Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (5 page)

Ilkka stood and went to stare at the raven. He said something I couldn’t understand, rapping his knuckles on the pane. The bird flew off.

“Did you train it to talk?”

“No.” He smiled, showing very white teeth. “But I encouraged it.”

“What does it say?”

“
Hyvää iltaa.
‘Good evening.’ It will say that till spring. Then it will say
hyvää huomenta
.”

“Meaning?”

“‘Good morning.’”

“How does it know the difference?”

“When the nights are eighteen hours long, everyone knows the difference.”

We sat for a few minutes in silence. Ilkka continued to stare at the window. It was an effort to keep my hands from shaking. Finally I asked where the bathroom was, and Ilkka pointed down the hall.

“That way, on the left. If you reach the kitchen you’ve gone too far.”

I mumbled thanks, retrieved my bag, and stumbled into the hall.

The arctic color scheme extended throughout the house. Alcoves held delicately carved bone figurines, a whale’s tooth etched with a scene of a beheading. Some fashionably transgressive work by Deborah Turbeville, as well as more macabre photos, including a nineteenth-century cyanotype of a string quartet of skeletons in evening dress, and images from an archeological dig—piles of human skulls, skeletons missing skulls or limbs.

Other than the Turbevilles, none of them reflected the sort of blingy taste I associated with the fashion photographers I’d known, especially those who’d made their money in the Go-Go ’90s. I didn’t recognize any of Ilkka’s own work on the walls. There was no indication he’d ever done commercial photography, except for that Jenny Saville deconstruction of a couture model. It all seemed coldly ascetic, almost monastic, save for the faint scent of wood smoke and vetiver. I passed an office where Suri sat staring at a laptop, and finally reached the bathroom.

I locked the door, took a long pull at the Jack Daniel’s, and checked out the medicine cabinet. Nothing but soaps wrapped in black tissue, the same autumnal scent as Ilkka’s cologne. I stuck one in my bag, washed my face, and exchanged my frayed turtleneck for my striped shirt; popped a couple of Focalin and opened the envelope Ilkka had given me. Inside was a vinyl wallet containing three thousand euros. Anton had kept his side of the deal. I counted out half the notes and slipped them into my own tattered wallet, shoved the rest into my pocket, and returned to the living room.

Ilkka stood by the window, talking on a cell phone. He shot me an apologetic look, spoke for another minute, and signed off.

“Sorry. That was my wife; one of our children is not feeling well at school. She may come back early with him if the nurse thinks he should come home.”

“You’ve got kids?” I could no more imagine children here than in my own apartment.

“Two. A boy and a girl.” He gazed at the frozen garden, then turned and gestured toward the hall. “Come. I’ll show you what you’ve come to see. Tell me, how do you know Anton?”

“I don’t. He asked me to look at some photos he’s interested in buying. Yours. I never heard of him before two days ago.”

“You might want to keep it that way.”

“Why?”

“We have a saying:
Kun paholaiselle antaa pikkusormen, se perkele vie koko käden
. ‘If you give your little finger to the Devil, it will take your whole hand.’”

We turned down a passageway, and he continued. “I was delighted when Anton told me he had retained you to authenticate my photos.
Dead Girls
was a very important book for me; I found it in a used bookstore when I was at university. I hadn’t realized there were other people doing the kind of photography that I wanted to do. I felt as though I suddenly had permission to create my own work. All those photos of yours, they aged well. Better than your punks did.” He gave a barking laugh. “Iggy Pop and Johnny Rotten, dinosaurs selling insurance and butter on TV. So much for anarchy. And I saw your
Stern
photograph online, the Kamestos death mask. Everything has a price, yes?”

“I don’t care who’s buying the round, long as he pays.”

“I hope Anton has paid you well, then. He can afford to.”

I shrugged. The truth was, I was caught off guard by the fact that both Anton and Ilkka knew my work. I’d spent thirty years living under the world’s radar, scraping by on booze and whatever drugs I could scrounge from Phil Cohen. It was unsettling to think I had a second life, courtesy of some old black-and-white photos of dead people. Ilkka looked at me curiously.

“You’re a cult figure,” he said. “Didn’t you know that?”

“Must be a very small cult.”

“It is,” said Ilkka, and laughed.

