Lindstrom's Progress

by Moss, John

  “We’re in Austria, not Lower Slobovia.”

  “Or the outskirts of Timmins,” she said. “I grew up with a privy. It’s cold on the bottom in winter, tacky in summer. The best thing about busing to school in town was flush toilets.” She yawned. “Listen to me, I’m nostalgic. It seems like we drove forever.”

  Harry made eye contact in the little mirror over the sink, then he returned to working up an insipid lather with hand soap and cold water. Suddenly, Joan sprang from the bed. She was naked. She had been saving the fresh underwear he’d put in her bag until morning. It was morning.

  If he had been aware she was stripped to the buff beneath the blanket beside him, he might have got more sleep, just knowing how absurdly trusting she was.

  Or openly available, Harry.

  Watching her in the mirror as she tugged the gingham curtains open and stretched in the sunlight, Harry refused to believe that. She was slight and supple and there was something so wholly pristine about her nakedness, he was disturbed by his visceral response. She was a child utterly unaware of her own vulnerable beauty. He looked back at his own reflection, but he could still see hers in the background.

  He started to turn.

  “No, don’t.”

  Being an image in the mirror allowed her an illusion of innocence that direct confrontation destroyed. He resumed shaving.

  She addressed his reflection. “Do you think I’m attractive, Harry?”

  She was asking a serious question. Slowly, he turned to face her directly.

  “I think you should get dressed.”

  She looked mildly annoyed but quickly rallied. Gathering her lingerie from her bag and the rest of her clothes that were neatly piled on a chair, she stepped naked into the hallway. The last thing Harry saw was her bottom as she pulled the door closed behind her.

  Over breakfast, Harry asked the patron where he could find Rachel Damboch.

  “I know of no such lady,” said the man, stroking his waxed moustache. “I grew up in our village, but I have been away in Vienna for almost forty years. I have only come back since two years, while my father was dying.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Harry.

  “He is dead now, it is okay.”

  “You’ve never heard of Rachel Damboch?”

  “You eat. I will ask my neighbours. Perhaps someone knows her.”

  He went out the door, walking in his best Poirot style like a wounded penguin, and was gone before Harry could protest that he’d rather ask around on his own so he could take in the layout of the village and check on the whereabouts of Dimitri Sakarov.

  Before they finished their coffees, the patron returned.

  “I am sorry to tell you, your friend was dead since three months. She is in our cemetery. We do not dig people up as we used to, to pile their bones in the ossuary. She is still in her grave.”

  Dead end, Harry!

  He felt like he had been struck in the solar plexus. His breathing was shallow and rapid. Then he realized he couldn’t hear Joan breathing at all. Suddenly she exhaled. She was bewildered. Harry reached out and touched her pallid cheek with the back of his hand.

  “It’s okay,” he assured her. He wished he felt the same confidence he was trying to express.

  “I am sorry for your loss,” said the patron. “She was family, yes? That is sad. It is very bad when close people die, even when very ancient. I nursed my father, but he dropped dead in this room. Sometimes it is better to die quickly like Frau Damboch.”

  Harry needed to get into the open air. He needed to think. Checking out of the Gasthaus was simple, since they had no luggage. They climbed into the sky blue Fiesta and sat there, gazing along the narrow street at the cluster of buildings down by the ferry landing.

  “We can’t do it, Harry.”

  “Do what?”

  “You’re thinking that if we catch the ferry at the last minute we could leave Mr. Sakarov behind.”

  “No, actually I wasn’t thinking that at all.”

  “Well, we can’t leave without rescuing Lena. How much time do we have?”

  He glanced at his watch. “Four hours. Damn it.”

  “Could we negotiate for more time?”

  “I doubt that’s an option. We might have to deal with Sakarov before we find her.”

  Deal with, as in kill? You’re not a killer, Harry.

  There’s always a first time.

  There doesn’t have to be. That cliché collapses under its own weight.

  She’s got to be here.

  “If this is where her surrogate mother lived, she’ll be here.” Joan spoke with total conviction.

