Lindstrom Alone Read online

  “And Sigrid?”

  “I was thirteen. She fell into a hole and the earth collapsed.”

  “A hole?”

  “My father’s grave.”

  Harry knew the details. It was unsettling to hear the words spoken out loud, especially by Bernd.

  “You were with her?”

  “Not exactly. Right now, I’m concerned for my mother.”

  “You know she talked to the police about you?”

  “When she thought I was missing? I wasn’t.”

  “When she thought you had something to do with Sigrid’s death.”

  “Of course. But what could the police do? She had decided I had a predisposition to murder. She did not believe in the arbitrary whims of a malevolent universe. It was easier to believe in the wickedness of a little boy who grew into a diabolical adolescent before her eyes. Heir to the sins of his father, apparently. Not to her own. When a friend of my middle sister, Rose Ahluwalia, fell from a bridge in the Don Valley a couple of years later, Birgitta blamed me. As far as I know, Rose jumped, but my mother locked me in my room for three days. I was reclusive at sixteen, I liked being alone. She wasn’t cruel, she sent the girl up with meals.”

  “The girl?”

  “Our au pair when Giovanna died. She came back from Guadalajara after she finished university and lived with us. Helped in exchange for expenses. She walked out one day and never returned. Probably went back to Mexico.”

  “Or she’s dead. There seems to be a lot of death around you, Mr. Ghiberti.”

  “And around you, Mr. Lindstrom.” There was a leaden pause in the conversation. “But then, it’s your job, isn’t it?”

  He’s not talking about your family history, Harry; not about us.

  Harry gazed into the dull glow of the Christmas tree lights. He had left them on all night as a small offering in compensation for the tree having been cut down and rendered effete with coloured garlands.

  “How long has she been gone?” he asked.

  “My mother? A few days.”

  “You can’t be more precise?”

  “I come and go. She has an open arrangement with our housekeeping service. They look after the place whether we’re there or not. I am not my mother’s keeper, so to speak. We both travel and I wasn’t too worried. But when she didn’t turn up last night, I knew there was a problem. My sister Isabella died at home on a Christmas Eve. Birgitta would never stay away on the anniversary.”

  “She celebrates the anniversary of her daughter’s death?”

  “Observes, not celebrates, and, yes, she does. All three of them.”

  Harry surveyed his guest’s face, and Bernd seemed unconcerned as he in turn surveyed the room. He seemed to take after his Italian father in appearance, more than his Nordic sisters who apparently had looked like Birgitta. He was an attractive man, almost handsome, although there was something a little askew about his features. They didn’t match his colouring. His complexion was quite dark but his lips were thin, his long nose was narrow, his forehead full. He had dark eyes, creased at the edges; they might have been the eyes of a man twice his age. He did not smile easily, and when he did it was restrained, like he didn’t want to give away too much of himself.

  “Where were you when your mother thought you were missing? Were you in Sweden?”

  The man unaccountably laughed.

  “If I’m in Sweden, she worries. If she worries, I must be in Sweden. I’m with an NGO based in Stockholm so I’m often there.”

  “I thought everything in Sweden was government, even the aid organizations. What do you do?”

  “You mean, what have I got to offer besides compassion? I trained as a paleoanthropologist. Old bones and guesswork. I got sidetracked.”

  Death was too distant in that line of work. He wanted it up close and personal.

  Harry had almost forgotten his coffee. It was lukewarm but he sipped the crema off the top, which still tasted fresh, then drained the cup in a few swallows.

  “It’s a little hard to explain,” the man said.

  “Try me.”

  Don’t be abrupt, Harry.

  Bernd Ghiberti leaned forward on the sofa and gazed out over the harbour.

  “Abused women.”

  “Blondes,” said Harry, without missing a beat.

  “Not at all,” Bernd snapped, apparently taken aback by Harry’s suggestion. “As I explained, it is a sensitive issue.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “I work with brutalized women. Mostly in northwest Africa, Mauritania, Mali, Niger. Places where it’s impossible to keep track of the living, never mind the dead.”

