Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (6 page)

“No, the Jólasveinar are not nice like Christmas elves; they never became that Christian.”

I turned back to the photo. “So did they catch the guy who did this?”

“Never. None of the bodies was ever discovered, by the police or anyone else, as far as I know.” He lifted his head to stare at me with those icy gray eyes. “I do not mean that I was the murderer. I was not.”

He returned to the map chest for another photo, set it down beside the first, and peeled back the white tissue. “This is Spoon Licker.”

I grimaced.

“I know,” Ilkka said softly. “Horrible.”

But his gaze remained fixed on the print, his mouth parted as though he stared at something unspeakably lovely. I could see why.

An old man lay in a snowbank, head turned to the camera. He wore a stained blue sweatshirt, sneakers held together with duct tape, faded cotton pants that looked like hospital scrubs. One eye was open, milky blue clotted with red. Where the other eye had been was a hole, with a pointillist spray of crimson on the snow behind him. A metal spoon had been thrust between his gaping jaws. His tongue was gone, and Ilkka’s signature radiance flared from the spoon like a lit fuse. It was like a scene from some terrible fairy tale: the witch forced to wear red-hot iron shoes, the prince whose eyes are scratched out by thorns.

Yet it was also stunningly beautiful. Ilkka had captured veins of blue within the snow, and the spray of blood might have been feathers or petals. I searched in vain for footprints, evidence of a killer or onlookers.

“How did you know?” I asked. “Who tipped you off?”

“How did Weegee know? I have sharp ears. And eyes.”

“But the police must have suspected you.”

“I told you, no one ever knew of these deaths or cared. I did not know this man. Look at him.” He jabbed a finger at the print. “This carcass—who was he? I will tell you: he was nothing.
Kulkuri
—a ‘tramp.’ If his life had been worth something, someone would have searched for him! Someone would have mourned him. No one did. There was no search party, no investigation. Winters are very long in this part of the world. By spring, he was gone. They were all gone.”

“Gone?”

“Wolves and bears, lynx. Ravens.” He gestured dismissively. “Winter swallows everything.”

“But winter didn’t kill him. Or wolves.”

“Neither did I.”

“But you know who did.”

“‘Death will claim no man until his time has come, and nothing will save a man who is fated to die. Therefore be bold: to die in fear is the worst death of all.’ That is what the sagas teach us, and I would not argue with those words.” His gaze remained unfathomable. “I’ll show you the rest.”

One by one he set out the remaining photos, his gloved hands meticulously removing each sheet of the protective tissue until the entire sequence covered the table. All were in the same oversize color format; all had been shot in the winter; all had, somewhere, Ilkka’s signature flare.

“This is Svellabrjótur. Icebreaker.”

Beneath the ice of some northern lake, air pockets and bubbles formed a glittering constellation in a man’s blond hair. His eyes bulged, and his mouth opened as though caught in the middle of a yawn. The photo had been taken at night with a long exposure, beneath a moon so brilliant it resembled a halogen bulb in a sky streaked with stars. It would have taken a while to set up, and then the photographer would have been there in the frozen dark with a corpse beneath the ice, calmly counting the minutes till he closed the aperture. I wondered how much the temperature dropped when Ilkka entered a room.

Ketrókur, Meat Hook, seemed almost mundane compared to the other pictures. A middle-aged man, heavyset and wearing a black overcoat and a business suit, sprawled on a rocky, snow-sifted beach with a meat hook through his head.

“Where was this?”

“Huk Beach, in Oslo. A nude beach.”

“It looks cold for a nude beach.”

“Homosexuals would go there for sex. He was not mourned, either.” He gestured at the final photograph. “Hurðaskellir. Door Slammer.”

A landscape so heavily drifted with snow that there was no sense of scale: Fir trees, boulders—all had disappeared beneath blue-white dunes poised to break above a calcified sea. The shutter speed was so fast that I picked out individual snowflakes as they swept near the lens in crystalline explosions. Elsewhere, whirling snow made it seem as though you looked at the scene through gauze, streaked black where the wind exposed a bare tree limb.