  Harry nodded agreement. He hoped she was right. “So we ask around,” he said. “Someone has to have seen her.”

  “You don’t think she’ll blend in?”

  Harry turned to her and smiled broadly.

  “No, I don’t think ‘selective discernment’ applies in Hallstatt.”

  They got out of the car and walked through the village. Harry was struck by the strange feelings of ambivalence it offered, cramped tightly against sheer rock on one side but open to the dark lake and distant landscape on the other. Intimate and expansive, a nice combination. There was no sign of Sakarov. His BMW was still there, empty and ominous.

  They dropped into several shops and failed to find anyone who knew either Lena or Rachel. Finally, in a shop built into the front of a house on a short side street they found an old woman who had known Rachel Damboch. The woman’s body was bent and gnarled, but her face was serene. She told them Rachel was her friend. The woman’s English was limited, but they managed to figure out that Rachel had lived on a high precipice overlooking the lake, in an ancient chalet with electricity from its own generator but no running water and no road access.

  “The scenery, yes, is wunderbar,” said the old woman, smiling. “I have not been to chalet since we were young. Rachel lived there much time after retirement. Even before retirement. She preferred to come visit me here. She would arrive at holidays and a few bottles of scotch we would share and talk very serious and laugh. It was pleasant, those times, but she became old. She is better off dead.”

  “Oh no,” Joan exclaimed.

  “Oh yes,” said the woman and grinned with satisfaction for having outlived her friend. She talked for a while about Rachel and about her decrepit chalet, then hobbled with them to the door and as they were going out she added, “You tourist people, you come to our beautiful village and you look for exotic women. It is very strange.”

  Harry stopped short, letting Joan slip by onto the street.

  “Someone else was looking for Rachel Damboch?”

  “Not Rachel, no. Fat Russian, he look for beautiful red-haired woman. Perhaps Madalena Strauss, Rachel’s girl. After she became policewoman, I never saw her again. I have been told she is dead, now, since after Rachel is dead. Her body in the Danube floated up. I think her friend lives in the cabin, now. Very secret, no one sees who. This person, I think very beautiful, she gets deliveries. She gets scotch whiskey and groceries. Sometimes other things. But maybe the Russian looks for your wife. She has red hair like Madalena, only not so wild. Mister, I nothing tell him. I did not like him, like the pig he smelled, like he sleep in his clothes.”

  “Fräulein DeBrusk is not my wife,” said Harry, seeing Joan from a different perspective. “Auf wiedersehenn, thank you.”

  “Good bye. Good bye, Fräulein DeBrusk. Danke schön.”

  The old woman handed Harry her card as they left.

  “You come back sometime to visit,” she said.

  “So,” Harry exclaimed to Joan, handing her the woman’s business card to put in her bag. “Our Mr. Sakarov has been here looking for Madalena. That means he doesn’t know about Rachel.”

  “Which doesn’t give us much of an advantage since the poor old soul is dead.” She smiled. “We still have two hours, Harry.”

  They scrambled along a narrow laneway, following the bent old woman’s directi
ons, until they came to a path etched diagonally by the feet of countless generations into the steep incline. They worked their way past ancient shrubs that clung to small pockets of earth scattered amidst rocky outcroppings and came to a smaller path veering upward even more steeply. They had moved around the mountainside, out of sight of the village. Sometimes they used their hands to pull themselves ahead. Harry’s toes hurt, the missing bits more than the ones that survived. He wasn’t sure what they would find at Rachel’s cabin, but he relished the notion that the big Russian would have to negotiate the same difficult landscape to follow them.

  Since he had returned to Austria, Harry had been thinking of Sakarov as a Russian again. In Canada he was a second generation Canadian from Saskatchewan with a ludicrous accent. In Europe, he was a member of the Russian new-capitalist amoral elite.

  More than an hour had passed since they began their climb when suddenly they broke out into open space. Harry turned and looked back, but there was no sign of Sakarov. Off to the side, a weather-beaten log chalet was perched precariously on a rocky ledge. It had a steep roof with wood shingles covered in lichen and moss and overhanging eaves to cope with heavy snow. There were a few shambling outbuildings and straight ahead some abandoned mining carts close to a large ironclad door blocking entry into the mountainside.

