Closing-up time was near.
‘Felix Berg?’ he said when I told him what I was looking for. ‘You suddenly develop an interest in photography, Saxon? You starting to take pictures?’
‘Only if you let me take some nice soft-focus shots of you laid out on the rug there, Burke, the way God and Karl Marx intended you to be.’
‘My folks used to have some just like it up on the fireplace when I was six months old,’ he said. ‘What you need the updates for?’
‘You not changed much since then?’
‘Lost most of my looks. That’s about it.’
‘I don’t believe it. You saying you used to be even cuter than you are now?’
He laughed, but he wasn’t letting me out of it that easy.
‘You be serious now. What’s the deal?’
It was impossible to feign casual with Burke.
‘There was a body found out at Howth.’
‘I heard it on the lunchtime news. Our friend the Marxman striking again. At this rate, even I’ll be packing my bags and heading for the hills. What about it?’
‘That was Berg.’
I didn’t mention my own part in the story for now.
‘Is that right?’ Burke seemed genuinely taken aback, enough so as he didn’t press me when it must’ve been obvious I was keeping something back. ‘I know his sister, you know. She comes in here sometimes looking for rare books. Out-of-print stuff. Smart lady.’
‘You didn’t know him?’
‘No one knew Felix Berg.’
‘Loner?’
‘And then some. Hardly went out at all from what I heard. Not socially anyway. Recluse with a capital R. He certainly never came in here. Some people called them the Ice Bergs, they were that cold.’
‘You have his books though, right?’
‘If I do, they’ll be back here somewheres. You just hold on now while I look.’
It was as well I’d come round now, Burke called through to me from the back of the store whilst he searched for what I wanted. If I’d waited till morning when news of Berg’s death had had time to filter through to the newspapers, there wouldn’t be a copy to be had in town.
‘Death always does wonders for an author’s sales,’ he said.
‘Maybe I should try it,’ I said as he came back into view with a great white square of a book wedged in his huge Marine’s hands. Though they always looked as though they were too clumsy for books, those hands always treated them like glass.
He laid it flat on the table.
The book was called Unreal City.
‘T.S. Eliot,’ Burke explained. ‘The Waste Land. You ever read it?’
‘I’ve not had the pleasure, no.’
‘Don’t mock what you don’t understand. You should read it,’ Burke said. ‘There’s bound to be a copy round here someplace if you want me to add it to your tab. Eliot was a poet. He came from your neighbourhood. Boston. And he ran away from it like you too.’
‘To Dublin?’
‘No.’
‘Then at least one of us had some sense.’
Burke smiled. ‘Berg brought out three books,’ he said, ‘but the first two are out of print. This is the most recent. I could try tracking down copies of the others if you want?’
‘I’ll let you know. I’ll just take a look at this first. And at these rates,’ I added, catching a glimpse of the price on the inside cover, ‘I think I’ll pass. There are Third World countries with a smaller GDP than what he’s charging for this. I don’t think my credit card could cope with buying three.’
‘That,’ said Burke, ‘is the global money market for you.’
‘And as I have told you on plenty of occasions before,’ I said, ‘if you start preaching your pinko politics at me, I’ll turn right round and walk out of here and you won’t see me again this side of your damned revolution.’
‘You’d be back. You know I’m right. I’ll make a convert of you yet.’
‘I told you, I got nothing to wear that goes with barricades. And you should be more careful what you say. You don’t want Sweeney back here busting your balls.’
Burke had been graced by a visit a few weeks back from Paddy Sweeney when the anti-terrorist supremo was fishing for any little wriggling sardine to back up his theory that the Marxman was some leftist agitator on a mission. An outsider with a taste for Marx plus a history of familiarity with weapons, Burke was bound to beep on someone’s radar eventually.
I often regretted I’d missed the encounter.
Suffice to say, Sweeney never came back.
Right now, I turned the book over and checked out the picture of Felix on the back.
It was the first time I’d seen him.
First time I’d seen him alive, that is.
First time I’d seen his face.
He wasn’t smiling. He had a reedy, anxious, nervy, slightly feminine look about him. His hair, as fair as Alice’s was dark, was long and needed combing. His eyes were squinting slightly through his glasses. He looked so young, he was young, but he looked younger still than his years. What was he when he died? Mid thirties? Yet even at that, it didn’t seem like his face was ready to settle down into familiarity. It was too changeable. He had the sort of face that a particular mood could transform into something potentially unrecognisable.
I turned the book over again quickly, trying not to think about the sight of his body displayed so grotesquely among the rocks, the tide tickling his naked senseless feet.
It was hard to think of the man who had made this book ending up like that.
Murdered.
When I looked up, I realised Burke was watching me.
‘Did you know this guy?’ he said.
‘I didn’t know him, no. At least . . . it was me who found the body.’
