Lindstrom Alone Read online

  “Agreed.”

  Bernd Ghiberti rose to his feet and vigorously shook Harry’s hand. While they walked to the door, he said, as if they were friends, “You’ll like Stockholm in winter. Perhaps I’ll see you there.”

  “Perhaps.”

  The fingernails, Harry!

  “Do you know about a root cellar your mother described to me?”

  “Of course. It’s in an ancient burial tomb.”

  He’s the authority, he should know.

  Bernd continued, “We used to play there when we were small.”

  “We?”

  “Myself, Bjorn and Inge Olafsson. They lived in the cottage next door.”

  “Your mother showed me a tin of human nail parings she found there. She says they belong to you.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Are you missing a manicure kit?”

  Bernd Ghiberti glanced down at his perfect fingernails.

  “I usually have them done professionally in Stockholm.”

  “Have you been to Iceland, Bernd?”

  “On several occasions. We’ll have to talk about it sometime.”

  “Yes,” said Harry, “we should.”

  6 THE BALCONY

  AFTER BERND GHIBERTI LEFT, HARRY FELT A LINGERING sense of apprehension. He wondered again if Birgitta was already dead. But then, why bring Lindstrom-Malone back into the case? Was he simply expressing a Nietzschean will to power?

  Nietzsche, Harry? Really? Power over whom? If he’s already disposed of her somewhere, it could simply be a matter of misdirection. Perhaps you should tell your friend, the superintendent.

  Without the remains, there’s no point.

  Well, consider this, disappearing might be Birgitta’s way of dealing with maternal dread. She’s blaming herself for nurturing a serial killer. Nothing to do with existential flourishes, Nietzschean or otherwise.

  Fair enough, he thought. He needed Birgitta Ghiberti to be alive. This beautiful woman, who seemed to flourish like a rose in a compost heap, he needed to connect with her, to understand how she dealt with deaths that were arbitrary and unspeakably cruel. He needed to understand whatever he could in his own life that he could neither reverse nor accept.

  He tried calling his travel agent to book a flight to Sweden, but the agency was closed over Christmas. Gazing around like he was looking for help, he acknowledged the tree cowering in the window and relaxed into his armchair.

  Is Bernd checking me out or trying to control my involvement? Does he want to eliminate his mother or save her? Is he a killer of young women or devoted to rescuing them? As my friend Aristotle once said, ask the right questions.

  Harry considered Aristotle the patron saint of detectives, while recognizing that Francis Bacon was a more likely candidate. Understanding comes when the mind is open to wonder; when the facts are a mystery, the mystery is fact. Bacon might have said it like that. The circularity of the argument appealed to Harry. Not for its logic, for its symmetry.

  It was midafternoon on a sunny day but he was feeling restless and the temperature outside, with the wind chill, was bitterly cold. Nearly at the point where Fahrenheit and Celsius converge, it was too damned cold for a walk. Even the Inuit, he had read, stay home in their bungalows or if they’re out on the land they retreat to igloos when the temperatures plummet to this extreme.

  He slipped off his shoes and socks and climbed under the duvet on his bed fully clothed. He didn’t sleep well; he hadn’t expected to. Hovering on the verge of unconsciousness, his mind swirled with images of small bodies exploding, of drowned bodies with Botticelli eyes, bodies asphyxiated under a slurry of frozen earth, bodies shattered and charred. Female bodies, with one small boy wandering among them.

  At some point the images softened into shades of drifting white, as if he had been caught up in the midst of a silent snowstorm. The bodies of young women appeared as contours in the drifting snow, with only their eyes peering through, wide open, sky blue, and lifeless. And the sound of wind whimpered through cedars, the wavering scent of black spruce filled the air. Harry woke up shivering. When he drew the duvet close around him and curled into himself, he was still cold.

  He rolled over in search of warmth and when his arm draped across the empty space beside him, he woke up completely. The room was frigid. Wrapping the duvet around his shoulders, he walked barefoot out into the living room. The Persian carpet under his feet felt reassuringly snug but the air was even colder.

