by Mark Ellis
She turned to Melissa. “See anything you like?”
But Melissa had decided that with the cruise on the horizon, she wouldn’t be buying today. She’d been looking for a kitschy-cool retro lamp for her home office, and she coveted an authentic tribal dream catcher. The Inside Passage would surely offer a trove of those. And there was always the chance that she would find the perfect lamp on the cruise.
As they strolled to another table, a rumpled street person called out in a loud voice. “Ain’t nothing changed for me,” he proclaimed, loudly enough to add menace to the bazaar’s tableau of simmer and contraction. “You lose everything, you kill yourself.”
Bazaar security moved slowly around him.
“Not me,” he yelled as the officers approached.
“Not me,” he said more quietly, once they were upon him. The entire plaza seemed to watch for long moments, moments in which security delivered what seemed from a distance to be terse warnings. A Seattle Police cruiser rolled up. With glances all around, Melissa, Shauna, and Randy set out for a nearby café.
Chapter Eleven
That evening after things cooled down, Melissa treated herself to a long swim in the complex pool, noting with gratitude that the pool tech had lowered the temperature of the water. She had the giant pool all to herself and channeled the Blythe family’s handsome presidential swimmer while doing her laps.
Back at her condo desk, she mustered up the energy to call Detective Rob Zambria in New York City and leave him a message requesting a call back. It didn’t surprise her when he rang back at midnight, three in the morning on the East Coast. She asked if he would be willing to make his office available for a webcam interview, assuming the subject was amenable.
“Absolutely,” agreed the gruff-voiced Zambria. “Who are we talking about?”
Melissa dropped the Lara Svenko reference, adding, “It’s her father. I’ll call him first thing in the morning.”
“Right, but isn’t this Svenko thing a done deal?”
“All I know is that the magazine doesn’t buy the official line and wants us to ask a few more questions. At this point, we kind of feel it’s all about them.”
Next morning, she dialed Viktor Svenko’s number on her landline and got him on the fifth ring. His hello was articulate in a way that Melissa had ethnocentrically not expected and sounded tired. She identified herself and her assignment.
“I don’t know the point of keeping with the investigation,” Viktor said.
“Well,” said Melissa, “there’s always the possibility that Trans Oceanic was somehow negligent, which could open the possibility of damages.”
“The damage is done,” said the Russian, as if insulted by her remark. In any case, the idea of legal action was a ruse. Throughout investigations both local and federal, the Northstar was shown to have proceeded impeccably. From the moment Svenko boarded the ship to when she was discovered missing and finally to the moment the circuit court gaveled the posthumous inquiry to an end, Trans Oceanic had gone by the book, and beyond. There were no broken railings on the ship, no poorly maintained substructures that could have explained a fall from the liner. Svenko had run up only a respectable cocktail tab the night she died, two White Russians, and in fact, like other members of the press, she had been given solicitous attention on the voyage.
Listening to Viktor’s slow breathing on the phone line, Melissa wondered if anyone in the widower’s circle ever spoke of Lara. She’d learned on her earliest cases how friends and associates gradually avoid speaking of the departed and how those nearest the deceased secretly grieve over the loss of the loved one’s spoken name. Often an investigator got the sense that he or she was the only person saying the name anymore. When Melissa told Viktor that there would be a considerable stipend in exchange for granting a new interview, he said, “I don’t want money, only the truth of how Lara died.”
Melissa assured him that was fine, that she respected that, and told him that an agent named Zambria would be calling soon to escort him to an office where they could chat, face-to-face.
Viktor agreed, and next morning he proved good as his word. Zambria’s linkup materialized on Melissa’s condo computer at the appointed time, and through the high-quality camera appeared a face that had seen enough back alleys to stock a library full of film noire. The buff Italian detective looked back at Melissa from his desk chair appraisingly, every bit the diviner of big-city whodunits and attractive female investigators. Behind him, a steel and glass curtain of midlevel Manhattan skyline stretched across the window.
