by Moss, John
Joan ignored the cruelty of Madalena’s judgment, asking instead, “What about your own daughter, Lena? Harry told me you have a daughter. Is she alive?”
Lena glared, then her lips pulled into a smile while her eyes narrowed to a pained squint. “She is dead. My ex-fiancé Dietmar Henning told me how she died.”
“How did he know?”
Harry realized Joan did not know the details of Dietmar Henning’s death.
“After a certain amount of coaxing, he confessed to killing her.”
“Oh my God!”
“Your God, not mine,” Lena declared bitterly. “My Freya would not cooperate with her captors. He was one of them. So he raped her.”
“Oh God!”
“She was four years old.”
“Jesus!” Harry exclaimed.
“Dietmar was humiliated by pride, not shame. He did not regret that he had done such heinous things to a child. He had done them before, and sometimes they died. He was very disturbed that I knew what he’d done. I was his betrothed, his one true love, he insisted that to the end.”
“But he told you!”
“As I explained, Joan. I coaxed him. His dying words were a confession.”
“With no absolution!” Joan’s voice quavered.
Harry knew Joan believed in a ferocious God who could only be mollified through priestly intervention. She seemed more disturbed by Dietmar’s death without the confessional sacrament and remission of his sins than by how he had died or whether he might have deserved eternal damnation.
Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat! Karen murmured. Exclude the bastard from the communion of saints. Cast him forever into the darkness.
Harry recoiled from Karen’s bitterness.
Freya and Lucy would have been the same age.
For himself, he was utterly repulsed by Lena’s admission of brutality but profoundly moved, knowing the terrors her daughter had endured and the shock Lena must have experienced on discovering what her fiancé had done. He wanted to hold her and share her pain. He had a great capacity for pain. He wanted to throttle her for the cruelty of her response.
Lena had gone back to sorting through her paraphernalia, preparing for Harry’s electrocardiogram.
“If you will just settle back on this mat on the floor, Harry. It would be better than sitting. Remove your shirt and your socks.” She nodded to a fine Persian prayer rug on the floor between them.
“And if I don’t?”
“I thought you understood, Harry. If you do not, I shall be forced to hurt Miss DeBrusk. Very badly if necessary. That is why she is here.”
21 PATHETIC FALLACY
Karen's voice reverberated inside Harry's skull. He could hear the urgency and confusion. She was trying to speak in real time. He couldn’t make out her words, but the panic was clear. He glanced at the pistol lying on the coffee table. He glanced at Lena. She seemed so certain of her dominance that the gun was superfluous. He glanced at Joan. She appeared distressingly indifferent to the threat on her life. Could it be she didn’t understand?
There was a lot Harry didn’t understand himself.
“Lena,” he said, trying to suppress his frustration, to stifle his outrage. “We’re here because Sakarov gave us no choice. We’ve come to bloody well help you.”
“Mr. Sakarov is going to kill you if you don’t kill him first,” Joan added in a quiet voice she might have used to refuse cream in her coffee.
Lena turned away from her bank of equipment and smiled. The smile was unnerving. She could have been a deranged Dr. Frankenstein about to jolt his experiment into motion. Yet there was something beguiling in her smile, as if she had discovered herself to be the scientist’s awakening monster, robust and bewildered in a baffling world.
“Listen, Harry. Listen! You can hear his footsteps.”
She’s bloody demented, Harry.
But Harry could hear heavy shuffling outside.
For an interminable moment, nothing happened. Then the door pushed open and Dimitri Sakarov filled the frame. The big man braced himself on both sides of the doorway, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath.
Well then there now. Everything’s changed now, Harry. You’re off the hook for your moral authority, but your life is seriously at risk.
Madalena Strauss seemed relieved by the fat man’s arrival. Harry found this perplexing. Either she didn’t understand why Sakarov was here. Or he didn’t.
Or both do. Or neither does. The permutations are intriguing.
Sakarov tried to grin, but it came across as a grimace. The thick roll of fat between his shoulders and bulbous head was shot through with red striations. His cheeks showed a bloodless pallor as they pushed up into his eyes, reducing them to painful slits. He was wearing city shoes. Italian leather scuffed beyond redemption. His suit jacket was drenched with sweat; his pants had a rip in one knee, stained brown from dried blood. He glowered at Harry and ignored Joan.
Okay, Slate, if you’re going to take him down, now’s the time.
But Harry didn’t move. He was too busy trying to read whatever was passing between the fat man and Madalena. As random ideas swarmed toward clarity, it was all beginning to make sense. He glanced at Joan. She offered him a heroic glimmer of solidarity. He glanced at Lena. Her voluptuous masses of hair absorbed sunlight diffused through the insulated blind. It looked matte black, with only a few hints of scarlet.
“So, Mr. Harry. You are not surprised to see me, yes?” Sakarov had resumed his Russian inflection.
“Not really. You’ve been following us for the last two days.”
“Ah no, I was chasing you, don’t you see? I was urging you on, making sure you were going in the right direction.”
That’s a different way of seeing things.
Sakarov glanced at Lena then aggressively back at Harry. He lifted a bulky arm and made a show of looking at his watch.