  The balcony door had pushed wide open and swung back against the outside window ledge. The drapes were almost closed. He didn’t remember doing that. He had admired the open vista of the harbour, the islands, the brilliant blue sky, before retiring for his extended nap.

  Sequencing had never been Harry’s strength. Instead of going for his slippers, he stepped tentatively out onto the small serrated drifts of snow, first one foot, and then, when he couldn’t reach the door, the other. The snow squeaked under his weight. There was no option, to counter the weight of the door, stiff on its hinges, he had to step farther out, in small quick steps as if he were walking on coals.

  The breeze sweeping across the harbour picked up. A gust lifted the duvet from his shoulders. He tried to wrap it closer with one hand while the other grasped at the door, swinging it free. Suddenly the duvet billowed and was gone. He turned to watch it slide through the air, sailing out over the water like a wounded raptor. A flash of colour by his feet caught his eye and he stopped for a moment and squatted to retrieve a ceramic orange that had unaccountably migrated from the bowl on the coffee table. It wasn’t embedded in the snow but sitting on top, like it had just been placed there. As he leaned down, the door closed behind him with a bone-chilling resonant clang.

  Standing up and wheeling around to face the glare of the glass, he swore. He jumped from one bare foot to the other while he tried to get a grasp on the frozen door handle. A pale shadow moved across the living room as he pressed close to see through his own empty reflection. The sad coloured lights on his diminutive Christmas tree mocked him through the glass. He tightened his grip on the door and pulled. His hand slipped off, tearing layers of skin from his palm and fingers.

  Did you see someone?

  Karen spoke in a clear and resonant voice to penetrate his jumping shaking shivering frenetic activity.

  Focus, he remonstrated to himself. Focus, focus. He stood perfectly still. All he could hear was the moaning wind as it brushed against the building and the shuffling drone of “Silent Night” drifting from a nearby apartment.

  Karen was wordless but still with him. His feet passed from burning piercing pain to an aching heaviness, like stubs of raw meat. He was afraid of collapsing. Pressing the raw flesh of his hand to the door handle, he pulled until it again tore free. He turned and grasped at the balcony rail. His hand fused with the frozen metal, he yanked it away, losing skin from his fingers of his other hand. He smashed at the glass of the door with his elbow, he smashed at the picture window with the ceramic orange, hoping the glass sheet would shatter into the room away from his exposed feet and legs but it reverberated with a dull thud, the orange broke, and the glass remained solidly fixed in place.

  Karen. She was there.

  Shielding his eyes from the glare, he moved close to the glass again and peered through. The grey drapes shrouded his view to the sides. He gave a last tug on the door and lost more flesh from his hand, which meant his pores were still releasing moisture, he was sweating as he began to feel warmth surge through his body, abandoning his vitals, inviting him to settle on the hard icy snow.

  Where was the music coming from? I don’t know, I’m tone deaf. Where is it coming from? Coming up. It’s from the apartment below.

  Okay. Hands too frozen to grasp anything, can’t swing down onto their balcony. Shouting? Did I shout? Nobody’s listening. Listen to the music.

  The belt, Harry? Not long enough. Take off your pants, Harry. Get fingers going, blow on them. Pain, that’s good. More pain, great,
great. Good pants, Tilley Endurables. They’ll hold. That’s great.

  With his pants absurdly around his ankles, he stepped onto them to insulate his feet while he thrust his hands up under his armpits. The pain was excruciating but soon he could move his fingers.

  He retrieved his pants and standing on the icy snow again he tied one leg to the rail, tied the other leg to his wrist. Good, good, now over, swing over. Slowly, don’t break, don’t tear them.

  And if the pants rip, it’s a clear fall to the bottom. Quicker than freezing to death. Feel that wind, Harry, down we go.

  Harry eased himself over the rail, holding on with stub fingers crooked over the steel, steel tearing at his flesh, then he slipped down past the edge of the cement base, and he dropped quietly into the air.

