Lindstrom's Progress Page 2

  You’re a cultural theorist. You know it’s never as simple as that.

  Was, Harry. I’m dead. And you’re a philosopher. You love the confusion.

  Was a philosopher.

  Once one, always one.

  It’s something you do, not something you are.

  Wittgenstein said that before you did.

  He might have. Anyway, it’s not the confusion that attracts me, it’s the complexity—an existential challenge to explore the innumerable unknowns between the initial premise and what seems a foregone conclusion. You know where you’re going but not how to get there.

  You’re being pretentious, Harry.

  And you’re being sesquipedalian.

  That literally means “a foot and a half long.” You’re being sesquipedalian, saying I am.

  He sat back and observed Madalena Strauss observing him. With a shock he realized it was not Karen who had distracted him from the images of death on the pavement outside but this woman sipping coffee like an autoerotic experience. With her red hair burning rampant in the pointillist light from the sconces and chandelier, with her tailored clothing and rakish demeanour, and with her piercing green eyes and petulant lips, he thought she must be the most sensual being he had ever encountered.

  “From the roof,” he reiterated, trying to get his bearings. “Are you sure?”

  “The Canadians? Yes, from the roof.” She gazed into his eyes with unnerving intimacy. “You will help me, Harry. My colleagues in Stockholm and Toronto told me you are very good at what you do.”

  “I am,” he said. He worked more effectively by projecting confidence. He had learned that from Chief Inspector Gamache and Hercule Poirot. “You need someone discreet to find out why you have not been arrested,” he said. “Canadians are renowned for discretion.”

  “Good!”

  “Superintendent Miranda Quin? Inspector Hannah Arnason?” She nodded affirmation. For the time being, it was enough to know how she had found him.

  Miranda’s a fan, Harry. I doubt Hannah Arnason is. You slept with them both.

  Not with Hannah; it was never consummated. Miranda was a very long time ago.

  Measurable in months, not years.

  “It is beyond my scope to investigate the police,” he said.

  “But not the crime.”

  “And I have no desire to prove an innocent woman guilty.”

  “I assure you, I am not innocent.”

  One way or another, I have no doubt.

  A passing waiter refreshed their cups, pouring espresso and steaming milk simultaneously with an elegant flourish, and then slipped back into his place as a fixture in a milieu redolent of honourable servitude and Edwardian decadence.

  Habsburg decadence, Harry.

  He gazed around the room, taking in the ornate plasterwork, the dark wood panelling, the brocade curtains, and so much upholstery it seemed like an explosion of colour from his Aunt Beth Lindstrom’s living room. An overlay of Regency, Victorian, Edwardian with not much of more recent vintage.

  Federal, not Regency, Harry. And she was your great aunt.

  Arguments with Karen continued to be a lovely diversion. They had resumed within months of her death, perhaps initiated, accommodated, encouraged, because her body had never been recovered from the Anishnabe River where the Devil’s Cauldron had devoured their children, spit Harry out as a pathetic survivor, and ground Karen into detritus or secreted her battered corpse under muskeg downriver. The full impact of her death was not quite as apprehensible as those of Matt and Lucy, whose ashes were mingled in a rural cemetery near where the family had lived.

  His mind swarmed with unruly details. Karen had distracted him from the woman opposite and her puzzling dilemma. He drew himself into the moment, but instead of responding to the urgency of her presence he spied beyond her in a dark corner of an anteroom the big man who had come to his room. The man was hunched awkwardly over as if he were trying not to be noticed in spite of his enormous size and ill-fitting apparel.

  “Do you recognize that guy over there?” he asked Madalena Strauss.

  She pivoted in her chair—he couldn’t tell if she saw him—then she looked back at Harry. “Is it someone you know?”

  “We’ve met.”

  The improbability of Harry knowing another person in Vienna did not seem to arouse her curiosity.

