by Moss, John
“Couldn’t be the same person. If she modelled for Klimt, that would make her well over a hundred when she died.”
“Exactly. Elizabeth Book with a z was the daughter of Elisabeth Bök. Follow me, Harry. She was Lena Strauss’ great aunt, her grandmother’s sister. The sisters were shipped to Ravensbrück in 1943 with their mother, who had been Klimt’s mistress and model. The mother died there in ’44. Lena’s grandmother was transported back to Mauthausen in Austria where she died. Elizabeth, Lena’s great aunt, was barely alive when Ravensbrück fell to the Allies. Her mind was gone. She was nursed back to physical health by Canadian Army nurses. When they sorted out her mental problems sufficiently, she was sent to Canada as a Displaced Person. That was in 1947. Once she reached Toronto, she was indentured as a maid for a year, then she picked up work as a freelance translator and eventually a major Canadian publisher hired her as their international editor. She was fluent in five languages, but she refused to travel. She lived on her own in an apartment on Avenue Road. Until.”
Simon paused for breath or dramatic effect.
“Until?” Harry demanded. “Don’t be coy, Simon. Go on.”
“Until in 1955 she encountered a damaged young woman being held by police for soliciting. Elizabeth was at the Don Jail on a translation job. I’m not sure of the details, but she ended up taking the young woman home.”
“The young woman being Rachel Damboch.”
“Right, yes, it was Rachel Damboch, formerly of the Huronia Asylum for Idiots in Orillia and then with no fixed address until rescued from the streets by Lena Strauss’ great aunt. The details make a very tidy story, don’t you agree? Of course they leave out the emotional trauma of two tortured souls, one haunted by the fiendish dementia of her Nazi countrymen and the other by being locked up as a mental defective.”
“And how could you possibly know all this?”
“Ha! That’s the simple part. I told you that Rachel had written a book while she was a house-mother at Asperger’s SOS-Kinderdorf in Hinterbrühl. Her book was about Mauthausen slave labourers building prototype jet engines for BMW and hauling stone blocks from a quarry by hand. She apparently drafted another book on Dr. Hans Asperger’s wartime activities. Both are in manuscript and held at the University of Vienna.”
“You told me you couldn’t get access to them.”
“Yes, but I figured, correctly, if Rachel wrote books, chances were good that her mentor did too. Elizabeth Book wrote a memoir! It wasn’t about surviving Ravensbrück, it was about her years in Canadian exile. It was never published, but she did significant work as a translator and editor so her employers kept her private papers with her work projects and the whole shebang is presently being scanned by a PhD student from U of T. It’s all there, relatively available, and fortunately written in English.”
“So how did Rachel end up in Austria?”
“Back to the ancestral homeland, I suppose. By proxy. Elizabeth was so traumatized by her wartime experience she couldn’t bear to return. Rachel, her education well underway, went in her place, liked it, and stayed. You know the rest.”
“Not quite,” said Harry. “You told me last night you were sure there’s a closer connection between Rachel and Lena Strauss.”
“That part’s not quite clear. We’re looking through a glass darkly, here.”
The last time Harry had heard that expression, it was from the slovenly lips of Dimitri Sakarov.
“Once Rachel left Toronto,” Simon continued, “I don’t think she and her mentor ever saw each other again. Austria never purged itself of its Nazi past the way Germany did. Claiming to be a victim of the Anschluss, it allowed fascism to fester. Elizabeth was horrified, mesmerized. She kept tabs on the political activities of the extreme right wing Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, the so-called Freedom Party of Austria. She fulminates in her memoirs about the insult to humanity of their existence. She writes about her mother, Elisabeth Bök, almost as if she were a myth. She writes about Ravensbrück but not from memory. She writes more about Rachel; she writes about Rachel’s retrospective books on the Nazi era. She was afraid for Rachel, afraid she was stirring up a vipers’ nest.”
“Simon, please. Tell me about Rachel and Lena.”
“I’m sorry, Harry, but you need background. There’s a lot to assimilate.”
