by Moss, John
He knew her approach to the horrors of child exploitation would have horrendous repercussions. The Findlays’ leap from the Kressler balcony with the little boy, driven by her revelations, was proof of that.
What about Simon’s death, Harry? They lost two kids, the one they discarded and the one they didn’t know.
Lena began busying herself among the electronics.
He had to slow her down, to stop her if possible.
“Why now? What about your gatekeeper?”
“I know you have reservations about this, Harry.”
“What about Rachel Damboch?”
“What about her? We worked on my research together. Do you realize everything here had to be lugged up by hand? From computer components to groceries. Rachel loved this place, but it’s actually mine; it’s been in my family for generations. We used to mine salt.”
“I thought Rachel was your conscience.”
“I don’t have a conscience.”
“And that’s why she wanted to keep you in check.”
“You are partly right, Harry. Rachel worried about what she called my ‘moral judgment.’ Especially after the Dietmar Henning incident.”
“You did kill him?”
“I did.”
“And removed his testicles?”
“And gouged out his eyes. I used surgical instruments. He was unconscious.”
“Before or after you cut him?”
“Does it matter? When I told Rachel what had happened—”
“What you did.”
“When I told her about the incident, she insisted on setting up a gatekeeper to guide me on how I should deal with our findings, should she not be here when the right time came. And she isn’t here, Harry.”
“Then who’s the gatekeeper? You obviously need one.”
“I thought you would have realized. It’s you, of course.”
Like a drowning man reviewing his entire life in a kaleidoscopic instant of time, every moment of his relationship with Madalena Strauss compressed into a startled blink of his eyes.
Karen was silent.
Madalena rose from her swivel chair. She leaned over casually and picked up her pistol, holding it cradled in the flat of her hand as if it were an injured bird and she had to decide whether to save it or to put it out of its misery. Then she did a totally surprising thing. She handed the gun to Harry.
“You take it. I need to get dressed.”
She walked out into the wing where her bedroom was, closing the door behind her. They heard an exterior door shut—that’s how she must have got out to come at them from behind. But she was still inside; they heard her rummaging around, getting dressed.
Harry looked down at the diminutive semi-automatic in his hand. He emptied the magazine and dropped the bullets into his pocket, then he set the gun down on the coffee table.
Lena obviously felt coercion was no longer necessary. Somehow, without the weapon, she seemed more dreadful. What unspeakable powers did she have more powerful than gunpowder?
“Harry, what in the Lord’s name is going on?” said Joan, pushing against him to sit up. “This woman is a lunatic.”
“A brilliant lunatic.”
“Looking around here, I’d say the old lady was the brilliant one.”
“I think they complemented each other. They worked on child exploitation as a joint venture.”
“Until your friend Lena went viral.”
“Until she discovered she was sleeping with the man who abducted her daughter.”
“My God, my goodness.”
“Exactly,” said Harry.
“So Rachel reined her in. But here’s what I don’t get—well, there’s a lot I don’t get—but especially, I mean, she as much as said you can stop her. If I’ve understood what you told me in Salzburg, she’s about to unleash Armageddon. But only if you’ll agree to it. Does she think she’s going to debate you? I mean, you’ve got the gun.”
“Unloaded. She still seems to be in charge.”
“Then reload, Harry.”
“It’s not about guns. It’s about control. Whoever knows the most holds the reins.”
Spoken like a true philosopher, Harry.
“So how can you be her conscience if we don’t know what’s happening?”
Lena walked back into the room. Her outfit—a scooped-neck blouse printed with geometric patterns, a bejewelled choker, a dirndl skirt with a broad leather belt, and black slippers—seemed like an Alpine costume. The subtle application of eyeshadow below her eyes as well as above them gave her a haunted appearance. She looked less like an Tyrolean peasant than an Edwardian courtesan painted by Klimt’s morbid young protégé, Egon Schiele.
