Lindstrom Alone Page 5

  Sigrid flinched but held her ground. She wasn’t afraid of her brother, no matter how weird his behaviour. Being strange was part of his strength. She was wearing Isabella’s black taffeta skirt with a red tartan sash and full-sleeved white blouse. On her, the outfit seemed like a costume, perhaps because it was meant for Christmas, or because Sigrid had not fully grown into a woman’s body and looked like she was playing dress-up. But it made her feel good. Bernd never let her talk about Isabella and she could hardly remember Giovanna.

  “You look silly,” he said, regaining his composure.

  “I’m just trying it on. It almost fits.”

  “The dead are dead, you know. Throw it away.”

  “No.”

  “Do what you want.”

  “Whatever. Do you think Papa suffered?”

  “Do you care?”

  “Of course I care. What a dumb thing to say.”

  “Or maybe I’m just honest, and you’re not. Those people downstairs, they don’t care that he’s dead. They’re just coming in to watch Mom, to see how she takes it. People who go to funerals and stuff are ghouls.”

  “The mass was nice.”

  “Yeah, because we’re Lutheran it seemed better than it was.”

  She sat on the edge of his bed and smoothed the taffeta skirt over her legs. She leaned back against her hands and thrust out her chest, making her small breasts rise against the white cotton of her blouse. Looking down at herself, she felt warm inside. It didn’t bother her that her brother was openly staring at the same thrusting of her breasts. She raised her legs straight and admired her ankles, then suddenly leapt to her feet.

  “Let’s go for a walk!”

  “It’s raining.”

  “No it’s not, you know it’s not, you know without looking. That’s part of being a Wiccan, isn’t it?”

  “No, I’m not practising. I just like reading about it. You wanna play D&D?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Let’s walk over to Pleasantview.”

  “The cemetery? Yuck.”

  “We’ll find Vittorio’s grave. It’ll be with the rest of the Ghibertis, Aunt Terese and Uncle Tony and them. It’ll be open.”

  “Open?”

  “Yeah, they’ve dug it already. C’mon.”

  He had settled on the bed beside her but clambered over and grabbed a sweater from the floor and together they trundled down the stairs, past startled guests in the foyer, pulled jackets from the closet, and were out the door and into the dismal March gloom, on their way to the cemetery, before either had time to think much or say anything.

  When they passed between the stone pillars and under the ornate wrought iron archway into the cemetery, Sigrid slipped her hand into his and trudged along so close they brushed against each other with every step. Bernd knew precisely where the Ghiberti plot was, in the part of the cemetery with lots of ornate tombstones and obelisks, angels weeping and angels ascending.

  Although the rain had stopped, the air was still laden with a fine mizzle that formed halos around the streetlights. The pines loomed dark against the livid glow of the city, and the stark branches of dormant oaks and the occasional chestnut or maple stood out like fractures in the dismal sky.

  Their father’s grave was covered with a tarpaulin that had slipped off its supporting beams under the weight of the rain and draped into the depths of the earth. They stood close, gazing down at the darkness in front of them, fascinated by the icy glint of saturated topsoil near the top of sheer walls that descended through the murky clay into absolute black. Close to one side, an ominous mound partially covered with a mat of artificial turf admitted chunks of frozen ground to lie exposed that had been hacked out by machine. On the other side there was an awning with folding chairs stacked in the shadows.

  Sigrid leaned into her brother’s warmth. She knew both of her sisters lay in graves on the other side of the cemetery, Isabella in a bronze urn and Giovanna in an oak casket with brass handles, and the sky would be equally oppressive hanging over the more discreet, even reticent, tombstones and markers above and around them. She tried not to think about ashes and bone shards or mouldering flesh (or would it be desiccated, she wasn’t sure). She shuddered and leaned closer against Bernd.

  He twisted his neck to look at her and shrugged. He could see the horrid pale light of the city gleam a putrescent green on her forehead. He took a deep breath between pursed lips, flicked his tongue out to moisten them, and put his arm around her. They were standing very close to the edge. Suddenly, he pulled away.