“Ms. Blythe, I don’t think we’ve worked together before,” he said. “I’m sure I would have remembered.”
Melissa wasn’t crazy about the way he was looking at her, but she sucked it up. There were justifiable sexual harassment cases, and then there were women who simply could not be dealt with. Word got out, and the men would freeze them out. In her experience, a little flirting came with the territory.
“Likewise,” she replied flatly.
“So, anyway,” said Zambria, confidently enough to suggest that the matter of his appraisal was still on the table, “I have here Mr. Viktor Svenko. Mr. Svenko, if you’ll please take my seat.”
Zambria moved off screen to allow a smallish elderly man to position himself and descend into the high-backed leather throne. Melissa’s first impression was that notwithstanding his age and the travails of what must have been a hard life on the hydraulic circuit, Viktor’s eyes were still furtively intelligent, as if all his life had been a matter of waiting for portentous knocks at the door.
“Mr. Svenko, thank you for coming today. May I call you Viktor?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you. Viktor, I want you to think back. Is there anything in Lara’s Russian or American past that might possibly explain what happened on the ship?”
“You mean beside the fact she’s a Socialist?”
“No,” Melissa softened, imagining the day he’d received news of his daughter’s death. “What I mean is, is there anything else, anything having nothing to do with her political activism?”
Viktor pondered over this larger context.
“Depression, relationship problems?” Melissa prompted.
When Viktor hesitated longer, Melissa sensed that her investigatory precursors hadn’t gone beyond the cruise and its political implications. Finally, he began to stutter something up—the kind of halting disclosure sleuths know can contain the seeds of revelation.
“Barb Stamen,” he said. “I think it has a connection.”
“What about this Barb Stamen?”
“Always I say it is no good,” he said, “for them to be together.”
Melissa couldn’t see her cohort, Zambria, but could feel his heightened interest tick in the small office so many miles away.
“Let me understand,” probed Melissa. “They were friends, or more than that?”
“They were lesbian,” said Svenko.
“You objected to your daughter being with a woman?”
“No, this woman.”
A rumble began to slowly overtake the audio of the transmission. It grew inward upon itself, becoming a whine of amplified propulsion. Melissa could swear it was rattling the window behind Viktor, who looked back and up.
Zambria’s head poked into the side of the frame. “Um, sorry, Ms. Blythe. They come in low on the way into LaGuardia.”
“Viktor,” said Melissa when the roar subsided, “I want you to tell us everything you know about Barb Stamen. Will you do this?”
“Visit her website. That’s all you need to know.”
“Website?”
“Yes, on the computer. You just put in her name.”
It was noon, and only the clericals were still around, hurrying up and down between Scrimshaw’s floor and the staff offices. Melissa’s decision to grab a quick gyro before searching the name Viktor Svenko had given her turned out to be a bad idea. The website that came up odiously recalled to her the morbid F
aces of Death film series of the late 1980s. Deathknell.com in all its gory glory was the cyber-embodiment of this school of real-life horror.
She found Barb Stamen on the About page of the Seattle-based enterprise, head mistress of an online charnel house full of human misfortune and mortality. On the satin-black Home page, she found options for galleries full of morgue shots, crime scene photos, and accident footage and a special gallery containing the captures of amateur photographers who happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.
Melissa had seen her share of crime scene photos, but she clicked through to measure the depravity of the site. Every imaginable misfortune that could befall living flesh was displayed over captions with sophomoric comic-book humor.
Shotgun suicide: He was at his wit’s end.
Air balloon/electrocution fatality: This will burst your bubble.
Dumpster compactor accident: Poor white trash.
A woman crumpled on a concrete sidewalk: Watch that last step—it’s a bitch.
