7

There’s an old Van Halen album cover, a detail from a painting by an artist who went insane. The painting shows a cross section of his skull, compartments filled with gruesome Freudian nightmares and traumas—fleshless limbs, beatings, hobnailed boots.

Ilkka’s house was like that. Upstairs was the tightly wound superego; the darkroom was like entering his reptilian forebrain. A faint, familiar smell filled the place—the vinegary scent of acetic acid; liquid gum arabic and ammonia; sulfur dioxide, silver intensifiers—chemicals used for film processing. There was an underlying odor of drains. Photos from Ilkka’s fashion spreads covered the walls: Haute couture models attacking each other with scissors; an ebony-skinned woman with a banana-yellow tree frog on her tongue; a girl slumped on a toilet seat, billows of white tulle obscuring her torso.

All shared the extrasolar flare that had been Ilkka’s trademark—miniature novas blooming from eyes or scissors or a drop of water on a girl’s bare back. There were also a few pictures of heavy-metal bands, and some grainy black-and-white crime-scene photos.

“That’s how I got started.” Ilkka indicated a newspaper clipping of a corpse stuffed in the trunk of a Volvo. “I was at university in Jyväskylä, doing art history, and the police needed someone to take photos for them. Their regular guy went on vacation to Ibiza, so I filled in for him. Then he never came back. I loved it.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“I didn’t want to stay in Jyväskylä. I decided to study archaeology, so I moved to Oslo and took some classes at university. That’s where I met Anton; I used to hang out at his club. He introduced me to Jürgen Borne—you know his work, right? Jürgen was looking for an assistant, and he hired me. I worked on that Vogue Italia spread, the one with Chira Hendrix and the reindeer. That was my idea. After that, it all came together.”

I peered at another newspaper photo—a kitchen with a woman curled on the linoleum, hands clutched protectively around her head. There was a hammer beside her, blond hair caught between its claws. Droplets of blood glowed like liquid mercury spilled across the floor. He’d found his gift early on.

“I still have it set up for film.” Ilkka flicked on more lights. “But mostly I do digital now.”

Cabinets and shelves lined the walls, crammed with boxes and camera equipment. The enameled sink had been divided into sections for agitating and developing film. Photos and contact sheets were strewn across a counter beside a flat-screen monitor. There was a large table in the center of the room, and an old map chest was shoved into a corner.

“I know.” Ilkka grinned. “It’s a mess.”

“No, it’s great. It looks—” I started to say, It looks human. “It looks like a good place to work.”

“Oh, it is. My wife hates it: She doesn’t want the children to see my pictures. One reason for all the locks. She hasn’t been down here since I built it. No one has, except for me. And now you.”

He began to clear the table, moving glassine envelopes and contact sheets and finally a large camera with an old-fashioned flashbulb attachment.

“That a Speed Graphic?”

Ilkka cradled the rig against his chest. “Yes. My baby.”

“Can I see it?”

He hesitated before handing it to me. “Be very careful.”

I was. The Speed Graphic’s the camera you see in old movies, toted by newspapermen at crime scenes, political campaigns, behind enemy lines during the war. Weegee had one. It’s an amazing rig—three viewfinders, two shutters, everything operated manually.

You had to be fast to use a Speed Graphic. It helped to have Weegee’s supernatural gift for knowing when to push the shutter release, a microsecond before your moment disappeared. He once said, “With a camera like that the cops will assume that you belong on the scene and will let you get behind police lines.”

I held it gingerly, a nice weight. Silken black finish, chrome trim. The chrome marked it as a prewar model, and I looked at Ilkka curiously. “How long have you had this?”

“I bought it at a pawn shop in Jyväskylä. That’s how I got the police job: I looked the part.”

The camera even had its original flash attachment, a concave seven-inch reflector with a bulb still attached—an old General Electric Synchro-Flash, blue-coated, which meant it was used for color and not black and white. Those old bulbs were intensely bright, five hundred thousand lumens released over a fraction of a second.

“You have trouble finding bulbs for this?”

He smiled ruefully. “Yes. For a long time I had a stockpile, but they’re getting harder to find, even on eBay. That’s the last one until I find a new source.”

I handed it back to him with great care. He set it in a cabinet and retrieved a white cloth.