  Harry sat back in his chair. There was a stillness between them that he found unsettling. She was more sinister than he had expected, more attractive than he could have imagined. She had a single-minded need to understand why she wasn’t being prosecuted, she showed no empathy for the man she had murdered, and she was comfortable without the chatter that others might have considered a social necessity.

  Those sound like symptoms, Harry.

  Your doctorate is in the eternal verities, he responded. You’re not a real doctor.

  Uneasy with his companion’s ominous charisma, not comforted by Karen’s sardonic wit, he drew himself into focus. “Do you think the police won’t lay charges because you’re one of them?” he asked.

  “No, that is not it.”

  Harry waited. They both recognized it was time to fill in the details.

  After giving the appearance of consulting notes inside her head, Madalena Strauss explained that she worked out of the central detachment at the Polizei Zentralkommando on Herrengasse inside the Ringstrasse. She was an investigating detective in homicide. When Dietmar Henning floated up in the Danube Canal, his corpse was identified, and she was informed and initially kept apprised of the investigation. As months passed and she heard less and less, she became edgy, then alarmed. She pressed the investigating officers at Polizeiinspektion Donaufelderstrasse across the canal and discovered the case had been filed under Ungelöst. Unsolved. They had moved on.

  “So you didn’t immediately confess?”

  “They would have had a stronger case if they solved it on their own. There was lots of evidence but not too much. I am in the profession, Harry. I know how to seed a crime.”

  “And you wanted them to have the best possible case, of course.”

  “Of course. You understand.”

  “It’s rather unusual to work for the guilty party. I usually leave that to the defence lawyers, Ms. Strauss.”

  Harry glanced over into the anteroom. The fat man had slipped away. His coffee accoutrements were still in place on the table beside his empty chair. Harry tried to assimilate conflicting thoughts about the small boy who had trusted his parents, about his own shock and revulsion, about the revised account that had them leaping from the roof, about the absurdity of the bellicose man barging into his room, with the absurdity of the man peeping at him over pastries like a child hiding behind upraised hands.

  “Mr. Lindstrom?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  Her lips were red and full but pulled tight against her teeth, slightly open. She was breathing through her mouth.

  When her lips relaxed, they were her most sensual feature.

  She hasn’t stood up yet, Harry. I’m sure you’ll find other attributes. What about the extravagant hair? Piercing eyes. Good teeth. Strong nose. Neat bosom. Don’t say you’re not looking. You are.

  Sometimes Karen made Harry uncomfortable. He shifted in his chair, pushing her into one of the darker corridors of his mind where she could amuse herself among shared images and stillborn thoughts.

  “Why do you believe your Dietmar Henning deserved to die?”

  “He stole a family treasure.”

  Harry had been expecting a litany of heinous crimes. Theft was not even on his list.

  “A treasure worth a human life?”

  “A painting.” She tilted her head, as if flirting, but she wasn’t. She pushed her hair away from her face. “Quite valuable for sentimental reasons.”

  “Valuable?”

  “Twenty million euros.”

  That’s a lot of sentiment, Harry!

  “A Klimt,” he said without pausing t
o think.

  “Exactly, a Gustav Klimt.”

  Since arriving three days ago in Vienna, Harry had been in pursuit of that most philosophical of painters. He had toured the Arts building at the Universität Wien, several museums, palaces, galleries, wherever Klimt was on display.

  Before the accident, when Harry taught philosophy, when Karen and Matt and Lucy were alive, he had become fascinated by Klimt. A record $135,000,000 was paid for a 1907 portrait and Harry was intrigued by the bizarre correlation between art and value. He published an essay on the subject in an obscure academic journal and explored it in lectures and seminars during his last spring at Huron College. And despite his antipathy to hanging prints of famous paintings at home rather than original works, he had a small Klimt reproduction on the wall of his condo bathroom.

  “You own an original Klimt?” he asked.

  She gestured to a waiter and to Harry’s surprise she ordered a single malt scotch on the rocks. Harry demurred. He preferred the subtlety of wines or the folksy congeniality of a good North American beer.

