Lindstrom's Progress

by Moss, John

  As he signed off on the bill, she added, Harry, no matter how beautiful she is, if you sleep with her, be a gentleman and do it for old-fashioned lust.

  Harry had not been with a woman in the three and a half years since Karen died. She wouldn’t have minded. He was still young and he missed sex. But he missed sex with Karen. He couldn’t yet dissociate desire from the person desired. Perhaps never. He didn’t worry about it.

  When he walked out of a side street into the looming shadows of the floodlit cathedral, Harry was surprised to find so many people about, ignoring the drizzle. Instead of following down Gartner Strasse he turned west into the broader reaches of the Graben walkway and progressed slowly through clusters of late-night buskers and vendors and chattering tourists.

  The carnivalesque distractions cleared his mind. He had always found it easier to think with distractions, like when the radio was blaring or he was surrounded by a crowd. While he preferred solitude, tranquility allowed him to think too much about himself. I am, therefore I think. That’s what philosophers do, and he had been a professional philosopher for most of his adult life. Illusions of objectivity and abstract analysis couldn’t obscure the fact that thinking about thought began and ended with the thinker thinking. What the mind could not conceive was inconceivable. The mind that always explored the limits was the mind that limited the exploration.

  Harry, you’ve been gazing at your reflection long enough.

  He hadn’t realized he’d stopped in front of a shop and was staring through diffused light into its murky depths. He tried to bring himself into focus among the handbags and shoes. What he saw was a tall, lean man, close cropped hair prematurely grey, eyes like cracked amber, strong nose and chin, high forehead, clothing indistinguishable from any other well-dressed traveller. He winked without smiling.

  He moved along the Graben and past the swank shops and cafés down Kohlmark toward Michaelerplatz, which would then allow him to take Reitschulgasse back to the Kressler. Vienna thrilled him like few other places, but in the bleak night air it was suffocating. He picked up his pace. Overhead the sky was squalid from the lights of the city absorbed in the mist. At street level, shadows loomed in every direction.

  Toronto in the summer is looking pretty good about now.

  But not until I sort this out.

  What? How?

  By insinuating myself into Madalena Strauss’ good graces, apparently.

  Into her pants.

  Come on, I need to know if it’s true.

  If what’s true? That she’s involved in the exploitation of children or that she’s an assassin? Or just that she fucks.

  I don’t like not understanding.

  Even if it kills you.

  You know what I mean.

  Not always. Trust me, Harry, death is not a viable alternative. You’re caught between a guilt-ridden cop with magnificent hair and her creepy adversary. Maybe we should sidestep this one and go home.

  “Not likely.”

  Harry looked around. He had spoken out loud.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, as if making amends for his apparent eccentricity to an unseen witness. In fact, there was no one else within hearing range and as he turned into the shadowy narrowness of Reitschulgasse, Harry could smell horses. On his second day in Vienna he had attended a showing of the famed Lipizzaner Stallions at the Spanish Riding School behind these same bleak walls. Not a horseman himself, he marvelled as the horses pawed and hovered like mythical ghost-grey beasts, chillingly robotic yet fiercely primeval. He stopped, hoping to hear them in their stalls. He heard nothing but a single set of footsteps behind him. He glanced around, but the streetscape was empty.

  Emerging from the passage through the palace wall, he watched his own distended shadow reach across the street and up the stark façade of buildings opposite. In the chiaroscuro lighting and rain-laden air, an oddly familiar scene appeared bled of all colour, like a black and white film. Surely this was where Harry Lime had lived. Or Anna, his actress girlfriend. On Harry’s own side of the street a water fountain loomed in a square that was enclosed on three sides by the stone walls of the Riding School and some civic buildings with which they merged in the mottled gloom.

  Harry could hear the footsteps again. He slipped into a niche of darkness by the public entrance to the Lipizzaner exhibition. Following his own long shadow cast across the wet cobbles, the fat Russian emerged through the breach in the wall. Clearly disappointed at losing Harry, he strode off toward the Kressler at a rapid pace, almost breaking into a cumbersome lope as he left the square.