“You told me last night the connection was obvious. Lena’s gatekeeper has to be Rachel.”
“Lena, yes. Lena’s mother was raped. Is that direct enough?” Simon struggled to catch up emotionally with his own revelations. “I’m not trying to obfuscate, Harry. You gave me a job. I’m trying to do it.”
Patience was never your defining virtue, Harry. Let’s hear him out, shall we?
The veins stood out on Simon’s temples. He seemed under progressively more strain as his narrative developed. Harry offered a grimace of sympathy and sat back. Instead of continuing, Simon gazed across the harbour. He seemed to be distracted by the squadrons of dinghy sails billowing in the freshening breeze.
“You have a lovely spot, here, Harry. Do you sail?”
“Never,” said Harry. “Please, Simon. I need to understand about Lena.”
“Of course you do.” Simon rose to his feet and walked out onto the balcony, then turned and faced Harry framed through the open doorway. “Parentage can be a nasty business,” he announced. He moved back into the room almost serenely, like he had shared a great burden. He resumed his seat.
Harry couldn’t help wondering if Simon was extending his account to include Harry’s situation and the deaths of his children. Or if he was connecting to his own situation, about which Harry knew nothing at all.
“Lena’s mother was gang-raped by neo-Nazis,” Simon continued. “Retaliation for being a red-haired Jew. She was devastated. No charges were laid. She was pregnant. She found her way to the Kinderdorf in Hinterbrühl. I suppose there had been letters between her aunt in Toronto and Rachel, maybe between her aunt and herself. Lena was born at the school in 1982. Her mother relocated to Vienna. However, Lena lived under Rachel’s care in the Kinderdorf until moving to Salzburg at sixteen for her university preparation.”
“The school was for children with Asperger’s, wasn’t it?”
“Primarily. Founded by Hans Asperger and Asperger’s was Rachel’s specialty. She may have had an autism spectrum disorder herself, although it’s much rarer in girls. Or it may be that the Asylum for Idiots created conditions where simulated autism was a survival technique.”
“Simon, I wonder if Lena Strauss also suffered from Asperger’s.”
Simon gazed at Harry with an expression of curious affection. “Tell me,” he said.
Harry’s entire experience of Madalena Strauss coalesced in his mind, from grand tragic gestures to nuances caught in the flick of her hair, the fixed gaze, intonations carried on the edges of conversation, the urgency of confessions and explanations that had drawn him into her world.
“Pathologically focused, difficulty with small talk, literal-mindedness, chronic anxiety, inappropriate movements, lack of empathy.”
Think about it, Harry. Every one of those symptoms could also be a natural human response to particular horrors in the woman’s life.
Are you recanting, Sailor?
Not recanting, reassessing. She grew up in an Asperger’s environment, raised by a woman who possibly had Asperger’s herself. What you saw was most likely imitative behaviour. From infancy, she saw those symptoms as being the norm.
Her mother was traumatized as a child by her wartime experience, then raped by neo-Nazi thugs too numerous to establish Lena’s parentage (had anyone been inclined), and retreated into solitude in the heart of Vienna, where she eventually died, leaving Lena a modest fortune in recovered assets.
Her other mother was Rachel Damboch.
And Lena herself, with her own child stolen, exchanged intimacy for information that drove her to murder. She was brutalized by the fat man and ended up a mutilated corpse in the Danube
.
Harry, look at Simon. He’s here, he’s waiting for you to process what he’s told you. Speak to him, Harry.
“So,” Harry said, breaking the heavy silence between them. “Now all we have to do is track down Rachel Damboch before Sakarov does.”
“Good. You intend to release her files.”
“Which are accessible through your computer at home.”
“Yes,” said Simon.
“I have to check them out, I owe Lena that much.”
“If Sakarov figures out that Rachel is the gatekeeper, he’ll kill her.”
“You assured me he wouldn’t.”
“That was last night, this is now. I hadn’t realized the intimate connection.”
“Then I’ve got to reach her before he does.”
“Harry.”
“Yes?”
“There’s more. I’ve kept the most perplexing part until last.”
