by Moss, John
When Madalena was sixteen she had fallen in love. She was at school in Salzburg. One day she met a boy while they were strolling in opposite directions along the promenade by the Salzach River. It is so easy to meet when you are young. They caught a premonition of their future in each other’s eyes as they passed. They paused and turned around to see if the other had turned. They went for coffee. They laughed. She was from an ancestral town called Hinterbrühl and doing a prep year for university. She intended on going to the Universität Wien. He was on an Erasmus exchange at the Universität Salzburg. He was Norwegian and was doing a degree in cultural studies at university in Oslo.
He didn’t speak her language very well and she his not at all. Mostly, they conversed in school-book English.
They became lovers after knowing each other only a few hours. He was her first. She had to con her way into residence that night with a story about being held up at a relative’s in Hallstatt, a village in the region renowned for its salt mines and beauty. She was a strange girl and no one thought to check.
He told her his name was Gustav Vigeland and he had a girlfriend in Oslo. That was okay. Madalena was sixteen. She had no intention of getting tied down. They were vigorous lovers, but they never spent an entire night together. On their last evening at the end of the term, she told him she was pregnant. He congratulated her.
She had no expectations, but given the wondrous transformations in her own body and mind, she was bewildered by how detached he had seemed, as if she had announced she got an A in calculus or free tickets to a concert.
She moved to Vienna and took the following year off school. Her mother supplied funds without asking questions. When her daughter was born, Lena named her Freya after the Scandinavian goddess of fertility. She was not without a sense of humour.
When she wrote Gustav to announce the birth, her letter was returned unopened. There was no one by that name at the address she had been given. A handwritten note on the back of the envelope by an anonymous stranger asked, did she mean the Gustav Vigeland, the famous sculptor, because, if so, he was dead. She could try reaching his estate at Vigelandsanlegget in Oslo.
Fuck him, she thought.
She had always thought Norway romantic. Now it seemed empty and cold. Not a place she would want to visit. She didn’t bother to look up Gustav Vigeland.
Shortly after Freya turned four, Madalena finished her degree in psychology. She was contemplating advanced studies to make the effort already invested worthwhile. Few things have less intrinsic worth, she noted, than an undergraduate degree in psychology.
“What about philosophy?” he parried. “A bachelor’s degree in philosophy pretty much precludes a job in the real world.” He did not rise to defend education as the prelude to a full life. That he had been a professional philosopher made this clear if implicit.
Only to other philosophers, Harry.
Early in the summer of her graduation, her mother died and Madalena discovered she was quite prosperous. After she liberated the Klimt (she spoke of one painting, not two), she was wealthier than she could ever have imagined. She decided to take a year off from her studies and devote all her attention to Freya, who would be going to school soon, and then it would never be the same between them.
She seldom thought of her lover who had called himself Gustav Vigeland. It was a wonder he hadn’t claimed to be Thor Heyerdahl, the most famous Norwegian of all. Even then, she wouldn’t have guessed he was lying. People share the same names. There are only so many to go around.
She paused in her narrative before continuing in a lower register, more quietly, painfully. “And then,” she said. “The evil thing happened.”
Freya was taken from her.
Two men and a woman had come to her door early in the evening. They said they were from Social Services. One man was stocky, middle-aged, well-dressed. The other was younger, taller, with thick black hair plastered close to his skull and eyes that avoided hers by staring at the floor. The woman was attractive, with fair hair cut short and too much makeup. There had been a report of abuse from one of her neighbours in the building. They were not permitted to identify the complainant. Nor were they at liberty to state the exact nature of the complaint. They were very apologetic, but they were required to take the child into custody. They had several documents with signatures and official stamps of authority. They gave her a slip of paper with an address where she could attend a hearing the next morning and sort all this out.
The situation was the kind of bizarre paradox that had marked so much of Madalena’s young life. The men were domineering but gentle and sympathetic; the woman was delicate but very severe. This was for Freya’s own good and if everything was in order, she would be back in her own bed the next day. They pulled her door closed when they left, effectively barring Madalena’s way. She stared at the back of the door. She had not cried for fear of upsetting Freya.
Eight years later as she talked to Harry, burning tears filled her eyes and rolled down her cheeks and into the corners of her mouth. She told him she had spent the night of Freya’s departure in a straight-backed chair, weeping softly. Her tears tasted like salt, like blood. The next morning, she went to the address on the paper. It was a vacant lot where a building had been demolished during the war and ownership of the property was still in dispute.
Fighting hysteria, she went to the police.
A woman at the police station took down all the particulars and that is where the case ended. Hourly, daily, Madalena checked back, and each empty response devastated her more than the one before. Freya had simply vanished. Her disappearance was a matter of record, a police file, an irreversible irreducible tragedy. A statistic.
At the end of the summer, Madalena enrolled in advanced courses in criminology. On the side, she studied computer technology. Two years later, with a Magister diploma in hand, she joined the police force. In spite of being striking in appearance, an attribute she did not try to play down, she progressed through the ranks very rapidly.