Lena sat down in the easy chair facing Harry and Joan, who were still side by side on the sofa. She crossed her legs with elegant precision and tossed her head to shift a cascade of copper red hair away from her face.
“I see you two are quite comfortable,” she said. “So, Harry, we should resume our conversation. Rachel gave you powers you didn’t know you had, and now we must use them to our best advantage.”
I think you’re supposed to say shazam, Harry.
Joan was thinking along the same lines. “Well, Peter Parker, it seems you’ve been bitten by a nuclear spider.”
A deep full-throated laugh issued from Lena as she waited to hear what Harry’s response would be.
“I didn’t even know Rachel Damboch existed until a few weeks ago,” he said.
“But she knew you, Harry. She knew your writing. The paper on Klimt, yes. But more importantly, she had come across your essay on necessary murder in Philosophy Today. I think you called it ‘Justifiable Homicide.’”
“It was ‘Justifiable Homicide?’ with a question mark. An interrogation, not a declaration.”
“But very thoughtful, very wise. Rachel ran across your writing during her work on Hans Asperger. It was your moral civility that made her decide to abandon her research into his possible Nazi activities. She shifted her focus to the concentration camp at Mauthasen where slave labourers worked on the BMW turbojet fighter. That is where my grandmother died.”
“I’m so sorry,” Joan interjected. “Are you Jewish?” She seemed flustered by not knowing. “How did she die?”
Lena glowered without bothering to shift her gaze from Harry. “By gasoline injection. Or strangulation. Possibly from malnutrition or exhaustion.” She paused. “Once she got involved in my project, Rachel was never able to finish her own study. A single camp, my grandmother’s death, seemed inconsequential in comparison.”
“It sounds terrible,” said Joan.
“It was terrible. You cannot possibly imagine.” Lena paused again and then resumed her account of Rachel’s research projects. “She had studied with Dr. Asperger and spent a great deal of time in the libraries of Vienna when she lived in Hinterbrühl. That’s where she was my surrogate mother and guardian, at his SOS-Kinderdorf school in the district of Mödling and then, after she retired, here. Even before, she would spend months at a time in this place. Her computer brought the libraries of the world to Hallstatt. So, Harry, she researched you. She knew about your accident on the river. That distressed her. She had grown up in a place called Sudberry.”
“Sudbury. Northern Ontario,” said Harry.
“Me too,” said Joan. “Near Timmins.”
“I don’t know if you’d call it growing up,” said Harry. He felt the need to show he was not entirely in the dark by reminding himself what he knew while bringing Joan up to speed. “Rachel was a ward in the Huronia Asylum for Idiots in Orillia; that’s how it was known back then. She was turned out on the streets as a misfit and eventually came under the care of Elizabeth Book in Toronto, Lena’s aunt, and the daughter of Elisabeth Bök, Klimt’s model and Lena’s great-grandmother and prototype; red hair, green eyes, wicked ways.”
“Ah yes,” said Madalena. “You are a researcher too.”
“Not at all. I hate research. I hired Simon Wal
es to do it for me. Did you know he was the boy that couple from Oakville bought and discarded?”
“Of course. He ran away.”
“Did he have a choice?”
“It is not my concern, Harry. Listen, you need to know how we brought you into the picture. We researched your background as a scholar; we knew about the deaths of your family and that you had become a private investigator. We knew you had a connection with Superintendent Quin of Toronto Homicide. We discovered you had been locked out in the extreme cold last winter. We hacked into your medical information.”
“You can’t do that.”
“We did it, Harry. You’d be surprised how brilliant Rachel was with computers. A little old lady, a cybersavant, you might say.”
He recalled both his own and Simon’s dismissive judgment of the old woman’s computer savvy.
“Rachel had a rare and special mind, Harry. It was her blessing and her curse.”