  Harry was struck by the level of irony; he grimaced.

  “Look,” said Bernd. “I’m worried about Birgitta, forget me.” When Harry didn’t protest, he continued. “I think she’s gone back to Sweden.”

  “She’s not really missing then, is she?”

  “No one has seen her.”

  “Then how do you know she’s there?”

  Bernd dismissed the question by ignoring it. “I’m sure she went via Iceland but I couldn’t find an actual booking,” he said. “She did a search for hotel listings in Reykjavik.”

  “Did she buy her flight online?”

  “Perhaps on her Blackberry.”

  “Could she have stayed in Iceland?”

  “It’s a small enough place the authorities would know.”

  “Depends who you talk to. I’ve been there,” said Harry. “It’s not that small.”

  “Perhaps not.” He hesitated. “I checked. She has left.”

  “If she was ever there.”

  “They are very efficient.”

  “And the Swedes aren’t?”

  “The Swedes are relaxed with their own, Mr. Lindstrom. She has dual citizenship. She would have simply walked through, especially coming in from Iceland.”

  “So she’s in Sweden by default, since she’s not in Iceland and she’s not in Toronto?”

  “It seems that she stepped off the plane and disappeared. She’s waiting for me.”

  “Explain.”

  “I have to be in Stockholm by the end of January. She’s already there, pursuing her investigation.”

  “To prove you are a serial killer.”

  “To prove someone out there is killing young women, yes.”

  “Then good for her, if she finds him.”

  “On the contrary. If she finds him, he will be forced to eliminate her.”

  Perhaps we should pause and discuss the ambiguity of pronouns, Harry.

  Harry felt chills running down his spine.

  “That sounds like a threat, Mr. Ghiberti.”

  “A warning.”

  “A rather ominous warning.”

  Is there another kind, Harry?

  “If she is right about the carnage, and let’s suppose she is wrong about me, then as she closes in on the murderer he will have no option but to stop her. By killing her, I would think. He is apparently what criminologists describe as a miscreant in the ‘organized non-social category.’ He is a very intelligent man, his crimes are not overtly violent, but he is viciously determined.”

  “Have you done research on this?”

  Bernd Ghiberti acknowledged Harry’s question with a nod and continued, “He will not stand for interference. Not because she will expose him. Part of him yearns to be caught. But because she will fuck up his plans.”

  Harry blanched at his odd choice of words.

  “So long as she continues to say that I go around slaying young women, she could be in grave danger.”

  “She thinks you kill people, and you’re worried about her.”

  He is afraid of her, Harry, and for her. You love ambivalence.

  I don’t.

  “Will you take the case?”

  “Like I told your mother, we don’t do missing persons.”

  But you like Sweden, Harry. It’s midwinter. You like snow. I’ve never understood that about you. You l
ike ice and snow.

  Harry looked outside at the dazzling blue over the islands and the infinite colours of white.

  “I think perhaps you need legal advice,” he said. “You and your mother should define the limits of your relationship in a legal document.” Sometimes rational thoughts seem absurd when spoken out loud.

  “Like a marriage contract. Not very likely.”

  “Of course.”

  “I avoid lawyers.”

  “Of course.”

  Harry avoided lawyers himself whenever he could. People whose profession depended on the separation of ethics from morality appalled him. It might be ethical to defend a sex-murderer like Karla Homolka but it was morally indefensible. He switched tactics.

  “A couple of times you’ve described your mother going back. And you say she has dual citizenship.”

  “Our family owns a farmhouse on an island in the Baltic. A couple of elderly aunts still live there. Annie and Lenke.”

  “Their last name is Shtoonk?”

  “Sviar. My mother’s family on her mother’s side. It’s a very old name.”

  “Does she speak Swedish?”

  “Not as well as I do. I spent summers on Fårö with my aunts after we sold the Muskoka cottage. She didn’t speak English until she started school but hasn’t kept up with her Swedish. Her parents were refugees from Lund and became hardscrabble farmers in northern Ontario.”