‘I get it,’ said Burke. ‘Look, you sit down there and take a look and I’ll go get us some coffee. Forget the time. There’s plenty of things I can be getting on with back here—’
‘No, Burke, honestly. I appreciate it,’ I said, ‘really I do; but I think I’m just going to take this home and look at it there.’
‘You’re the boss.’
But he seemed sorry to let me go. There was his mother hen instinct again. He wanted to make sure I was OK.
It was only when I was halfway home that I realised I hadn’t even paid for the book.
Was it any wonder Burke never made any money?
Chapter Nine
Once I got home, I ordered a pizza. When it came, I took it and the book out on to my balcony overlooking St Stephen’s Green, Central Park’s midget brother in the heart of Dublin, locked now after hours, and watched taxis pulling up outside the hotels and restaurants which ringed the green, bags being hefted up the steps, couples standing round outside glancing at menus, tourists taking a ride in the early evening sunshine on the horses and carts that worked the surrounding district, listening to the clatter of hoofs drifting up from the street.
Thought of Fitzgerald too. Tonight she’d told me she was going to visit her mother. Her mother lived someplace quiet about forty minutes out of town. Fitzgerald went to see her once a week and always came home feeling both shitty and exploited, laden with guilt at the constant criticism she had to endure from the sour witch. Why d’you never call? Why do I never see you? She wasn’t even that old. There was nothing wrong with her, but that didn’t stop her manufacturing illnesses like she was stocking them up in case of shortages later. Fitzgerald had tried taking me out there a couple of times, but it had always ended with her mother getting upset. She found it hard to accept that Grace wasn’t going to get married and start producing grandchildren. She was her only child. She said she feared a lonely old age.
I wished I had more sympathy for her, but in truth she just irritated me. Griping wouldn’t change one atom of the world, and I could see in her glances at me that she knew it well enough. She just wanted to punish Grace by sowing misery and weeds in her path.
I escaped fro
m the thought of her into Felix’s book, opening it on my lap.
First thing I did was read the brief biography of him at the front (there was some critical essay printed there too, but I didn’t feel up to tackling that just yet).
Berg, it seemed, had been born in Stockholm, which explained the accent if nothing else. Swedish father, mother from Dublin; in looks, Felix and Alice had obviously taken after different parents, dark and light sides of the same moon. Both parents had died in a car crash when the children were still young, Alice, the elder, only twelve, Felix ten, whereupon they’d been bundled back from Stockholm to Dublin to be brought up by an elderly aunt from an obscure branch of the family in a crumbling pile out in Howth.
Felix was educated at some exclusive college in Dublin, then went on to study photography at St Martin’s School of Art in London, before moving back to Dublin fifteen years ago. He’d been based here ever since. Never married, or if he had, he didn’t want the private details printed all over his books. Never gave interviews.
He was also, as I’d discovered already, rarely photographed, not even by his sister, who, it seemed, was a talented photographer in her own right (she’d taken the shot at the back of this latest book), albeit that she now worked mainly as a critic, writing for various journals and academic quarterlies, turning up on TV and radio as a talking-head pundit on culture. She had also published a number of books, including ones on the American photographer August Sanders and another exploring modern theory on the use of optical and photographic effects by painters from Rembrandt to Hockney. It was all way above my head.
Felix had exhibited widely round the world: New York, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Munich, St Petersburg, Sydney, you name it; and only ever in solo exhibitions. Even as a student, it seemed, he’d refused to allow his work to be exhibited alongside that of his contemporaries. He’d won numerous awards and his work had been bought by such venerable institutions as the Museum of International Contemporary Art in Brazil, the Pace/Magill Gallery in New York, the Irish Centre for Photography, as well as by private collectors in the US, London, Mexico and the Far East. The originals of his work now commanded huge prices and he was fast becoming one of the most collectable of modern photographers, not least because he refused to sell much of his work, and had recently even expended a deal of effort and money trying to buy back what he’d sold in his early years, maybe because he agreed with the critics who’d denounced that early work as violent and semi-pornographic, criticisms which had led him for a time into extended silence.
Frankly, it was another world to me. It made my head ache. But then I’d never had much time for art. I never had the patience for digging through the multiple levels of obfuscation to find whatever fragments of possible meaning were hidden within.
Same with poetry. Life’s too short.
But all my doubts and cynicism faded when I finally finished the biography and just looked at the photographs. Meaning ceased to matter. The purity of the image was everything. They were unutterably beautiful and it was easy to see why these photographs had brought him such renown. All my smartass cynicism about art dissolved to nothing in their presence.
On the title page there was an epigraph in French from Baudelaire: Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves/ Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant! – thankfully with a translation below, since I don’t speak French (the French seem determined to pretend to live in a world where Americans don’t exist or matter, and I’m happy to reciprocate).
Swarming city, city full of dreams, where a ghost in daylight clutches a passer-by!
That summed up perfectly what Berg had tried to portray in his photographs.
