Lindstrom's Progress

by Moss, John

  “I must admit,” Lena said, addressing Harry as if the others weren’t there, “I was disappointed when you left Vienna quite so suddenly. I thought you might have stayed for the funeral.”

  “You didn’t float to the surface for another week.”

  “But Vienna has so much to offer.”

  “You told me about your Pandora’s hoard of iniquity and at that point I wanted nothing to do with it.”

  “I also told you about my gatekeeper. You didn’t know it was you, of course. When you returned to Canada, you chose art over life, Harry—trinkets on a golden bough; my Klimts over the lives of innumerable suffering children.”

  That’s not how it was, he thought, but he couldn’t be certain.

  “So,” she said, “the threat to Joan got you back on track.”

  Harry rose to his feet and walked behind Sakarov to the window. He reached past Lena to raise the blind. The sky over the Hallstätter See had turned an angry grey. The lake water itself was virtually black. Lena tilted her head. Her hair radiated in waves away from her face which in the softened illumination looked strangely serene, as if everything was happening according to a plan that only she understood.

  Harry glanced at the pistol on the table. He felt the weight of the bullets loose in his pocket. Sakarov shifted in his chair and Harry remembered how fast he could be despite his bulk. Harry wondered if Sakarov was armed.

  As Harry surveyed the room, Joan watched him with an expression of sustained fascination, like a pedestrian caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. He gave her a nod of encouragement.

  He wasn’t sure what he was going to do next, but he needed her to be engaged, needed to be able to count on her.

  “Joan,” he said, “what do you make of all this?”

  She brightened, as if until now she had felt excluded.

  “I think we are in a hell of a mess.” She paused, apparently adrift in her own thoughts for a moment. “Harry, why wouldn’t Mr. Sakarov’s friends follow him when he was following us? It would have been in their best interests to do so, don’t you think?”

  She gave her hair an abrupt toss away from her forehead.

  “I think you’re right,” said Harry. “Unless they’re counting on Sakarov.”

  “To do what? Perhaps they know you and Lena must both be present for the release of her files. And here you are.”

  “I don’t even think Sakarov knew that.”

  Sakarov shifted his weight but said nothing.

  Joan smiled with inexplicable satisfaction. “I hate to use a hackneyed term, but this is ground zero for the bad guys, isn’t it? If biometric identification breaks down, or if Lena changes her mind, they are free to carry on as they have been.”

  Where’s she going with this, Harry?

  Lena spoke up, unaware of Karen’s misgivings. “Rachel counted on my powers of persuasion and Harry’s philosophical acumen to harmonize. There is no going back. We will release my files; you will be our witness. Mr. Sakarov is free to go.”

  “And if you are both dead?” Joan asked, still smiling.

  “Then the files die and countless children continue to suffer.”

  “Would the files be irretrievable?” Joan asked.

  “Lost in a cyberspace cache for eternity.”

  “And what if you remain alive, but your computer system breaks down?”

  “It won’t.”

  “But if it did?”

  “The files would no longer be accessible. Rachel established this as our access point. We might as well be dead.”

  “That would be a shame,” said Joan with a guileless smile. She reached into her large handbag and withdrew a tissue and blew her nose. She reached in again and pulled out a scaled down Glock semi-automatic, brandishing it like an outsized tube of lip gloss. The others stared at her in wide-eyed amazement. Harry expected to hear the rumblings of pathetic fallacy from thunder outside.

  “Oops,” said Joan with cloying cheerfulness. “It seems Mr. Sakarov’s business associates are represented after all.”

  Joan flourished her weapon with a dexterity that surprised Harry.

  She was a hunter, remember. She’s used to killing big things.

  Sakarov started to rise from his easy chair.

  “Sit!” Joan commanded, slipping the safety catch. “Mr. Sakarov, you and I are not allies. I shot you once, I look forward to doing so again. Did you really think you could hurt my friend Simon and not pay the price? And you should not have groped me. That was not at all nice.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “You did. In the King William.”

