Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (8 page)

“You ever meet his customers?”

“I tried not to. But Ilkka never did much business like that,” she added earnestly. “Sometimes he sells one of his old crime photos to Anton, as a favor. I have to make the arrangements. It’s not illegal; you’d think it would be, but it’s not. Murderabilia, it’s called. Some people only collect from serial killers in jail. Some people, they like autographs or…”

She made a face, and went on. “Hair. Or fingernail clippings. All from murderers. I think it should be against the law.”

That might explain how Anton found out about me. It also might explain the sudden spike in prices for
Dead Girls.
To a completist, maybe my passing association with a serial killer would be enough; the photo in
Stern
would lead them to my book and then, in Anton’s case, to me.

I leaned across the table and covered Suri’s delicate hands with my own. She smiled, and I drew her hand to my mouth, kissed one knuckle then let my tongue trace the cleft between two fingers, tasting salt and ink. After a moment she withdrew her hand, still smiling. My eyes lingered on the ring on her third finger, a thick band of silver set with a moonstone.

“My girlfriend,” she said. “For Christmas. We’re engaged.”

“Too bad.” I sank back into my chair. “I don’t get it. You say you hate this, but you still work for Ilkka. Which means you have to deal with people like Anton.”

Suri finished her beer. “Yes, I know. I’m a hypocrite. But selling crime photos, it’s not so different from fashion photography. Bodies are just objects to them. Nobody cares if a girl weighs seven stone and a photographer makes her pretend to overdose and puts her in a Galliano dress. Why should someone care more about a dead body than one that’s pretending to be dead?”

“But you posed for those shots with Ilkka. What, did he hold a gun to your head?”

“Do you know why he stopped doing fashion work?”

“He got married and had kids. Old story.”

“He had to call Emergency 999 during a London session because a girl was so malnourished she almost died. That was when he stopped doing fashion work. That girl was me.”

I looked at her arms, beautifully defined, her broad high cheekbones and strong square chin. “How much is seven stone?”

“Ninety-eight pounds. That’s why I work with him. He saved my life.”

I started to point out that he was also the guy who’d been photographing emaciated girls in the snow, but she cut me off.

“It was a brave thing, really. He doesn’t make so much money now. Kati has a good job, but it’s hard because of Oskari’s treatments. They keep trying different things, and now they want to go to a clinic in Mexico. But it’s very, very expensive. And they lost a lot of money in October—some bad investments. They had a bad money advisor, a real asshole. I hear Ilkka arguing on the phone with him all the time. I hope he can afford to keep me.” She glanced at her cell phone. “We should get back.”

“I think I’ll hang out here for a while. I’m beat.”

True enough. But I was also tired of the whole situation—far too complicated for something that had nothing to do with me except a paycheck. And Anton Bredahl sounded more and more like the kind of asshole who should have lost his money in the crash, had there been anything like justice in this world.

Instead he was making god knows how much, dealing in pictures that were the next best thing to snuff photos. I had no qualms about Ilkka’s photos, which were beautiful and seemed in line with a guy who collected Christmas cards with Satan on them. But I was getting pretty sick of rich people.

Suri pulled on her coat. I thanked her for the beer, then asked to borrow her cell phone. She handed it to me. I found Anton’s number in my pocket, walked to a corner, and called him. He answered immediately.

“Hi, Suri.”

“It’s Cass Neary. I checked out those photos for you.”

“Really? That was fast.”

“Yeah, well, there’s only five. Didn’t take long. He’s got a whole Batcave downstairs. Nice darkroom. Or it was, before he switched to digital.”

“But these aren’t digital?” Anton’s voice rose slightly.

“No, they’re all color film stock. My guess is Fuji Crystal Archive, Super Glossy. He uses an antique Graflex Speed Graphic camera, 4 × 5 color negs. He has his own processor and printer, so he handled it all himself. Chromira printer, probably state of the art when he got it. Still gets the job done.”

“You’re so good, Cass. But there were only five?”

“Yeah. But they’re beautiful—fucking incredible.”

“You’re certain about the number?”

“Maybe he had more, but I didn’t see them. He didn’t talk like there were more. Believe me—photos this good? Five is plenty. I’d kill to know how he did them.”