“I don’t know how much time you’ll need for this.” He began to clean the table’s surface. “But Anton is extremely controlling. He needs things to be perfect, orderly. In this case, no doubts about authenticity. You understand?”

“Yeah, sure. But you’ve worked with him before, right? He owns some of your work. That’s what I assumed, anyway.”

“Yes, he has some of my work.” Ilkka’s tone grew terse. “Old police pictures that I sold him when I was young and needed the money. But nothing from this sequence. No one has ever seen any of these.”

“Not even Suri? Or your wife?”

He shook his head. “I set up a temporary link to one of the images. You saw that?”

“The guy with the window smashed against his face?”

“Yes. Gluggagægir.”

He tossed the cloth into a sink, rummaged in a drawer for two pairs of white cotton gloves. He gave a pair to me and pulled his on, waiting as I did the same. Then he crossed to the map chest, withdrew a key, and unlocked the bottom drawer. With great care he removed a large print, roughly 44 × 28, covered with protective tissue paper. He set it on the table and painstakingly removed the protective tissue. I whistled softly.

It was the image Anton had shown me online: the black-haired guy in that incongruously bright, blood-striped parka, his broken face shrouded by splintered wood and shards of glass.

But there was no comparison between the on-screen image and the real thing. It was printed on super glossy paper, probably Crystal Archive, with saturated color so intense it was as though I stood in the photographer’s shoes with the boy’s corpse at my feet. Beneath a moonless sky, snow glittered blindingly from black spars of rock. A drop of blood on the shattered windowpane looked as though it would stain my finger if I touched it. Where the jagged spear of glass pierced the boy’s cheek, Ilkka’s trademark flare shone so brilliantly that I blinked.

“It’s incredible. But, Jesus. What happened?”

“As you see. He is dead. This was in Vemdalen, Sweden, near the border with Norway. December 1991.” He ticked off the information as though reading a train schedule. “Gluggagægir is one of the Jólasveinar. The Yuleboys.”

“The Yuleboys? That’s a cult?”

Ilkka looked startled. “No,” he said quickly. “A folktale, a Christmas legend used to scare children into being good. The Jólasveinar are trolls. The original legends were quite frightening. Now they’re utterly commercialized, like the Smurfs—cartoons to sell Christmas cards and toys. Like everything else in our heritage, they have been corrupted by Christianity and capitalism.”

“They’re Finnish?”

He shook his head. “No. I mean our shared northern culture. Finns are not Scandinavian, but we are Nordic. And the Jólasveinar are Icelandic. But Iceland was settled by the Vikings, so their origins were Norse, and the Jólasveinar tradition is even more ancient than that. I have researched it for many years, and even I don’t know how ancient—thousands of years, at least. Over time the myth was degraded to accommodate Christian beliefs. Here in Finland, it was even worse: We have no record of our own true history.

“The Kalevala is nothing but stories cobbled together by a single man a hundred and sixty years ago,” he said with disdain. “Stories of men and witches and little gods—but our gods are not the true gods. For that we must look to an older world where the ancient ways remain alive.”

“Like Norway?”

“Yes. And Iceland, which is where our purest Nordic culture survived. That is what I believe. Originally there were many Jólasveinar, but manufacturers have chosen only thirteen, the ones who might sell the most toys. The Jólasveinar go creeping around your house in the thirteen days before Christmas, and one visits each night. Gluggagægir is the Peeper: He spies in windows. Then there’s Hurðaskellir, Door Slammer; and Þvörusleikir, Spoon Licker; Lampaskuggi, Lamp Shadow; and Ketrókur, Meat Hook, and—”

“What, no geese a-laying?” I laughed. “Meat Hook—there’s a Hallmark moment if I ever saw one.”

“No, the Jólasveinar are not nice like Christmas elves; they never became that Christian.”

I turned back to the photo. “So did they catch the guy who did this?”

“Never. None of the bodies was ever discovered, by the police or anyone else, as far as I know.” He lifted his head to stare at me with those icy gray eyes. “I do not mean that I was the murderer. I was not.”

He returned to the map chest for another photo, set it down beside the first, and peeled back the white tissue. “This is Spoon Licker.”

I grimaced.

“I know,” Ilkka said softly. “Horrible.”

But his gaze remained fixed on the print, his mouth parted as though he stared at something unspeakably lovely. I could see why.