But no matter where you looked—no matter that the sky was lowering and featureless—that unearthly radiance suffused everything, as though the world had erupted into a ghostly supernova. It was the kind of photograph that makes a career; a once-in-a-lifetime shot.

And if Ilkka was telling the truth, no one else had ever seen it.

I was so entranced that it took a minute for me to notice the body. It lay in the foreground on a plank—a door—outstretched limbs so pale I’d mistaken them for ridges of snow. Unlike the other corpses, this one was a naked woman, small breasted, with platinum hair. Her face was bleached of color, her lips leaden; her open eyes revealed irises cloudy green like old glass. Her head was turned so that she gazed directly at the camera. Her body was eerily untouched by snow. I stared at her, my neck prickling, and fought an almost irresistible urge to disappear into that brutal, beautiful space.

“They do not sicken you,” murmured Ilkka.

“No. They’re incredible.”

“Most people would find them horrifying.”

I shrugged. Photography is the art that justifies atrocity: war photography, pornography, memento mori, footprints left on a landscape where the last great auk died. None of us is innocent.

“The way you capture light…” I stared at the girl’s unseeing eyes, a travesty of the detached gaze all great photographers cultivate. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You didn’t use a flash gun?”

“No—that would have been
petkuttaa,
a ‘cheat.’ Only the flashbulb. I show what the world hides from us—the true world. The sun doesn’t lie. The night doesn’t lie.”

“But how did you do it? It’s impossible. There’s no available light.”

“No. What is impossible is to take a photograph where there is only light. You can never shoot the midday sun without a filter; you know that. But there is no true darkness. There is always light, somewhere.”

“Not enough for that.” I gestured at the print. “Not enough to make everything look fucking incandescent.”

“There is always light,” repeated Ilkka. “Buried beneath the earth, even. Not everyone can see it. But I do.” He leaned forward, scrutinizing me. “Just as you see something else. It is there.…”

Hs finger hovered alongside my right eye, the raw scar that had not yet healed. “A flaw behind your retina. I can see that, too. Odin traded one eye for wisdom and the gift of true sight. Perhaps you have done the same, yes?”

He drew back, and we gazed at the photos.

“All these people,” I said. “Did you see some flaw in them?”

“I know nothing about any of them, except what I have told you. But they deserved to die. They were unclean: Their own darkness had invaded them. Whatever light they possess now, it came from me.”

“Is this it?” I stared at the table. “Just these five?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Anton told me there were six.”

Ilkka remained silent. I stared at his chiseled face and ice-gray eyes, trying to make sense of all this. I caught no chemical whiff of fear or adrenaline, nothing to signal that he’d touched any weapon other than a shutter release. He might be crazy, but he was telling the truth.

Part of it, anyway. Ilkka Kaltunnen might be lying about that sixth photo, but he wasn’t the murderer. Someone else was. Anton? In which case Ilkka was blackmailing him, despite the fact that Ilkka was inextricably bound to whatever had happened out there in the snow, beneath the ice. Not just complicit in any cover-up or failure to report the murders, but in whatever bizarre belief system had left at least five people murdered, their deaths unnoticed and unmourned.

I’d never heard of a murderer who kept a court photographer, but there’s always a first time. Ilkka either witnessed each killing or he was tipped off before the blood cooled. He got his money shot and split.

And money definitely would be an object. Large-format images like these cost a bundle to produce. No commercial lab would have developed or printed them without asking questions or calling the cops.

Photographers are like professional stage magicians. They admire each other’s work and share tips but seldom reveal exactly how the trick was done. I figured I’d give it a shot. “How’d you process them?”

Ilkka pointed to an adjoining room. I walked in and found a huge machine, sleek and white as a plastic coffin beneath a translucent plastic tarp—a first-generation Chromira LED printer. He must have socked away a small fortune to pay for it: In the ’90s, this rig would have set you back fifty grand plus change.

But it would also allow you to produce your own prints in-house, with no embarrassing inquiries about blood on the snow. I saw another door at the end of the room, with half a dozen light switches beside it. I was willing to bet that was where the big color negs were processed, in an equally expensive rig.