“Perplexing?”
“Confusing, disturbing, amazing.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Last night when I left, someone was waiting outside your building.”
“Dimitri Sakarov?”
“No. I think it was Madalena Strauss.”
Harry gave no indication he had heard. A huge black chasm opened inside. He felt nothing, he thought nothing. It was like those brief flashes of consciousness following his rescue from the Devil’s Cauldron when he realized that his family was dead.
“Harry! Harry, I’m sorry, I thought it was her. Maybe it wasn’t.”
Harry slowly swung his head to the side so that he could look out over the islands and across the open expanse of Lake Ontario.
“Harry. I recognized her from the paintings. Maybe. I don’t know. It was raining. I couldn’t be sure. There was a heavy mist. She was highlighted in copper and gold. It was an illusion; sleep deprivation; a concussion; my jumpy imagination. Harry? Maybe it was her.”
Simon Wales was thrown off his style, not by the sighting of a dead woman but by telling Harry she was alive.
Harry drew back from the abyss. He spoke in a soft voice. “Of course it was her,” he said. “I should have known. Perhaps I’ve known all along.”
“Really,” said Simon in affirmation, not disbelief.
“No dye job, no disguise,” said Harry.
“Hair like burnished copper. Like Klimt.”
“Of course. Why would she bother to hide it? There are only three other people in Toronto who’d recognize her. Miranda, Morgan, and Dimitri Sakarov. She’s a master of blending in, in Vienna, at least. Maybe not so much, here.”
Simon offered a grim smile.
“So it was suicide, not murder,” said Harry, as he tried to gather the explosion of thoughts set off by Simon’s announcement into a revised narrative.
“Assuming I saw her last night, there’s a good chance it was neither.” Simon gave his chin a sagacious rub.
Harry offered his own grim smile.
“If her death was a set-up,” Simon noted, “wouldn’t she have had to come up with a body?”
“It was decomposed, mutilated by river traffic. She was a cop. She’d know where to find a corpse if the occasion required. It took careful planning, of course. When we had lunch together at the market she would have already planted her dead doppelgänger in a storm sewer along the Wienfluss. It was a pleasant lunch, though.”
Harry, wit is the refuge of wise men, sarcasm the refuge of fools.
Just scrambling to catch up, Sailor. By the time the Russian tortured her, her scheme was already in motion.
Corpses and cadavers aren’t that easy to come by, you know, even for a cop.
A street person, an overdosed drug addict. Her friend Frau Detektiv Honsberger might have assisted. The little old lady with the blue rinse and silver tooth.
You don’t think Honsberger is the gatekeeper, do you?
If she helped find Lena a superfluous corpse, she’d hardly qualify as her conscience. She was just a sympathetic ally.
Is, not was. Your friend is alive, unless Simon made a ghoulish mistake.
Simon doesn’t make mistakes.
Simon had been watching Harry thinking.
“Harry,” said Simon, “what’s it all about? Why would she do this?”
“Death gives her impunity.”
“Impunity?”
“It makes her lethal.”
“She’s here to kill Sakarov.”
“Exactly, Simon. She’s here for revenge.”
Harry rose to his feet, restless. Simon stood up when Harry did and sat down again when Harry did. Harry had never had such a faithful companion. It was annoying.
“Simon,” he said. “Go home, get some sleep.”
Simon rose again, straightened his linen suit jacket and started to walk toward the door, then paused and turned around.
“She wasn’t downstairs spying on us. She was waiting for the fat man, wasn’t she? After we got through to her online, she knew he’d turn up here.”
“And I’m sure he did. He was the lookout for Fearman’s thugs.”
“Those two work for Conrad Fearman?” Simon asked, not surprised.
“Our slovenly pot-smoking Russian acquaintance works alone. He uses other people’s muscle to do his dirty work. And yes, I think Lena used me to find him last night.”
“Why not just go to the King Willie?”
Harry got up and walked Simon to the door, which leaned clumsily in its shattered frame.
“Because you’re not the only one who experiences revelations, Simon. Mine was false; Sakarov’s wasn’t.”