An old man lay in a snowbank, head turned to the camera. He wore a stained blue sweatshirt, sneakers held together with duct tape, faded cotton pants that looked like hospital scrubs. One eye was open, milky blue clotted with red. Where the other eye had been was a hole, with a pointillist spray of crimson on the snow behind him. A metal spoon had been thrust between his gaping jaws. His tongue was gone, and Ilkka’s signature radiance flared from the spoon like a lit fuse. It was like a scene from some terrible fairy tale: the witch forced to wear red-hot iron shoes, the prince whose eyes are scratched out by thorns.

Yet it was also stunningly beautiful. Ilkka had captured veins of blue within the snow, and the spray of blood might have been feathers or petals. I searched in vain for footprints, evidence of a killer or onlookers.

“How did you know?” I asked. “Who tipped you off?”

“How did Weegee know? I have sharp ears. And eyes.”

“But the police must have suspected you.”

“I told you, no one ever knew of these deaths or cared. I did not know this man. Look at him.” He jabbed a finger at the print. “This carcass—who was he? I will tell you: he was nothing. Kulkuri—a ‘tramp.’ If his life had been worth something, someone would have searched for him! Someone would have mourned him. No one did. There was no search party, no investigation. Winters are very long in this part of the world. By spring, he was gone. They were all gone.”

“Gone?”

“Wolves and bears, lynx. Ravens.” He gestured dismissively. “Winter swallows everything.”

“But winter didn’t kill him. Or wolves.”

“Neither did I.”

“But you know who did.”

“‘Death will claim no man until his time has come, and nothing will save a man who is fated to die. Therefore be bold: to die in fear is the worst death of all.’ That is what the sagas teach us, and I would not argue with those words.” His gaze remained unfathomable. “I’ll show you the rest.”

One by one he set out the remaining photos, his gloved hands meticulously removing each sheet of the protective tissue until the entire sequence covered the table. All were in the same oversize color format; all had been shot in the winter; all had, somewhere, Ilkka’s signature flare.

“This is Svellabrjótur. Icebreaker.”

Beneath the ice of some northern lake, air pockets and bubbles formed a glittering constellation in a man’s blond hair. His eyes bulged, and his mouth opened as though caught in the middle of a yawn. The photo had been taken at night with a long exposure, beneath a moon so brilliant it resembled a halogen bulb in a sky streaked with stars. It would have taken a while to set up, and then the photographer would have been there in the frozen dark with a corpse beneath the ice, calmly counting the minutes till he closed the aperture. I wondered how much the temperature dropped when Ilkka entered a room.

Ketrókur, Meat Hook, seemed almost mundane compared to the other pictures. A middle-aged man, heavyset and wearing a black overcoat and a business suit, sprawled on a rocky, snow-sifted beach with a meat hook through his head.

“Where was this?”

“Huk Beach, in Oslo. A nude beach.”

“It looks cold for a nude beach.”

“Homosexuals would go there for sex. He was not mourned, either.” He gestured at the final photograph. “Hurðaskellir. Door Slammer.”

A landscape so heavily drifted with snow that there was no sense of scale: Fir trees, boulders—all had disappeared beneath blue-white dunes poised to break above a calcified sea. The shutter speed was so fast that I picked out individual snowflakes as they swept near the lens in crystalline explosions. Elsewhere, whirling snow made it seem as though you looked at the scene through gauze, streaked black where the wind exposed a bare tree limb.

But no matter where you looked—no matter that the sky was lowering and featureless—that unearthly radiance suffused everything, as though the world had erupted into a ghostly supernova. It was the kind of photograph that makes a career; a once-in-a-lifetime shot.

And if Ilkka was telling the truth, no one else had ever seen it.

I was so entranced that it took a minute for me to notice the body. It lay in the foreground on a plank—a door—outstretched limbs so pale I’d mistaken them for ridges of snow. Unlike the other corpses, this one was a naked woman, small breasted, with platinum hair. Her face was bleached of color, her lips leaden; her open eyes revealed irises cloudy green like old glass. Her head was turned so that she gazed directly at the camera. Her body was eerily untouched by snow. I stared at her, my neck prickling, and fought an almost irresistible urge to disappear into that brutal, beautiful space.

“They do not sicken you,” murmured Ilkka.

“No. They’re incredible.”

“Most people would find them horrifying.”

