Astua Sisään. Enter.

I clicked.

There were no Weegees here. Dreamy, vaguely familiar images filled the screen: bruised women sitting in office cubicles on an ice floe; square-jawed men in eyewear forged of rusty nails; a line of solemn blond children marching across a rocky beach, arms laden with leafless birch twigs. The locations were arctic, even when the models wore acid-green shantung sheaths or skirts of distressed chiffon: ice-locked lakes, barren tundra, evergreens so thick with snow they resembled alabaster topiaries. In one image, disheveled women in fur leggings and camisoles harnessed reindeer to a sled piled with raw meat. The photos were shot on film, not digitally; a highly saturated palette of indigo, silver, ochre deepening to the coppery black of dried blood; a pure, snow-blind white nearly impossible to capture without washing out the faces of the models.

That ethereal white twigged it for me. The site belonged to the Finnish fashion photographer Ilkka Kaltunnen. He’d been a prodigy during the late 1990s, when he was only in his twenties, and had a flash of notoriety for a
Vogue
shoot where the models all appeared to have died of heroin overdoses in a sauna. He’d also shot album covers for a couple of obscure Scandinavian bands excoriated for their involvement in church burnings and other satanic hijinks in Norway and Sweden.

Those scenes were mostly off my radar. I knew Kaltunnen for his real work. Among serious photographers, Kaltunnen was noted for that signature white: a burst of radiance in a model’s eyes or the silver clasp of a bracelet; a brilliant, malign flare no one else could replicate in a darkroom.

His heroin chic seemed a little off-topic for Bredahl’s collection. No rough edges. No dead people.

And I was no longer in the darkweb. I scanned Kaltunnen’s site and found more fashion pictures, none more recent than 1999; a few music videos; some bleak winter landscapes and panoramic black-and-white shots of an industrial waterfront.

Nothing seemed to fit Bredahl’s remit. I returned to his archive, searched for anything credited to Kaltunnen.

Nada. I was still brooding when the next message from Bredahl arrived. I checked the time: If he was in Oslo, this guy kept late hours. The e-mail consisted of another complicated set of links into the darkweb.

“Holy shit.” I refilled my glass, staring at what was on the screen.

It was a night photo, deep focus, color—an expanse of jagged, snow-drifted rocks, spare and bleached as the surface of the moon. Near the center, a young man lay on his back as though sunbathing. He wore a candy-striped parka with a white fur hood, black jeans, and black motorcycle boots. He was thin and had long black hair.

But it was impossible to get a clear look at his face, because a window, frame and all, had been smashed against it. Broken glass shone like ice on the parka; the stripes on his parka were streaks of blood. A hank of black hair was snarled around a splintered muntin. A spar of wood split his lower jaw so that it gaped open, tongue lolling between crimson teeth. His cheek had been pierced by a triangular piece of glass. Where it split his flesh, a tiny sun glowed, the most brilliant thing in that surreal, glittering world. There was a single word on the screen:

Gluggagægir

If it was fake—Photoshop or a still from some slasher movie—it was the most convincing fake I’d ever seen. If not, it was the most beautifully composed crime-scene photo on Earth. I hadn’t followed Kaltunnen’s career since he’d retired from the fashion world, but it had always been a point of pride for him to work only with available light, and he’d broken contracts rather than allow magazines to retouch his work.