  Hanging. He dangled from one arm. The wind, it was like he was falling. Pain distorted perception, displaced sense, swallowed itself up, he felt nothing at all. Only silence. He felt a melodious humming. He felt the whisper of voices. Had they left the radio on? Were they singing? Were the words in his head? There is no point to all this, that is the point. The world is all that is the case; Wittgenstein. Words thundered in his head and receded.

  I’m going outside and may be some time. When they found Robert Scott his journal described his own dying and the deaths of his fellows. We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death. Did anyone find the frozen remains of poor Captain Oates?

  Harry felt strangely at peace. He turned slowly, twisting on the end of his makeshift bindings, dangling twenty-two stories above the frozen swirling ground. The wind had picked up, stronger and stronger, slicing against his face. Captain Oates, where did you get to? Harry could see movement, the world was moving. A balcony door like his own opened slowly. Muffled voices. Then a man’s arms. Get a knife, cut him down, damned material is tough, get him in. Harry passed out.

  HE WAS AWARE of the horrific pain before he fully regained consciousness. It seemed if he could only wake up, it would go away, but as he entered the light it became worse.

  “Harry?” said a voice. “Mr. Lindstrom, can you hear me?”

  Perché me ne rimuneri cosi? Perché, perché, Signor?

  “His eyelids are fluttering.”

  Was faith in the absence of God superstition?

  His head swarmed with the philosophers he had taught who tested the limits of God in their minds. God, but the pain was unbearable.

  “Mr. Lindstrom, do you know where you are?”

  In a hospital, what hospital? His life started to come back to him, penetrating the pain.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Can we call someone?”

  “No.”

  “Family? Friends?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You need someone.”

  Karen.

  A young woman smiled. She was wearing a loose blouse with an annoying teddy bear pattern. The other woman she had been talking to left the room.

  Harry tried to isolate the source of his pain.

  Harry, they’re pumping morphine into you.

  Then why does it hurt so much, Sailor?

  “My toes!” Harry mumbled through clenched teeth, his head pivoting back and forth on the pillow. He was shivering, convulsing in small rapid twitching.

  The nurse placed her hand over his arm, just above the IV needle, and moved her fingers in a gentle rhythmic motion, in time with his heartbeat.

  He shivered and felt hot and cold, like warm streams of liquid were running through frozen tissue inside. He could hear the sound of icecubes crackling in a glass of cold water, he could feel the sound. He could hear himself breathing.

  When he woke up again, another nurse was on duty, an older woman in a floral blouse. The room was a different colour. It was night. Harry wept from the pain until he was fully aware, and then he choked it back, but his temples pounded under her gently massaging hands.

  “How are you doing, sport? We thought we’d lost you.”

  “Me too.”

  “Can you feel the warmth?”

  Harry shuddered. He could feel her ministering touch, he could feel warm tremulations.

  “Your insides have been washed with warm fluids, Harry. It’s called lavage. You’re on a thermal drip. Plus morphine.”

  “Okay,” said Harry. The pain shooting up his left leg was unbearable.

  “We can up the dose. When you’re a little stronger, you can self-administer. For now, let us do it, okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your heart stopped. You’re a lucky man.”

  Harry couldn’t assimilate the two parts of her statement.

  “Those people tried CPR, they were trying to help. Cracked some ribs. Nothing that bandages and bed-rest won’t cure.”

  For the first time, Harry realized some of the pain was not coming from his foot. He drew in a deep breath and briefly the pain in his chest superseded the pain from his toes.

  God, Harry, breathe gently, breath slowly.

  “We had you on a cardiopulmonary bypass until you warmed up and we could get your heart pumping on its own, that’s when you had your innards in a warm rinse.”

  “Was I dead?”

  “Not brain dead, you’re talking to me now.”

  Harry could feel himself slipping away. She was Jamaican; he was slipping into the sounds of her voice, bathed in tropical sunshine.

  When he awakened, it was light again and the room was no longer the cadaverous green from the night-sky of the city glaring at the window. It was a gentle beige and the nurse with the teddy bear blouse was back.