I shrugged. Photography is the art that justifies atrocity: war photography, pornography, memento mori, footprints left on a landscape where the last great auk died. None of us is innocent.

“The way you capture light…” I stared at the girl’s unseeing eyes, a travesty of the detached gaze all great photographers cultivate. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You didn’t use a flash gun?”

“No—that would have been petkuttaa, a ‘cheat.’ Only the flashbulb. I show what the world hides from us—the true world. The sun doesn’t lie. The night doesn’t lie.”

“But how did you do it? It’s impossible. There’s no available light.”

“No. What is impossible is to take a photograph where there is only light. You can never shoot the midday sun without a filter; you know that. But there is no true darkness. There is always light, somewhere.”

“Not enough for that.” I gestured at the print. “Not enough to make everything look fucking incandescent.”

“There is always light,” repeated Ilkka. “Buried beneath the earth, even. Not everyone can see it. But I do.” He leaned forward, scrutinizing me. “Just as you see something else. It is there.…”

Hs finger hovered alongside my right eye, the raw scar that had not yet healed. “A flaw behind your retina. I can see that, too. Odin traded one eye for wisdom and the gift of true sight. Perhaps you have done the same, yes?”

He drew back, and we gazed at the photos.

“All these people,” I said. “Did you see some flaw in them?”

“I know nothing about any of them, except what I have told you. But they deserved to die. They were unclean: Their own darkness had invaded them. Whatever light they possess now, it came from me.”

“Is this it?” I stared at the table. “Just these five?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Anton told me there were six.”

Ilkka remained silent. I stared at his chiseled face and ice-gray eyes, trying to make sense of all this. I caught no chemical whiff of fear or adrenaline, nothing to signal that he’d touched any weapon other than a shutter release. He might be crazy, but he was telling the truth.

Part of it, anyway. Ilkka Kaltunnen might be lying about that sixth photo, but he wasn’t the murderer. Someone else was. Anton? In which case Ilkka was blackmailing him, despite the fact that Ilkka was inextricably bound to whatever had happened out there in the snow, beneath the ice. Not just complicit in any cover-up or failure to report the murders, but in whatever bizarre belief system had left at least five people murdered, their deaths unnoticed and unmourned.

I’d never heard of a murderer who kept a court photographer, but there’s always a first time. Ilkka either witnessed each killing or he was tipped off before the blood cooled. He got his money shot and split.

And money definitely would be an object. Large-format images like these cost a bundle to produce. No commercial lab would have developed or printed them without asking questions or calling the cops.

Photographers are like professional stage magicians. They admire each other’s work and share tips but seldom reveal exactly how the trick was done. I figured I’d give it a shot. “How’d you process them?”

Ilkka pointed to an adjoining room. I walked in and found a huge machine, sleek and white as a plastic coffin beneath a translucent plastic tarp—a first-generation Chromira LED printer. He must have socked away a small fortune to pay for it: In the ’90s, this rig would have set you back fifty grand plus change.

But it would also allow you to produce your own prints in-house, with no embarrassing inquiries about blood on the snow. I saw another door at the end of the room, with half a dozen light switches beside it. I was willing to bet that was where the big color negs were processed, in an equally expensive rig.

Yet as far as I could see, the only thing Ilkka had ever used it for was a sequence that produced just five photos. Where was the sixth photo that Anton had referred to? Ilkka had told me he mostly shot in digital now, and there was no sign of any other oversize prints, unless he stored them in the map chest. What photographer invests a hundred grand in equipment he hardly uses?

A rich, obsessive control freak locked into some crazy-ass death cult. He and Anton deserved each other. I returned to the table, where Ilkka gazed transfixed at his own work. “It’s good, isn’t it, Cassandra?”

“It’s brilliant.” I meant it. “I’d still like to know how you did that.”

The overhead light candled the lenses of Ilkka’s glasses as he smiled but said nothing.

“What if you and Anton can’t agree on a price for these?” I asked. “You got other buyers lined up?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“So you’re just selling him these prints and the negs?”

“There are no negs. I’ve destroyed them all. These are the only prints.”

“You won’t keep a set?”

Ilkka continued to stare at the table. “That time is gone,” he said at last. “I am not sorry: There were a lot of evil things, and I do not need help remembering them. These will be the only prints.”

