Wunderkammer Graf Antiquitäten, Theatinerhof, Munich, Germany
September 18, 2009
5:15 p.m.
The gold-embossed letters across the main window announced Quinn’s arrival at his destination: Wunderkammer Graf Antiquitäten. The shop was set to the far side of a courtyard that made Quinn think more of Italy than Germany. The square’s elegant cobblestone piazza was surrounded on all sides with full-height, arched windows and doors, set within mustard-yellow, plastered walls below pitched roofs of overlapping orange tiles. Overlooking it all were the encrusted, rococo towers of an ornate Catholic church; the courtyard must have once been adjoining cloisters.
The music that had followed him across the square to the shop’s dark windows further contradicted the location. The Magyar polka of the five Hungarian buskers, huddled against the early evening cold in the courtyard’s entrance, was an infectious, toe-tapping groove of guitars and violins racing to keep up with the rattle of the cimbalom at the quintet’s center. It pushed Quinn east, making him think of gypsies, not Nazis, despite the small sign he had just passed that identified the exact place where Adolf Hitler’s original putsch in 1923 had come to a bloody end.
Quinn’s first view into Graf’s shop was obstructed by the reflection of his own tall body in his black wax-cotton motorcycle jacket. The head of the old axe, wrapped in a piece of sheet and looped with an off-cut of climbing cord, projected above his right shoulder like a Franciscan crucifix. Cupping a hand over his eyes, he leaned in closer to the glass in order to get a better view. The sights within instantly assaulted him.
An aging king cobra, splitting and flaking from the rusty wire frame that supported it, reared up as if about to strike at him through the glass. Below it lurked a small stuffed crocodile, black and polished with age like carved ebony. A fully distended puffer fish was keeping the grinning reptile company, a look of surprised agony on its bloated face telling of a final brief moment of understanding that it was never going to be allowed to exhale. Interspersed with the varnished taxidermy were bones of all shapes and sizes, some reassembled into the complete skeletons of reptiles, birds, small mammals, even a hollow-shelled turtle. Behind them, a fossilized fish skeleton lay within a slab of cream limestone. Another, smaller fish skeleton was visible within the curved cage of its spiny ribs, a secret cannibalistic shame laid bare in stone for all to see in eternity.
Raising his gaze a little, Quinn’s eyes met the cobalt glass stares of two stuffed crows. They looked down their sharp jet-black beaks at him from either side of a bony human spine to which their feet were bound with barbed wire. The sight instantly took Quinn back to that desperate gorak scratching and clawing at him on the Second Step. Quickly looking away to break the recall of the oily bird, his eyes were drawn to an array of other artifacts that warped and disassembled the familiar of human life. A compartmentalized wooden box contained fifty glass eyes staring, lidless, in every direction, each iris a slightly different shade of blue or green or grey. Two large glass domes stood to either side, one filled with severed antique dolls’ heads, the other crammed with detached legs and arms, each limb chubby and porcelain white. Last, and most disturbing of all, an array of jars containing fetuses in yellowing, syrupy formaldehyde behind peeling, handwritten labels. The realization they were actually baby sharks swept Quinn’s body with a physical surge of relief.
It didn’t last long.
Suddenly Quinn saw not the black crow but a ghost staring back at him.
He jerked away from the window’s glass.
When he looked again, he saw that it was actually a human skull, hovering between the glass bell jars of amputated doll parts, studying him in return with hollow eye sockets. Its two rows of teeth, long to their roots, began to open and close as if laughing hysterically at his fright.
Slowly, the grinning skull lowered on unseen hands to be replaced by the head of a man of about seventy. The image of the skull lingered within the face that replaced it, a shadowy outline beneath the pale skin, little flesh to hide it. A shaved head showing patches of grey stubble above each ear revealed the precise, round curve of the cranium. The faint outline of a short white beard in no way hid the pointed jawbone. Only the eye sockets were obscured as white light reflected off small round glasses, masking the eyes within. Quinn watched as a pair of thin lips exaggeratedly mouthed “Boo!” at him and then vanished from the window.