  Harry looked up at Harry Lime’s apartment.

  He was channelling Orson Welles as a kind of interior ghost and, strangely, he felt empowered, as if he were the bad guy himself. He hurried after his shadow, but by the time the Kressler was in sight, the Russian was nowhere to be seen. Just as well, Harry thought. Like the proverbial dog chasing a car, he didn’t know what he’d have done if he’d caught him.

  3 CAFÉ CENTRAL

  Harry ambled through the morning beneath a pastel blue sky and arrived at the Café Central on Herrengasse at the stroke of noon. Madalena Strauss was waiting for him, seated in a booth with red and gold upholstery inspired by Klimt. She was dressed less austerely than the previous evening, with more flow and colour. She smiled when he approached.

  “Adolf Hitler used to sit here,” she announced, not getting up.

  “Really,” he said.

  “And Tito and Lenin and Stalin.”

  “Not at the same time, I assume.” Harry sat carefully so as not to stir up the dust left behind by such august and murderous patrons.

  “Also Sigmund Freud. We will have kaiserschmarrn,” she announced. “It is famous here.”

  But only here? She has an interesting mind. She didn’t mention that Beethoven and Mahler and Mozart had also been frequent visitors to the Café Central. And Leon Trotsky and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

  “You will like kaiserschmarrn. And coffee, of course. Mélange, our version of latte. Did you rest well? You look tired.”

  Harry wondered if she had any idea about his dinner with the fat man or having been shadowed on his way back to the hotel.

  He looked around with admiration. He and Karen had occupied a table closer to the door a dozen years previous, when they travelled from Cambridge while he was completing his doctorate and she was a summer lecturer at Newnham College. He had been interested in Goethe’s Sturm und Drang phase, she in Freud’s sexual dreamscapes.

  The building from the outside looked like the opulent stock market it had been until its conversion to a coffeehouse in 1860, with neo-classical statuary perched on stone balusters and intricate fretwork carved around arched windows. Travelling on limited resources back then, they had been daunted, but when they went in, they were mesmerized. Soaring facets of light from the high vaulted ceilings swirled among slender columns. The same windows that had seemed ominous from the street were luminescent with daylight. A pianist played Mozart on a grand piano at eleven in the morning. They had ordered coffees and a luxuriously chocolate Sachertorte to share.

  “Let me tell you how they make the kaiserschmarrn,” said Madalena Strauss, leaning closer as if she were about to share a dark secret. “If a recipe says to work all the ingredients into a thin batter, sprinkle with raisins, or serve when golden brown with cranberry sauce, it is not kaiserschmarrn.”

  She sat back, looking pleased with herself. The light from myriad angles caught in the coils of her hair. Her head moved gently from side to side while she talked, giving her an ethereal yet primal radiance he found disconcerting. Instinct told him she might be a predator. Harry was a rational man; he did not trust instinct.

  “You have told me how not to make it,” he said.

  “Indeed,” she agreed. “But here is the real thing.”

  A waiter dressed in black and white set down a serving platter between them piled high with something between a pancake and an omelette that had been randomly sectio
ned into bite-sized morsels. The morsels gave off a perfume of indescribable richness and delicacy. Cognac? Rum. Butter and sugar and almonds, lemon and vanilla.

  He and Karen had seen patrons at other tables eating kaiserschmarrn and had returned to the Café Central three times in the following four days to feast on it, skipping proper lunches to justify the extravagance.

  “You see,” said Madalena Strauss, savouring a bite and speaking delicately, with her mouth full. “It is sometimes better to say what is not than what is.”

  Harry smiled with lips pursed to keep from embarrassing himself with excessive saliva.

