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The drawings were followed by oil paintings and Norah was surprised to see that the artist worked even more brilliantly in oils than in pen and wash. She stopped at a painting alongside a couple in their mid-sixties, drinking champagne: he in jeans and a jacket, with a full head of white hair; she blonde and heavily made-up, wearing low-denier black tights under a turquoise dress.
It was a hyperrealistic painting of the ocean at night. The waves—so dark and viscous that they resembled oil more than water—looked as if they might slosh out of the picture at any moment.
‘Nice,’ the man said.
‘It’s good,’ said the woman, ‘but it’s not great.’
She went on her way and the man followed her, so Norah was able to have a better look at the painting. She had to get very close indeed to see that this piece of reality, plucked out of the world like a ripe fruit, was made up of paint on canvas and not waves and spray and night air. If the other visitors hadn’t kept distracting her with their conversations, she felt that it might have soaked her to the skin and tumbled her ashore with seaweed in her hair.
‘Did you know that Valeska boycotts her own private viewings on principle?’ said a young man behind her. She pricked up her ears; Valeska was the name of the artist.
‘I know,’ a woman replied. ‘Incredibly pretentious. Really, of course, she’s the biggest attention whore of them all. Jerome says she’s impossible to work with.’
They spoke like actors, as if they weren’t talking to each other, but in order to display their knowledge of the artworld to as many people as possible.
‘Oh my God,’ the man said. ‘I can believe it. Although Jerome isn’t in my good books just now. He took me to see a performance of that ridiculous Belgian woman last week.’
‘Bride de Jong? Isn’t she Dutch?’
‘Who gives a fuck? The point is, she does performance art that was out of date in the seventies.’
Norah moved away from the picture to get a better look at the pair of them.
He was tall and rangy in skinny jeans, an apricot-coloured T-shirt, a striped blazer and horn-rimmed glasses, while she wore slacks with braces over a shirt and had hair dyed a matt pale grey.
They drifted away from the picture towards the waiter with the champagne glasses.
‘Are you going to Big B’s private view?’ Horn-rims asked.
‘Oh my God,’ the woman shrieked. ‘Are you kidding? Of course!’
‘I thought maybe action art wasn’t really your thing…’
‘That’s hardly relevant. Compared with him, Nitsch is a nobody.’
Norah suddenly didn’t feel like looking at paintings any more. Where was the cloakroom? She scanned the room, looking for the gallerist who had taken her coat and then stopped in stunned shock when she saw the last picture of the exhibition. It was another oil—white and every shade of blue beneath a strip of black. Norah shuddered.
A frozen lake under a starry night sky.
24
After the private viewing, Norah knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep, so she set off towards the thirty-euro address which was supposedly Dorotea Lechner’s, wondering whether the money wouldn’t have been better invested in cigarettes or a few drinks.
The city was surprisingly quiet. There was no one in Norah’s carriage except a stubbornly silent couple of about sixty and a group of young men talking to each other in a language Norah couldn’t understand. The train stopped and spat her out and she paused to get her bearings. No one had got out with her; she was alone in an area where—apart from the station—there didn’t seem to be a great deal. A high-rise block was visible in the distance and the water of the canal glistened beneath the steps leading down from the station. Norah had never been to this part of Vienna before. She opened Google Maps, entered the address she’d been given and followed the instructions on her phone. Asphalt, darkness, dirt and emptiness—only the fluorescent light of the station flickering behind her. Ahead, the extinguished neon sign of a discount store and, in the distance, houses strung out along the water.
Norah walked along the deserted canal. Not a soul about, not even a couple snogging or an old man walking his dog. Only the biting cold and the shallow water, as black as the oily ocean in the gallery. Norah shivered with cold as she hurried along the canal, dodging frozen puddles and potholes to avoid slipping. As soon as she could, she took a flight of steps up from the canal to the street and when her phone told her she was almost at her destination, she looked up to see that there was a bar on the ground floor of the house she was heading for.
