by Moss, John
The woman was amazing, indeed. She conducted interrogations by stealth. Harry wondered if this was Swedish protocol or her own peculiar way of doing business. Intriguing and very effective. And wily and manipulative. By delivering Ghiberti to Harry, Harry’s ill-defined quest was subsumed into her own inquiry. He was, in effect, working for her.
“And she asked you where you had been two nights ago?” Harry said, trying to seem casual.
“Among other things, yes. We were just making conversation. My God, she’s good looking, but larger than life if you know what I mean.”
“No,” said Harry. “Explain.”
Bernd Ghiberti flashed a grimace of annoyance, then shrugged. He swirled his brandy in the oversize bowl of his glass and inhaled the aroma. “I was with friends, Bjorn and Inge Olafsson,” he said.
“All night?”
“Until midnight. Then I went back to my hotel. I either stay there or with the Olafssons when I’m in Stockholm.” He wrote down the hotel address on a slip of paper and handed it to Harry. “You can always leave a message if I’m out.” He took back the note and added the phone number of his friends. “I’ve known them since childhood, a brother and sister. They have the house next to ours on the island of Fårö. Have you ever been there?”
Harry shook his head.
“Where Ingmar Bergman lived. Windswept and haunting.”
“Of course,” said Harry.
Bergman was always a good topic of conversation between Swedes and outsiders. Swedes were fiercely proud of the filmmaker’s fusion of landscape and the tortured human psyche, but righteously defensive about gloomy stereotypes. When in Sweden, however, Bernd Ghiberti seemed to identify as an outsider, an Italianate Canadian who spoke Swedish and summered in the Baltic. Bergman didn’t appear to interest him.
“You used to go there after Giovanna drowned.”
“Vittorio held on to the Muskoka cottage until he died, but after Giovanna I never went back. I was a boarding student at Upper Canada College—my sisters went to Branksome Hall but they lived at home. In the summers I was sent to stay with my aunties on Fårö. Free to wander among stone walls and giant boulders on the north end of the island. Birgitta would sometimes visit while I was there.”
What an odd way of putting it.
“She knew Bergman,” he continued. “That was during what she called his ‘dark interlude’ between film-making and death.”
“Do you have a car?”
“Of course.”
“Rental?”
“No, I keep it for when I’m in Sweden. My friends look after the old thing; they drive it when I’m not here and store it in their garage. Is this an interrogation?”
“Conversation,” said Harry.
“I realize why I was being asked for an alibi,” Bernd offered. “I read about the girl in Hagaparken. She froze to death like the girl in Toronto—I talked to your friend Superintendent Quin about her. It seems my mother’s sordid suspicions are contagious.”
“It doesn’t help that you were in the same city when both murders occurred.”
“I was. And during that same period there were a thousand other murders in the world. It is a statistical probability that some were young women, some of those were found naked, a few of them died of exposure, and even a few were in places I happened to be, when they expired.”
“Which only proves that your guilt is a statistical possibility.”
“Then I am guilty of bad math, but not murder. And here I thought serial killers were exceptionally bright.”
“Only the organized, non-social variety, as you’ve said yourself. The disorganized asocial offenders are usually quite stupid.”
Bernd seemed amused. “My work in Africa should be proof that I’m neither.”
Or he found a place to kill women with relative impunity.
While he seemed to find something droll about their conversation, Bernd Ghiberti did not smile. His dark eyes, creased at the edges like a much older man or someone too much exposed to the sun, glinted in the light from the open fire that bled the colour from his lips and highlighted the length of his nose.
Then Bernd said in a quiet voice, “Professor Lindstrom, you also were in both places at the time of the murders.”
Harry ordered another beer. Ghiberti nursed his cognac. They both stared into the fire. When the beer arrived, Harry sat back and appraised his situation. He was across from a man whose own mother wanted Harry to prove he was a serial killer, and who appeared to be mildly amused by the attention this brought him from the police and from the investigator he had more or less hired to prove his innocence and because he was concerned for his mother. He seemed almost content, gazing into the flames. His eyes reflected the pulsing glow of embers in the grate.
Harry tried to imagine what horrors those eyes might have witnessed? And strangely, he conjured images of girls in North Africa enduring the most grisly brutalities because of their sex, and not blonde girls and young women drowning, or incinerating, or being suffocated by earth collapsing on top of them. Or dying exposed to the frigid air.
For a moment, it seemed to Harry his mind merged with Ghiberti’s, and he could see into its darkest recesses with chilling clarity. This man may have killed and would kill again, to create order out of chaos, to impose an elemental structure on a universe reeling out of control.
“The women.” Harry said, not as a question but with a leading intonation, as if he expected Ghiberti to finish his thought.
“The women, yes.”
“The young women, here and in Toronto, they weren’t sexually assaulted.”
“Weren’t they?”
“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? They were stripped naked, but left in pristine condition.”
“Perhaps their killer was not interested in sex.”
“Perhaps he was incapable of sex. There’s a difference, isn’t there?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Ghiberti answered. “My expertise is with the dead, not the dying.” Warming to this wry summary of his abandoned career, he continued, “The dead can sometimes tell us a great deal about ourselves.”