  “I will tell you,” she continued, knowing she had his attention. “The raisins are stewed in rum. I add a dash of brandy. The egg whites are beaten until very stiff, then folded in carefully. The yolks are blended with other ingredients and allowed to stand for twenty minutes. You must be patient and precise when cooking kaiserschmarrn. When only one side is golden, you flip it over, then tear it into pieces quickly and remove from the stove while still cooking in its own heat, so it will be crisp and moist. It is a genius of opposites.”

  As are you, thought Harry.

  Despite the nostalgic power of the situation, Karen had been curiously silent. It was as if she were observing them both, trying to figure out their chemistry. The woman was disturbingly attractive. She was intense and charming and tough. And by her own admission, lethal. If she were involved in the trafficking of children and had actually executed her fiancé with such a diabolical flourish, then Harry was in very big trouble.

  Like a moth to a copper red flame.

  The pianist played excerpts from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major. Harry was tone deaf; he heard music as sound but not art. Madalena Strauss told him what they were listening to and he had no reason to doubt her. It was a pleasing arrangement of noises, mixed with the quiet buzz of conversations and the occasional clanking of dishes, an aural complement to the rich textures of light that descended from the pale curves of the vaulted ceilings and filled the vast and intimate spaces with a dream-like atmosphere.

  He shut his eyes and listened, then opened his eyes and gazed at the woman across from him. The music faded. “I had a visitor last night after you left,” he said.

  “The fat man?”

  “You knew.”

  “No, but who else?”

  Indeed, he knew no one in Vienna and the fat man had been none too subtle spying on them in the Kressler salon.

  “Madalena, do you know what he wanted?”

  “With you? Of course not.”

  “Are you curious?”

  Her eyes widened, but she ignored his question, apparently more intent on her own concerns. “I have brought you a file,” she said. “It is all I have been able to gather on what the police know of Dietmar Henning’s death.”

  “You refer to him by his full name. A curious formality, given you were about to be married.”

  “It is how I distance myself from my indiscretion.”

  Harry took the file from where she had set it on the marble-topped table and tucked it into his shoulder bag.

  “Aren’t you going to look?” she said.

  “Aren’t you going to ask what the fat man wanted?”

  “What did he want?”

  “Ah,” said Harry. “He wants me to spy on you.”

  So much for being covert!

  Harry continued, “He feels the murder of Dietmar Henning was not sufficient—”

  “Perhaps it was not—”

  “—not sufficient to bring me all the way from Toronto.”

  “Why else would I want you here?”

  “His question exactly. And when I figure out the answer I’m supposed to share it with him.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or he kills me, apparently.”

  “You do not seem alarmed.”

  “Oh, I am, but mostly I’m baffled. He gave me no indication of when I will know enough to merit my death if I don’t pass it on.”

  She looked at him with the same fleeting pity she might have offered a runway model with ill-fitting shoes.

  “I suppose you will know when you know,” she said.

  “He seems to think you were especially cruel in disposing of your ex-fiancé.”

  “Gouging out his eyes with my thumbs, ripping off his testicles with my bare hands, cooking his parts in a paprika goulash and serving it to the homeless.”

  “Orphans, I believe. And what about his charges that you are involved in a clandestine operation of some sort.”

  “Clandestine?”

  “A conspiracy with very bad people. He says you are connected to the international trade in children.”

  “Connected,” she murmured. The vaguest hint of a smile crossed her lips. She raised her right hand. It hovered for a moment as if she were going to grasp something out of the air between them, then with the back of her hand she brushed unruly tendrils of hair away from her face and turned her head slightly, so that natural light through the window glistened on her alabaster skin.

  “And what do you think?” she asked.

  “Is there any truth to what he says?”

  “It depends. I have a deep interest in such things.”

  He waited, shifting uneasily in his chair. With neither an explanation nor denial forthcoming, fascination was fast giving way to revulsion.

  “Can you give me details?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He waited. Nothing.

  “He says you were involved with the couple who died.”

  “Involved? You mean the Canadians and the boy?”

  “Did you know them?”

  “I met them.”

  Harry had not expected her answer. His nostrils flared. “In the Kressler?” he asked.