Catchy banners drifted over the Internet graveyard, announcing new exhibits on newly created pages. Grinning skulls invited browsers into evermore gruesome galleries. Gear could be purchased—caps, T-shirts, and a gangrenous green coffee mug featuring the site logo. There were chat rooms and links to similar sites. How reprehensible it all was. Melissa’s full stomach turned at the thought of the ghastly appetites that were satisfied in this dark corridor beneath even the sickest recesses of the web.
Worst were the videos on display. Everything from post-collision highway mop-ups to filmed and fatal animal attacks. Air-crash aftermaths, live stoning of faithless Arab women, and real-time political executions. Horrendous reels from undeveloped parts of the world, where men accused of stealing bread were yoked with a tire, doused and burned.
In the photographic flesh, the demonic-eyed Stamen became an immediate suspect in the death of Lara Svenko. Her black hair was cut in a medieval pageboy, her lipstick was formaldehyde amber. An upside-down cross hung between her small breasts. No dummy, she’d earned a graphic arts BA from Mills College in Oakland, minoring in web design. She was former editor for the literary magazine Unspeakable and had won a Bram Stoker Award for her short story “Cufflinks.” The webmistress had a daughter, Circe, ten, living with her father, according a year-old entry on the site’s blog.
A recent post noted that it would be Stamen’s last for three months. She was taking the summer off, leaving the site in the capable hands of Assistant Editor Hailey Dusk. Stamen’s accomplice was another Goth-inspired wisp, her hair blood red and spiked by gray sprigs like Pinhead’s Hellraiser nails.
There were a few other staffers, all women, one of whom had a three-dimensional tattoo of a tracheotomy on her throat. The Contact page was located beneath two pens dripping with blood. Melissa hesitated, rubbing her temples, then clicked away from the site.
Did Stamen take a hiatus over the summer of 2008 too?
Melissa pondered why these educated young women would apply their intelligence to such a debased enterprise. What human characteristic were they appealing to with this den of prurience and necrophilia-tinged voyeurism? The only thing she came up with was a Psychology Today analysis of the slasher genre she’d once read. Stamen and Dusk belonged to a generation unmoved by the pathos of humanistic fiends like Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, King Kong, or even Godzilla. They’d been subjected to an ironic lack of regard for dignity in death. They likely had no religion and distrusted traditionalist society’s narrative about mortality. Their response was Deathknell, hung like a shrunken head at the entrance to a Burmese hut.
If Viktor Svenko could be believed, Melissa had disinterred a grim factoid that all the federal sifters and badge-wearing goodfellas like Zambria had apparently missed. She gave her strained temples a deep-tissue rubdown, and another thought came: maybe the authorities hadn’t missed this obvious lead. Perhaps there was another narrative they wished to keep alive.
An email chimed through from Ms. Claymore.
Morris Laszlo’s body found. Details to follow.
Morris Laszlo had gone to the family compound along the Columbia River after the Meltdown. And then he left again, probably during the federal inquiry into insider trading allegations against the family business. At some point later, he returned and hanged himself from the low-hanging bough of a mature beech tree near a water cistern behind the family’s riverfront spread.
He might’ve rotted where he hung. The cistern was serviced only prior to the start of the summer season, when the family visited, and they hadn’t come since late September of 2008. The death investigator’s theory was that coyotes got to Morris’s legs, tore him down, devoured him, and strewed his bones across a small tributary that runs down from the cistern. A handyman’s dog found the remains.
Chapter Twelve
There was a knock on the door of an apartment roughly three miles from Manhattan Island’s Ground Zero in a building that might have been cut and pasted from entries in a pre-collapse, Soviet Union architectural design competition. The quietly insistent rapping startled Viktor Svenko because it was late, the latest he’d had a visitor since one fateful night eight years before.
Someone had knocked on his door the night of September 11, 2001, an immigrant woman who’d mixed up the floors. Viktor had looked into her eyes with heightened awareness; she was the only living creature he’d seen that day, for he stuck to his rooms. He’d heard the boom from the first plane and from his concrete balcony had watched as smoke rose where he knew the tip-tops of the Trade Center towers to be. A second hit, unbelievably, on his small-screen television. Then both tip-tops of the towers were gone. Later came the wee-hours knock, the empty woman, seemingly unaffected by the horrors of the day. Viktor understood. He was saddened and scared, but the soil under his feet was not his homeland. He’d felt vicarious in his horror.
