by Moss, John
Madalena rose to her feet. “I need to rest, Harry. We’ll talk again later.”
Harry gazed out the newly glazed window, sickened by the skyline of Vienna, by the world that was the same as before.
7 PANDORA’S JAR
Early in the spring, a few weeks after what would have been Freya’s twelfth birthday, Dietmar Henning walked into Madalena’s bedroom from the shower with a towel around his waist and his hair plastered flat against his skull. She glanced up and a pain ran though her like a bullet to the heart. With his hair slicked back and his absurdly sympathetic eyes cast down, he was an apparition from the harrowing past. The horror she had felt each time he touched her suddenly coalesced around an unbearable memory. Her mind reeled, she struggled to catch her breath, she squinted. He looked puzzled. It was him, she had no doubt; he was the young man with the black hair who had, along with the dumpy middle-aged man and the woman with too much makeup, stolen Freya eight years ago. Different hair, a nose job, a body filled out, eight years older. But there was absolutely no doubt.
She stared wide-eyed at Harry.
“Lena?”
She raised her head and looked deep into Harry’s eyes.
“Lena, you did kill Dietmar Henning, didn’t you?”
Unexpectedly, she smiled.
His mind swarmed with the implications. In talking to the Russian, Harry had conceded that virtually anyone was capable of murder if the circumstances warranted. That was the catch. What circumstances warranted murder? Surely she was morally justified in killing the man who had abducted her child. But the gouged-out eyes, the mutilated genitals, that wasn’t so easy to reconcile with the smile on Madalena’s lips.
“It is Saturday morning,” she announced. “I think we should go to the Naschmarkt and buy ourselves a nice lunch.”
Harry sucked in his breath. Her revelation had left her curiously euphoric. “Lena,” he asked. “Why did the fat man do what he did, and why didn’t he kill you?”
She seemed to contemplate his question with wry amusement.
“It was his crude form of communication, Harry. Your presence in Vienna provoked him. He wanted me to know his power over me is absolute. He can’t risk killing me—as long as I’m alive, he can force me to suppress what I know about the business, as he calls it. If I am dead, he loses control.”
“So he’s in the business himself?”
“He’s an enforcer, a fixer, a dealer. A very unpleasant man.”
“And how does he control you?”
“By threatening to kill children—a bomb in a nursery school in Hietzing, the 13th District. It is a fashionable suburb. What might be a back-page story of mindless terrorism in Mogadishu would be catastrophic in Vienna. White European children in expensive clothes, somehow he thinks that would bother me more.”
“Would it?”
“Harry, the horrible thing is, I don’t know. I don’t think so. A child’s life is a child’s life. But a child like my Freya, flesh of my own bleeding flesh, yes, possibly. Intellectually, morally, it is immaterial. As emotional extortion, yes, it may be that he wields more power by threatening to exterminate my own kind. The very thought of that scares me, that human suffering could be on a relative scale. Such thinking led to my great-grandmother’s death.”
“At Auschwitz?” Harry named the one Nazi concentration camp that had come to represent over 40,000 others: internment camps, transit camps, slave labour camps, extermination camps, and death camps for children, women, homosexuals, Jews, Gypsies, dissidents, ethnic subversives, and POWs from the Eastern Front. Auschwitz-Birkenau was perhaps the most terrible, if murder can be measured in relative terms.
“Auschwitz is in Poland. She died in Germany. They were taken to the women’s camp at Ravensbrück, north of Berlin. My great-grandmother and one of her daughters died there. Her other daughter, my grandmother, was transported back to Mauthausen.”
Reduced to explicit details, the past was more coherent than the details of her own life, the horrors more easily accepted.
“My grandmother was transferred from Ravensbrück to the women’s sub-camp in Lenzing for work making ersatz wool. Margarete Freinberger, her friend before the war, was Oberaufseherin. She returned my grandmother to Mauthasen near Hinterbrühl in the district of Mödling, where she worked making engine parts for the BMW 003 turbojet fighter plane. In the last days of the war she was murdered by the SS, either by gasoline injection or manual strangulation. She died within a few miles of where she was born.”
Harry tried to assimilate the atrocities of the Holocaust with Madalena’s children’s crusade. One was her heritage, the other her legacy.
“You told me you are dead already. But you’re telling me Sakarov needs you alive.”
“My death is the best protection for those children in the 13th District. There would be no point in killing them if I’m gone.”
God, Harry, this woman is psychopathic. Or a genuine martyr.
Perhaps it’s a matter of perspective, Sailor.
“You say he needs you alive,” he said.
“To control my information, yes. I had hoped my arrest would release me from his power, but I wasn’t arrested. I have had to take other measures.”
She seemed a guileless innocent in the light streaming through her window. Harry was reminded of the pre-Raphaelite painting she had summoned to mind in the Café Central: Pandora kneeling in front of an ornate box, naked and sensuous as she peered into the future its contents would set loose on the world.
“I don’t understand,” he said, but he was beginning to. “You thought your files would become a matter of public record if you were convicted of murder, is that it?”
“Exactly. There would be no point in killing me. More significantly, there would be nothing achieved by bombing a nursery school in the 13th District.”