The hall ended in a room with wood-paneled walls and a staircase. Ilkka stopped me before I could start upstairs. “Not that way. Here—”

He slid aside a panel to reveal an alarm box, punched in a code, and slid open a section of wall. Last time I’d heard of something like this was in a Nancy Drew book. Ilkka stepped inside. He switched on a light and beckoned me to follow, closing the door behind us.

“Watch your head.” He ducked down a narrow flight of stairs. “This was the original servants’ quarters: The kitchen and pantry were down here. I had it made into my darkroom.”

I followed him until we reached the bottom. Ilkka held the door for me and bowed. “Welcome to Valhalla,” he said.

7

There’s an old Van Halen album cover, a detail from a painting by an artist who went insane. The painting shows a cross section of his skull, compartments filled with gruesome Freudian nightmares and traumas—fleshless limbs, beatings, hobnailed boots.

Ilkka’s house was like that. Upstairs was the tightly wound superego; the darkroom was like entering his reptilian forebrain. A faint, familiar smell filled the place—the vinegary scent of acetic acid; liquid gum arabic and ammonia; sulfur dioxide, silver intensifiers—chemicals used for film processing. There was an underlying odor of drains. Photos from Ilkka’s fashion spreads covered the walls: Haute couture models attacking each other with scissors; an ebony-skinned woman with a banana-yellow tree frog on her tongue; a girl slumped on a toilet seat, billows of white tulle obscuring her torso.

All shared the extrasolar flare that had been Ilkka’s trademark—miniature novas blooming from eyes or scissors or a drop of water on a girl’s bare back. There were also a few pictures of heavy-metal bands, and some grainy black-and-white crime-scene photos.

“That’s how I got started.” Ilkka indicated a newspaper clipping of a corpse stuffed in the trunk of a Volvo. “I was at university in Jyväskylä, doing art history, and the police needed someone to take photos for them. Their regular guy went on vacation to Ibiza, so I filled in for him. Then he never came back. I loved it.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“I didn’t want to stay in Jyväskylä. I decided to study archaeology, so I moved to Oslo and took some classes at university. That’s where I met Anton; I used to hang out at his club. He introduced me to Jürgen Borne—you know his work, right? Jürgen was looking for an assistant, and he hired me. I worked on that
Vogue Italia
spread, the one with Chira Hendrix and the reindeer. That was my idea. After that, it all came together.”

I peered at another newspaper photo—a kitchen with a woman curled on the linoleum, hands clutched protectively around her head. There was a hammer beside her, blond hair caught between its claws. Droplets of blood glowed like liquid mercury spilled across the floor. He’d found his gift early on.

“I still have it set up for film.” Ilkka flicked on more lights. “But mostly I do digital now.”

Cabinets and shelves lined the walls, crammed with boxes and camera equipment. The enameled sink had been divided into sections for agitating and developing film. Photos and contact sheets were strewn across a counter beside a flat-screen monitor. There was a large table in the center of the room, and an old map chest was shoved into a corner.

“I know.” Ilkka grinned. “It’s a mess.”

“No, it’s great. It looks—” I started to say,
It looks human
. “It looks like a good place to work.”

“Oh, it is. My wife hates it: She doesn’t want the children to see my pictures. One reason for all the locks. She hasn’t been down here since I built it. No one has, except for me. And now you.”

He began to clear the table, moving glassine envelopes and contact sheets and finally a large camera with an old-fashioned flashbulb attachment.

“That a Speed Graphic?”

Ilkka cradled the rig against his chest. “Yes. My baby.”

“Can I see it?”

He hesitated before handing it to me. “Be very careful.”

I was. The Speed Graphic’s the camera you see in old movies, toted by newspapermen at crime scenes, political campaigns, behind enemy lines during the war. Weegee had one. It’s an amazing rig—three viewfinders, two shutters, everything operated manually.

You had to be fast to use a Speed Graphic. It helped to have Weegee’s supernatural gift for knowing when to push the shutter release, a microsecond before your moment disappeared. He once said, “With a camera like that the cops will assume that you belong on the scene and will let you get behind police lines.”

I held it gingerly, a nice weight. Silken black finish, chrome trim. The chrome marked it as a prewar model, and I looked at Ilkka curiously. “How long have you had this?”

“I bought it at a pawn shop in Jyväskylä. That’s how I got the police job: I looked the part.”