There was nothing tentative about the knocking on his door now. He was sure whoever was knocking had never knocked before. He summoned his strongest voice. “Who is it?”
A muffled reply: “I was a friend of Lara.”
Leaving the chain lock secured, Viktor opened his door a crack.
Standing in the dim corridor was the kind of woman he’d never expect to see in this museum of subsistence. Gorgeous, emaciated, her matted red hair done up wickedly into a mantle of gray thorns. Her eyelids were laden with giant globs of metallic-silver goop, and her lips, in jaundice gold, pursed with intention. A worn denim jacket draped loosely on her skeletal frame and slung around her shoulders was an oversized studded leather purse.
“Hi, I’m Hailey Dusk. I was very close to Lara. May I come in?”
“What is it you have to discuss with me?” intoned Viktor.
She affected a deference that belied her garish costume, and Viktor expected that she might kick the door at any second, pulling the chain lock from its beat-to-hell jamb.
“I have something for you, from Lara.”
Viktor’s proletarian instinct for self-preservation bade him to close the door and call building security. The woman seemed to sense this. “Please, Viktor. I loved your daughter. Do you think I could possibly do you harm?”
He unloosed the ridiculous chain lock and admitted her, but the very second he closed the door behind her, he feared he’d made a mistake. She strode into the living room contemptuously, as if forced to loiter in an outhouse, fished a pack of smokes out of the front pocket of her bleached denim jacket, and lit a cigarette. As the tobacco mixed with the odor of blackened bananas and sink-washed undergarments, she produced from under the purse’s black flap what he recognized as a laptop computer.
“It’s Lara’s laptop. Barb wanted you to have it.”
She was smiling, but there was cruel fire underneath the cool silver of her eyeliner. She was a creature reminiscent of those in the frightful video games he caught glimpses of in the Times Square parlors. Viktor reached out cautiously and took the black laptop she held out to him.
&n
bsp; “I thank you for this, but I don’t understand why you return it to me.”
His visitor blew a long vortex of lip gloss–scented smoke into his face.
“It contains your daughter’s last writings, and Barbara did love Lara, but let me tell you something, old man.”
Viktor had survived the Stalinist antecedents, Khrushchev’s doomsday shoe, Brezhnev’s inscrutable détente, and the good-faith failings of Gorbachev. Now, cornered in his own home, he prepared for the conditions by which he would escape being forcibly rejoined with his daughter.
Dusk snorted nicotine out of her nostrils, this time averted. In a gesture worthy of any fed-up Gulag commandant, she stubbed the cigarette butt out on a tea saucer on his coffee table.
“Did Barb Stamen kill my Lara?” he asked, throwing himself on the mercy of being Lara’s kin.
Dusk softened, her eyes lowered, a terrifying intimation that served no further purpose than to show Viktor he was about to be liquidated.
Viktor opened two windows, allowing the breeze off an East River slough to dilute the smoke of Dusk’s cigarette.
For a long moment, his night visitor had looked out his sweat-moldy aluminum picture window, turning her back to him as if he were bound and gagged. It occurred to him that she loved Barb Stamen as well as she claimed Stamen loved Lara. How unfortunate for his daughter to have fallen in with such women. For Lara’s sake, it would have been better to remain under the acid rain of Lake Stavack. If she was fated to seek the love of her own sex, there were surely hidden pockets of such attraction in the homeland.
Now only he remained of the Svenko family. Viktor would live out his years in this anonymous mimic of Building Seven.
“This case is closed, Mr. Svenko,” Dusk warned after he asked about Stamen and his daughter’s fate. “Barb thought you should have this, consider it a gesture, but don’t give me reason to return.”