“I’m sure they can,” said Harry. “And what about all those other girls?”
“What other girls?”
“The corpses your mother has tallied up who seem to appear from time to time, punctuating the winter landscape. And always in places you have just been, apparently.”
“What about them?”
“I understand they were not naked.”
“Is that significant, Professor Lindstrom?” He was irritated. Hardly an admission of guilt, but it was a start, a chink in the proverbial armour. “My mother,” he said, his voice softening as he shifted the direction of their conversation. “You have not managed to contact her?”
“Have you?”
“No, of course not. I was told she attended a public reception at the Hotel Skeppsholmen. I was not in the country at the time. I only arrived a couple of days ago, just before you did. As I suspected, she made it through Swedish customs from Iceland without anyone noticing. And now she has disappeared again.”
“Perhaps she’s avoiding you.”
“I’m certain she is. Oh, you’re joking, stating the obvious. I had hoped you might have had better luck.”
“If you’re asking, do I know where she is? No. Am I concerned for her well-being? Not really. Am I searching for her? Good question.”
“But isn’t that why you’re in Sweden?”
“No, I like Sweden, I like Sweden in winter.”
“You must find her, you know. It is very important.”
“Have you tried your aunts on Fårö? She could be out there in the Baltic, on the family farm.”
“It is only a farmhouse. And yes, I contacted my aunts and they haven’t heard from Birgitta in months. I checked with the girl. They don’t have a telephone. They’re very old and prefer to live in the past. Or watch television. They have a TV.”
“The girl?”
“A young islander who works in Visby. She attends Gotland University.”
“Sounds like Fårö is isolated even from Gotland. It would make a good place for your mother to hide.”
“The aunties would never be able to keep a secret.”
“Depends on the secret. All old people keep secrets, Bernd.”
“I’ll have to remember that, should I ever grow old.”
“Is it in doubt?”
“My growing old? Yes, of course it is in doubt. Not so much as for my mother, however. She is teetering on the cusp of senescence, Harry. You think that unkind? Not so unkind as imminent death. She is in grave danger.”
“From who? Whom?” Harry winced. He usually avoided pedantic flourishes. They had once enhanced his authority in the lecture hall and among former colleagues who knew he had graduated from Cambridge.
Mid-sixties is hardly senescent, Harry.
“From whom?” Bernd said with a rhetorical flourish. He scowled and the flames flickered against the contours of his face like a cheap metaphor. “From me.”
Harry sank back into his leather chair.
The other man sank back into his, swirled his cognac so vigorously the aroma wafted through the air between them. The low ceiling glistened and the plaster walls cast an eerie sheen. Other patrons drank and chattered as if nothing in the world had changed.
“You?” said Harry at last, acknowledging the dramatic shift in strategy. “You’ve told me you were afraid if she closed in on the killer he’d have no choice but to do her in. Now you’re saying it’s you she should fear. That’s a bold admission.”
“It is all quite Darwinian, if you think about it. Survival of the offspring, nature red in tooth and claw.”
“Might I ask how you would kill her?” Harry posed the question as blandly as possible, on the premise that the more detail he was offered, the less likely the crime, which he knew to be the opposite with potential suicides, but this was about murder.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“To whom doesn’t it matter? Look, Bernd, why not go to the police?”
“For what? If every case of matricidal fantasy were turned over to the police, there’d be no time for traffic tickets.”
“But I take it, conflicted as you appear to be, your intentions are more substantive.”
“That is why I need you to intervene, Harry. I want you to save her life.”
Or to track her down for him, to make his job easier.
Harry took a deep draft of beer and set his glass back on the table in the exact place it had been sitting, and turned the glass in the circular pool of condensation, slowly spreading the moisture into a thin shapeless smear.
“Are you saying you want to kill your mother because she thinks you’re a killer? You can see there’s a circularity to the argument. It’s fascinating.”
“I’m glad you’re amused.”
“No, I’m appalled. Well, intrigued, that might be more accurate. And alarmed. And perhaps a little depressed at finding myself in the middle of it all when I could be touring the T-bana, or back at home, brooding with a view.”
“Understand this,” said Ghiberti. “My mother wants to destroy me. There is nothing frivolous about that. Whether I am a serial killer or not is irrelevant.”
“Not to the girls who died in the snow, not to their grieving families.”
“Of course. But this, right now, is between my mother and me. She means to destroy me. And I will resist.”
“By destroying her first.”
“If I have no choice.”
“But you do. There’s always a choice.”
No, Harry. You don’t believe that.
“I am asking you,” Bernd continued. “Save her life. I promise, without your intervention, she will die.”
“Or she is already dead and you’re planning to use me as, what? A scapegoat, an alibi, a witness after the fact?”
The last time you saw him in Toronto, you thought he might have already killed her. Now you’re wondering the same thing! Patterns of suspicion, Harry?
“No, she is alive.” Bernd said this with a suppressed snarl that startled them both.
“Then for God’s sake man, you don’t need me to intervene. Walk away from it.”