  “Let’s clean this up,” he said. “It’s caving in.” He moved around to the opposite side of the open grave and grasped the tilted end of a beam but couldn’t move it. “Grab the tarp, we’ll have to slide it out of the way.”

  Icy water had pooled in the canvas folds and they had to strain and tug this way and that until it came free, and then they dragged it over the mound, so it reached from the grave’s edge to cover the ersatz turf. They moved around to get grips on the two beams that were tilted precariously at the edge, threatening to fall into the muck at the bottom.

  “That’s better,” he said, once they had set the beams on the tarp, and she moved close beside him, again. He draped his arm across her shoulders. He leaned over and kissed the top of her head, tasting the damp warmth of her hair. She tilted her head to look up at him and he gave her a quick kiss on the lips. They both flinched. He released his grip on her shoulders, jerked his own shoulder in an exaggerated shrug, and she slipped down into the depths of the grave, sprawling with a gurgling splash at the bottom.

  There was a roiling of muck and then silence.

  As he turned to walk away he could hear her begin to cry. She didn’t scream, it was more like a soft moaning. Glancing over his shoulder, an eerie apparition of the tarp, seeming to writhe as one edge was drawn suddenly into the grave, compelled him to pause. The beam near his feet teetered up onto its end as the tarp shuddered beneath it, then plunged into the darkness. The other beam tumbled after it and the unholy whimpering from the depths of the earth came to an abrupt stop.

  When they retrieved her body early the next morning, Bernd was with them. After the alarm was raised that she was missing, he told them he had left her at the cemetery, where they had gone out of respect for their father, and he had become frightened when she decided to re-set the tarpaulin to keep out the rain, and he had gone home and gone to bed. There was no mystery about where she was. She was lying half-buried in muck at the bottom of the grave. When she was extricated, they saw the deep wound in her forehead. Inexplicably, she was dressed in a Christmas outfit that was soiled nearly beyond recognition. The evidence of her fingernails caked with blackened blood and frozen topsoil suggested she had died not from the beam as she tumbled into the grave but from suffocation as a slurry of frigid earth fell on top of her when she tried to claw her way out.

  4 CHRISTMAS

  COLD SEEPED IN AROUND THE EDGES OF HARRY’S sheepskin. He squinted to protect his eyes against the rush of frozen air as he picked up his speed to generate warmth. His face muscles had stiffened into an icy carapace and his nose was in the first stages of frostbite. His toes throbbed as his blood surged to keep warm. After a brief respite in Le Petit Gourmet northwest of the Rosedale subway station, where he dipped a croissant stuffed with marzipan into his third coffee of the day, he practically sprinted on the packed sidewalk until he arrived flushed and breathless at the door of the imposing three-storey Ghiberti house. When the door opened, he stood face to face with a man in his early thirties in trim condition, dressed in a thick Aran sweater, who seemed quite at home. Behind him, Birgitta was talking to a young woman who was passively blonde, as opposed to flamboyant. Birgitta nodded in Harry’s direction, then walked out of his sightline. The young woman followed her.

  “You must be my mother’s detective,” the man said, with no trace of a smile. Bernd, the missing man, was no longer missing. Harry did his best to remain expressionless. The man made
no gesture toward inviting him in. Harry shuddered, clapped his gloved hands and tucked them under his armpits.

  “I’d like to speak to Birgitta,” he said. “Mrs. Ghiberti.”

  “There’s no need. We’ve sorted things out.”

  “Things?”

  “There are no dead bodies.” He glanced down at Harry’s card he had picked up from the foyer table. “Mr. Lindstrom-Malone. There are no random killings, our family skeletons are buried, my sisters were not murdered. They died. My mother has never quite come to terms with that. I’m sure you understand.”

  Harry knew more about arbitrary death than this man could possibly realize. Or did he know more about Harry’s history than his mother did?

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Bernd with an icy smile. “Case closed.” He shut the door in Harry’s face.

  Fuck it, Harry. Let’s go home and roast by a nice warm fire.