She had chosen criminology over law because she needed to understand where the system broke down. She was not interested in justice and social order. She was interested in how the rules that allow society to function can be so easily exploited by those who hold them in contempt.
People working with her often resented her tireless dedication. People above her were daunted by her smile, which was never a shared social gesture; it was always private, as if she were smiling only for herself. People subordinate to her found her work ethic and her poise enviable attributes, although none tried to cultivate her friendship.
She worked on her own time building massive files on child trafficking. No one in the force ever connected her with the teenage girl who reported losing her daughter years earlier, an improbable story that had throbbed through the headlines and quickly expired.
It was assumed she was writing a book. She told Harry this as if she were talking about someone else. Rumour had it she had a graduate degree in criminology and she was generally conceded to be alarmingly bright. She was referred to, offhand, as Fräulein Magistra, or Mag Strauss. Sometimes, with irony because she did not look bookish, she was called The Professor. She was not discouraged from her private investigation. A well-received study of a universally abhorrent area of criminality would bring credit to her superiors and might give her colleagues a well-needed lift in public esteem.
Madalena became notorious for having no social life. In most people, that would be considered a sad aberration. Because she was beautiful, in her it was considered a tragic flaw, a violation of the natural order, with implications beyond her personal sphere. Over the years, she realized, an aura of suppressed evil developed around her, as if she were inseparable from the terrible things she was bent on exposing. She was a superlative cop, a relentless and methodical researcher, a strange human being.
“Then I met Dietmar Henning.”
She paused and looked around for a moment quite frantically, as if she were diso
riented by her own disclosures. Her haunted eyes settled on Harry.
“Lena, do you think Freya is still alive?” he asked.
Her eyes darkened.
“Madalena,” he said gently.
Her eyes were like mirrors, glazed with tears.
Oh my God, my God.
Harry thought that his heart would burst. He could not begin to fathom the depths of her anguish.
He reached across the table to cover her hands with his own. She pulled away, leaning back in her chair. Her eyes grew wide and she swallowed hard. It was clear she had never talked like this before. She flashed hatred in her eyes, gratitude, fear, but not certainty. Tears slid down her cheeks, into the corners of her mouth.
“I whored myself, Harry.”
Harry struggled to keep up.
“With Dietmar Henning,” she said.
“Lena?”
“You have to understand.”
He was trying to.
“As a homicide detective I work in the field. There is a steady turnover of corpses with grief-stricken survivors, pretty much all the same in their grief. And there are the killers. Every killer is different from every other. Dealing with them is my job and I am good at it. The strange thing is, I seem to communicate with the depraved better than with the bereaved. I haven’t been very good handling my own grief, so I wasn’t very good with theirs.”
Lena smiled her crooked smile. “After I lost Freya, I learned to feel nothing. My research was cerebral. Until Dietmar Henning, I had never met anyone directly involved in the trafficking of children.”
“And then everything changed?”
“Everything changed.”
She continued her story. The words seemed to come from inside his own head, as if they were listening together.
One evening, walking home from work she had stopped at Café Sperl on the lower end of Gumpendorfer Strasse. It was a little out of the way but one of the best coffee houses in all of Vienna. More low key and intimate than the Central, it was one of her favourite places.
This was a year ago last spring. She had had a good day, closing a particularly gruesome case of domestic violence by arresting the husband, his mistress, and her surprised boyfriend, who had sponsored the affair to extort money but had not counted on murder.
She slid into a booth upholstered in patterned velvet, a comfortably dated floral design of crimson and grey, and ordered zimtschnecke, a spiral shaped pastry filled with sweet cheese and crushed nuts. She would skip supper and the calories would average out. She sipped her mélange and gazed absentmindedly around the L-shaped room with its dark wainscoting and soft amber walls glowing softly like beeswax from a profusion of congenial chandeliers alight well before sundown. The other customers were reading papers or chatting quietly.
“I’ve been there,” said Harry. She was explaining the scene in such detail, he feared the urgency of her story would get swallowed up in the telling.
“I know,” she said.
A shiver ran through him. He nodded. She went on. A man there caught her eye. He was her own age, sitting in a window seat and reading by the light coming from outside. He was handsome and seemed in a world of his own. Her attention moved on, but an odd sense of revulsion made her look back. Why should she feel anything about him at all? She coughed; he looked up. She looked away but not before experiencing another tremor of revulsion.
He went back to his paper and she looked again. He wasn’t a known criminal or fugitive. He wasn’t someone she had encountered unpleasantly at a social function—she didn’t go to parties but occasionally had to attend receptions and funerals. He wasn’t a corrupt celebrity, an e-millionaire, or a villain from the movies.
He could be one of a thousand profiles she had put together over the last few years. It was hard to tell. He was not electronic data; he was real. She ran through clusters of faces in her mental inventory, faces associated with different aspects of the child sex trade—abductions for the purpose of illicit adoption, internet pornography, child labour and slavery, prostitution of minors and infants, and the international traffic in snuff films.