“You have less than one hour to go. You are very lucky I am here. You have saved many lives, perhaps. Of course, I am sure you thought when you found her, together you would gang up on Sakarov. Poor Harry.”
Harry caught Joan’s eye. He couldn’t make out her expression.
Demure confusion, Harry? She’s fifth business, crucial to the plot but extraneous as a character.
Her allusion to a Robertson Davies novel heartened him, but Sakarov’s contempt and his confidence were disconcerting. As the big man trundled slowly across the room and eased himself into the largest chair, Harry forced himself to make a huge leap in logic. “You’ve been working with Lena all along,” he said. The words spoken aloud seemed absurd.
“Not working with me, Harry, he was working for me.”
Reality collapsed like a house of cards, the same way it had when he discovered she was no longer dead. Lena picked them up and began to reshuffle the deck.
“His options were limited,” she explained. “They had been for some time.” She stepped closer to Sakarov and placed a hand on his shoulder. He cringed almost imperceptibly and smiled. “You’ve done a good job, Dimitri. A little clumsy, perhaps. The death of those Findlay boys was unnecessary, especially the one who called himself Simon Wales. He was Harry’s friend.”
“I was angry. There was a weapon at hand.”
“A water glass,” said Harry.
“I was out of sorts. I had been shot by Miss DeBrusk and I was bleeding to death.”
“My God, imagine if you really were,” Lena observed. “There must be vast quantities of blood in that body of yours.” She turned her attention back to Harry. “You see, I needed you here. That is what Rachel insisted. Dimitri made it happen. Joan was a means to an end. She is so wonderfully untouched by the world. I knew if you believed she was in danger, you would be compelled to rescue her. It’s in your nature.”
“Kidnapping Joan was your idea?” Harry was incredulous but not surprised.
“I arranged for Mr. Sakarov to insist Joan come to Vienna. I knew you’d take it from there.”<
br />
“And just how did you force him to comply?”
“By killing his sister.”
Oh God, Harry. Don’t say anything. Just listen.
“He didn’t like her,” Lena declared. “Ask him. She was a manager at his Pushkin Hotel in Saint Petersburg. She was stealing from him and having an affair with his personal assistant, one Fyodor Blozinski. I did not go to Russia. I don’t like Russia. I met her in Toronto.”
“You met her, yes. You strangle her in Canada,” Sakarov offered. “I did not like my sister so much, but Fräulein Strauss also promised she would murder my grandchildren unless I do what she says.”
There seems to be an epidemic of threatening children, Harry. Who even knew the fat bugger had children of his own, never mind grandchildren.
Real grandchildren, I wonder?
Yes, real, or he wouldn’t care if she destroyed them.
“Why didn’t you just kill her?” said Harry to Sakarov with brutal logic. “And why the hell don’t you speak the English you were born with?”
“Is my parent’s English. I am Saskatchewan Russian.”
“You’re pathetic.”
“You ask why I didn’t kill Fräulein Strauss? Is not so simple, Harry. I tell you when we meet in Vienna how much power she has for control of lives. Information, you know, is most powerful weapon. Was better I cooperate.”
“Better for whom?”
“If I do what she says, she promise the record of my criminal dealings is gone like wind, my grandchildren are okay, and I keep my Pushkin Hotel. Is very good business.”
“When you first turned up at the Kressler, you were already working for her then?”
“Oh yes, from beginning.”
“Drop the goddamned fake Russian.”
“I am not fake Russian. Fake Canadian, maybe. I grow up in Saskatchewan and never play hockey. I never curl. I do not drink double-doubles. I like Timbit doughnut holes but not so much as vatruska. Is ancient pastry, very sweet. I never collect funny money at Canadian Tire. I go to agricultural college but never graduate.” He seemed amused by his litany of Canadian traits.
Harry tuned Sakarov out as he scrutinized Lena’s face for an indication of denial or remorse. She had settled into a desk chair with her back to the computer system and seemed to enjoy seeing her nefarious powers on open display. The opaque window behind her had turned sullen grey. The sky must have clouded over; a storm was building up and hiding the sun.
Pathetic fallacy; nature reflecting the human situation.
He ignored her. She was being willfully cheerful.
“This was all so that I would lend you my heartbeat, Lena? Why not just ask?”
“Because you would have refused.”
“Your mentor was a very wise woman.”
“Yes, she was.”
“And you are self-consciously devious.”
“Self-consciously? Yes, I am.”
Harry scrolled through the details in his mind of their entire relationship. Since she had first contacted him by email she had been manipulating to get him to come to Hallstatt but more significantly to control his mind. She had played Sakarov like a pawn, and Sakarov had played Harry.
“Lena, did you plan for me to return to Toronto after you died the first time?”
“With my gift in the black box, yes.”
“Your Klimts.”
She looked dismayed that he had revealed the contents of the box. “Just poor imitations, Harry.”
“Oh really.”
She stood up and walked over to him. He backed away and sat down on the sofa beside Joan. The natural light in the room had turned gloomy. She stood between Harry and the opaque window. In silhouette, she looked familiar again. She leaned close and spoke in a barely audible whisper.
