Lindstrom's Progress

by Moss, John

  She was telling him how much she liked Miranda Quin and how strangely disturbing she found Hannah Arnason. She was gossiping.

  “Lena?” The timbre in his voice telegraphed concern. She was being evasive.

  “Let me worry about me, Harry. You worry about you.”

  “As far as I know, the only person I have to fear is Sakarov.”

  Surely you’re being ironic!

  “What about me, Harry. Don’t you fear me?”

  “Of course, but I’m too polite to say so. I’m Canadian. We’re always polite.”

  “But you’ve just admitted it.”

  “Yes I have. Candour by stealth is also Canadian.”

  “Then let us be candid. I need you to trust me, Harry.” Madalena gazed at him with a sly crinkle about the eyes. “I need you. Together we can save lives.”

  “Or destroy them.”

  “It’s hard to do one without risking the other.”

  “You think your paintings will entice me? Or that I’ll be forced by grief to comply?”

  “The Klimts are yours for safekeeping and, for a man like yourself, even briefly possessing them is surely its own reward. As for grief, it may not be an incentive. But guilt—” She left the word hanging. The green of her eyes flashed and her mouth hardened. “I know about guilt and losing a child.”

  She paused, took a few deep breaths, and continued. “There is no remorse, Harry, no compensation or redemption sufficient, no penance or atonement possible, for what we who have survived must endure.”

  He swore she was looking into his soul and finding herself in the deepest and most painful recesses. While he did not believe the soul existed, she made it seem real.

  “My beloved Freya, my last vision of her green eyes huge with tears and flashing with, oh God, Harry, with disappointment—how could I have been so wretchedly stupid, naïve, gullible, weak, submissive, compliant. But I was. And I will live with that terrible knowledge clutching at my heart until I draw my last breath. I watched my girl wrenched from my arms and did nothing. I did nothing.”

  Any sense of personal violation he had felt was swallowed in empathy. His own guilt for the deaths of his family had not diminished since the accident. The floodwater conditions of spring had disguised the natural warning signs, made reading the river difficult. But the accident should not have happened. He should not have let it happen. But it did.

  The two of them, the investigator from Toronto who thought too much and tried not to, the police officer from Vienna, who felt too deeply, they shared grief in common with all who have lost children, and the guilt felt by all who have survived their children’s deaths, no matter how they were taken away.

  He thought about the small boy clutching the hand of an adult on either side as they stepped off the balcony at the Kressler Hotel. Harry had been paralyzed, not only by the death of a child he didn’t know but by the arbitrary absurdity of his plunging into oblivion because the adults he was forced to trust betrayed him.

  Lena had seemed reserved to the point of indifference about the boy’s fate. Now, Harry knew she must have been struggling to deal with her own ineffable pain.

  He desperately wanted to offer solace.

  She toyed with her sauerkraut, lifting strands with the tines of her plastic fork.

  “Do you need to talk about the attack?” he asked her in a loud whisper meant to convey privacy yet be heard over the ambient noise.

  “No,” she said at last. “But I will, if that’s what you want.”

  “Why no police?”

  “It was not a police matter, Harry. There are things much more important than my own suffering.”

  He didn’t know how to follow up on that statement, which seemed stoic beyond comprehension.

  “Harry. Sakarov and I have one thing in common—I feel no more bound by the law that he does. That is what makes me such a formidable opponent.” She mouthed her words to project them clearly. “I have no idea why his own history has driven him to the depths of depravity and I don’t care. But what I have endured, losing my child, whoring myself, other things you don’t need to know, all this has pushed me to realize the constraints of the law and due process are shit. Merde. Shite. Scheisse. Do you understand what I’m saying? Individual rights, Harry, the right to privacy, they offer sanctuary for the vicious and depraved. Those who hide behind the veneer of respectability, behind facile legislation and sleazy lawyers, they must be exposed. Laws only work for those who accept their primacy. For those who hold the law in contempt it is, in fact, contemptible.”

