Lindstrom Alone Page 9

  He pulled the door closed after him, swallowed up by the hollowness inside. He rummaged through the house the whole night long, opening and closing every door, checking cupboards and drawers, shifting furniture, rolling back carpets, shaking out linen, spilling books and clothing and toys across floors, desperate to find some impossible remnant of their lives that would twist time around and bring them back. He could smell the scent of lilacs that seemed to emanate from Karen, whether she was wearing perfume or not. He could smell the scent of the children. The dead were everywhere around him and he could not connect.

  In the morning, he found a five-gallon container in the garage, filled with gasoline for the lawn mower. (Karen had wanted to go canoeing in the wilderness.) He retrieved vise-grips from the basement to get the top off. (Matt was excited about sleeping in a tent and cooking meals over a fire and listening to wolves. Lucy marvelled at being in a park she had seen in a painting.) He emptied the gasoline over the living room furniture. He could not think where Karen kept the matches. (It was him: he missed the hidden rapids.) He found matches in the kitchen string drawer buried under a nest of elastic bands, surrounded by half-used packages of birthday candles.

  Seated resolutely on his front stoop, while the flames leapt over his shoulders and smoke billowed into the sky, Harry listened to sirens wail out their lament through the crackling air. Memories of summers long past crowded his mind: the scent of cedars, of campfires, the brushing of air through pines, the liquid murmur of hulls as they slipped though the waves; the plaintive howl of wolves at night, the distressed cry of loons echoing across black water. Algonquin Park was a summer experience. Winter was another country entirely. He imagined swirling snow and searing winds and ignored the outstretched arms of the volunteer firemen. As sparks became embedded in his clothing and scorched his hair and flames seared his flesh and clouds of smoke swirled down to engulf him, they hauled him away from the inferno’s embrace.

  Time passed. He was given Matt and Lucy’s ashes. Karen’s body had been absorbed into the wilderness. Possibly it had drifted downriver and lodged irretrievably under the islets of floating swamp in the marshlands along the northerly side of Long Pine Lake. He placed the ashes of the kids in a common urn and buried it in the Catholic cemetery near Lucan on the Roman Line, although Harry and Karen were not Catholics and the children were heathens. He buried it with no marker in the dead of night, close by the tombstone signifying the nearby remains of the Donnelly clan, who may, or may not, have earned their heinous fate. The grass there grows a rich emerald green. Karen loved irony.

  Harry did not go back to teaching philosophy, although Huron College graciously invited him to return. He moved to a small furnished apartment in London and watched through closed windows as southwestern Ontario slowly turned into autumn. When his friend Miranda Quin came for him, he took her advice and moved to Nanaimo, a continent away, before finally resettling in Toronto. Karen followed his progress over the next three years.

  And Harry endured.

  7 POURRITURE NOBLE

  HARRY SAT WITH ONE FOOT PROPPED ON THE OTTOMAN that the super retrieved from his locker in the basement. It had come with his teak and leather chair. He leaned forward to adjust a cushion, then slouched back from the effort. TGH had discharged him after a week, and he was healing but he still hurt like hell. His injured toes were throbbing with pain, yet when he tried to wiggle them, he felt nothing. If he wasn’t looking, he would have sworn they were moving.

  The fractured ribs were tolerable as long as he avoided coughing. He avoided coughing. His fingers and palms were tender but healing, the tips were okay, his nails were intact.

  He had been home a couple of days before he emailed Miranda Quin. When Beethoven’s Fifth played on his phone, he knew who it was.

  “Is that lindstromalone.com?” she asked when he answered. “Harry, what the hell is going on? Your message was cryptic, really weird. You dangled from a balcony, pantless, your heart stopped, you froze to death? What’s happening? There wasn’t any report. Why didn’t you call me?”

  She listened sympathetically while he described the disembodied pain from the toes of his left foot.

  “How do you know it’s from your toes if they have no feeling?”

  “In my head. When I touch them, they’re virtually dead. But they hurt like a son of a bitch. It’s not a pretty sight,” he told her. “But I was lucky.”