“That part is between you and me. Whatever else happens, it is important that Elisabeth Bök remains safe and eventually returns to her homeland. Please, you will honour the terms of my gift.”
“You have strangled Sakarov’s sister, you have murdered Dietmar Henning, you have dumped a woman’s body in the Danube Canal, and you have led me around Europe like a puppy on a leash. Now you are threatening the life of this woman beside me who has done nothing but good her entire life, and you are about to open a flood of accusations that could destroy the lives of thousands—but you ask me to honour your trust?”
“Yes, I do.”
“It’s that simple?”
“That simple, yes. I have avenged myself on the man who murdered my four-year-old daughter, Harry. I have eliminated the vicious sister of a man whose crimes are monstrous in scope and brutality. I have deceived you, perhaps, but you are here and unharmed, and I have threatened Miss DeBrusk but only because you might refuse to play your part in exposing inestimable decadence. And the woman in the canal, she was a derelict, her body was useful. She achieved more in death than in life, I expect. In the moral balance, I am perhaps not so bad.”
“Why did you send me away after I just got here?”
“It’s very simple, really. I brought you to Austria to help me. I needed your heart, yes. I needed your moral authority. Mr. Sakarov and I, we tested you, Harry. Over wienerschnitzel and kaiserschmarrn. For my purposes, you were suitable.”
“And for Sakarov’s?”
“He doesn’t matter. You were much as Rachel thought you would be. You would do the right thing at the right time. Meanwhile, I needed you to take care of my personal property. So I made sure you were sympathetic to me, if not my cause, and sent you home.”
“You sent me! Was that before or after you turned up dead?”
“Death was my disguise. I needed to disappear because Mr. Sakarov’s very powerful and infinitely cruel colleagues were closing in. I needed us both to be safe.”
Harry turned to Sakarov. “You warned her about your friends?”
“I had my grandchildren and my hotel to protect.”
“But not your sister?”
“It was too late.”
Harry turned back to Madalena.
“If Sakarov was your reluctant ally,” he cast a withering glare in the Russian’s direction then looked back to Lena, “if he was under your control, how could he have tortured you? Why would you allow him to rape you?”
“If I allowed him, it would not be rape. But look at him, Harry. He is a pig. He would not get near my body unless I was dead.”
“But he did.”
“Harry, there was no torture,” Lena declared emphatically.
“I saw you, for God’s sake. You were brutalized.”
“I wanted to make sure you were totally committed before you went back to Toronto. How better than to share my suffering.”
Harry was bewildered. He had washed away blood from her wounds, he had cleansed ash from her burns, he had soothed her bruises with ointment.
“It’s impossible,” he protested.
“Unlikely, perhaps. Not impossible.”
Listen to her, Harry. She’s proud of herself.
He was thinking. The cuts were surface wounds. The burns were hideous but superficial. The bruises were only in places she could reach.
But wouldn’t an autonomic survival mechanism kick in?
Apparently not.
He could not conceive of motivation strong enough to override the pain she must have endured. “You have a monstrous imagination, Lena.”
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
Harry sat forward on the sofa and tried to stare into the depths of Madalena’s haunted eyes, but he could only see his own image reflected from their surface sheen.
“I could smell wildflower honey and fresh paint,” he said. “You burned yourself with beeswax tapers and cut yourself with a window-glass paint scraper. You beat yourself with bare fists. You also burned yourself with cigarettes, knowing I’d connect them to Sakarov. You probably used his brand and you flushed the butts. You were never raped. That’s why you refused to permit medical treatment.”
“You not
iced my windows had been painted. You are very observant.”
The woman’s resolute courage conflicted with her depraved commitment. He searched for clarity. “What about your beating in Toronto?”
“In the King William? That was real, of course. Oswaldo refused to cooperate, but Gregor was willing.”
“He was willing? You invited the beating.”
“They knew their employer would approve.”
“Conrad Fearman?”
“Yes. They knew he was disturbed by my project. Oswaldo could not bring himself around to beating a woman, but Gregor complied. He used a dishtowel, he wrapped it around his hand, he hit me as I directed. I bruise quite easily. It is the pale skin, I think.”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
“I knew you were coming to my rescue, I had to make it worth your while. I needed you, Harry. But you are a thinking man—for me, that was your strength, but it was also your flaw. I had to be sure you would be ruled by what you felt, not what you thought.”
It worked, Harry thought.
“I enjoyed our interlude while I stayed as your houseguest. It was pleasant spending time with you as well, Joan, and so easy, with you, to remain an unknown commodity. I was happy. But Mr. Sakarov became anxious. He was afraid Fearman’s thugs might realize their folly in cooperating with me. They might return and eliminate me. The beating was a contentious issue. Murder would simply be work. Sakarov worried this might happen before I had time to remove evidence of his own criminal activities from our files. He worried that if I was eliminated you would release them yourself, although I explained that you couldn’t. Rachel had made sure we must work together.”
Sakarov shifted his gigantic bulk in his chair. He was looking uneasy. Harry suspected the fat man was only beginning to realize the extent of Lena’s Machiavellian powers. He had assumed in doing what she ordered he had remained in control of his own destiny. Now he apparently wasn’t so sure.