“I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“His indifference to Lena’s death when we talked at Fearman’s cottage told me he’d murdered her. It seemed reasonable given he’d already raped and tortured her. But he knew he hadn’t killed her. And since I was no longer buying the suicide thing, he reasoned that she might still be alive. And if she were alive, he reasoned she might be out to kill him. And since he was in Toronto, he figured she might be here. So he went low profile and stayed away from the King William. But he couldn’t afford to stay away from us, Simon. Not after he realized we’d connected with the dead woman who was no longer dead.”
“Ah,” said Simon as they stood in the hallway. He pressed the elevator button. The door opened immediately. The elevator hadn’t moved since he’d arrived. In the short time Simon had been there, Harry’s world had changed.
Lena was alive and Sakarov was a dead man but for the killing. After Simon’s revelations, Harry both knew more, and understood less, about the dark world Lena inhabited.
15 FINDING LENA
After Simon left, Harry's condo seemed especially empty. He was getting used to having the kid around. Simon was unnervingly prescient about Harry’s needs, but his methods were frightening. Harry did not like having someone so close who understood what he didn’t. He realized that was the modern condition. We’re all surrounded by people who know more than we do. He should have been a Renaissance man, Erasmus or Leonardo; a lesser version, perhaps, but alive when it was still possible for one person to know everything.
You’d be long dead by now, Harry. Make the most of your faithful companion. He won’t be around forever.
Sounds ominous.
Just realistic. One way or another, he’ll move on.
I’ll miss him.
Meanwhile, what about your red haired friend?
Lena or Joan?
The one who murdered her ex-fiancé. And is planning to kill again.
If Sakarov knows she’s alive he’ll do his damnedest to kill her first. It’s all very Darwinian.
So find Sakarov and you’ll find her.
Harry stepped out into the sunshine at street level feeling apprehensive. He made his way north through the grotty catacombs under the Gardiner Expressway and emerged into the daylight beside Union Station. Women were dressed in shorts and summer dresses. He realized it must still be the weeke
nd.
At the King William the concierge informed him that Mr. Sakarov had not been available for several days. Harry gazed around the refurbished lobby. He wondered how much of the Edwardian decor was original and how much was reproduction. The fact that he couldn’t tell affirmed his appreciation for what had been done. There was a lovely accessible decadence about the place that would have made the original Elisabeth Bök feel quite at home. Klimt might have designed the upholstery.
There was no security to speak of, so after checking the registry Harry slipped onto a service elevator unnoticed and got off on Sakarov’s floor.
You would have drawn less attention using the regular elevator, Harry.
It was probably monitored. This way, if he’s here he’s in for a surprise.
And if he isn’t?
But he is.
Gut feeling?
Logic.
Are you going to knock on the door and say you’re here to save a life but you don’t know whose?
He rang the buzzer under a brass nameplate with Dimitri Sakarov’s name etched in cursive script, waited, and rang again.
The door opened and the fat Russian squinted against the light of the hallway and offered a cruel smile.
“You’re here sooner than I expected. Come in.”
Sakarov turned away from Harry and lumbered back into his apartment, which was emotionally austere in spite of the opulence. Expensive shiny things from different eras and cultures with little relationship to each other, set against darkly embossed wallpaper and lit with a strange plethora of light fixtures ranging from Tiffany to Waterford. Much like a higher-end antique shop, Harry thought, as he glanced around, looking for evidence of Lena’s presence.
“She is here, yes,” Sakarov announced. They both understood he meant Lena. “In the spare bedroom. You might say she accompanied me home from a chance encounter down by the harbour.” The Russian turned to face Harry. He was holding a small semi-automatic that was dwarfed by his stubby fingers. He waved the gun. “She came willingly, of course. Now, please,” he said with exaggerated courtesy. “Put your cell phone, your keys, and your gun on the table. And your wallet, of course.”
Harry placed his wallet and keys on a burled walnut table cut down to coffee-table height. It might once have been in the foyer of a Jarvis Street mansion.