  “Oh that,” he sneered. “I had forgotten. I suppose I did.”

  “You deserve this,” she said, shifting her gun from one hand to the other.

  “Morituri te salutamus.” He offered a mock salute as he settled against the back of his chair.

  With a startled look in her eyes, Joan fired in Sakarov’s direction. His head lurched slightly within the collar of fat around his neck. His eyes widened and his pupils rolled upward trying to focus on what looked like a housefly that had settled on his forehead. A thin wisp of blood escaped from a small crater as the fly disappeared into Sakarov’s skull. Behind him, a fine spray of blood and viscera hung in the air. His mouth formed a gasping hole and his eyes went perfectly still.

  22 THE SALT MINE

  Sakarov sank into his own bulk, a pyramidal mound of immovable flesh. Harry felt strangely dissociated from the death scene. He listened for Karen’s voice, but she had burrowed deep into his mind and refused to be heard. Madalena Strauss looked curiously amused. She seemed indifferent to arbitrary death and was apparently impressed by Joan’s surprising metamorphosis. Joan herself was a picture of composure with the same sweet smile and soulful eyes, the same aura of injured innocence, that had endeared her to Harry when she had first appeared to take charge of the foundling girl in his apartment.

  Joan gazed out the window, assessing the weather. “We’re in for a good storm,” she announced.

  “Were you expecting your friends?” Lena asked.

  “Oh no, I am here on my own. Look, you can see the rain clouds sweeping up the mountainside. Lena, Harry, we had better get moving. Please, on your feet.”

  Sakarov was evidence of what happened with non-compliance. Harry and Lena moved in the direction Joan indicated. The three of them stepped through to the shed and then outside into a different world altogether of battered wood, rusted iron, shattered rock, and mounded tailings. As they moved amid what seemed like a primitive industrial wasteland, moisture-laden air turned to lashing rain. Its elemental force drove them more quickly toward the great iron door into the mine.

  At Joan’s direction, Harry removed a heavy crossbar and struggled to pull the door open. Rusted hinges shrieked against the din of the storm as he worked them loose. He turned to the two women behind him when the door was open enough for them to squeeze through. He was under a slight overhang of rock and his jacket was relatively dry, but they were both drenched.

  Observing Joan, Harry was reminded of canoe trippers he’d met as a kid who seemed oblivious to weather extremes. Her russet hair was plastered close to her skull and rain water smoothed the flesh of her face into sculptural contours. It was as if she enjoyed being caught in the storm. Lena had appeared less in her element, but once under shelter, when she violently shook her head, her hair glistened like a halo and she seemed like a woman who had just stepped from the shower prepared for a night of debauchery.

  Joan motioned with her Glock. Harry and Lena slipped deeper into the dank confines of the darkened mine. Water sloshed at their feet as Joan followed them in.

  “Puddles, good. You will have water. I’ll leave you now. But Harry, the car keys, please. Thank you. I’m sorry about the cabin, Lena, but as soon as the rain stops, I must cremate Mr. Sakarov. Then I’m off for home. My friend David Morgan must be worried.”

  “You’re not going to burn down my house?” Lena challe
nged. “My computers! Please, Joan, do not do this.”

  “It would not be possible to move Mr. Sakarov, even if both of you helped me. And where would we put him? Not in here with you. That would be very unpleasant.”

  “Don’t you dare destroy Rachel’s computers!” Lena screamed.

  Harry had never heard her so desperate.

  “Rachel’s computers? Your files. Yes, I’m afraid I must. There will be a fire, then there will be nothing left of Mr. Sakarov but ashes among ashes.”

  “Apart from his monstrous legacy of grief and perversion,” Lena snarled.

  “Ah, don’t you see? The harrowing of hell is impossible. We have long since fallen from grace. There will be an endless succession of Dimitri Sakarovs in this middling world of ours. If there were no hell, then what’s a heaven for, as they say. I’m sorry to leave you like this, with no possibility of closure.”

  “I’d say trapped in a salt mine is closure enough.”