A glass door within the next arch opened, setting off a brass bell that clanged with an irritating racket, vibrating violently on a coiled leaf spring as if determined to wake the dead. When it finally quieted, Bernhard Graf, patiently standing to the side of his now-open door, said in the same elegantly fluent yet accented English that Quinn recalled from the telephone call, “Mr. Neil Quinn, for I can only assume it is you, do enter. I am, of course, Dr. Bernhard Graf.”
Quinn hesitated.
“Come in,” Graf urged with a smile of reassurance. “Whilst it is my deliberate intention to deter the loitering teenager and the ignorant tourist with the somewhat disturbing nature of my shop window and, should that not suffice, with my unnecessarily irritating doorbell, I am most keen for you to enter. I have been looking forward to meeting you all summer. I see you have brought the ice axe as I asked. That is exciting indeed.”
The collector retreated before him into the shop. Everywhere Quinn looked there were glass-fronted cases full of objects. Every inch of free wall space was covered with more artifacts, some even suspended from the ceiling. His eyes adjusting to the subtle backlighting, Quinn was assaulted by the sheer variety of the items. Antlers, daggers, fossils, spears, swords, bones, surgical tools, helmets, false limbs, effigies, skins, feathers, tribal masks, battle flags, gods, devils—it was endless, all of it sinister and disturbing.
Instinctively Quinn tried to seek safety in the familiar. He identified a pair of wooden skis and then some big snowshoes, lattices of taut gut pulling on curved ash frames like vintage tennis rackets. In an umbrella stand filled with fencing swords, walking sticks, tribal clubs, a sawfish blade, and a narwhal tusk, he noticed two wooden ice axes, much like the one he was carrying, the sharp edges of their metal heads covered in wrinkled brown leather covers. In one display case there was another group of alpine items. He wondered if it contained the oxygen cylinder he had sold to Graf. Squatting down to get a closer look, he tried to further settle his mind with recognition of the old metal pitons, the snow daggers, the long-toothed crampons like animal traps arranged on the glass shelves within.
“Mr. Quinn, I hope there will be plenty of time for us to study old climbing things together in the coming days. But for now, let us take a seat, share a schnapps, perhaps?” Graf raised his eyebrows in wry recognition of the rhyme in his English question. As if reading Quinn’s mind, he then said, “I am afraid you won’t find your oxygen cylinder which I am sure you have regretted selling to me many times. It was a beautiful piece but sadly proved irrelevant to my specific interest. I too received an offer for it that I could not refuse. Please take a seat and permit me to pour you a drink so I might study your famous ice axe. Dirk, bring out the Williams Birne.”
Graf pointed Quinn to two chairs with a small glass-topped table in between, while a man in his late twenties, dressed in a black suit and a black silk shirt that both precisely matched the color of his parted hair, appeared from a room to the rear of the shop. Bringing forward a crystal decanter filled with a clear liquid and three small glasses on a silver tray, the thin white Dirk placed them on the table and waited as if ready to join them.
“Time to disappear now, Dirk,” Graf said dismissively. The younger man’s face hardened, his eyes narrowing as he looked first at Graf and then at Quinn unslinging the axe from his shoulder. Graf stopped Quinn from unwrapping it with an outstretched hand, saying to Dirk, “Later. Okay?”
Without another word, the man turned precisely on his heels, collected a leather raincoat and a briefcase from the back of the shop and left. As the hideous racket of the doorbell settled for a second time, Graf poured two full glasses of schnapps, saying, “Poor Dirk, he’ll be in a sulk now. It’ll cost me a trinket or two, I imagine. The boy is a poltroon but he has his uses. Now let me trade you a glass of schnapps for a look at this famous ice axe.”