  Harry drew in a deep breath. There was a circularity to her argument that he found frightening. She condoned subverting the law because others subverted the law. And yet there was enough truth in her indictment of the system he was committed to serving that he felt oppressed, as if the collapse of western civilization were his personal responsibility.

  “Let’s say I do understand. You’re planning to skip the courts—”

  “Exactly.”

  “And if among the dreck, you ruin innocent lives?”

  “Wikileaks. Julian Assange.”

  “That’s not an argument.”

  “I don’t need an argument, Harry.”

  “You’re very dangerous.”

  “I hope so. Believe me, Harry, I have been thorough. No name is in my files that does not belong there. These people are the scum of the earth. Gangsters and pedophiles living among us as politicians and priests, professionals and business executives. We will destroy the scum by exposing it to the open air.”

  “Not without due diligence to protect the rights of the innocent.”

  “The children, the innocent, what about them?”

  The little boy on the ledge.

  He stared at Madalena across the table. He had seen this woman, for her convictions, rendered into bloodied flesh like meat on a butcher’s block. She frightened him.

  “Do you know about Pandora?” she asked. Despite her relaxed tone, Harry realized she was not changing the topic as radically as it might have seemed.

  “Pandora’s box, yes.”

  “It was a jar.”

  Harry shifted into his bemused professorial mode. “Hesiod wrote about Pandora,” he said. “One of the lost plays of Sophocles described the evils she unleashed on the world. Box was a mistranslation by the Renaissance humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam. It was actually, as you say, an urn or a jar.”

  “You sound like a scholar trying to obscure a good story with facts.”

  Karen mumbled, but he couldn’t tell whether in defiance or agreement.

  “Tell me,” he said. He felt an absurdly inappropriate surge of satisfaction, like for a moment he’d slipped back into his former life.

  “Pandora was the first woman,” Lena continued. “She was created from mud by Zeus to punish Prometheus, who had given away the secrets of fire. She still had the attributes assigned to her by the gods, but now she was mortal. Her only reminder of the world left behind was a jar that contained every evil the gods could imagine, including hope, perhaps the most insidious evil of all. And when out of curiosity she opened the jar, much as Eve had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, all the evils swarmed out and they infested the newly fallen world.”

  It’s all about fear and loathing of women in the western world. It always is.

  Harry concurred.

  He was struck by the coincidence of Lena and her exposition with her earlier evocation of Rossetti’s Pandora, painted in the likeness of his favourite model, Jane Morris.

  “And you are Pandora,” he said.

  “No, no. I’m here to put the lid back on the jar.”

  That’s quite an undertaking for a mortal and a mere woman at that.

  “You’re going to confine evil in a single swoop?”

  “Not all, but I hope enough to make a difference.”

  “And hope gets locked away, as well?”

  “Hope is an illusion.”

  “And what if your jar shatter
s from the strain? What if you release even more evil?”

  “It will not happen.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I have a gatekeeper, Harry.”

  Harry was perplexed. Had the classical analogy descended into gibberish or was she trying to tell him something important?

  She responded to his puzzled silence. “With Dietmar Henning, I frightened myself.”

  “Killing him?”

  “Whoring, being with him. My judgment appalled me, Harry. And after I couldn’t get arrested for killing the miserable bastard I took precautions.”

  “You set up a gatekeeper.”

  “I needed to be held to standards higher than my own.”

  “That’s somewhat illogical, isn’t it?”

  “Moral equivocation is always illogical, Harry.”

  “And if, just suppose, you are no longer around and, just suppose, your files are turned over to me—”

  “They will not simply be turned over, Harry. Nothing is ever that simple. You know they exist, but you must seek them out. If access were simple, Sakarov would have deleted them already.”

  So first you decide to take on her project. Then you decide if it’s something you want to do. One of you has got this ass-backward, Harry.