She had been fiddling with the pastry flakes remaining on her plate. The waiter asked if she’d like another. No, she insisted, but ordered fresh coffee and with eyes lowered she smiled at the tabletop as the waiter cleared her place. The man by the window glanced over several times. She looked up, caught his eye, she nodded.
He moved to her table like it was the most natural thing in the world. As she acknowledged his conversational gambits with an offhand smile, it was all she could do not to jam a pastry fork into his strangely unthreatening eyes—for unspecified crimes, for the way he made her feel.
He spoke German with an Italian accent. He claimed to be an Albanian refugee, after which he shrugged expansively to let her know he was prospering. He told her he worked for a clothing importer. She said she was a buyer for Pregenzer Fashion on Schleifmuehlgasse, off Karlsplatz, just around the corner and down the street. He modified his credentials to explain he in fact worked for an international security company but had wanted not to seem intimidating. She told him she was not intimidated.
His thick brown hair, worn fashionably unkempt, his boyish features and easy air, combined with clothes from Hugo Boss, hand-tooled Italian loafers, a gold chain around his neck, and a heavy gold ring on the little finger of his right hand, conveyed the kind of mawkish charm of someone who hung out in clubs that had bouncers.
Not her type, not that she had a type. She didn’t date. But she was attractive, she knew how to flirt, she was able to transform her revulsion into sultry contempt that made her seem more alluring.
He was pathetic, really. He made no attempt at consistency in his personal revelations, saying whatever came to his mind as he tried to read her responses, and consequently she believed nothing. What might have made him mysterious and even seductive with music booming over loudspeakers and strobe lights flashing, here in the casual elegance of Café Sperl made him seem a handsome buffoon. He had a nice smile, showing lots of teeth, and crinkling about the eyes that suggested a man given to tanning parlours. As he began to anticipate success, he slouched in his chair, conveying a sleazy insouciance Madalena found embarrassing, especially in the Café Sperl where the waiters knew her by name.
“Madalena.” Harry’s voice intruded.
“Yes.”
But he had nothing to say, just wanted her to know she wasn’t alone. She acknowledged his need to connect with a pained smile and after a moment continued, “What I’ve already told you about him was not the whole story. It’s true he shook down the criminal class for amusement. The police knew about this and turned a blind eye. What I didn’t tell you, and what the police investigating his death don’t know, was that he made most of his money from kids. Some from illicit adoptions, but far more from sex, the more degrading the bigger the payoff. It’s a billion dollar industry, Harry, and he was deeply involved. Never a kingpin. He wasn’t executive material. But as an enforcer and a free agent, he was smart enough to take the initiative when left to his own resources, ruthless enough to do whatever was necessary. That made him a valuable asset and a formidable adversary.”
She described having struggled through their initial encounter to quell surges of loathing, even though she knew nothing yet of his actual work. She sensed he was evil. Evil had become her obsession. She needed to penetrate the cheap façade. She was afraid her contempt would scare him off. She used truth as a bait.
She leaned across the table and whispered with all the sensuality she could muster, “I’m a cop.”
He flinched then saw she was throwing this in as a challenge. He was in no danger of being apprehended. He obviously felt reckless. She was as beautiful as a painting, but she was a cop, and he held cops in wary esteem.
From there on, it was easy.
Over the next year, she learned all she could learn from Dietmar Henning about his role in the international trade in children. Her accumulated res
earch took on flesh-and-blood reality as depravity became manifest in the actual lives that were touched by her venomous lover.
She learned by listening, by prowling his laptop, by questions that played to his ego. She was able to identify a network of businesses and their numbered accounts, to trace lines of commerce from Tokyo to Toronto, Estonia to Thailand, Athens to New York, lines that seemed almost infinite, like inflamed capillaries spreading through diseased human flesh.
Socially, she introduced him as an international dealer in art and antiques, but he was quite open in private about his extortion sideline, blackmailing the criminal class. During their period of intimacy, never once did she feel anything but disgust for Dietmar Henning; not once did she loathe him any less than the first evening when they had made love and she excused herself afterward to silently retch into the toilet just down the hall from where she now sat talking to Harry.
Before Dietmar Henning, she had no idea what to do with her research. As he came to the end of his usefulness, she developed a plan. She wanted to be absolutely sure of the facts, then she would reveal what she knew in a cyberexplosion of monumental proportions. She would expose the fine people who fucked children, the upstanding citizens who peddled small bodies, the human garbage who adopted kids stolen from their natural parents. She would lay it all out in the open.
She would use the internet but not for anonymity—she would sign her name and supply documents, photographs, links that would back up her revelations. It was the simultaneity of the net that made it the most logical venue for her charges. It would all suddenly be out there. She herself could be eliminated but not silenced.
She was under no illusion that her efforts would close the industry down. But it would provide interference on a massive scale and might even save lives. It would punish, humiliate, possibly destroy. Perhaps in some perverse way it would atone for the terrible guilt of allowing Freya’s abduction to occur.