It really was a quiet neighbourhood; Norah still hadn’t seen a soul. But there were lights on in a lot of the windows—a comforting sight.
Norah stepped up to the front door of the nondescript house whose colour she couldn’t make out in the dark—maybe cream, maybe white or grey—and studied the names on the doorbells. There were names, which there weren’t always in Vienna, but not the one she was looking for. Krstic, Müller, Celi, Talhouni/Nägele, Wagner. And there was one bell without a name. As Norah saw it, that meant three possibilities. Number one, the woman lived in that flat. Number two, the woman didn’t live here at all and Norah’s reticent informer had simply piloted her to the bar where she was a regular. Number three, her informer wasn’t an informer at all, but a con man. Norah glanced at her phone. Half-past nine. Too late to ring a stranger’s doorbell. If Dorotea Lechner did live here, Norah would have to come back another time. Nobody liked being surprised late at night; you didn’t need to be a journalist to know that. She’d try in the bar and if that didn’t get her anywhere, she’d come back in the daytime. She was also going to have to come up with some way of getting these people to talk if she wanted to write a feature about them. Who liked talking about living on the streets and begging?
Norah went into the bar. It reminded her of Werner’s favourite drinking hole: a long dark counter, a football match on a small TV high up in a corner, walls hung with various pennants and an Austria Vienna scarf, a no-nonsense landlady who looked as if she’d turn you out if you tried to order an alcopop, and in front of her, at the bar, a row of men—and they really were all men—who evidently took their drinking seriously. The underbelly of Vienna’s nightlife.
Refreshingly, a few heads turned to look at Norah as she went in, but none of them showed any real interest in her, so she took a seat at the far end of the counter and ordered a beer, which the landlady set down before her with a mute nod.
Norah thanked her and decided to lay her cards on the table, guessing that careful questioning wouldn’t get her anywhere with this formidable woman. Mid-fifties, Norah reckoned. She had bright eyes and a fierce updo and looked as if she had a healthy dose of common sense.
‘I’m looking for someone,’ Norah said. ‘Dorotea Lechner.’
The woman frowned.
‘Friend of yours?’ she asked.
‘Not exactly.’
‘Colleague?’
Norah decided to take pot luck and nodded—it couldn’t hurt. The landlady’s face instantly brightened.
‘From the theatre,’ she said. ‘Thought so, as soon as I saw you.’
Norah managed to conceal her surprise by downing half her beer—which got her a satisfied smile.
‘Dorotea will be pleased. You’ve only just missed her, by the way.’
‘She was here this evening?’
The woman nodded.
‘You don’t happen to know where I might find her, do you? Or where she lives?’
‘Well, I don’t know that she’d want that.’
Norah said nothing and tried to look harmless.
‘I can give you her mobile number,’ said the landlady.
‘Really? That would be great.’
The woman leant over the counter towards Norah.
‘Is it about a part?’ she asked.
‘Have to see about that,’ Norah said and smiled.
The landlady wrote the number on a beermat
and Norah thanked her, finished her beer and paid, leaving a generous tip. As soon as she was out of the bar, she dialled the number. She let it ring for a long time while the cold took hold of her again, attacking her earlobes, the tips of her fingers, her feet through the thin leather of her shoes. Nobody picked up and there was no voicemail, so Norah couldn’t leave a message. She walked along the canal, thinking hard. Dorotea Lechner worked at a theatre. This new piece of information needed processing. She tried the number again. A cyclist whizzed past her; between the houses, bare trees stretched their limbs imploringly to the sky. All was quiet. And then suddenly Norah heard something. A little way down the embankment, not far from where she was walking, she thought she heard a phone ring. She stopped and listened. She heard a train in the distance and a car a few streets away, but that was all. Norah tried Dorotea’s number a third time, and almost as soon as a connection had been established, the ringing sounded again, only a few metres away. Norah felt as if she’d been plunged into the icy canal; she was suddenly wide awake. She wished she was at home in her flat. Why had she come here? Couldn’t she have waited until the next day to search out the creepy fortune teller? Norah’s heart hammered in her chest and she knew she was afraid. But she got a grip on herself and followed the sound.
