Lindstrom's Progress Read online

  Copyright © 2018 John Moss

  Published by Iguana Books

  720 Bathurst Street, Suite 303

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  M5S 2R4

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of the author or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Front cover image: “Univers-elle ou Larmes d’or” by Anne Marie Zylberman

  Front cover design: Ruth Dwight

  Detail from “Univers-elle ou Larmes d’or” by Anne Marie Zylberman, 2006, commonly and erroneously attributed to Gustaf Klimt.

  A Stonewood Imprint

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Moss, John, 1940-, author

  Lindstrom’s progress/ John Moss.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77180-280-2 (softcover).–ISBN 978-1-77180-281-9

  (EPUB).–ISBN 978-1-77180-282-6 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8576.O7863L572018 C813’.6 C2018-904094-7

  C2018-904095-5

  This is an original ebook edition of Lindstrom’s Progress.

  for Beverley because I love her

  1 THE KRESSLER

  Harry Lindstrom gazed out a window on the sixth floor of the Kressler Hotel, searching for his reflection in the sheer glass wall of the office tower across Königstrasse. The sun setting behind the hotel surrounded the ornate façade of the Kressler in flames. Blinded by the illusion, Harry looked to the skyline beyond, which was pale and cool as the darkness of evening rose from the oldest part of Vienna and spread over the city. On the horizon, a moving circle of lights outlined the gigantic Ferris wheel in Prater Park as it came to a ponderous halt. The haunting tremulations of a zither resonated inside his skull.

  Forget the theme music, Harry. You should be thinking about murder.

  The voice was familiar, of course. He turned and scanned the room. As he expected, she wasn’t there. He switched on a table lamp with a burgundy shade weighted with crystal pendants before returning to the window and pressing his forehead against the pane. The flames were subsiding. The Ferris wheel began moving again. Self-consciously, he raised his hand over his head as if waving and located his reflection, highlighted in a burgundy glow.

  Well done, said the voice. You’ve found yourself. But remember why we’re here, Harry. She’ll be downstairs by now.

  Harry was in no hurry. Madalena Strauss had kept him waiting three days.

  He expected a plea for civility but heard only silence.

  His gaze shifted to movement in the glass wall as a door opened onto a poorly lit balcony. Three people—a man, a woman, and a small boy—stepped out and stood against the ornate stone balustrade. It took a moment for Harry to realize that they were a reflection from the balcony next to his own.

  The man seemed to look across the abyss at Harry watching him, then he turned and helped the woman clamber up onto the balustrade and lifted the boy and climbed up himself, with the toddler between them, holding their hands. The floor of the balcony above pressed low so that by reaching up with their free hands it provided the adults stability. Again, the man looked directly at Harry’s reflection. Then he turned to the woman, she looked down at the boy, and still holding hands, the three of them stepped into the air.

  Harry gasped for breath, drowning, his mind reeling. He turned from the window, eyes groping for something, a colour, a texture, the brocade wallpaper, gilt-edged mirrors, the grotesque chandelier, something to grasp and take hold and draw him back into the everyday world. Time passed, and he heard honking; more time, then the ululation of sirens.

  He looked out again, straight ahead. The light behind the reflected balcony was filled with movement. The balcony door opened and a very large man stepped out into the open. The man put his hand across his brow to shield his eyes and stared in the direction of Harry’s reflection. He flicked a lit cigarette into the air, cocked his thumb and index finger and jerked his hand upward as an imaginary handgun exploded. Was he miming his contempt for death? Or passing judgment on murder—for the child had been murdered, whatever had driven his parents to end their own lives. Was it an existential gesture aimed at an absent God? Or was he aiming at Harry?

  Before Harry could think how to respond, the large man receded back into the hotel room next to his and shut the door behind him.

  Harry leaned against the window and looked down. Königstrasse was bustling with colours and people. One small area of the sidewalk was cordoned off. Otherwise, a springtime evening in the Opera district of old Vienna was in full swing.

  The Riesenrad Ferris wheel stopped and started again. The zither in his head resumed its unsettling cadence. He listened for his wife’s voice, wondering if she heard it too. She often spoke in his mind. They carried on conversations. While he knew she was dead, she was as real to him as his own sense of himself.

  “Karen.” He whispered her name. They had watched old movies together. They had watched The Third Man many times. The penetrating urgency of the music, the menacing play of distended shadows in a warruined city, seemed the perfect correlatives for what he was feeling now.

  Don’t confuse feeling with thinking, Harry.

  I’m thinking about a movie.

  And what should you be thinking?

  About the boy. About the primal absurdity of arbitrary death. Instead, I’m thinking about music and shadows.

  Maybe that’s all there is, Harry. Music and shadows.

  Don’t, Karen.

  I was a professor of cultural theory. That’s how I think, she said.

  Harry’s struggle to avoid confrontation with what he’d observed was interrupted by a loud thumping. A key turned in the lock and his door burst open.

  The large man from the balcony next door, the fat man who had turned his fingers and fist into a gun, strode over to Harry.