  “Oh, for sure.”

  “I was. The little toe was nearly a goner but they managed to save it. Looks kind of mangled but it works. Which is a good thing. You need it for balance. The big toe lost a chunk from the knuckle to the end. It looks as bad as it feels.”

  “That must be gratifying,” Miranda exclaimed. “Can you walk?”

  “Right now, I can hobble. It hurts, which they tell me is a good thing. Whatever that means. The ribs are almost better.”

  “The ribs!”

  “I cracked a couple. They tell me I should be getting around in no time with hardly a limp, except when I run. And the phantom pain might stay for life.”

  “That is a complex figure of speech,” she said.

  “A phantom for life? I suppose it is.”

  “So how in God’s name did you end up locking yourself out with a wind chill of forty below, and dangling from a pair of pants by the wrist? I’ll say this: you’re very inventive. Eccentric, but inventive.”

  “I think someone was trying to kill me.”

  “Kill you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Seriously. On your balcony. Barefoot and pantless.”

  “The door was wide open when I woke up from a nap. There was an orange outside in the snow.”

  “A what?

  “An orange.”

  “For goodness sake, Harry. A clockwork orange?”

  “When I bent down to pick it up, the door closed behind me. And locked. It didn’t do that on its own.”

  “You sure it wasn’t an apple?”

  “No, it was a ceramic lure and I bit.”

  “Ouch, but it worked, apparently.”

  “And when I looked in, I thought I saw someone moving. It was hard to see through the glare. I’m sure someone was in there.”

  “And why are you telling me now? Why didn’t you report this, Harry? I’m homicide, remember. You were dead. That makes it murder.”

  “I resurrected?”

  “A technicality. Dead is dead.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Didn’t this strike you as worth pursuing?”

  “I wasn’t dead for all that long.”

  “So who was it?”

  “Miranda, I have no idea.”

  “It could have been the notorious serial killer Bernd Ghiberti.”

  “Not as funny as you think. He had just tried to hire me to find his mother.”

  “Really. Nothing surprises me anymore. Who else, then?”

  “I haven’t made any friends in Toronto, but I’ve made a few enemies.”

  “I’m your friend, Harry.”

  “Don’t come over.”

  “Takeout? Thai or Italian?”

  “Surprise me.”

  “I’ll bring a friend of my own.”

  Harry scowled. He surveyed his living room. Everything seemed new, even his antique Persian carpet. Things had not worked out relationships with each other, the way they do over time. The spaces between them were empty. His eyes stopped at the blue-black depths of his Blackwood etchings, each brooding with energy in the afternoon light.

  He had three David Blackwoods. He preferred original works and abhorred commercial prints, especially by Tom Thomson or Turner or the ubiquitous van Gogh, unless they were authentic posters for an exhibition. He had a framed poster of a sultry nude with flaming red hair by Gustav Klimt hanging in his bathroom. It was a detail from a larger picture. He picked it up in a junk shop on lower Jarvis St. as a time-warped souvenir of having seen the original with Karen in Vienna, twenty years earlier. Near the end of h
is career as a philosopher, he had published an article in an obscure journal on the curious relationship between art and value, after the original of that same Klimt had sold for $135,000,000.

  He and Karen had owned a fine copy of “Fire Down the Labrador,” Blackwood’s most famous work. The burning ship, the crew fleeing into the night in a small boat, the monolithic iceberg, and the huge grinning whale twisting beneath them, aroused a curiously unsettling schadenfreude, pleasure in response to what Schopenhauer might have called the horrific sublime. Their original copy was lost in the fire but he had tracked down another and bought it, along with the haunting “Brian and Martin Winsor,” which showed an abandoned dory at sea, the oars still set, jammed in an ice-flow far from the shore, and a nostalgic triptych called “Notes from Bragg’s Island” that made him feel like a secret watcher, exposed to the details of Newfoundland life. The three pictures spoke to each other, held conversations that echoed his own troubled world. The mythic drama, the allusive emptiness, the melancholy secrets. As his eyes drifted away, he could hear the voices of the dead.