  As they walked and for no apparent reason, she started mumbling about nihilism and the compensations of art. By the time he reached the Rosedale subway stop, she had moved on to philosophy, applauding Nietzsche and Sartre because they wrote novels that grappled with pointlessness the only way possible, in fictional terms, and admonishing Heidegger and Wittgenstein because they wrote treatises, not literary texts.

  Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Harry. They weren’t real writers.

  They didn’t pretend to be. But Wittgenstein was a poet, Harry argued. His attention to language as the limit of consciousness attracted Harry, but Heidegger, in spite of his odious politics, was more in tune with Harry’s experience of death as the one and final affirmation of an authentic life. Still, he preferred Wittgenstein’s company from the pantheon of beings that lurked in the labyrinth of his mind, more so than most. Of them all, he was the most poetical. He knew that poetry alone used the inherent ambiguities of language to communicate through evasions of meaning.

  He wrote the most perfect poem of all time, you know.

  Who? What? Harry had to scramble to keep up. She had switched from Wittgenstein to the rather odious anti-Semite, Ezra Pound. He paused in the storm to let her recite Pound’s perfect poem in its entirety:

  “In a Station of the Metro”

  The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

  Petals on a wet, black bough.

  When he got back to his condo, it was midafternoon. Pound’s poem lingered in his mind. It was not perfect. Perfection was not what poetry tried for. But it was evocative, richly allusive, deeply haunting. It was about death and catching a glimpse of timelessness in a delicate moment of time—not so much about that as doing that, the words were themselves the images and the perfect stasis between them. Okay, perfection.

  And another thing, Heidegger was more coherently focused on language than your buddy, Wittgenstein; he dwelled, as he said, in language. For myself, I prefer Saussure’s semiotics, Derrida and his Derrideanisms, the expansiveness of Roland Barthes, or, more, much more, the ponderable imponderable’s of Umberto Eco.

  You’re name-dropping, Sailor. Knowing intellectuals doesn’t make you one, no more than reciting Pound makes you a poet. The poor bugger ranting in a cage in the scorching sun and the mind that wrote your perfect poem don’t connect.

  You guys put him in the cage and he wrote the Pisan Cantos.

  Us guys? The Allied forces, your side.

  I’m dead. I don’t have sides.

  Dusk was beginning to settle over the city but above the lake the light shimmered silver and grey. Another storm was gathering force, this time coming in over the water from the States. Harry cracked open a bottle of ’61 Bordeaux and sprawled on the blue sofa. It was an exquisite claret but after a single glass he recorked the bottle and ate a snack of leftovers from the fridge. With the lights turned low, he watched the approaching snowstorm and tried not to think about dying and death.

  He was relieved to be free of the Ghiberti case but uneasy. There were too many confounding variables and at the same time there were intriguing intimations of a classical paradigm—one sister had drowned, another had turned to dust in a gas explosion, and a third had suffocated under a mudslide. Earth, air, water. If there were to be a fourth, she’d be destined to die in a fire.

  Patterns, Harry! We’ve jumped a couple of millennia from Aristotle to Lévi-Strauss.

  Karen had trained as a literary and cultural theorist and had been on the same faculty in the English Department. Huron College University (that seems redundant, Harry), part of the University of Western Ontario (doubly redundant). Now, mercifully called Western University.

  Harry had been hired as a specialist in British empiricism; he had written his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge on John Locke, but he was more interested during his last years teaching in the contemporary displacement of devotion by zealotry. He was still essentially an empiricist. What you see is what you get.

  Who cares! That was invariably Karen’s most salient argument.

  Their dinner conversation was as likely to be about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dexter as Derrida or Claude Lévi-Strauss. Even when Harry snuck in references to his old Trinity College cohort, Ludwig Wittgenstein, it was more likely to be something about his reputation as a prophet trying to penetrate the swirling darkness of his own thoughts than to the elegant and enigmatic propositions that resulted.

  Sometimes they were playful and sometimes they conversed in the abbreviated jargon couples share.