  Don’t get sentimental on me, Slate.

  His left foot was still excruciating. He couldn’t differentiate one toe from another, but at least he knew where the agony came from; he could concentrate on its source, try to make the pain tolerable.

  Willpower and morphine, Harry.

  “I’m going to have to change your dressing, Mr. Lindstrom. The doctor will be in after lunch. Can you just lie back?”

  “And think of England?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing. Yeah, have at it. They bloody well hurt. I think somebody sold you a fake: your morphine’s a placebo. My toes are throbbing like they’re going to fall off.”

  “Mr. Lindstrom. Harry. A couple of them are very damaged. The nerves are dead. They’ve turned black.”

  “They bloody well hurt.”

  “Phantom pain.”

  “The pain’s not phantom, for Christ’s sake.”

  “The nerves have been destroyed, the pain’s in your head. You’ll have to be careful.”

  “Still hurts.”

  Harry realized he could not feel the injured toes while she cleaned away the wound, yet the phantom pain was so intense he thrust his head hard against the pillows and fought back tears. If pain were a colour, this was white, subsuming all others. He shut his eyes, sheet lightning flashed, and he could see inside his brain: it looked like a turbulent sky in the dead of a midwinter night.

  “There, all done. You can get some rest.”

  “My hands?”

  “I’m sure they hurt. You lost some skin, surface flesh; you’re wearing gloves filled with a gel.”

  “Thanks. What’s your name?”

  “Adrienne.”

  “Thanks, Adrienne.”

  “Which hospital? Toronto General?”

  “TGH, yes.” She rested a hand lightly on his and leaned close, trying to see through the pain in his eyes. “There must be somebody we can call.”

  “Thanks. I’m okay.”

  “I’ll up the sedative. You need rest.”

  Harry hovered on the dark edge of unconsciousness. His mind swarmed with words as if they were images. The Devil’s Cauldron, Anishnabe River, Algonquin Park. The words shattered into fragments that wheeled though his mind. Thundering torrents. Wilderness surging. A river collapsing. Eyes filled with terror. Limbs flailing. Mouths screaming water. Foam streaked with blood, swirling with viscera. A
bsolute blackness, absolute silence. Then flames, the stone house in Granton, the consuming fire. Close to where the legendary Donnellys were murdered. Their own house burnt to the ground. Sometimes the horror of that story seemed to merge with his own.

  Harry dreamed his terrifying memories of emptiness. He was in a different hospital room. The blinds were drawn. From a great distance he could hear the words of Psalm 22, the words of Christ’s roaring from the cross. Someone was praying, reading scripture, someone was singing Puccini. Perché me ne rimuneri cosi? Perché, perché, Signor?

  After two weeks in a military hospital near Algonquin Park and six weeks in the hospital in London, Harry had been declared recovered. (As if you can recover from death.) He was discharged in the evening and went home and everything was in place but nothing was the same. The old stone house on Sanctuary Line that he and Karen had lovingly restored stood proud in the rural landscape and, now, unutterably incomplete.

  They had taught themselves carpentry and plumbing, wiring and drywalling and stone masonry. For a decade the house was their passion, and as it came alive they were in its thrall, and the children were part of what they had made. For Harry, it was a permanent place that would outlive them, and they were its guardians for a generation or two. It was the home his parents had never provided. It was the Lindstrom home in Preston that had sustained his Aunt Beth long after she moved to Toronto. It was the only home Harry had ever known, and now it was empty, as only the homes of the dead can be.

  The Black Donnellys had lived not three miles away, and their story of murder and vengeance a century before had become part of the heritage that Karen and Matt and Lucy and Harry felt was as real as their own historical past. They had taken on the identity of this small corner of Canada, inseparable, they thought, from its past or its future. It gave them a place to stand on.

  He entered through the porch at the side. The wisteria flourishing on the trellis cast more shadow this late in the summer, this late in the day. The Muskoka chairs inherited from Karen’s family, the blue play table with two small benches, the table set with tiny cups and saucers for four, waited for the family’s return.