  “Who knew she’d been living next to a salt mine?” Joan said. “God, it reminds me of Timmins.”

  “Do you realize every last thing in this place was hauled up here on somebody’s back?”

  “I know. Some of these salt mines are thousands of years old.” Joan gazed around her, taking in the details of the ragged terrain. Then she declared with uncharacteristic authority, “Four hundred years ago Hallstatters built a pipeline forty kilometres long. It carried brine to be dried for the salt market and they used more than 12,000 hollowed-out trees.”

  “Are you making that up?”

  “I read a brochure at the tourist office down by the ferry.”

  “When, for God’s sake? You haven’t been out of my sight.”

  “The last time I was here.”

  “You’ve been here before!”

  “Seven years ago. After I graduated, the summer before I started my M.S.W., a girlfriend and I travelled by Eurorail and auto-stop.”

  “You hitchhiked! You really are an odd one, Joan. I’d never have guessed that you’d bummed around Europe. Does Morgan know?”

  “He never asked.”

  Harry was not really surprised.

  “It was a long time ago,” she said.

  “Seven years is not a long time.”

  “It’s all relative, isn’t it, Harry? I’ve seen a lot more than you’d think.”

  “Have you been up here before? Did you tour the mines?”

  “We visited ossuaries, saw lots of bones. But one salt mine looks much like another. The big iron door isn’t familiar. Of course, it would have been open, wouldn’t it?”

  Now didn’t seem the time to pursue her story, but she had one after all. They were leaning on each other like siblings who knew everything and nothing about each other. Her copper red hair, damp from sweat, caught the sunlight as she shook it away from her head. Harry pushed his own back, although it was cut so short it stood almost straight off his skull.

  As they moved up onto the weathered porch, he reached out and gave her hand a squeeze. In another life they might have been lovers and in another he might have been her professor and she the kind of student he’d look forward to seeing in the second row from the front and be disappointed the days she skipped class.

  Despite the derelict condition of the logs and frame, the chalet door was solid. It was unlocked. He pushed it open. They gasped. She grasped his arm so tightly he winced. There was zero consistency between the disrepair of the exterior and the high-tech modernist hideaway they encountered inside. It could have been an executive sanctuary in Scarborough or the Vienna suburbs. There was not a soul in sight, but the air was filled with that same indefinable feminine scent he had noticed in his apartment after Lena had left.

  He called gently, afraid the illusion might collapse from the sound of his voice.

  They stepped inside and pushed the door shut behind them. A hush filled the air as the outside world disappeared. Small dots of green, orange, and red glowed from computer components along an exterior wall below a thermal Venetian blind that glowed from the light outside but admitted no image. Several blank monitor screens reflected the room imperfectly and one live monitor with the sound turned off featured Wolf Blitzer in pantomime on CNN. There was a sealed urn beside one of the monitors, a plain metal cylinder of the kind used to transport human remains.

  I wonder if they’re her own?

  More likely they’re Rachel’s.

  Harry surveyed the sleek ambience with all the amenities. The furniture was much like his, mainly teak and leather. Along the back wall was a fully equipped kitchen with stainless steel appliances and to the right an open door led into an extension that from the outside had seemed nothing more than the remnants of a board and batten shed.

  Clearly, much had changed since the gnarled old woman in town had visited her friend’s ramshackle retreat for their evenings of gossip and scotch.

  As his ears adjusted to the quietness, Harry could make out the soft rush of a shower coming through from the wing where the bedroom and bath must be. He spoke to Joan in a low voice, expressing satisfaction.

  “She’s in there,” he said.

  “Lena?”

  “Who else could it be?”

  “And we’ve lost Mr. Sakarov, haven’t we?”

  “For the time being.”

  “Harry,” she whispered. “If Rachel Damboch is dead, who is this gatekeeper you told me about?”

  “The keeper of Lena’s conscience? Good question. Maybe there isn’t one.”