Looking down at the water from the embankment, she saw it. A dark shape. Norah stopped and blinked, as if to force her eyes to get used to the dark, but whatever it was remained elusive. Norah stood and stared, trying to get a grasp on the situation and when at last she realised what she was looking at, everything seemed to stall and slow, as if the flow of time were suddenly as thick and sticky as tar. There, black against the darkness, was a human figure. It was floating face-down at the shallow bank of the canal, and if it hadn’t snagged on a big, bare branch, it would have drifted away. The ringing stopped and Norah realised that it had come from a dark bundle that was just visible on the grass at the water’s edge. A bag, perhaps, or a rucksack, she thought, running towards it, slipping on the frosty grass in the thin high-heeled shoes she had put on for the private viewing, not for a night walk. She arrived at the bank out of breath and, kneeling down, stretched out an arm to the figure floating on the water, but she couldn’t reach it. She dropped her bag on the grass, lay on her belly and pulled herself as close to the water’s edge and the motionless figure as possible without getting completely drenched herself. She could almost touch the soaked cloth of the woman’s coat, but as soon as she got it between her fingers, the lifeless form drifted away a little, as if trying to escape her grasp. Norah reached out a bit further, panting—she wasn’t shivering anymore, but sweating—and managed to grasp a piece of coat between her fingers. Straining, she pulled the figure over to her, a centimetre at a time to begin with, and then, with a last heave, all the way to the bank, where she grabbed the body in both arms, turned it over and pulled it out of the canal, puffing and cursing, feeling the icy water seep out of the clothes. Then she laid it on the grass and looked down at it. The dark hair was no longer in a thick plait, but loose. The face pale and serious. An aging Ophelia. Norah saw at once that Dorotea Lechner, if that was her name, was dead. She felt her pulse, just in case, but all was still; the woman was cold as ice. As so often in situations of stress, Norah was suddenly calm. She dried her wet hands on her damp jeans and took out her phone. Then she sat down on the grass a few metres away from the corpse, wrapped her arms around her trembling body, and waited for the ambulance and police to arrive.
25
The journey home seemed to go on forever. The fluorescent light in the train, the laughter of late-night revellers, the smell of grease wafting over to her from the seat opposite where a teenage boy was impassively eating chips—it was all suddenly unbearable to Norah. The doctor on call had confirmed that the woman was dead. It seemed that she really was called Dorotea Lechner. The policemen, two men of Norah’s age with lean, muscular bodies, had taken her statement and contact details. She had decided to tell them the more plausible part of the truth—that she was working on a feature about beggars and homeless people in Vienna and had been hoping to speak to the woman about her experience. The officers had implied that they were treating the case as an accident. Ms Lechner had been walking by the canal in an advanced state of inebriation and had, for whatever reason, strayed from the path to the edge of the water. There, presumably, she had slipped and fallen, banging her head on a stone so that she had landed in the water unconscious and drowned.
But Norah had a funny feeling in the pit of her stomach. Yes, it was true, the policemen’s explanation sounded plausible, and Norah ought really to be glad that nobody suspected her of being involved in the incident. And yet. A few days ago, the woman had appeared out of the blue and told her she brought death.
And now death had caught up with her.
Rarely had Norah so badly needed a drink. The little bistro on the corner of her street seemed just the place to warm up and escape for a moment longer the silence and loneliness waiting for her in her flat. It occurred to her what a mess she must look in her muddy jeans and tattered shoes, but no one seemed to take any notice. Norah sat down at the bar and ordered a vodka. After downing it, she ordered another—and another—and then, in a last, desperate attempt to kill time, she asked for a beer.
When she finally climbed the stairs to her flat an hour or so later, she had trouble getting the key in the lock. Inside, the floorboards seemed more uneven than usual, the kitchen lamp swung from the ceiling like a pendulum, and getting out of her dirty things and into clean, dry clothes was something of a struggle. But although it hadn’t been Norah’s first dead body—she’d once done a stint reporting on crimes for a local daily in Hanover—she wasn’t done drinking yet. There was still white wine in the fridge. She filled a glass and went and stood at the window.