  “Original, yes. It wouldn’t be worth stealing if it wasn’t. It’s the artist’s maquette for The Kiss in the Österreichische Galerie at the Belvedere Palace.”

  “I saw it yesterday. It’s—” He stopped, at a loss for words. Language in his mind had not yet caught up to his perception of Klimt’s dazzling achievement. “What do you mean a maquette? I thought that was a term in sculpture.”

  “No, mine is on canvas. You forget, English is not my language. It is not a cartoon or sketch. He completed it down to the shimmering gold. It’s a relative miniature, the size of a laptop, but it’s not quite the same. The one on public display is life-size, perhaps two metres by two metres, six feet by six.”

  “I’m okay with metric. Is it catalogued?”

  “Mine? No.”

  Harry waited.

  “The woman in both paintings is my great-grandmother. Klimt gave her the small one. They were lovers, I assume. I like to think so.” Her green eyes blazed in splashes of light from sconces on the panelled walls. “Of course, he had many lovers. Perhaps she did as well. She was very striking, don’t you think? You have visited Secession, yes?”

  Was that a question, a guess, or an observation?

  Harry had been at the Secession building earlier in the day, on Friedrichstrasse off Karlsplatz between the Opera and the Market. It was an art nouveau gem, built in 1897 with an austere white exterior, severe angles, a whimsical facade of owls in conversation, and a gold-leaf dome or cupola cradled in its upper reaches like the sun captured in an architectural vice. Nearly empty inside but the home of Klimt’s frieze from 1903 dedicated to Beethoven, with some of the most striking representations of female sexuality ever portrayed. The most erotic of these was a naked woman with electric green eyes, lips full of promise, and a voluptuous mane of copper red hair—a woman who bore an uncanny resemblance to the woman sitting opposite him now.

  She obviously expected him to make the connection, as if that would verify the credibility of her claim to owning an unregistered original.

  It worked; he believed her.

  He asked how they had had such good fortune to keep it in the family.

  “Good fortune, oh yes. My great-grandmother was from Mauthausen, a small town near Linz. In Vienna, she lived a bohemian life but retired back to her home town and eventually married a local landowner. After the Anschluss in March of 1938, Austria was declared a province of the Third Reich. The painting was hidden. My great-grandmother was Jewish, which meant the picture was Jewish and a dangerous possession. Klimt, on the other hand, was highly prized by the Nazis, who seized many of Austria’s treasures. That too made it a dangerous possession.”

  “Hidden where?”

  “Behind another painting in the same frame, an unsigned amateur landscape painted by her daughter, my grandmother. It was given on loan to the Mauthausen Rathaus to hang in the mayor’s office just before the Wehrmacht took over the building. A beautiful Jew looked down on Nazi proceedings from behind a thin veneer of Austrian scenery. Such irony, yes? And by the end of the war she was forgotten by those of our family who survived, except for my mother, who was determined to leave it hidden, along with her worst memories of the war. She was only eight when she returned home. The painting was part of a fantasy word that was gone forever.”

  “Until you discovered where it was.”

  “I did. I stole it back. She was ours.”

  “You stole it.”

  “Even the frame. I left an envelope with a thousand euros. That was more than my grandmother’s landscape was worth.”

  Her green eyes flashed as she brushed her hair away from her face. Harry sat straighter in his chair.

  “And your grandmother and her mother, what happened to them?”

  “Getötet und gebrannt, the official ledger declared. There was another sister, my great aunt, who I assume met the same fate. Killed and burned.”

  “Killed and burned.” In those simple words, the horrors of the Holocaust leapt from historical knowledge to personal reality, graphic in their simplicity, terrible in their acceptance.

  Harry filled the emptiness with a question, turning their talk back to the painting itself. “You recovered your Klimt quite recently, then?”

  “No. No, it was some time ago. My mother told me before she died. She was forty when I was born. I’m not even sure she knew it was anything more than a family story. For me, the actual painting, when I found it, was affirmation. I did have a past—out of the ashes, something beautiful and precious.”