“But I gather there are people in authority who might have been exposed. They refused to prosecute. You needed me to help make the case against you, not because you’re guilty but to set you free. Are you guilty?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, of course.”
“No, Harry, it does not.”
“Then suppose you are dead.”
“Yes, suppose I am.”
“Why not set up your files to be released automatically? I’m not a computer whiz, but couldn’t there be a floodgate that opens if you don’t check in at predetermined times?”
A cryptic smile briefly distorted her features. She said nothing. He tried a different tack.
“Lena, if you have killed already, why not kill again, why not kill Sakarov?”
“Ah, so you do condone murder! It would be good if he were dead, yes, but evil is profligate, Harry. If Dimitri Sakarov dies, ten more will step forward to take his place. The people he works for are not an organization; that’s what makes them so difficult to bring down. Their network is vast and discontinuous. And Sakarov himself is very well organized. His death would create a vacuum, and evil abhors a vacuum. His minions would rise to fill the gap. That’s what makes him so useful to them and so dangerous to us.”
“To us?”
“My files must be released anonymously, simultaneously, in an onslaught of biblical proportions.”
“With you playing God.”
“I will be dead. It is the only way.”
“Then who controls the deluge? How will your files be released, if not by you and not by God?”
Guess, Harry!
“By you, my friend.”
Oh shit! Karen’s voice, Karen swearing. Let’s get the hell out of here.
“No,” he said, sharing Karen’s concern. “No, no, no. No, Lena. Apart from anything else, that would put me in exactly the same position you’re in now.”
“Not quite, for several reasons. Sakarov will not know you’re in control.”
“I won’t be.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” he said, but he knew th
at wasn’t true. Sometimes, the moral imperatives are so clear and the consequences of inaction promise to be so catastrophic, there is no choice but to act.
“Harry…”
Madalena paused, as if for a moment considering the brutality of what she was about to say. “If you could have saved Matthew and Lucy, even if it cost your own life, you would not have hesitated. Am I not correct?”
God, Harry. She’s pitiless.
“Yes.”
“Exactly. There would have been no choice. Harry, an opportunity will come—not for your own children but for thousands of others. They will depend on you and you will not let them down. It is not in your nature. I have researched you, Harry Lindstrom. I know you.”
There’s knowing and there’s knowing.
“And you realize,” said Harry, “Sakarov has researched you. He’s been reading our email.”
“No, he has seen only what I wanted him to see. I am a much better hacker than his accomplices in Saint Petersburg.”
“Of course you are,” said Harry.
Walking in the direction of the Naschmarkt, Harry felt vulnerable being out in the open, while Madalena seemed carefree, with the morning breeze combing through her long hair. Given her fragile gait, she might have been out for a morning stroll after a night of extravagant love.
They cut between gloomy blocks of apartment complexes hiding charming balconied courtyards behind their walls and came out beside the Wienfluss concrete floodwater bed, at this time of year a meagre tributary to the Danube, which it joined beyond the city limits.
Finally, at the risk of echoing Bogart, Harry slowed his pace a little, and asked, “Of all the people in all the world, why me?”
“Well, let me see,” she said with disarming nonchalance. “I needed to enlist a man of intelligence and integrity, cultural awareness, and professional commitment.”
That was succinct, Slate, and as vague as an ad in the personals.
But she went on to tell him about the international symposium on “Women in Police Service” held in Berlin the previous April, where she had become friends over dinner and drinks with a Superintendent of Homicide from Toronto, an Inspector with the National Criminal Police from Stockholm, and a Detective Sergeant from Hong Kong.
“I’ve never been to Hong Kong,” said Harry.
“No, but there is a Shirley Zhou there who would love to meet you. You occupied a good deal of our conversation. Miranda Quin and Hannah Arnason made you seem like exactly the man I was after. I asked them questions. They’re cops, they enjoy talking about themselves, and they offered what they believed were objective answers about you. For the Swede you were courageous, contemplative, willful, and sexy. And at six feet, you’re a little on the short side. For the Canadian, you were tall and handsome, the tragic protagonist in an unfinished story, and a paradox, Harry, an intellectual driven by emotion, a man of smoldering convictions. And sexy.”
What the hell are smoldering convictions?
She means I’m a paradox.
And you like that.
Yes, I do.
Madalena’s cascading hair caught spirals of the morning sun as she bobbed her head in animated conversation, explaining while they walked how she and Shirley Zhou had encouraged Miranda and Hannah to spin out their revelations.
Miranda Quin was Harry’s mentor and closest living friend. They had known each other at summer camp where Miranda was a counsellor and Harry a camper. They had briefly been lovers while he was at Cambridge and she had begun working for the Toronto Police Service after a brief stint with the Mounties. They did not keep in regular touch after that, but when she heard about a young philosophy professor from London, Ontario, who had survived a canoeing accident that had taken the lives of his wife and their two small children, she picked up on his story. At first she felt getting too close would be intrusive, until in anguish and remorse he had burned down his home on the Sanctuary Line near Granton. Then she drove down to London and visited him where he had been hospitalized. As he slowly emerged from the nightmare of still being alive, Miranda helped him in the transition from a job lecturing about the human condition to dealing with it directly as a private detective. He set up briefly on the other side of the continent, in Nanaimo, BC, and then, when his refusal to accept black-and-white justice landed him in trouble with the courts, she insisted he move to Toronto where she could keep an eye on him.