His silence was taken as an invitation to elaborate. “Rachel appeared slow, below normal, until she was ten, when she received a severe blow to the left side of her head from a fellow inmate at the asylum. She nearly died, but after she recovered she was different. There are other cases recorded like hers. She had gained access to hidden parts of her brain. Suddenly, she could remember everything that was spoken to her, every word, and repeat every conversation verbatim. She picked up languages she’d never heard before in a few weeks. There are other documented cases of such a radical explosion of intelligence. No one thought to document Rachel. Going from one extreme to the other, she tried to learn how to be normal and tried to teach herself normal behaviour, but she was strange. They didn’t know what to do with her at the asylum so they set her free. The next decade was very troubled as she tried to adjust to life on the streets of Toronto. Why am I telling you this, Harry?”
He felt like a Pirandello character lost in a play, in search of the author.
“Perhaps it doesn’t matter anymore,” she said.
But Harry knew it did. She was describing aspects of herself. She had been strange as a child and was taken in by Rachel, who recognized a kindred spirit. Life for Lena was a sequence of conscious decisions. Perhaps she wasn’t autistic, but she displayed obsessive-compulsive behaviour and, he realized, she was never spontaneous. Even now, she was only simulating impulsiveness in her revelations about Rachel. She needed Harry to know things about her. She did not care if he liked her or agreed with her. She needed him to understand.
“Please,” he said. “Keep on. You were talking about computers and how you hacked into my medical records.”
“Rachel did. A couple of years before Bill Gates and Paul Allen created Microsoft, she was writing programs in Austria. She mastered Fortran before its limitations and special applications were known. Computers were not mathematical machines for Rachel; they were geometric landscapes. She had an extremely rare form of synaesthesia. Everything that happened inside a computer she visualized in terms of colours and textures and shapes. She knew computers, Harry. There was nothing they could do that she could not envision.”
Joan spoke up. The attraction of ideas seemed to have erased her fears. “I studied savants in psychology. They used low frequency impulses to temporarily impede functioning on the left side of the brain and that gave people’s minds astonishing abilities. But only in spurts, nothing long lasting.”
“Well,” said Lena, “the effects of Rachel’s blow to the skull seems to have lasted her whole life.”
“So she read my medical files?” Harry wanted to get back to the fundamental question of why he was here.
“She was enthralled by computers, but she was old-fashioned and preferred to read books. She could read two pages at once, the left eye taking in one page, the right eye taking in the other, with virtually total recall. Dr. Asperger wanted to study her. She refused. She preferred caring for damaged children. When she retired to Hallstatt, an infinite library was available online. She read everything. But she loved to gossip, of course. It took her mind off her mind.”
“She gossiped with the old lady in town.”
“And with me. She hated being different. She loved Russian novels.”
“And digging into my records.”
“Yes, you were hospitalized for hypothermia. They had to do a lavage, washing your guts with warm water. You lost a couple of toes.”
“Parts of toes.”
“Parts. And there were detailed copies of your electrocardiogram readings. That’s what we were after.”
“What bloody use were ECG stats?” He felt violated, as if they had tapped into his innermost secrets.
“Everyone’s readings are a signature, Harry, as different as fingerprints. Actually, you only have to isolate the five phases of one single heartbeat to make positive identification. We have your heartbeat on record. And now, we have you. That is, I have you. Rachel is gone. But so, we match the two heartbeats, your living heartbeat and the one from Toronto embedded in our security system. Bang! We unlock my files. Thank you very much.”
“And you need me to be here in person?”
“That’s how Rachel insisted we do it.”
“And you were fine with all this restraint?”
“Rachel died a natural death, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“It never crossed my mind.”
“I would not have hurt her, for goodness sake. I loved Rachel. She helped me realize the need to keep certain of my impulses under control. Revenge must not consume the avenger’s soul, she would say. And now she’s here again, acting through you. Not in a creepy way. It’s not about ghosts and the supernatural. But you do see, I need you here for your heart.”
“For the harrowing of hell.”
“Ikh bin dokh a yid. We have sheol. Jews don’t believe in hell.”
“And I’m an atheist, which means hell is what we make it.”
“It’s part of the Apostles’ Creed,” said Joan.