  He wandered inside his head and the voices became quite distinct, although only Karen’s was familiar. He seemed to be walking with Wittgenstein through the familiar passages of Trinity College. The great man was talking to himself. Then Karen intruded to discredit whatever his argument was by declaring him a Nazi.

  No, said Harry, Ludwig was like Italy, only the opposite. During World War I he was on their side. In World War II, he was on ours. It was Heidegger who was the Nazi. Harry was alarmed that she didn’t know better. He stirred restlessly on his chair. Wittgenstein was an Austrian Jew who abjured his vast family fortune to think. Hardly a fan of der Führer (whom he had known at school in Linz).

  But Heidegger slept with Jews.

  With Hannah Arendt, yes, so she said. And with Elisabeth Blochmann. But he was a signed-up member of the National Socialist Party and devoted to Hitler.

  And yet so important a thinker!

  Ezra Pound was “important,” and he was a rabid anti-Semite.

  That’s different.

  He dozed restlessly, and a couple of hours later, following the trembling sensation of the elevator, there was a knock on the door. My God, Karen murmured. Doesn’t anyone use the buzzer? Don’t people get what a security system is for?

  She’s a cop.

  People shouldn’t be walking through like there’s a revolving door.

  Harry shouted to come in. He was surprised when it wasn’t Miranda.

  “Detective Morgan.”

  “How are you doing?” Morgan seemed a bit sheepish, as if he’d wandered into the wrong party. “I hear you’ve had some trouble.”

  “A little. Help yourself to a glass of wine. If you prefer white, there’s an unoaked chardonnay in the fridge.”

  “Right beside the Château d’Yquem, I see.”

  “You know wines?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Morgan. “The better ones.”

  “We’ll have that one for dessert, after the spicy Thai.”

  “It’s a ’67. Perhaps you should hold onto it.”

  “Perhaps I should.”

  Harry. That bottle cost me a fortune.

  Conversational hors d’oeuvres, Sailor. Exchanging hockey scores. Talking baseball. That bottle’s forever.

  And so it should be.

  The d’Yquem had been in their makeshift wine cellar during the fire, along with a prized ’45 Mouton Rothschild. The water-stained label exuded a smoky aroma. He kept it in the fridge for safekeeping. He had sold the Château. Mouton, but not the d’Yquem which had been Karen’s present to him when Lucy was born. She had a colleague pick it up in England and smuggle it home. 1967 was the best year in the history of sauternes, someone told her. She looked it up. D’Yquem was the best of the best.

  Morgan admired the view, then settled on the sofa.

  “So,” Morgan said at last. “Someone tried to throw you over.” He got up again and peered through the door, then rattled it and tested the latch.

  “The going over was my idea. Someone tried to freeze me to death.”

  “And nearly succeeded, I hear. How’re the toes?”

  “It’s all in my head.”

  “Phantom pain?”

  “Apparently.”

  “So, what happened?”

  Morgan seemed fascinated by Harry’s account of how he had rescued himself, but dubious about the conspiracy theory.

  “What theory? I was locked out.”

  “I’m just suggesting: if the door slammed shut in the wind, at minus twenty the humidity from the room might have frozen the latch solid almost instantly.”

  Harry glowered. This guy wasn’t here for the dinner.

  “Was it locked when you got back from the hospital?”

  Harry continued to glower. Anyone might have unlocked it again. The super, the neighbours downstairs who rescued him.

  Morgan smiled. He wasn’t buying it.

  Harry’s piercing eyes, grey hair cut short, resolute set to his mouth, his posture erect, even with his injured foot propped up on an ottoman, affirmed his presence as a naturally strong, proud, and quiet man who could never imagine having nearly brought about his own death, locking himself out in the cold on Christmas Day.

  “I took a look at your file,” said Harry to distract Morgan from his CSI trajectory. “On Birgitta Ghiberti.”

  “On her son, yeah, Miranda told me. That was from twenty years ago, before we were partners.” For a moment Harry thought he was talking about Birgitta. “You knew her before I did,” said Morgan. “I never went to camp.”