They were cityscapes mainly, street scenes, shot in black and white, but with occasional splashes of colour for effect or contrast. And they were cities I knew well, or thought I’d known well before then. Dublin, naturally, and London, but also New York, Berlin, Venice, even a couple of my own home town of Boston. He’d taken one shot of Union Bridge, where I’d worked as a waitress when I was in college. Even so, he made them all seem alien; refracted through his lens, his eye, these familiar spaces became unrecognisable, sinister, so that it was only when I looked at the accompanying titles and captions and notes that I was able to place them at all.
And what made them stranger still were the figures that inhabited them.
I say figures rather than men and women, because that’s what they were. It was impossible to distinguish one from another, impossible to think of them as real at all. He had taken multiple shots of the same street at different times of day and night and then superimposed the pictures over one another endlessly until one would lose count and there was layer upon layer of these strange figures inhabiting the same space, getting in each other’s way, but always unaware of one another’s very presence, until the image became so faded and crowded that the figures were insubstantial as phantoms – ghosts in daylight clutching at passers-by – and you could see the stones of the city through their bones and skin.
The photographs were simultaneously tranquil and hectic. On one level, the city itself became the only reality, the still point in the turning world, and on another level my head ached with the multiplicity of images, presences, lives, all clashing and conflicting with one another in a mad claustrophobia which made you realise as you looked at them how crowded and insane a city was, how lives jostled and ground against one another without ceasing, even when they were unaware of doing so, and how nothing was ever really your own, everything had been claimed before, everywhere had been occupied and reoccupied repeatedly.
You were just there on sufferance till the next person took your place, and the next one took their place, and the next theirs, in endless disconnected uncaring succession.
I sat and looked at the photographs so long that the light faded into darkness, and I needed the light through the window behind me to see; but no matter how often I looked at them, I still saw something curious and miraculous, and I almost forgot I was only looking at them now because Berg was dead. The vividness of what I saw here made that idea seem absurd.
Only when I’d been through the book a score of times did I get round to tackling the essay at the front, and here finally was something truly indecipherable. Felix’s images spoke with the clarity of a single pure note struck in the middle of a tuneless cacophony; seeing them was like walking out of an airless room into an open space on top of a mountain, where the air was sharp as frost. But in the essay – written, I noted, by someone called Vincent Strange – all the layers of obfuscation had been replaced on top, separating Berg’s work again from the watcher and putting it back protectively into the hands of the critics, the experts, where it could remain unsullied by popularity. I had little time for these academic games.
Vincent Strange, though, took bullshit to a whole new level.
‘Berg’s exercises in existential rage,’ he wrote, ‘his unceasing revolt against self and society, remind one repeatedly not to take anything for granted, that what one sees is not always what is there. Reality is contingent, fluid. Nothing can be relied upon. The world is subject to constant revision. What is there is suddenly not there. What is black is white. What is he saying? That the world cannot be trusted and no one in it.’
The author related all this back to Felix’s childhood, particularly the early loss of his parents. There was the supreme example to any child of the world suddenly proving to be less reliable, less trustworthy than they might have assumed they had a right to expect.
I wasn’t particularly impressed by that automatic equation between personal history and creative endeavour. It was too trite, too reliant on the instant easy answers peddled by quack psychologists. Too often I’d dealt with killers who’d been released early from prison by the same breed of false prophets who declared their patients ‘cured’ of whatever it was that had afflicted them, only for them to kill again, worse again.
If they couldn’t even get that right, why should the
y expect to be listened to when they pronounced on other complex matters of motivation? Everything was guesswork where the human mind was concerned, for all that they pretended it was science.
I guess it was just a relief to see they weren’t the only ones, that art critics made the same grandiose assumptions without having the first idea what they were talking about.
Chapter Ten
Early morning found me checking out the morning editions. Felix Berg’s death had made the front pages, naturally enough, of all the Dublin papers, most of the main ones out of London, and a fair few of the international editions too. My name, I was glad to see, had been kept out of it for the present, but the press had happily seized the opportunity to print once more the gratuitous details about the Marxman’s previous killings, as if the public in Dublin was not nervous enough. This was still something that was happening to other people, people they knew only as names in newspapers, it was still not affecting ordinary folk in the city directly – but with each killing the sense of dread only seemed to creep closer, become more real.
As it was, the reports I read that morning told me little that I didn’t know already from the biography at the front of Unreal City, and what I hadn’t known was only dates and details and more of the same posturing affectation from critics as I’d endured last night.
Only two facts were new to me, though both were interesting. The first was that Felix had been hospitalised about a year ago after being assaulted and robbed whilst working one night. There was nothing so unusual about that. I knew from talking to press snappers that it was a dangerous business, taking pictures in the street, especially at night. There’s always some junkie going to be attracted by the lure of all that expensive equipment, not to mention the drunks and thugs just looking for someone making themselves conspicuous with whom to pick a fight. He was hit on the head, suffered a fractured skull, severe concussion. Doctors said he was lucky to survive, though not any more he wasn’t, I reflected grimly.
The Dark Eye (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 2) Page 5