  “I meant for your daughter.”

  Lena Strauss slipped into silence. Harry felt her presence at his side. She had become no more substantial in the darkness than Karen. Except Karen made sense to him and Lena’s Machiavellian obsessions put her beyond comprehension.

  Joan stood in silhouette against the ragged landscape visible through the entryway door.

  “Joan, why?” Harry asked.

  “No reason, Harry.”

  She scrounged for something in her Roots bag and came up with a wilted Bavarian sausage.

  “Here,” she said. “You might as well have this. And thanks for packing my other shoes. I’ll need them once I get back to Hallstatt.”

  He couldn’t see her features, but her voice sounded eerily calm. She started to back out through the partially closed iron door, then paused.

  “I know you’d like to understand, Harry, but there’s not much I can say. I’m not driven by existential angst or childhood trauma. I was never abused or subject to bouts of depression. I had a reasonably happy childhood, a good education, a modest but satisfying love life, an engaging job, the prospect of contentment through a long middle age, and the genetic predisposition for a relatively brief dotage and satisfactory passing. When Mr. Fearman approached me to do what Mr. Sakarov wanted, it seemed so out of the ordinary, I was easily won over. His offer to donate a million dollars to the Zylberman Centre helped. His friends in Vienna gave me the gun. Then you turned up as predicted. And that is my story—there is no story. Amen.”

  “What about Simon?”

  “Simon was my friend. His killer is dead.”

  Harry felt a surge of grief before letting Simon Wales slip into the black hole where he suppressed his inconsolable losses. Joan DeBrusk backed out into the dusk.

  “For God’s sake, Joan, you can’t just leave us here to die,” Harry protested.

  “There’s another way out; there’s always another way out. I’ve been here before, remember. There are miles and miles of passageways. This mountain is riddled with tunnels and shafts. It’ll take you a couple of days, but you’ll find the exit. I’m sure Lena knows where it is. You may have to improvise a bit. But you’re very resourceful, both of you. I’m sure you’ll be okay.”

  “Joan,” Lena spoke in a quiet voice. “The tunnel is blocked.”

  Joan pushed the door shut with a reverberating clang, followed by a loud grating sound as she slid the iron crossbar into place, leaving Harry and Madalena Strauss locked in total darkness. Instinctively, they moved closer. The sense of the other’s presence was reassuring. Neither of them spoke. Harry reached out and took Lena’s hand. Together they edged away from the door onto a slight rise above the pooled water.

  Harry couldn’t remember ever experiencing such an absolute absence of light. There was paradoxically more brightness when he closed his eyes tight than when they were open. With even the tiniest sound reverberating against the rock walls, he felt absurdly disoriented. He took a step, but his knees threatened to give out as he tried to compensate for the absence of sensory cues. He crouched down to steady himself.

  “Are you all right, Harry?”

  “Yes, keep talking. I need to connect.”

  “Me too. It’s better with voices.”

  “You know your way around?” he asked hopefully.

  “I wasn’t allowed to come in here when I was a kid.”

  “So you didn’t?”

  “I certainly did. And yes, there used to be another exit. I’m not sure I could find it, but it doesn’t much matter. Five years ago a gigantic rock slide completely blocked it off.”

  “Completely?”

  “Sorry.”

  “This isn’t good.” Harry had lowered his voice to an echoing whisper.

  “Harry, did she mean us to die here?”

  “No, her job was to erase the files. Fearman convinced her they would destroy innocent people. I suspect the elimination of Sakarov was moral outrage she couldn’t otherwise bring into focus. And revenge, which I’m sure she’d deny.”

  “She’s a strange one, Harry. I kind of liked her.”

  “Yeah, she’s likeable. Nice hair.”

  “Of course,” said Lena. “Beautiful hair.”

  “We’ve got to get moving.”

  “Where, Harry? The tunnel is blocked.”

  “We need to explore.”

  “There’s nowhere to go.”

  “We need heat. We need light. We need to think.”

  “We have plenty of time to think.”