  “Can I help you?” said Harry, standing firm. He could think of nothing more appropriate to say.

  Staying close by the door, a hotel porter exuded smug condescension. So the intruder must be someone with authority, a cop or a gangster.

  “You see nothing,” the fat man said in oddly inflected English.

  “Not very much.”

  “No, Mr. Lindstrom.” The man looked out the window, sidling close enough that Harry had to back away. “You see nothing from here.”

  Less an inflection than grammatical distortion. Not German. Russian, perhaps?

  “Perhaps you are right,” said Harry.

  “Good evening, then.” The fat man turned and left abruptly. The porter, having stepped to the side, followed after him.

  He knows your name, Harry.

  Harry moved close to the window and looked down. After a few minutes, his portly intruder walked past the stained patch of sidewalk where a uniformed officer was removing the yellow tape that had sequestered the death scene. Within moments, pedestrians began passing over the pavement oblivious to the stains or the drama they recalled.

  Vienna is like that, Harry thought. So many European cities are like that. Their bloody histories, small horrors and unspeakable suffering, absorbed into the pavement, the architecture, the atmosphere that in themselves speak of imperial grandeur. A North American city is simple, by comparison. It grows organically. Or, like Detroit, it grows and decays. Wars are fought elsewhere. Triumphal marches are through alien gates.

  There was another knock on his door, this time
deferential.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said the same porter as if the incident of moments ago had never occurred. “There is a lady to see you.”

  “Send her up.”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “No,” said Harry. He let his thought hang in the air. “It’s all right. I’ll meet her downstairs. Ten minutes.”

  He could have just called.

  Or she could, he thought.

  Exactly ten minutes later Harry stepped off the elevator. Wearing jeans, a button-down shirt open at the neck and the nubuck sports jacket he had picked up while working a case on the Swedish island of Gotland the previous winter, he displayed the nonchalant elegance expected of guests at the Kressler. Being forty-three and fit, Harry was comfortable with his personal style. He did not dress for the setting. He assumed any setting he encountered would accommodate the way he dressed. In this, he betrayed not arrogance or sartorial insensitivity but confidence held over from his days as an academic that the mind made the man and clothing was an agreeable vanity.

  He hadn’t given much thought to how he was dressed at the moment. It would have been the nubuck jacket with jeans or his shabbily-genteel Armani blazer with jeans. Either, with brown Cole Haan shoes and no tie.

  He wandered around until he spotted the only woman seated alone. She was ensconced in a splendid, intimate, decadent parlour panelled in dark wood, with an illuminated glass ceiling, formal furnishings, lots of floral prints and red brocade, no windows but wall sconces, an ornate chandelier, and table lamps ablaze with plum-red shades.

  Your lady friend is posing over coffee and biscuits, Harry. She looks rather louche. Don’t you love the word louche. If she weren’t a cop I’d take her for a desperately successful actress or a very expensive escort.

  Harry tried to ignore Karen’s caustic congeniality. His mind was still crowded with images of smashed bodies on the pavement outside. These were intercut with grisly memories he tried to suppress of his family’s destruction by water.

  The woman looked up but didn’t rise when he approached.

  “Harry Lindstrom,” he offered, holding out his hand. She nodded.

  He sat down facing her. A waiter brought fresh coffee and hot milk. A second cup and saucer were already in place. There were sufficient biscuits for two.

  “That was an unpleasant business outside,” the woman offered as a conversational gambit, allowing herself a disinterested grimace approaching disdain.

  “Apparently,” said Harry with as much nonchalance as he could muster. Experience had taught him the best way to deal with the intolerable was to function as normally as possible.

  “They jumped from the roof. It is fortunate no one was under them.”

  “From the roof?” He was not surprised by the distortion of facts, but he marvelled that the fat man could have taken control so quickly. “Quite fortunate,” he agreed. He didn’t associate good fortune with death.

  “They were foreigners.”

  “Really?” Harry wondered why the qualification was relevant.

  “Canadians. Like yourself, Mr. Lindstrom.”

  “Call me Harry.”

  “Call me Madalena if you wish.”

  Madalena Strauss sat tall in a high-backed chair. Her tumultuous hair spread away from her head in an arresting display of copper red waves. She looked around the room with a proprietary air. She was Viennese. This was her world. And then she looked back at Harry.

  “Thank you for coming.”

  “It was difficult to refuse, Ms. Strauss.”

  “Are you attracted to murder, Mr. Lindstrom?”

  “When the case is unusual, yes. And of course to Vienna and to being well paid.”

  “But, as you explained, not in advance. Not until after the case is resolved to our mutual satisfaction.” Her composure seemed to waver but only for an instant.

  “You find it awkward to think of yourself as a case?”

  “My ex-fiancé’s death is a case. I am simply the killer.”

  Harry’s guts were still roiling in his struggle to erase the images of carnage outside, a scene he had not witnessed although the details were embedded like shrapnel in his mind. He wasn’t surprised that Madalena Strauss proclaimed herself a killer. He had found the notion irresistible when she contacted him at home in Toronto. She wanted Harry to establish her guilt, not prove her innocence. He was intrigued from the start to know whether she had actually killed someone, or was something else going on, something more grievous than murder?