  “Jewish refugees?”

  “They were certain the Nazi invasion would spill into Sweden, but it stopped at the Oresund, the Sound between Sweden and Denmark. They felt they were marked because they were anarchists and paranoid. Most anarchists are, don’t you think? They figured their refugee status in Canada would be enhanced if they were Jews, so they co-opted a Jewish name, Shtoonk, from a Jewish acquaintance with a cruel sense of humour.”

  “It’s an insult.”

  “You know Yiddish?”

  “Your mother told me.”

  “My grandparents weren’t very nice people but they got in, in spite of Canada’s less than welcoming treatment of Jews. Ironically, Sweden didn’t fall or capitulate. It stood aloof. That describes Birgitta, exactly. She stands aloof.”

  No, she does not, Harry thought. She came to see me, insisting you are a serial killer. She went to the police and made a case that you murdered your sisters sufficient that Morgan took it all down and filed a report. Composed, self-reliant, perhaps, but disinterested, aloof, not at all.

  How little do offspring know their parents, he thought. But what about the other way around, does the mother know her child? That question lay at the heart of the matter.

  What does he really want, Harry?

  Maybe to find out how much Harry knew, before he eliminated Harry.

  It seemed the case was active, again, although Harry’s objectives weren’t clear, or even who his client was.

  “Did you always call Birgitta by her first name?” he asked.

  “Since we were small, and never to their faces.”

  “Your father, too.”

  “Don Vittorio. He died when I was thirteen.”

  “What made you study paleoanthropology?”

  “I drifted into it. I like fossils.”

  You can drift into serial murder, you don’t drift into paleoanthropology. As a cultural theorist, that’s my professional opinion, Harry.

  “PhD from U of T, field work in North Africa. That’s where it all started.”

  “Where what all started?”

  A hint of confession? No it can’t be that easy.

  “Humanity, the species. Homo sapiens. To be more precise, homo sapiens sapiens.”

  “Precision is appreciated.”

  “A species that knows that it knows, is conscious of being conscious. That’s us. We are all descended from a single solitary female in sub-Saharan Africa. I was interested mostly in her.”

  “She may have been single; I doubt if she was solitary.”

  “That would be parthenogenesis, ha!” Bernd seemed to have forgotten the quest for his mother, old passions aroused by his fascination for the mother of all. “Virgin birth of the species. Interesting, since no intraspecific polymorphism has been found in a paternal gene— maybe that’s why. Ha! Very good, Professor, Detective, Mister; sorry.”

  “Bernd,” Harry countered, “do you kill people?”

  The man smiled sadly. “No, I don’t.”

  The curl of his thin lips, perhaps meant to undermine the gravity of Harry’s question, managed to make it a sinister possibility. “I studied bones, very old bones. Then, while I was working on a post-doctoral fellowship, I discovered things in the present that I couldn’t live with.”

  “What sort of things? About yourself?”

  He seemed wary. “In Mauritania. How is this going to help find my mother?”

  “Trust me.”

  The man gazed ingenuously into Harry’s eyes, then proceeded.

  “In the far country, one day, I had been walking on my own for hours and was a long way from my camp when I came across an isolated farm compound. Is this necessary?”

  “It is,” Harry reassured him.

  “At first, the place seemed to have an austere beauty, it was unspoiled; buildings made of wattle and grasses, animals wandering free, their ribs protruding, but not like they were dying. Fires smouldered in small courtyards. The people were emaciated, which is painful to see but not unusual in the region. As a guest, I was given pride of place in a hut of my own. I rested, then went out to watch the activities of the farm. Fossilized skeletons and the original mother were far from my mind. After noticing one or two shocking displays of impoverishment, I realized not everyone in the compound was gaunt. It took me a while to comprehend. It is one thing to hear rumours of an atrocity, another to see something so undeniably real. This was a leblouh encampment. I had stumbled on a farm where they inflict unconscionable rites on girls the age I was when my sisters died.”