“Please find her.” Bernd’s voice was eerily controlled. “You’re staring at me, Harry. What are you seeing? Stay out of my mind; I promise you, it is not a comfortable place to be.”
You always want to understand, even when there’s no explanation.
Mystery and the rational mind are not always incompatible.
Exactly, she whispered, they feed off each other’s limitations.
Easy, Sailor, you’re talking like me.
“Trust me,” he said out loud. “I have enough going on in my own head.”
“Find her before I do, Harry.”
“And do what?”
“Wait.”
“Until.”
“It will not be a long wait.”
“And then?”
“Do whatever is necessary.”
Abruptly, Bernd rose to his feet, tossed a bunch of bills on the table, and grabbing his coat from a peg on the wall strode out into the night, leaving Harry to finish his beer on his own.
12 SUMMONED
HARRY WALKED BACK ALONG DROTTNINGGATAN TO Bentleys. He pulled his toque down, warmed by Miranda’s thoughtfulness, and huddled into his smoky sheepskin, holding the collar snug with a gloved hand so that he peered furtively over it like an animal in distress. Not until he was halfway up the exterior steps to the hotel did he sense the presence of Sverdrup, standing in the shadows, his leathery face illuminated by the sustained glow of a cigarette as he inhaled its smoke into the depths of his lungs, or what was left of them. He was outside, this time, but there was no question: he was waiting for Harry.
“If you would please to come with me,” Sverdrup said, flicking his cigarette like a bit of stage business into the snow on the sidewalk below. He stepped down to street level and started walking south. Harry hesitated. He could see his cold decaf through the glass, beside the stale sweet roll in its bag on the step. He was tired and he felt oppressed. But he was curious, and in no doubt that the weaselly man with a face like a satchel intended on leading him to a rendezvous with his boss.
They found Hannah Arnason in a bistro down a narrow passageway just inside the old town, eating a late dinner on her own.
When they approached her table, she stood up, welcomed Harry with a handshake, and dismissed Sverdrup for the night.
She motioned to a chair, inviting Harry to join her. It seemed her office was wherever she happened to be.
She was wearing what looked like lace-up hiking boots but with pointed toes and three inch heels. A marvel of absurdist design, which gave her sufficient height that Harry felt momentarily diminished, a response reinforced by a dramatic sweater that swooped over her shoulders in a scarlet wave, shielding her from drafts while she ate. He drew himself up to his full height and sat down.
“You have met with Bernd Ghiberti,” she declared.
“I have.”
“And you think he murdered the girl in Hagaparken.”
“In all probability. And the Icelandic girl in Toronto.”
“I have been in touch with your friend, the superintendent. She asked me to watch for you.”
“To watch for me?”
“Yes, I have met her, you know.”
He didn’t.
“When I was a student. She had a nice partner, a man who was very sexy.” Hannah Arnason said “sexy” like she was complimenting Miranda on her wardrobe. “I was in Toronto, training to be a policeperson. You would say a policewoman, but I do not like that word.”
Harry wasn’t about to argue with her on the limitations of English in relation to gender.
“We went to your headquarters and they lectured us.”
“Not my headquarters. And what did she say?”
“Oh, I do not remember.
It was almost ten years ago.”
“No, now. When you talked to her.”
“Oh, yes. She agrees.”
“With what?”
“With you. With me. Mr. Ghiberti kills women, yes. It seems probable. Would you like some dinner? I know you have eaten nothing. I have ordered for you.”
Before Harry could protest or consent, a waiter appeared and set a blue and white plate in front of him with sautéed beet slices, sauerkraut, mashed potatoes, three sausage links, and a sprig of fresh parsley. He had not realized how hungry he was.
“I will pay,” she said. “Please enjoy.”
Hannah Arnason watched him eat and he felt strangely at ease. When he finished, he told her about his conversation with Bernd Ghiberti.
“And you believe him?”
“That he might murder his mother?” said Harry. “Yes, it seems reasonable that a pathological psychotic with homicidal propensities and a sordid childhood should aspire to matricide.”
“Isn’t a psychotic by definition pathological? And a pathological killer by definition psychotic?”
“Possibly.”
“Then it appears you must be her saviour, Harry.”
Harry flinched.
“Unless we can find other crimes to arrest Mr. Ghiberti for before he does it, which seems unlikely at the moment. You appear to be all that stands between his mother and death.”
Nicely ambiguous.
“Can’t you protect her?”
“From what, a bad life, a difficult son? There is nothing we can do; there’s nothing to be done. There’s nothing to be done.” She seemed for a moment to be humming to herself, but Harry had no idea what it was. “Not until after it happens. That’s the worst part of police work: clearing up the mess you were powerless to prevent.”
“And what would your official position be, if I were to kill the man, as he seems to want? I don’t go around killing people, you know.”
“Not unless you have to, I’m sure. In anticipation of a crime, as a preventative measure, that would be justifiable perhaps, but homicide, nevertheless. In self-defence, or to save a life, possibly acceptable, if the mitigating circumstances are truly that.”
“What?”