  “What did you do with it, Madalena? Did Dietmar Henning know where it was.”

  “My great-grandmother hangs proudly on my living room wall in the Gumpendorfer district beside the reframed landscape by my grandmother. For now, the Klimt is mine to enjoy. Someday it will go to Austria. It belongs to Austria. Dietmar knew where it was; he could hardly miss it. But he did not know what it was, at least not until the end.”

  “You never told him?”

  “Everyone assumes it’s not real. There are many copies of Klimt in the world, some of them very convincing.”

  “Yet he stole it.”

  “He stole jewellery—heirlooms recovered when Vienna was an occupied city after the war. I am quite rich.”

  “And the police, do they know about your Klimt?”

  “It is immaterial. They found my jewellery in his abandoned car by the canal. The painting never left my wall. If they had noticed it, they would have thought it a fake, not even a forgery, worth maybe a few hundred euros.”

  “Fake, not forgery?”

  “Forgeries try to replicate the original; that’s the point of a forgery. My painting, apart from being smaller, shows a woman with flashing green eyes who looks like she’s about to rise up and devour her lover. In the ‘official’ painting, her eyes are closed, and her arm is draped around her lover’s neck. He’s not drawn down to her but looming over. She is kneeling and he is standing, and she looks, how do you say, do you know the word, louche. It is French. She is not quite so louche as in my version.”

  Does he know the word! But of course.

  Karen.

  “Mine does not pretend to imitation.”

  “And you have the ‘chain of evidence’ to prove it’s authentic.”

  “My broken family, that is enough.”

  “And Dietmar Henning figured out it was original.”

  “Eventually. He was a very bad man, but he was not stupid. I would never have a stupid lover.”

  “How bad?”

  “His trade was extortion and blackmail. His victims were gangsters in the drug trade.”

  “That strikes me as stupid.”

  “It was profitable. Dangerous, yes, but unlikely to be prosecuted. And without knowing it, as a detective at the Polizei Zentralkommando I provided protection. Eventually colleagues informed me about him—anonymously, of course, for fear of retaliation in case I already knew. When I confr
onted him, he figured it was time to move on.”

  “Not quickly enough, it seems.”

  She apparently saw no humour in Harry’s comment. They looked past each other in silence. Then something caught her attention.

  “Your friend in the doorway is staring at us,” she said. “I wonder, is he watching you or is he watching me?”

  “Perhaps both,” said Harry, without turning.

  “Or perhaps neither,” she said. “He’s leaving now.”

  “I thought he had already left,” said Harry. The fat man’s presence was baffling, although on a minor scale. Far more momentous were the deaths of the Canadian couple and their child. Far more compelling was this woman across from Harry with her unsettling allure and strange determination to be taken for a cold-blooded killer.

  “I’ve often wondered if a work of art is worth dying for?” he mused. “Or killing for?”

  “Ah, then you have never owned a Klimt.”

  “No,” said Harry. “I never have.”

  Madalena Strauss shifted uneasily.

  “I think I must go,” she said. “Here is my business card.”

  “Can we meet tomorrow?”

  “Yes. I have been very busy, I’m sorry. I had to leave Vienna for a few days. Now we will cooperate. You come to Gumpendorfer, no, is better if we meet at the Café Central. It is very famous and close to my office. At noon. We will have lunch. I will answer your questions.”

  “Good,” said Harry, a little uncertain what his questions would be.

  He took her hand as they both stood up, turned it so her fingers briefly rested in his palm. At the same time, he did an inventory as Karen expected, which he completed as she walked away into the main lobby.

  Smart skirt, right length, crisp blouse, perfect legs, proud bottom, modest heels. Harry sat down again and toyed with his cup. Curiously, Karen remained noncommittal.

  Something moved beside him. He momentarily flinched and turned to catch a spectral image of himself in a polished wood panel. His encounter with Madalena Strauss had left him on edge.