  “No, in a café at the Imperial Hotel.”

  “Could I ask why?”

  “We had mutual interests. It is not your concern.”

  “You didn’t mention this before.”

  “It was not relevant. I had a meeting with them in the middle of the day. It was an unhappy meeting. I left. Later, they came to the Kressler. They died. It is unfortunate.”

  Tragic might be a more appropriate word.

  “So here you are, enjoying kaiserschmarrn with a killer, a woman with clandestine connections. You are uncomfortable, Dr. Lindstrom. Feeling guilty, perhaps. Morally compromised? But already, perhaps, you know too much and too little to just walk away.”

  There’s always a choice.

  Flee, fight, or submit. Those are options, not choices.

  This isn’t an exercise in rhetoric, Harry.

  Despite the strong possibility Madalena Strauss was a murderer, Harry found she embodied a strange kind of lethal innocence, purring to be admired but ready to wreak havoc if the occasion required—innocence that had nothing to do with passivity or ignorance.

  Harry, she’s no Mother Teresa.

  A woman who doubted the existence of God doing God’s holy work? No, probably not. But the analogy hung in his mind as he gaped at the woman across from him, stunned by her casual admission that she was involved with the trafficking of children, sickened by how dismissive she had been of the deaths on the pavement outside the Kressler.

  There was something about her that was uncomfortably familiar. Could she be more monstrous than a man who had allowed his wife and children to perish? In a perverse inexplicable way, he identified with her.

  Just as he was about to acknowledge that she was right, that he was too deeply involved to back off, she surprised him.

  “I think our business is done,” she said. She sat back. Her chilling detachment reminded him of a pre-Raphaelite painting by Rossetti, the hauntingly erotic narrative of Pandora, threatening to release her casket of evils on an unsuspecting world. “Send me an account of your costs,” she said. “It’s the least I can do.”

  Harry, you’re being dismissed!

  He stood up, reached into his bag and retriev
ed a wad of euros, peeled off a couple of notes and dropped them unceremoniously on the table.

  “You think I can’t walk away, Ms. Strauss. Just watch me.”

  He turned and strode out the door into the early afternoon sunshine. He glanced back through an arched window and through the glare in the glass saw her sitting preternaturally erect. He glanced up and down Herrengasse, trying to decide whether to go directly back to the Kressler or for a stroll through the oldest parts of Vienna before returning to make travel arrangements for home.

  He was unable to book a flight for Toronto until the following day. After a long afternoon circumnavigating the Innere Stadt by following the Ringstrasse counter clockwise on foot, and then clockwise, much as Sigmund Freud used to do between sessions with young women suffering from hysteria (whatever their symptoms), he settled into a good dinner at the Kressler’s famed Restaurant Rote Bar. He had managed to get his outrage at being manipulated and his moral confusion both under control by thinking as little as possible. The portentous buildings erected during the glory days of the Austrian Empire had absorbed his interest, drawing him out of himself. The monuments and parks, stonework and stucco, trees and flowers, greys and pastels, had a calming effect. By the time hunger had moved him to return to the hotel, he was feeling the same kind of gnawing disinterest toward the charges against Madalena Strauss that he might have experienced upon reading about typhoon casualties in countries he could hardly imagine. He had separated the agonies of anonymous children from his own unbearable memories.

  He might have gone all out and dined in the formal salon but, given his mood, the brilliant emerald decor, green carpet, green walls, green ceiling, and ebony black furniture dulled his appetite. The plush red of the Rote Bar was more to his taste.

  The opera crowd had already left for the evening performance and Harry was almost alone in the opulent surroundings. He sat on an upholstered red bench along a red wall beneath a life-size painting of two dogs, a short-haired miniature of indeterminate breeding and, towering above him, what appeared to be a lanky Saint Bernard with a dark head and a thick white coat but no other markings. Harry moved around to a chair so that he could admire the picture, or, rather, admire the dog. Not the toy, the big dog.