  The latch of the front door clicked inordinately loudly in the silence behind them. Mountain air swirled in from outside and before they could turn, there was another metallic click. Harry and Joan both knew intuitively it was the sound of a gun. From having seen too many cop shows they automatically froze with their hands in the air.

  “Joan DeBrusk! How good to see you,” said Madalena Strauss. “You too, Harry. Please turn around slowly. You can both put your hands down. I’m sure neither of you is armed. I see the Russian isn’t with you. I expect he will be along shortly.”

  The first thing Harry saw when he faced her was the muzzle of a semi-automatic. The second thing was that the woman holding the gun was wrapped casually in a bath towel, with a few locks of copper red hair escaping the confines of a matching towel bound around her head. Bare feet, no makeup, perfect complexion, eyes flashing. She was radiant.

  She looked like a study by Klimt, of course.

  Not a painting. More like one of his disturbing and luminous pencil sketches of women exposing themselves, masturbating with their crotches exposed, their unknowable faces ecstatic.

  20 THE HARROWING OF HELL

  Harry felt a surge of vertigo, as if he'd closed his eyes then opened them to find he was in a different room, a stranger in a different world. He had trekked up the mountainside hoping to find Madalena Strauss. He had found her in the flesh and to his astonishment she was apparently expecting him. She was holding a lethal weapon trained on his heart.

  He was angry at himself for not understanding the situation. He glanced over at Joan. She looked bewildered but oddly serene.

  “Lena,” said Joan. “I don’t think you realize why we’re here.”

  “No,” Lena responded. “I don’t think you do.” She fired her pistol; Joan reeled and crumpled to the floor.

  “For God’s sake,” Harry shouted. The sharp retort of the gun blast rang in his ears as he wheeled away from Lena and her gun to kneel beside Joan, who was trembling, her eyes huge and unblinking. He ran his hands gently over her body, ruffling her clothes, searching for the wound. There was no blood.

  “You stupid,
stupid woman,” he declared over his shoulder, aiming his words at Madalena as he dropped his voice to a quiet curse.

  “Harry, if I’d wanted to kill your friend she’d be dead. My first bullet was a wax slug—I like to avoid gratuitous killing when a warning will do. But I promise you the second is lethal. She’ll be fine once she realizes she’s still alive.”

  From his kneeling position, he pivoted to glare at Madalena Strauss. “You are absolutely,” he searched for a word, “unreal.”

  “I expect I am.”

  “Why her, for God’s sake? Why not shoot me?”

  “You’re not the enemy, Harry. Nor is Joan. I like you both. But I need to be in control now.”

  “Control what you want. You don’t need the gun.”

  “Yes, I think maybe I do.”

  By the time Harry had arranged Joan comfortably on the sofa, she was in command of her faculties, but she lay quiet, waiting for Harry to work out the Kafkaesque complexities of their situation or, perhaps, trying to work them out for herself. Harry, meanwhile, felt very protective. He had got her into this.

  No, Harry. Sakarov got her into this. You came like a knight errant to her rescue.

  By betraying Lena—that’s what Lena thinks.

  It’s only betrayal if you don’t get her help to take out Sakarov together. But, Harry.

  But?

  How does she know Sakarov is on his way?

  Lena interrupted. “I’m so glad you’re here, Harry. We’ve got work to do.”

  “You do realize Sakarov is intending to kill you.”

  “So I understand. But my research project, it’s time.”

  “Perhaps we should talk strategy first. Like how to deal with Sakarov.”

  “Forget him, Harry. We are about to create a deluge. Wikileaks only leaked—we’re going to create a flood to rival God’s first holocaust. We’ll drown the bastards in their own evil effluent.”

  “And hope the innocent rise to the surface.”

  Perhaps she was right. When Sakarov got there, if he was able to negotiate the climb, Lena’s future was in her own hands. She had the gun. Harry shifted around on the edge of the sofa. He could feel the warmth of Joan’s thigh press against him as he scanned the computer wall with the opaque window-blind in the centre. Lena had set her pistol on the desktop in front of her computers, disarming herself but keeping it within easy reach.