It was a good strategy. Most photographers make money by selling multiple prints run from a negative or, these days, a digital image. But the priciest photos, the ones that go for the big bucks at auction or through private transactions—those are often old daguerreotypes or ambrotypes, images produced in a one-off format, because that was pretty much the only game in town, back in the nineteenth century. Destroying original negs creates the kind of artificial scarcity that keeps the art world in business.

It would be possible to duplicate Ilkka’s pictures, of course, if you could get your hands on them. Still, to get anything approaching the quality of these originals would be almost impossible, and someone with a good eye—me, for instance—would recognize the difference between a first-generation print and one made from a copy neg.

That’s leaving out the law-enforcement issues that would emerge if these images ever hit the Internet. Whatever he’d been like in the winter of 1991, these days Ilkka didn’t seem like a guy who’d want to chance scandal and possible prison time. I wondered how much he was asking for the sequence.

And I wondered why he was selling it now.

Ilkka’s cell phone chimed. He answered it and walked into the room with the Chromira printer, talking quietly in Finnish. When he was gone, I quickly stepped to the map chest and slid open the top drawer, looking for a sixth print. It was empty. So was the next drawer and all the rest. Unless he had extra copies stashed elsewhere, those five prints were it. I did a swift reconnoiter of the room but didn’t see anyplace he might have stored them flat. Rolled up, they might have been anywhere, but I doubted Ilkka would be so cavalier with his trophies.

I searched inside a few more drawers—nothing but old contact sheets and film paraphernalia—then wandered to a counter strewn with CDs by Can, Kraftwerk, Alan Hovhaness, along with a bunch of dour-looking Scandinavian composers I’d never heard of. The guy definitely suffered from Stockhausen Syndrome.

But there were some old cassette tapes, too, with handmade labels sporting xeroxed images of inverted crosses and guys in corpse-paint makeup, the band names scrawled in Magic Marker: Sarcófago, Celtic Frost, Viðar, Bathory. I was vaguely aware of Bathory, and I knew Viðar only because they were Scandinavian, and Ilkka had shot their first album cover.

I glanced at the Celtic Frost tapes, picked up one with the word Blot penciled on its cardboard insert. Ilkka was still occupied with his phone call, so I stuck it in my pocket, grabbing two more at random. I don’t even own a cassette player, but what the hell. A minute later he walked back into the room.

“That was my wife. Oskari, our little boy, is feeling worse, I have to get him at school. She’s in a meeting and can’t leave.”

He hurriedly covered the prints with their protective sheaths, replaced them in the map chest, and locked it. We both peeled off our white cotton gloves and retraced our steps back upstairs.

“I’m not sure how long this will take.” His face looked drawn. “It’s the flu. She worries every time Oskari gets a fever. If he’s really sick, I may have to take him to the doctor.”

He seemed more disturbed than I’d expect someone to be over a kid with a cold, but it was no skin off my nose. “That’s okay. I think I’ve got enough to report back to Anton.”

“If you have any questions, we can talk about it this evening at dinner. He will be anxious to finish the deal; you might even have the chance to meet him.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Look, can I ask you one thing? How much are you asking for these?”

He named a figure that was double what I would have imagined. Anton was willing to pay 1990s art-world money, considerably adjusted for inflation. “A cash transaction,” Ilkka added.

Again, I kicked myself for not demanding more money from Anton.

We reached the main floor with its long white corridor like a tunnel in a dream. The handwoven rugs muffled our footsteps. Downstairs, surrounded by the familiar clutter of camera equipment, I’d almost forgotten where I was.

Now I felt unpleasantly aware that I was in a foreign land where I knew no one, trapped in a silent house where photos of the dead radiated power, and the living drifted side by side without speaking.

Finally we reached his office. Ilkka spoke to Suri, and I waited in the hall until he returned.

“Suri will help you find something for lunch,” he said. “I’ll let her know when I expect to be back for dinner and if Anton will join us. We can talk more then. I am looking forward to it.”

Unexpectedly, Ilkka rested his hand upon my shoulder. For an instant I saw my own face reflected in his wire-rimmed glasses. “Thank you, Cassandra. It is easier for me to let them go, knowing that you have seen them. It is our gaze that keeps them alive. But it is terrible, sometimes, to have that as a gift.”

He squeezed my arm and left.