  “Female circumcision?”

  Bernd’s face had filled with horror; his eyes showed a ghastly sheen as if he saw again whatever he had seen in that remote compound.

  “No, leblouh is not female circumcision. It is forced feeding. Some of the girls were obese literally to the point of bursting open. Literally.”

  “Like foie gras?” Harry didn’t mean to trivialize the horror Ghiberti conveyed, but he had nothing else to relate to, to make it real.

  “Girls being fattened for marriage. Some as young as five. Most around seven, a few as old as thirteen. You cannot imagine how drastic the methods.”

  Harry tried to envision the scene, but he couldn’t. It was, as Ghiberti explained, unimaginable.

  The man’s colouring began to return. In order to continue, he seemed to become almost dispassionate. “Girls are forced to consume over two pounds of butter a day.” He paused as if doing an inventory. “Forced to drink twenty litres of camel milk, eat pounds and pounds of millet. And if they throw up, they are forced to swallow their vomit.” He now looked cold and angry. “It’s done mostly by older women using coercion and torture. The methods are evil. Twisting of toe clamps, threats of dismemberment, and worse, much worse. On little girls, for grown men. Many, of course, literally explode from the inside out. They are discarded. But those who become suitably obese are prized possessions, passed on from the fathers who sent them there to proud husbands who buy them and take them home as proof of their manhood.”

  “And so your work is what? You go back.”

  “Not to the farms, to the families. We try, but we’re up against cultural imperatives so deeply ingrained, enforced by the distortions of tradition and dogma, I sometimes suspect the struggle is a fight for our own souls; we cannot change theirs.”

  “Bernd, are you a religious man?”

  “Because I talk about souls? It sounds less pretentious than saying ‘the essential authentic humanity of the individual.’ No, I am not. I am utterly secular, our organization is secular. If there were conceivabl
y a God presiding over such things, He would be his own most damnable creation. And you?”

  “No.”

  Harry quickly shifted the direction of their talk, not because it was invasive or distasteful, but to seize control. “Why would your mother have gone to Sweden, if you’re here in Toronto?”

  “She’s not trying to prove I exist, Harry. She’s trying to prove I should not. She’s not trying to track me down but to establish my guilt. She resents me for being alive, when her daughters are dead. She’s gone to find proof I should be cast into hell.”

  “As Pope John Paul said more than once, ‘Hell is the absence of God.’”

  “Then you and I, we are in hell already.”

  “Perhaps we are,” said Harry. “And your mother’s in Sweden.”

  Bernd Ghiberti began to smile, then thought better of it.

  “I’m sure,” he said.

  “Not North Africa?”

  “No, my work doesn’t interest her.”

  Nor hers him.

  On the contrary. He’s almost too interested.

  You don’t want to get caught in the middle, Harry.

  “Will you do it? I’ll pay well.”

  “I’m sure you would. But I’m sorry, if I track her down, it will be on her account, not yours. Conflict of interest. She’s my client.”

  “She hired you to prove I kill people. She fired you.”

  “No, you fired me. In any case, we didn’t have a formal agreement. I wasn’t fireable.”

  “Then there’s no conflict!”

  “And what do you propose I do if I find her? Tell her it’s not you murdering those women?”

  “Convince her that no one is murdering anyone. People die, Harry, surely you know that, even the young and the innocent. (How much does he know, Harry? He’s been told you were a professor and he drops hints about knowing a lot more.) Young women freeze to death in the snow, it happens.”

  “I’ll try to find her. Who my client is remains a moot point. The Ghiberti family, I suppose.”

  One way or another, Harry, you need to be paid. You’re working for Bernd to prove he’s innocent and for Birgitta to prove he’s guilty. If he’s innocent, she’s a fiend. If he’s guilty, then he is.

  “If you’re guilty,” Harry continued, “your mother will pay. If you’re innocent, you pay. Fair enough.”