The camera even had its original flash attachment, a concave seven-inch reflector with a bulb still attached—an old General Electric Synchro-Flash, blue-coated, which meant it was used for color and not black and white. Those old bulbs were intensely bright, five hundred thousand lumens released over a fraction of a second.

“You have trouble finding bulbs for this?”

He smiled ruefully. “Yes. For a long time I had a stockpile, but they’re getting harder to find, even on eBay. That’s the last one until I find a new source.”

I handed it back to him with great care. He set it in a cabinet and retrieved a white cloth.

“I don’t know how much time you’ll need for this.” He began to clean the table’s surface. “But Anton is extremely controlling. He needs things to be perfect, orderly. In this case, no doubts about authenticity. You understand?”

“Yeah, sure. But you’ve worked with him before, right? He owns some of your work. That’s what I assumed, anyway.”

“Yes, he has some of my work.” Ilkka’s tone grew terse. “Old police pictures that I sold him when I was young and needed the money. But nothing from this sequence. No one has ever seen any of these.”

“Not even Suri? Or your wife?”

He shook his head. “I set up a temporary link to one of the images. You saw that?”

“The guy with the window smashed against his face?”

“Yes. Gluggagægir.”

He tossed the cloth into a sink, rummaged in a drawer for two pairs of white cotton gloves. He gave a pair to me and pulled his on, waiting as I did the same. Then he crossed to the map chest, withdrew a key, and unlocked the bottom drawer. With great care he removed a large print, roughly 44 × 28, covered with protective tissue paper. He set it on the table and painstakingly removed the protective tissue. I whistled softly.

It was the image Anton had shown me online: the black-haired guy in that incongruously bright, blood-striped parka, his broken face shrouded by splintered wood and shards of glass.

But there was no comparison between the on-screen image and the real thing. It was printed on super glossy paper, probably Crystal Archive, with saturated color so intense it was as though I stood in the photographer’s shoes with the boy’s corpse at my feet. Beneath a moonless sky, snow glittered blindingly from black spars of rock. A drop of blood on the shattered windowpane looked as though it would stain my finger if I touched it. Where the jagged spear of glass pierced the boy’s cheek, Ilkka’s trademark flare shone so brilliantly that I blinked.

“It’s incredible. But, Jesus. What happened?”

“As you see. He is dead. This was in Vemdalen, Sweden, near the border with Norway. December 1991.” He ticked off the information as though reading a train schedule. “Gluggagægir is one of the Jólasveinar. The Yuleboys.”

“The Yuleboys? That’s a cult?”

Ilkka looked startled. “No,” he said quickly. “A folktale, a Christmas legend used to scare children into being good. The Jólasveinar are trolls. The original legends were quite frightening. Now they’re utterly commercialized, like the Smurfs—cartoons to sell Christmas cards and toys. Like everything else in our heritage, they have been corrupted by Christianity and capitalism.”

“They’re Finnish?”

He shook his head. “No. I mean our shared northern culture. Finns are not Scandinavian, but we are Nordic. And the Jólasveinar are Icelandic. But Iceland was settled by the Vikings, so their origins were Norse, and the Jólasveinar tradition is even more ancient than that. I have researched it for many years, and even I don’t know how ancient—thousands of years, at least. Over time the myth was degraded to accommodate Christian beliefs. Here in Finland, it was even worse: We have no record of our own true history.

“The Kalevala is nothing but stories cobbled together by a single man a hundred and sixty years ago,” he said with disdain. “Stories of men and witches and little gods—but our gods are not the true gods. For that we must look to an older world where the ancient ways remain alive.”

“Like Norway?”

“Yes. And Iceland, which is where our purest Nordic culture survived. That is what I believe. Originally there were many Jólasveinar, but manufacturers have chosen only thirteen, the ones who might sell the most toys. The Jólasveinar go creeping around your house in the thirteen days before Christmas, and one visits each night. Gluggagægir is the Peeper: He spies in windows. Then there’s Hurðaskellir, Door Slammer; and Þvörusleikir, Spoon Licker; Lampaskuggi, Lamp Shadow; and Ketrókur, Meat Hook, and—”

“What, no geese a-laying?” I laughed. “Meat Hook—there’s a Hallmark moment if I ever saw one.”