  “We’re not giving up.”

  “No Harry, we’re not. But perhaps we need to accept the grim reality. There is no way out of this terrible place.”

  Harry stared into the darkness. He moved his head, but nothing changed.

  “Do you think there’s anything in here that will burn?” he asked.

  “There might be some branches and boards. Kids dragged stuff in to make forts over the years. I once even slept here when Rachel thought I had run away.”

  “Did you run away often?”

  “A few times.”

  Harry hitched his pants to pull the damp material away from his skin. He reached into his pocket. The bullets were still there. He grasped a single bullet and pulled it out. He squatted and felt for rocks smaller than his fist. Then he manoeuvred around until he found a dry flat surface of packed rubble. Lena stayed close as he moved.

  Using the rocks as a vice and pliers, he carefully worked the slug away from the casing.

  “Lena, stay very still. I’m going to dump gunpowder on the ground. If I can get a spark, we’ll have a brief flare of light. Look around you. Memorize what you see. We need wood and we need something to elevate us off the ground. We need water to drink.”

  He tapped the bullet casing against stone, spilling its contents into a small pile. Then he took a rock in each hand and struck them together over the pile. No sparks. He needed steel. He felt for his belt buckle. It was brass.

  “I need your belt,” he said.

  Her broad leather belt had a steel buckle. He felt the surface of his rocks and chose the one with hard smooth facets that he hoped meant it was flint or quartz. He struck the stone and buckle sharply together. Sparks. He kneeled down close to his pile of gunpowder and struck his makeshift lighter again and again. Suddenly there was a blinding flare. Harry saw nothing but white light that burned into his retinas and then flickered to black.

  “Okay,” said Lena in a muffled voice. She was facing away from him as she spoke. “It’s all familiar. There’s a bunch of wood. I’m going to crawl over.” She must have been pointing. He understood her need to crawl. Moving in an upright posture in the absolute darkness induced vertigo. “Keep talking. Your voice will tell me I’m going in a straight line. This part of the mine is an antechamber about the size of the chalet with an ungodly deep hole off to one side, an air shaft to a tunnel way down underneath us. Okay, when I’ve found the wood, I’ll let you know. Do another bullet, I’ll gather whatever I can.”

  “I’ll
come too.”

  “I need your voice there. Anyway, you’re the light source, Harry. I’m a creature of darkness.”

  You see, symbolism is hard to resist.

  Harry talked as he listened to Lena slither over the coarse earth and through puddles. He described what he was doing as he prepared to explode the powder from the second bullet. When she was ready, he lit the gunpowder. It flared, again blinding him.

  “Keep talking, Harry. I’ve got some good stuff.”

  Over the sound of his own voice, he could hear boards and branches being dragged across the cavern floor.

  “Okay, you’re nearly here,” he said. He reached out and his hand sank into her bedraggled hair. “Good. Are there any twigs? What about pine needles?”

  “It’s all too big. Have you got your wallet?”

  Harry removed a small cluster of euros from his wallet. He set up another flare with the third bullet and handed Lena a euro to hold an edge into the combusted powder when it flared. After this, he had one bullet left.

  “Ready,” he said. “Here we go.”

  The euro caught, flickered, and went out.

  “The damned thing is damp,” Lena said.

  “This is our last bullet,” Harry explained. “Try blowing.”

  “It’ll just get damp from my breath.”

  “Okay, let’s try it again.”

  What about bills or receipts, Harry? I’ll bet they’re more flammable than money. And doesn’t your friend carry a lipstick? That’s grease!

  Hearing Karen at this point made him feel like a scared kid who’d wandered from home only to discover his parents knew where he was all along.

  “Bills,” he said out loud.

  “Pardon?” said Lena.

  “Have you got any pockets in that outfit?” he asked. “Have you got any lipstick?”

  “Lip gloss. There’s a little still left in the tube.”

  “That’ll do.”

  He found a couple of folded receipts in his wallet and handed them to Lena, directing her to coat them with lip gloss.