Exchanging the drink for the axe, Quinn turned to sit but immediately stopped himself short.
The chair before him was a spiky black metal frame constructed of the eroded barrels and pitted firing mechanisms of what must have once been bolt-action rifles and simple machine guns. The joints were the steel skeletons of small pistols and revolvers, the feet, long-finned bombs that ended in small black metal pineapples. The other chair was made in exactly the same fashion, as was the frame that supported the glass table. The ensemble crouched in front of him, almost pulsating with past murder.
“Oh, come now, a big, brave Everest climber like you surely can’t be scared of a little chair. They are magnificently evil though, aren’t they?” Graf chided, his lips curling in delight. “They were made by an Italian artist, a delightful young man. He hikes the high Italian Alps looking for the rusting remains of the war waged there between 1915 and ’18. The fighting up there was as unrelenting and brutal as anything that happened on the Western Front. The ‘White Hell,’ they called it, and I am sure it was. Anyway, whatever my charming boy finds he now converts into furniture. I think he successfully conveys his obvious message, don’t you? We are, indeed, all sitting on hell, Mr. Quinn, be it black or white.”
Graf then deliberately sat down heavily on the nearest of the two chairs and rocked back on it roughly. Its back metal feet scraped in protest before the front feet then fell back with a bang onto the shop’s flagstone floor. The sudden movement and noise alarmed Quinn, just as Graf intended, the German laughing back at him.
“Do you know sometimes I amuse myself with the idea that perhaps my young Michelangelo with the welding iron hasn’t properly deactivated one of the little bombs? So I sit in delicious anticipation that the chair will blow me and my little shop of horrors to—how do you say it in England, smithereens? It would be deliciously ironic, wouldn’t it? The very few people who would attend my funeral would have to endure the entire proceedings trying to stop themselves laughing. The thought of suppressed humor arising from my own demise does so greatly appeal.”
Quinn sat down gently on the other chair’s uncomfortable seat, taking a gulp of the schnapps as if in preparation for a major explosion, but all that happened was the clear alcohol scorched his throat with a taste of cooked pear. Sipping some more, he watched as Graf began to study the axe head with a large magnifying glass, twisting it around and nodding to himself as he spoke.
“I considered it inevitable you would not have supplied me with all the details of the axe in your brief description, and I’m delighted to see you didn’t. These markings on the shaft of ‘99’ and ‘J. B.’ and, of course, the tiny eagle and swastika that must have sent you scurrying for cover in the first place, are really most interesting. They will require us to take a little day trip to Garmisch tomorrow if our relationship develops as I hope it will.”
He turned his head to look directly at Quinn, all trace of a smile now gone.
“When I called you I started a mental stopwatch ticking that stopped the moment you arrived at my window. I told myself that the brevity of the time elapsed would reveal how high the axe was when you found it on the mountain. Given you are here in Germany so soon, it leads me to believe it was above eight thousand meters? Or perhaps it just suggests that you are completely broke?”
Even though Graf was right on both counts, Quinn was reluctant to reply, wary of any more of his secrets being sucked out of him by the strange man.
Graf put down the axe and stood up. When he looked again at the still-seated Quinn, his smile was restored.
“Neil Quinn, you are right not to reply. You are currently feeling disadvantaged. I understand. I act as if you already know me when it is still only the other way around. From afar, I have studied you at some length over the summer and therefore feel I already know you quite well. I take liberties with what I identify as your better nature. I need to remedy this presumption before I go any further.”
He passed the axe back to Quinn.
“Like a car salesman with a conscience, if there is such a thing, I am going to give you some more time in order for you to decide whether you wish to trust me. If you will join me, we can have dinner together during which I will try to convince you that, despite all the appearances to the contrary, I am actually a potential ally. Something I know you British like.” As he concluded his suggestion, Graf removed his spectacles and cleaned them with a handkerchief. Without them, Quinn noticed the man had surprisingly kind eyes.