  But Harry didn’t think so. Commitment first, then judgment. A sequence to be avoided, but it did make sense.

  “Would I be subject to your gatekeeper’s moral authority?” he asked.

  “Only if you decide to proceed.”

  “Then perhaps you should tell me who this person is.”

  “When I am dead, you will need to find her for yourself. Sakarov does not know she exists.”

  “It’s a woman, then?”

  “You will need to find her, Harry.”

  “If I decide to take up the cause.”

  “You understand, Harry. Thank you.”

  “No, I don’t understand.”

  “You will,” she said with a smile that struck him as both sinister and seductive. “And Sakarov, he is the face of this scourge. You will bring him down.”

  Harry wasn’t sure where the fat man fit into the structures of evil she described, but her grievously wounded body left him in no doubt that he did. He wanted to move their conversation back to the reality where he was a witness again and not a key player. Before he could speak, she made a declarative statement.

  “He had a gun, you know.”

  She’s telling you she wasn’t submissive, Harry. She had no choice.

  “And he raped you?”

  She looked away.

  “The torture? Was that after the rape?”

  Jesus Christ, Harry.

  “First he raped me,” Madalena responded.

  “My God.”

  “You say that a lot. You are an atheist. It is odd.”

  “We live in a world shaped by the God I don’t believe in.”

  “I see.” She smiled with bruised lips.

  “Are you going to be all right, Lena?”

  Slowly her smile fell away as they sat for a while, surrounded by the clamour of the thronging crowd. He needed to bring their conversation back from the moral abyss and away from the diversions of an unregenerate God. He shifted to what seemed like a pertinent but innocuous query.

  “Lena, there don’t seem to be any men in your family.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Harry waited, then thought perhaps she hadn’t heard him. “You have a female genealogy.”

  “It would seem that way.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Sorry for asking? For noticing? For being a man? I do not dislike men, even those who inseminated my mothers before me.”

  Uh, Harry. Maybe we should move on to another subject.

  But Madalena Strauss herself did not seem inclined to pursue the topic. She offered Harry an eerie forgiving smile and lifted the sausage from her plate with fastidious fingers. She sunk her teeth deep into it, breaking the skin and releasing a flow of juices before twisting it to the side and biting off a large mouthful she chewed contemplatively, as if she had not just summoned Freud to dance in a command performance.

  Harry winced. He looked away. He watched the crowd, the Viennese shoppers lugging bags of fresh produce and cooked victuals to last them a week, the tourists chewing on handfuls of sugar and fat and salt in mouth-watering combinations. There were surprisingly few children. The Naschmarkt was a serious carnival for adults and for a minute Harry thought he could feel the loathing of myriad people all struggling to hold death at bay as they moved through the stalls searching for sustenance and diversion.

  Don’t be so bloody morbid, Harry.

  He watched Lena devouring her food. Suddenly he wanted to reach across and hold this strange woman in his arms, to protect and comfort them both. He had never met anyone so tough and so vulnerable, so warm and angry and elusive. She had drawn him into some Kafkaesque nightmare devised by her own dreaming mind and he was frightened she’d wake up and he’d lose her. It was confusing and Harry didn’t like being confused. But he found the confusion surrounding this woman, menacing as it was, irresistible.

  The sun was high enough that the awning now kept only him in the shade. She was in bright sunlight. As she bent to toy with the scraps on her plate, rays gleamed through her mass of copper red hair and caught highlights on her cheekbones and long narrow nose. She did not look allegorical, like the woman in a pre-Raphaelite painting. She looked real and alive, like the woman in the Beethoven frieze.

  In a panel called The Forces of Evil, Harry, don’t forget that.

  But Harry wasn’t buying Karen’s wariness. Beauty surrounded by evil, caught up in a nefarious design, does not make it evil itself.

  Nor good, Harry—to stand out amidst evil does not make beauty good.

  “I’ve got to pee.”

  The radiant vision of wounded beauty at the centre of his metaphysical discourse just announced she had to pee.