  Since that observation evoked no response in Harry, he continued, “Birgitta Ghiberti was a troubled woman. Astonishingly beautiful. An Ingrid Bergman blonde. Dark eyebrows, an amazing mouth. I imagine her hair is grey by now, or dyed.”

  “She’d be the same age as Bergman when she died.” Her hair was all the colours of white, Harry thought. Until he had seen her, he didn’t understand what that expression meant.

  Harry gazed at Morgan who was staring out over Toronto Island. This unkempt man with the furrowed brow and crooked smile, with whom Miranda had shared so much of her life, clearly he had a good mind, unruly, perhaps, but.

  But what, your own mind is unruly, Harry, it’s naturally chaotic, that’s why you were drawn to philosophy as a discipline, bankrupt as it was. It forced you to think, not just have thoughts. So you could emulate your intellectual soul-mate—

  It was Heidegger who declared philosophy dead, displaced by what he oddly enough called thinking. But back in my Trinity days I was struggling with Locke and the primacy of human experience, I wasn’t thinking about thinking.

  What a shame.

  Harry turned to Morgan. “Do you remember the details?”

  “Hard to forget. It was inspired depravity.”

  “The son’s behaviour?”

  “The mother’s story. She made it so vivid; it was difficult not to believe. I think the contrast with her icy composure made it more convincing.”

  “But you were inclined to doubt it, just the same?”

  “There was no proof. An exceptionally compelling version of personal tragedies, each more unbearable than anything I could imagine.” Morgan stopped, then added, “What happened was terrible, but people find ways to endure.”

  They do, don’t they, Harry.

  “I figured it was her rendition to account for the unaccountable.”

  “To create what you might call cosmic balance,” said Harry.

  “You might.”

  He wouldn’t, apparently.

  “So,” Morgan went on, “I did believe that she believed it herself. I talked to the kid. Then I wrote it up. You’re probably the only person who’s read the report right through, except maybe Superintendent Quin. And do you think young Bernd did what she says?”

  “There’s no proof that he didn’t.”

  There’s no proof God doesn’t exist.

  “There
’s no proof that he did,” Morgan countered.

  There’s no proof that God does.

  “You think it was Ghiberti who locked you out in the cold,” Morgan noted.

  “You don’t think anyone did.”

  “True.”

  “And what about part two?”

  “That he’s a serial killer? You don’t take that seriously, do you?”

  “In the ‘organized non-social’ category. That was his own designation.”

  “He confessed!” Morgan was obviously amused.

  “He implied. He came here looking for his missing mother. We talked. He wanted to hire me.”

  “To find his mother? Killers don’t usually hire investigators and then try to eliminate them, especially by weather. A bit of a double irony there.”

  He doesn’t talk like a cop! But then, you don’t talk like a professor.

  I split infinitives and avoid the word Heidegger whenever I can.

  Harry offered Morgan a wry smile.

  “I think he was here to find out how much I knew.”

  “Presumably too much.” Morgan shrugged. “Any idea where she is?”

  “Sweden, apparently.”

  “Apparently? It shouldn’t be hard to check. Are you still working for her?”

  “I suppose I am. To prove her son is a killer and to rescue her, if he is, or to rescue her from the real killer, if he isn’t.”

  “An interesting family.”

  “All families are interesting, especially when there’s murder involved.”

  “You sound like a Russian novelist.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’d walk away from this one, Harry. While you still have a few good toes.”

  Amused by his own sordid wit, it was Morgan’s turn to offer a wry smile. Harry stared out the window, gratified that the city was behind him, out of sight.

  He looked down at his hands. They were nearly healed, the pain was gone but the skin crackled when he moved them.

  The buzzer from the lobby sounded in the foyer. Harry started to get up.

  “Stay where you are,” Morgan said. “I’ll let her in.”

  THEY DECLARED DINNER a Ghiberti-free zone and chatted about the weather. Morgan left early. Miranda and Harry sipped sauternes in chilled champagne flutes that he kept in the freezer. A Château d’Yquem, but not the ’67.