“Probably best not to know.” Anton laughed again. He sounded relieved. “Did he discuss money?”

“I didn’t bring it up. He did mention someone else who was interested. A guy, from Oslo, maybe? Someone with very deep pockets.”

There was such a long silence, I was afraid he’d hung up.

So much for little Oskari’s miracle cure, I thought, then heard Anton’s voice, decidedly colder.

“Ilkka and I have a deal; you might remind him of that. Tell him I’ll be there tonight. How do you want the rest of your fee?”

“Mail it to me back in New York.” I gave him the address. “A cashier’s check.”

“Good-bye, Cass.”

The call ended. I joined Suri, now talking animatedly with the bartender, and returned her phone. She’d notice that I’d called Anton, but I’d be gone by then. I thanked her for the beer.

“No worries.” She smiled. “You’re sure you don’t want to come back with me? Ilkka will want to talk more at dinner.”

“Yeah. Not sure what I’ll do.” I’d been tempted to stick around and talk shop with Ilkka, but I had no desire to meet Anton, especially after I’d just inflated the value of Ilkka’s photos. “Find somewhere to crash for a while, probably.”

“Okay.” Suri tilted her head toward the giantess behind the bar. “Ritva will take care of you if you need anything.”

Suri kissed me on my cheek. I watched her go, sorry I hadn’t pressed my luck harder, got another beer from Barzilla, and retreated to a corner table. More customers floated in, but no one paid any attention to me. Music crackled from a speaker, the theme from
The Dukes of Hazzard
in Finnish. I downed my beer, then poured a jolt of whiskey from my stash. My head hummed with static, alcohol, Focalin, jet lag, exhaustion, all compounded by the memory of the photos in Ilkka’s basement. More than anything, I felt the dull, familiar ache of envy. Not for Ilkka’s wealth or house or family, or even his art collection. I’ve lived without all that for my entire life. I’ll die without it, too.

No. I envied him his obsession, whatever alchemy of desire and fear had fueled those photographs. You don’t get pictures like that without being in love with your subject.

But what kind of passion would drive someone to travel alone, in the depths of winter, to remote places where you wouldn’t just risk hypothermia but prison? His son’s medical expenses wouldn’t be enough; the murders had occurred years before the kid was born. Some sick, extraordinary vision hid behind those wire-rimmed glasses and taciturn demeanor. I recognized it because the same fire had consumed me once, so long ago it was like dredging up the memory of a story I’d heard from someone else.

Quinn.

Once upon a time, that name conjured an entire world, lost to me now. No one before or since has ever made me feel like that or see like that. Cigarette smoke and the blinding rush of amyl nitrate, the feverish rush of Quinn himself, sex and speed and the scratch of a needle on vinyl.

But it wasn’t just sex. Even after he disappeared, the enduring sense that Quinn was out there somewhere—in another part of downtown or another city, another country even—charged everything I saw and did with a secret glamour, the expectation that at any minute he might walk into CBGB or Club 82, or crawl from the wreckage of a party in some decaying loft. Photographing Quinn altered the way I saw the world. He was the lens that made everything darker, even as it brought it all into painfully sharp focus. It wasn’t love but something stronger: a sense of immanence, of being on the edge of some revelation that drove me to arm myself with a cheap camera and black-and-white film. That feeling stayed with me throughout my early years in the city. It charged my best work. Even if no one else could see Quinn’s gaze reflected in a broken syringe or a bathroom mirror at last call, I could.

But gradually that sense faded, or I did. I felt flickers of it sometimes, if I was drunk enough. Like now.

I retrieved his photo from my bag and stared at that bruised gaze, at once defiant and slightly desperate. I had always thought I’d known how that story ended. Prison, then …

What? The boy in that photograph was as dead as the girl who’d been behind the camera. But somewhere, the man Quinn O’Boyle had become had found that picture. He’d found me.

I put away the photo. The music stopped; my boots echoed loudly as I headed to the bar. Ritva looked up from a magazine.

“Another?”

“No thanks.” I held up the card William Lindblad had given me that morning. “There a phone I could use?”

She slid a phone across the counter, and I made my call.

“Helsingin Taksi.”

I gave him the bar’s address. The cab arrived a few minutes later, still blaring Wagner, and Lindblad nodded as I climbed in. “Back to Ullanlinna?”