  “Or do you say piss? I am never sure. In American books they say piss, but usually in films they say pee. In German we say Pipi and in French they say pipi. I wonder why so many Ps? It is an interesting subject, yes?”

  She had already risen to her feet. She stood beside Harry and leaning close kissed him on the cheek. Her left breast pressed into his arm. He felt her wince from the pressure. Her lips were warm and moist and bruised. He could feel their roughness and he tilted his head back and away so that they could look into each other’s eyes.

  “Don’t worry,” she said and slipped past him into the crowd.

  Harry waited for an hour, but he knew she wouldn’t be back.

  8 A DAPPER YOUNG MAN

  As he stood in the line for passport control at Pearson, Harry tried to work out the best strategy for getting through hassle-free. He could reasonably argue he had been in Vienna for pleasure. It wasn’t really business, since no one had paid him, but if he had to explain what kind of business he was in he was afraid murder might hold him up for a bit. As for the Klimts, he had picked them up from Lena’s apartment after she disappeared in the market. When she had kissed him goodbye, he had been distracted by her left breast and didn’t notice that she had slipped her keys into his pocket until he stood up and their weight shifted against his thigh. That’s when he knew for sure he would never see her again.

  She had asserted with cheerless resignation that she was a dead woman already. There was no doubt in Harry’s mind that her corpse would turn up with a sufficient flourish to ensure that Sakarov knew of it. There would be no point otherwise.

  Since he regarded himself as only the custodian of the paintings, he felt it was reasonable not to declare them. They were inside their ebony box in his Roots shoulder bag and his laptop was in his luggage. They had attracted no attention going through Austrian security before boarding. Lots of North Americans bought copies of great art from street vendors in Europe.

  He slipped his passport into the automatic scanner, declared no purcha
ses abroad, which was true, and moved on to the next queue, exhausted after the flight and so busy scheming he hardly paid attention when the agent asked him to reaffirm that he had spent no money and travelled to Vienna for no apparent purpose. He had the usual moment of trepidation because he had no idea what the marks she scrawled on his control card meant, but he was waved through the final barrier with suitcase in tow and a soft leather bag slung from his shoulder worth in excess of fifty million.

  When he stepped off the elevator on the 23rd floor and unlocked his door, it pleased him at last to be home. This austere high-rise condo with its Scandinavian furniture and splendid southern exposure overlooking the great freshwater sea of Lake Ontario was his sanctuary. Being away so much over the past year, in Sweden and then Austria, had somehow transformed it from a place he happened to live to the place he was actually from.

  He selected a space on the southwest wall of his living room out of direct sunlight and shifted a pair of prints of King’s Parade that he and Karen had bought in Cambridge to hang beside the largest of his Blackwood etchings on the opposite wall. One of the prints had been in his office and one in hers at Huron College and both survived when he burned their house to rocks and rubble. The exposed nails weren’t quite right, so he dug his hammer out of the hall closet and, holding a copy of Vanity Fair between it and the wall so he wouldn’t damage the plaster, he pried the nails free. After standing back and envisioning the best locations, he hammered the same nails into place, leaving enough showing that the heads would catch at the back of the picture frames. He tried The Kiss to the left and then to the right of The Forces of Evil, settling on the left, closer to the window.

  He wondered about insuring them but realized that would be impractical, if they were covered for their actual worth, and pointless, if they were not. He decided to upgrade the locks on the entry door and balcony, and to install a security system with a viciously loud alarm. He would enjoy the Klimts in private. Their best protection, as in the past, was to remain unseen.

  He ate a light supper from the freezer. It was after midnight in Vienna. He had been away just long enough to bring his internal clock into sync with local time, so he had to adjust all over again, coming home. He cracked open a fresh bottle of Beaujolais, chilled in the fridge. Colder than cellar temperature, but he liked it that way. It smothered the slight candy floss quality of the Gamay grapes.