  He gazed across the table, scanning her face, looking for emotion. She was very attractive, especially in the indirect lighting of the Kressler, but cool, poised, and predatory like a prize cat musing about vulnerable prey. “You said your ex-fiancé. Was the ex a posthumous designation?”

  She smiled. He wasn’t sure if she didn’t understand the question or if she was amused by his cavalier attention to nuance.

  Her smile lingered. “We were, you would say, dis-engaged when I shot him.”

  “You shot him?”

  “Yes.’

  “And the police refuse to charge you?”

  “I am police.”

  “You shot him with your service weapon?”

  “Yes.”

  “You told me on the phone you had no choice. Wouldn’t that make your crime manslaughter, not murder?”

  “The extenuating circumstances were personal. I intended to kill Dietmar Henning and I did. It was a premeditated execution.”

  “To which you confessed?”

  “Absolutely. I stretched my neck on the guillotine block. But the blade didn’t fall.”

  Harry shuddered, while appreciating her flair for the dramatic.

  “Do they still use the guillotine in Austria?” he asked.

  “Not since 1950. Capital punishment is no longer legal—although sometimes desirable. Before the Third Reich, we sometimes hanged people. Now we use extreme confinement and allow the guilty an interminably tedious lifetime to die from the inside out.”

  “Something you desire for yourself, it seems.”

  “I confessed. My confession was summarily dismissed.”

  “You offered proof?”

  “My word and my knowledge of the circumstances. But three of my fellow officers swore an affidavit that I was with them the night of the shooting.”

  “And you weren’t?”

  “No. They are lying.”

  “What about fingerprints or DNA?”

  “At the scene? Of course, we had been lovers.”

  “Other fingerprints?”

  “None.”

  “The murder took place at his apartment?”

  “His flat, yes. Beside the Danube Canal. He was shot on his balcony. I pushed his body over, went down the elevator, and dragged him to the water.”

  “No witnesses?”

  “It was three in the morning.”

  “And your buddies claimed you were with them at that hour?”

  “A late party, yes. They are not my buddies. My colleagues.”

  “What about ballistics?”

  “A bullet embedded in his heart. I am a good shot, especially close up. But someone exchanged it for an untraceable slug of the same calibre. Another passed through his skull and was never retrieved. I fired three times. The first into the air to get his attention.”

  “Which I’m sure you did. And no one heard the shots?”

  “It seems they did not.”

  “The police checked?”

  “So they say.”

  “It appears there’s a conspiracy to keep you out of prison.”

  “That is it, exactly.”

  “What about the media, the politicians, the police higher-ups, didn’t they want a conviction?”

  “As it turned out, my ex-fiancé was a very bad man. No one grieved for him, no one demanded justice. My claims were dismissed as the hysteria of an anguished lover. My bosses insisted I take some time off with full pay.”

  “And did you?
”

  “In Austria, if you are told to take time, you take time.”

  Harry was not familiar with the finer details of Austrian life. He spoke only a few words of German. He didn’t know the legal system. His understanding of Austria and Vienna came from a brief visit over a decade previously and a couple of hours doing a Google chain where, following reference to reference, he wound up on the site he’d started from.

  When he had at first demurred in the telephone conversation after their initial email exchange, Madalena Strauss insisted that most Austrians spoke English and that she could guide him through the intricacies of Austrian law; he would probably know more about Vienna, after his research, than people who had lived there all their lives.

  “Ms. Strauss, you feel this Dieter Henning—”

  “Dietmar.”

  “If you feel he deserved to die, if you are still convinced that his execution, as you call it, was justified—”

  “A necessity, I had no choice.”

  “And you’ve tried to explain your reasons?”

  “To the authorities? No, they are not relevant.”

  “The authorities or your reasons?”

  She offered a wry smile with pursed lips that told him nothing.

  “What I’m trying to get at is why you insist on being convicted for a crime no one wants to charge you with. Why not just walk away?”

  “You do not walk away from murder, Mr. Lindstrom. If there was a moral imperative to kill Dietmar, there is an equally moral imperative to pay for having done so.”

  Harry was uneasy with facile equations, especially in relation to morality. Whatever her reasons for murdering the man, her task was apparently incomplete until she was jailed for the crime. Why? Retribution, expiation, atonement? She didn’t seem like a woman in search of forgiveness.

  “So you are here, Harry, to do the right thing. Yes?”

  She called you Harry! That’s a good start.

  To what, he wondered.

  Karen was Harry’s conscience as well as his confidante.

  He listened to the bustle of waiters, the ringing of crystal, the resonant clink of bone china. He was waiting. Not for Madalena Strauss. He knew Karen had more to say.

  There’s a pattern, here. Last winter, Birgitta Ghiberti wanted you to prove her son was a serial killer. This gorgeous creature wants you to prove she’s the killer. In both cases you start out knowing who-done-it. Or think you do.