Lena turned to Harry for an explanation.
“Between death and resurrection, Christ descended among the dead and redeemed the souls of the righteous who had lived during the millennia before he was born. I don’t know how far back he went, I don’t know if he included Neanderthals.”
“Retroactive salvation,” she said. “A rather facile bit of religiosity.”
“What seems facile,” said Joan, “is that you believe you’re the redeemer.”
“Hardly. I have no desire to absolve the damned.”
“No,” said Harry. “But you’re intending to descend among them and pass absolute judgment.”
“Yes, if that is what harrowing means.”
“Close enough,” said Harry. He regretted he’d got them into the arcane machinations of theology. “It’s one thing to judge when you know all the facts. It’s another to judge when you don’t.”
“I think I shall enjoy the harrowing of hell, Harry. It’s more interesting than sheol. Now let us proceed to your heartbeat. We’ll need to take an electronic reading.”
“And why would I cooperate? I’m not at all sure what you’re doing is right.”
“But you think I could be.”
“Not without filtering your files very carefully first.”
“Harry, your heartbeat. Come over here.”
Harry stood up as if under an inexorable compulsion.
Harry, sit down.
He fingered the bullets in his pocket.
Madalena proceeded to arrange wires and electrodes attached to a machine the size of a printer.
“This is still in development; it takes time-delineated readings, then we make a representative selection. It doesn’t hurt, of course. Sit there.”
Harry, don’t sit.
He chose to remain standing. He watched Lena sort out her equipment for a while, then repeated his question, hoping the answer would be different this time.
“Why do you think I’d let you do this, Lena? I’m not prepared to open Pandora’s box, not until w
e’ve sorted through what sort of evil might fly out. So far, it’s all pretty vague.”
“You forget, we’re restuffing the jar. There’s nothing vague about what we’re doing, not for the children involved. Where do you want me to start—infants sold for adoption, children sold for sex, child slave labour in fields and factories, death squads of child soldiers, children as toys, expendable children, children as commodities. An obscene and savage economy. You want facts and figures? They’re all in here.”
She gestured to indicate her computer set-up. She seemed to be suppressing frustration.
Harry gazed at her with a mixture of horror and admiration.
She had become the righteously decadent courtesan of Egon Shiele’s haunted imagination. Apart from the gorgeously unruly hair, it was difficult to recall the sly provocative images by Klimt.
“Who do you want to protect, Harry? Conrad Fearman? He has had two granddaughters, as he calls them, for decades. When one set of girls reaches puberty, they are replaced with another. He likes them in pairs. The discards are sold to pimps if they’re lucky. Not by himself, of course. By a broker. Some are loaned out to be raped and eventually snuffed. Their little bodies are buried in your endless and majestic Canadian wilderness.”
Harry felt sick. He remembered their names, Marissa and Colleen. Did each pair have the same names? They had their own nanny. They summered in a luxurious cottage on Lake Rosseau.
“Fearman’s girls are from Ireland, Harry, not China, not India, not Papua New Guinea or Lesotho. Born as punishment to Catholic girls who strayed. Their Albanian nurse has been with them from birth. She will be there until they no longer meet Mr. Fearman’s requirements. Then she will return to Ireland and be given a new assignment. Yes, women are involved in this too.”
Joan listened intently. She said nothing. Harry realized the revealed horrors of hell she had learned as a child from nuns and priests had never been so graphic as what she must be envisioning now.
“You mentioned the Findlays from Oakville,” Lena said. “They bought a replacement child after the boy called Peter, you knew him as Simon, was banished. I told them they would soon be exposed,” Lena continued. “They tried to buy my silence with money and with tears. They went back to their dealer, Dimitri Sakarov. I suppose he explained that he couldn’t stop me. They were humiliated—no, mortified would be the right word. They were respected members of their community. Death was their only option. I didn’t expect they would take the little boy with them. But it’s as well they did. Sakarov would simply have sold him all over again.”