A man was standing in the light of the streetlight, staring up at her. Confused, she moved away from the window, pulled herself up onto the kitchen benchtop (another relic from the previous tenant) and drank her wine, watching the swaying ceiling light.
She suddenly found herself thinking of the photo of Arthur Grimm she had found on the internet. The short dark hair, the square chin, the steely blue eyes.
Norah slid down from the benchtop and went back to the window.
The man was still there, standing motionless. A slim man, neither tall nor short, with close-cropped dark hair. That was as much as she could make out in the darkness, but something told her he had deep-set blue eyes. Then—as if he’d been waiting for Norah to reappear at the window—he began to move.
He turned and stepped out of the light of the streetlight and had soon vanished into the dark night. Norah couldn’t have said what made her so sure, but she knew she had just seen Arthur Grimm for the first time.
26
Chocolate and weed, soft light and guitar music, the early dark of winter. Katinka lay curled up on Norah’s lap, her eyes half-closed, while Theresa alternately stuffed chocolate into her mouth and sucked on a joint. It did Norah good to talk to Theresa. She never made her feel she was bonkers, the way Sandra sometimes did. And she clearly liked being with her—unlike Max and Paul. Norah had told Theresa about Max’s lie—and about the calls he’d made since. So far she’d continued to ignore him.
‘Do you think I’m overreacting?’
‘Oh, please—your supposedly best friend lied to you! I wouldn’t want to talk to him either if I were you.’
‘Maybe he wants to apologise.’
Theresa gave a derisive snort.
‘Do you really want to know what I think?’
‘Go on.’
‘I think you can do without friends like that.’
Norah felt gloom descend on her and drowned it in another glass of the red wine she’d brought with her. She knew she’d have to have it out with Max sometime. But right now she was still too hurt.
The bastard, as Theresa had taken to calling her ex, hadn’t reappeared. Theresa was sitting on the sofa next t
o Norah, barefoot in jeans and a woolly jumper, prattling on about her seminars, her dishy professor, a novel she was reading, a hip new bar that had opened in Margareten. Norah’s mind wandered.
After finding Dorotea Lechner’s body in the canal, she had thrown herself into her work more than ever, but the strain of the last few days was making itself felt. The police officers in charge of the case were still convinced that the woman’s death was an accident and Norah accepted that. But what about the man who had appeared outside her house that evening and stared up at her flat? And who had written those strange texts? There was something else, too. Somewhere at the back of Norah’s mind, some dark, murky knowledge was stirring, struggling to reach the surface and connect with the recent goings-on. A shred of memory? A hunch? Norah was plagued by the feeling that she’d seen something important, but ignored it or misread the signs. It was like having an eyelash in her eye that refused to be dislodged.
‘Crocodile tears, schadenfreude, whitewash, iceberg,’ Theresa was saying and Norah resurfaced from her thoughts.
‘Sorry, what?’ she said, halfway between confusion and amusement.
‘Oh, nothing,’ Theresa replied. ‘You didn’t seem to be listening to me, that’s all.’
Norah laughed.
‘I’m sorry.’
Theresa grinned, then grew serious again.
‘What’s up with you?’
‘Do you remember the weird fortune teller I told you about the other day?’
‘Of course.’
‘She’s dead.’
Theresa, who had just sucked on her joint again, choked on the smoke.
‘My God! What happened?’
‘Accident,’ said Norah.
That was what they’d told her at the police station anyway: a tragic accident.
She thought about the results of her internet research on Dorotea Lechner. Born in 1948 to a Serbian mother and an Austrian father, she’d been an actor and had lots of parts in small theatres, even landing a few film roles in the eighties. As she grew older, though, it had become harder to find work, and at some point she must have fallen on hard times. Google had yielded nothing, of course, but Norah could imagine.
The Shadow Page 10