“Airport.”

“You should like this,” he yelled, backing out of the alley. “Valkyries. Like you.” He jabbed at my reflection in the rearview mirror, then touched the outer corner of his eye. “That scar, right? You’re going home already? Helsinki in the winter is not a lot of fun. That’s why you should try Disneyland.”

“Next time I’ll remember that,” I said, and braced myself as we careened out of town.

10

There were only two flights a day to Reykjavík. Icelandair wouldn’t let me pay cash, so I was stuck with a smaller operation that appeared to service vacation destinations near the Arctic Circle. No one seemed to want my money. When I tried to trade some of my euros for krónur at the currency exchange, the woman gave me a bored look.

“We don’t do krónur.”

“Is there anyplace else?”

“No one is doing krónur.”

I found a quiet corner, finished my Jack Daniel’s, then went through security. I got checked out thoroughly, presumably because I’d just paid cash for a one-way ticket to a country so broke it made me look like Bill Gates, if Gates traveled coach on a plane that had rolled off the assembly line back when Bono meant Sonny. The flight was nearly empty—four Japanese girls, a few people I assumed were Icelandic because they smiled more than the Finns, and me.

I dozed fitfully for several hours, woke when we hit some turbulence and one of the Japanese girls behind me started hyperventilating. I looked out the window and saw a shimmering archipelago of lights far below—Iceland’s coast. A few minutes and the lights were gone. I searched for some other sign of life below us, but there was nothing. I fell back asleep and dreamed of gazing at an immense photographic negative, a vast sheet of black glass that splintered at my touch.

*   *   *

It was past midnight when we finally touched down. The Keflavik airport was empty, except for a single clerk at Border Control. I exited into what seemed like an abandoned shopping mall—shuttered duty-free shops, deserted seating areas, empty escalators moving up and down. The currency exchange was closed, and when I tried to use an ATM, it refused to convert my euros into krónur. I wondered what the black-market rate was for foreign money.

Outside, a solitary bus idled in the pouring rain. The driver asked for a ticket. I gave him a couple of bills and clambered on board.

The trip to Reykjavík was like a bus tour through Mordor. Black lava fields, an endless waste broken here and there by ruined machinery or a building of stained corrugated metal. No trees. No towns. No stars, no moon; nothing but black sky above and desolation below. Occasionally a streetlight shone through the rain, ominous as a UFO. Desultory ’70s music dribbled from the radio between the rhythmic shriek of the wiper blades. The Japanese girls tried in vain to get a cell-phone signal. One of them staggered on tippy-toe heels to the front of the bus and asked the driver about the northern lights.

“Not cold enough,” he said.

Finally we reached a stretch of suburban strip malls—gas stations, fast-food joints, an Icelandic megastore—and pulled onto a spur road into the city. At the bus station I followed the Japanese girls into a minivan that took us downtown. Narrow streets crowded with SUVs and Audis; sidewalks even more crowded with drunken kids. The van stopped in the middle of what looked like the main drag, where a neon HOTEL sign glowed above a metal awning. The girls straggled out, retrieved their luggage, and went inside. The driver looked at me.

“Where to?”

I realized I had no idea where to stay. I was too exhausted to think of looking for Quinn, too tired even to find a bar. I pointed at the hotel awning. “This place expensive?”

“Yes.” The driver leaned out the window to spit.

I stared through the rain at a guy who repeatedly pushed his weeping girlfriend against a wall. Behind us, a car horn blared.

“How about someplace quiet?” I asked. “And cheap.”

“Cheap?” The driver eased the van forward. “In Reykjavík?”

“Just as long as I’m not sleeping in the bus station.”

We crept past more drunks, another guy shoving around his girlfriend, a huddle of teenagers smashing beer bottles against the curb. “Is it always like this?”

“Everything is worse now.” The driver swore as a boy lurched across the street, oblivious of oncoming traffic. “You chose a bad time to visit.”

The van turned down one side street, then another, and at last drew up in front of a nondescript corner building. White stucco had flaked away in patches, revealing gray cement mottled as lichen. Limp curtains hung inside grit-spattered windows.

“Hotel Kátur,” the driver announced.