Yet as far as I could see, the only thing Ilkka had ever used it for was a sequence that produced just five photos. Where was the sixth photo that Anton had referred to? Ilkka had told me he mostly shot in digital now, and there was no sign of any other oversize prints, unless he stored them in the map chest. What photographer invests a hundred grand in equipment he hardly uses?

A rich, obsessive control freak locked into some crazy-ass death cult. He and Anton deserved each other. I returned to the table, where Ilkka gazed transfixed at his own work. “It’s good, isn’t it, Cassandra?”

“It’s brilliant.” I meant it. “I’d still like to know how you did that.”

The overhead light candled the lenses of Ilkka’s glasses as he smiled but said nothing.

“What if you and Anton can’t agree on a price for these?” I asked. “You got other buyers lined up?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“So you’re just selling him these prints and the negs?”

“There are no negs. I’ve destroyed them all. These are the only prints.”

“You won’t keep a set?”

Ilkka continued to stare at the table. “That time is gone,” he said at last. “I am not sorry: There were a lot of evil things, and I do not need help remembering them. These will be the only prints.”

It was a good strategy. Most photographers make money by selling multiple prints run from a negative or, these days, a digital image. But the priciest photos, the ones that go for the big bucks at auction or through private transactions—those are often old daguerreotypes or ambrotypes, images produced in a one-off format, because that was pretty much the only game in town, back in the nineteenth century. Destroying original negs creates the kind of artificial scarcity that keeps the art world in business.

It would be possible to duplicate Ilkka’s pictures, of course, if you could get your hands on them. Still, to get anything approaching the quality of these originals would be almost impossible, and someone with a good eye—me, for instance—would recognize the difference between a first-generation print and one made from a copy neg.

That’s leaving out the law-enforcement issues that would emerge if these images ever hit the Internet. Whatever he’d been like in the winter of 1991, these days Ilkka didn’t seem like a guy who’d want to chance scandal and possible prison time. I wondered how much he was asking for the sequence.

And I wondered why he was selling it now.

Ilkka’s cell phone chimed. He answered it and walked into the room with the Chromira printer, talking quietly in Finnish. When he was gone, I quickly stepped to the map chest and slid open the top drawer, looking for a sixth print. It was empty. So was the next drawer and all the rest. Unless he had extra copies stashed elsewhere, those five prints were it. I did a swift reconnoiter of the room but didn’t see anyplace he might have stored them flat. Rolled up, they might have been anywhere, but I doubted Ilkka would be so cavalier with his trophies.

I searched inside a few more drawers—nothing but old contact sheets and film paraphernalia—then wandered to a counter strewn with CDs by Can, Kraftwerk, Alan Hovhaness, along with a bunch of dour-looking Scandinavian composers I’d never heard of. The guy definitely suffered from Stockhausen Syndrome.

But there were some old cassette tapes, too, with handmade labels sporting xeroxed images of inverted crosses and guys in corpse-paint makeup, the band names scrawled in Magic Marker: Sarcófago, Celtic Frost, Viðar, Bathory. I was vaguely aware of Bathory, and I knew Viðar only because they were Scandinavian, and Ilkka had shot their first album cover.

I glanced at the Celtic Frost tapes, picked up one with the word
Blot
penciled on its cardboard insert. Ilkka was still occupied with his phone call, so I stuck it in my pocket, grabbing two more at random. I don’t even own a cassette player, but what the hell. A minute later he walked back into the room.

“That was my wife. Oskari, our little boy, is feeling worse, I have to get him at school. She’s in a meeting and can’t leave.”

He hurriedly covered the prints with their protective sheaths, replaced them in the map chest, and locked it. We both peeled off our white cotton gloves and retraced our steps back upstairs.

“I’m not sure how long this will take.” His face looked drawn. “It’s the flu. She worries every time Oskari gets a fever. If he’s really sick, I may have to take him to the doctor.”

He seemed more disturbed than I’d expect someone to be over a kid with a cold, but it was no skin off my nose. “That’s okay. I think I’ve got enough to report back to Anton.”

“If you have any questions, we can talk about it this evening at dinner. He will be anxious to finish the deal; you might even have the chance to meet him.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Look, can I ask you one thing? How much are you asking for these?”