He couldn’t tell what Lena knew from Miranda’s table-talk and what she knew from research. Miranda might have alluded to family tragedy but would not have turned it into gossip, no matter how eager the audience.
Hannah Arnason was a more recent acquaintance. To call her a friend would not be appropriate, since there was a power differential that had swerved dramatically as their relationship progressed through a murder investigation in Sweden the previous winter. But there was a closeness between them, a shared vulnerability belied by outward appearances. Hannah was six-foot-four and a classic Scandinavian beauty with haunting blue eyes, a slightly upturned nose, full cheekbones, expressive lips, and hair the colour of honey under a harvest moon. She was a cop who bent rules. Harry had suffered as the victim of her unorthodox approach to solving crimes but was also the beneficiary. She had explained to her companions her enduring memory of the two of them trapped inside an ancient burial mound on the island of Fårö in the Baltic Sea when they contemplated having sex but didn’t. She had never met anyone so lonely nor anyone who disguised it so well.
“So there you have it, Harry. And of course, I skimmed through your essay in Philosophy Today.”
“Which one?”
But he knew which one. In a journal that attempted to bridge the gap between an esoteric academic discipline and the educated public at large, he had sometimes fulfilled his professional obligation as “public intellectual” by writing essays dealing with contentious issues. A piece that had come out just before the accident attracted more attention than he had anticipated. It was called “Justifiable Homicide?” The title was rhetorical. He used graphic examples from movies to argue that in certain scenarios the deliberate and unlawful killing of one human by another was morally justified.
The ensuing flurry of notoriety had made Huron College uncomfortable. Even Miranda Quin, who had studied philosophy and semiotics at the University of Toronto before entering police work, found his arguments indicative of a surprisingly facile turn of mind.
If Lena had read it, there was a good chance Sakarov had as well.
“I also read your essay on Klimt.”
“In Thinking? They don’t publish more than three hundred copies an issue!”
“It’s online, Harry. There are no secrets anymore.”
“I was writing about Klimt as a commodity, about value versus worth.”
“An argument provoked by your appreciation of his art.”
They approached the bustling forestall area of the market, where scavengers who squatted on cardboard mats were hawking used clothes, old books, discarded knickknacks, vinyl records, the retrieved flotsam and jetsam of a prosperous society. Harry picked his way through the jostling crowd, careful not to let Lena escape from his sight. With her hair aflame in the midday sun, it wasn’t difficult and yet he was anxious.
He tripped against a small child on a tether and stumbled forward. Lena caught his arm as he recovered. The child didn’t notice the drama and toddled on, stretching her lead to the limit.
“You say you tried to send me away.” Harry crooked his neck forward to broadcast his words through the din. “Yet here I am in the thick of things.”
“The man I entrusted with my Klimt might have served my needs better from a safe distance. Unfortunately, the same qualities of character apparently ensured you wouldn’t leave. Or fortunately, perhaps.”
Definitive ambivalence, Harry. She’s sufficiently elliptical to be convincing. I’m just not sure what she’s convincing about.
“Of course, you must leave,” she continued. “You’ll know w
hen it’s time to go.” She had to shout to be heard. “I really do want you to take care of my Klimt for me.”
“There’s something I need to tell you about your painting.” He was tall enough he could speak over the heads of the people foraging between them.
“It’s all right, I know.”
“You do?”
She moved to his side and looked up at him, her lips tightened, but he couldn’t tell if she was suppressing a smile or expressing regret.
“That’s a lot of Klimt,” he said. He put his arm around her to keep her close. “You need to give them to a museum. I mean, for God’s sake, you need to stay alive. Keep your paintings, don’t die. There’s got to be another way to release your findings.”
“No, there is not.” Her tone was unequivocal. “You must take Klimt to Toronto, Harry, and then you must think, Why in the world would Lena Strauss have wanted me to take her Klimts to Toronto? It is important.”
“Fifty million dollars’ worth of importance?”
“More important than money.”
They crossed a small street and entered into the Naschmarkt proper where the crowd was more orderly.
Strolling among permanent stalls made of brightly painted wood with gold lettering and shutters and canvas awnings and ornamental wrought iron, mostly open to the walkways but a few closed in behind glass walls, they could have been tourists. A cacophony of voices and languages wrapped around the surging crowds, creating a carnival atmosphere. The smells of cooked meats, raw fish, cheeses of every kind, mixed with the odours of flowers in profusion and fruits and vegetables and baked savouries and fudge, gathered in the air like a thick, rich soup.
They found a corner stall with bar stools beside small tables and ordered beer and platters of fat spicy sausages with cold sauerkraut and crisp sesame rolls. Despite the din they tried to pick up their conversation. Her Germanic inflection made hearing and reading her lips easier as she enunciated more clearly than a native speaker. She seemed able to hear him with no problem, although she did most of the talking.