  Sometimes he called her Sailor, the edge of his mouth curling slightly. After the kids were in bed, they often listened to episodes of Bold Venture on the net, a radio show from the early fifties starring Humphrey Bogart as Slate Shannon and Lauren Bacall as Sailor Duval. Harry’s voice had become gritty from lecturing, although more like Eastwood than the smoky precancerous rasp of Bogart. Karen had been whispering like Bacall since college; it unnerved some men, who thought she was echoing Monroe, but it wasn’t sensual, it was sensuous. There was a difference.

  The snow clouds were closing in. Harry poured himself another Château d’Issan.

  After a while, he could sense Karen’s warm breath on his skin, he could smell the lilac scent of her body, he could see the sheen of her hair, feel the touch of her flesh, and hear the sweet timbre of her voice as she moved with him through the hours. Logic told him she was not there. He was not delusional; he knew she was gone. But that did not mean she was absent or ephemeral. Karen was as real and authentic to Harry as he was to himself.

  They never talked about Matt and Lucy. Their children were buried in a gaping black hole inside him that sucked everything he remembered about them into itself. He simply could not bear the pain, or memories of their drowning, or his guilt for allowing it to happen. Sanity was a precarious condition, bought at the terrible cost of leaving his children behind. He imagined that he and Karen would grow older together. The children would remain children forever.

  When the snow started to fall, it was flurries and the temperature rose to just below freezing. Harry bundled up casually and walked over to the bottom of Spadina. He caught a streetcar up to Little Italy. He found a nice restaurant on College and settled into a pesto pizza with a half-litre of exorbitantly priced Barolo.

  Halfway through, he realized he was feeling the wine and decided to take the pizza remains home. While he struggled to put on his heavy sheepskin coat, he gazed past the glimmering candlelight into the snow flurries outside. The air was obviously still: passersby were walking upright, not huddled against the cold. It was a picturesque scene of urban winter and he was feeling a twinge of pity for people compelled to live in temperate climates, when a familiar halo of flowing white hair caught his eye. Birgitta Ghiberti. She was walking with her son, her arm linked in his. On Bernd’s far side, the same blonde woman Harry had seen for a fleeting moment in their Rosedale home leaned forward and caught his eye. They exchanged glances. She was young and blandly attractive, but when Harry looked away and then back, she had receded again into Bernd’s shadow.

  Were
it not for the contrast with the young woman’s blonde hair, which had an ethereal radiance in the candlelight flickering through the bistro window and the winter lights on the street, Birgitta’s white hair might have been mistaken for blonde as well. There was nothing in the appearance or demeanour of any of them to affirm the strange sense of menace their passing conveyed. Lingering over a glass of grappa, the complimentary eau de vie offered by the proprietor, Harry felt reassured but strangely empty or incomplete having seen the Ghibertis together.

  The next day passed and the next, and Harry was haunted by spectres of the dead Ghiberti sisters. Bernd may not have murdered them, but they died by acts of his obdurate will. Some rough beast had slouched into Bethlehem. The Bad Seed, Damien, Rosemary’s Baby. And yet the man in the Aran sweater who confronted him at the door of the Ghiberti house had seemed less Antichrist than a righteous Lucifer, fallen from grace for bearing the light, cursed for his own survival when his sisters had perished.

  Harry knew about survivor’s guilt.

  By the time Christmas Eve arrived, he had almost succeeded in banishing the Ghibertis, living or dead, from his mind. Young women giving up the ghost in snowdrifts seemed unreal. He called Miranda and let her know he was off the case. She was disappointed, wished him an ecumenical Season’s Greetings, and told him she’d call in the New Year.

  A letter turned up in the mail that he took to be a Christmas card, judging by its shape, the mauve envelope, and the writing in green ink, which was so meticulously done he thought at first it was by machine. There was no return address and no message inside, just a piece of mauve notepaper folded around a cheque for $2000. Made out to Lindstromalone; signed by B. Ghiberti.

  Is it blood money?

  In reverse. She’s paying me to stop the killing.

  It’s to seal the deal, Harry, to say her son intercepting you at the door confirmed his guilt. If you accept this, there’s no turning back.