13

I have no memory of returning to my hotel, just the heat that enveloped me when I finally got inside. A different guy was behind the counter, a young black kid who stared intently at an iPhone. He glanced up, and I handed him enough krónur to cover another night.

“Is there a computer I could use to check my e-mail?”

He nodded and ducked down to retrieve a laptop. “Just give it back when you’re done.”

I settled on the sofa, booted up, and searched for coverage of Ilkka’s murder.

I found a bunch of news items in Finnish and Swedish, photos of Ilkka, and one of Suri. A brief AP piece; another in Paris Match with thumbnails of Ilkka’s fashion photography. Nothing in The New York Times or other U.S. press. Too early, maybe, or too much bad news to compete with. I finally hit the jackpot with an article in that morning’s Guardian.

 

DOUBLE MURDER SHAKES FASHION WORLD

HELSINKI: Noted Finnish photographer Ilkka Kaltunnen and his assistant were found dead yesterday in his residence in an affluent Helsinki neighborhood, victims of a brutal murder. The bodies of Kaltunnen, 39, and Suri Kulmala, 30 and a former model, were discovered by Kaltunnen’s wife when she returned home from work. Kaltunnen was found in the hall outside his office, his skull crushed by a silver serving dish. A few feet away, Kulmala’s body lay sprawled in the office entrance, her neck broken when the door closed upon it hard enough to sever her spinal column. Kaltunnen’s wife was with their young son at the doctor’s office at the time of the killings. Her husband had returned home to attend to a business matter.

Speculation as to a possible romantic relationship between the two was dismissed as “utter nonsense” by someone close to Kaltunnen and his wife, a child psychologist. Police say that robbery was the more likely motive, but would not confirm whether any valuables were missing. Kaltunnen had amassed a substantial collection of twentieth-century photographs, including masterworks by Robert Mapplethorpe and Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee. A basement darkroom had also been ransacked.

Neighbors professed shock that such a thing could happen in one of Europe’s safest cities, while the fashion world mourned the loss of an icon, albeit one who had kept a low profile for the last decade. “He was a genuine visionary,” proclaimed Grace Coddington, creative director of U.S. Vogue, “one of the earliest artists to embrace digital photography and…”

I skipped the rest and sat staring at the screen. Finally I cleared the laptop’s history and returned it to the hotel clerk.

“Nobody left a message for me, right?” I asked. “No one came by or anything?”

He shook his head. “No. It’s been quiet all morning.”

The upstairs corridor was empty, with the same dank odor of mildew and cleaning fluid. I stepped into my room and turned the dead bolt, pulled down the window shades, and collapsed onto the bed.

It had to have been Anton—him or someone he’d paid off. A wealthy collector and dealer of murderabilia would presumably have contact with the kind of people who made his hobby possible. It would take someone a lot stronger than me to bash in Ilkka’s skull and snap Suri’s neck in a slammed door.

Had Anton planned the murders from day one? Or was he just so enraged by the thought of Ilkka selling the photos to someone else that he jumped in before the transaction could take place? Whichever it was, he’d now be aware that Suri Kumala had been killed and not Cassandra Neary. Maybe he’d look for me in New York.

Or maybe he wouldn’t look for me at all. Maybe I was just spinning out the kind of paranoid fantasy you come up with after tweaking or bingeing for a week.

Only thing was, I’d been relatively sober, for me.

I pulled off my soaked cowboy boots and threw them in a corner along with my jacket. I wished I’d thought of finding a liquor store; I was afraid to leave my room, until I came up with something like a plan. That was going to be tough. I don’t believe in safety nets: I believe in trapdoors, and the kind of luck that looks like forward planning only if you’re wasted enough to see a pattern in blood and broken glass.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t that wasted yet. I rubbed my eyes and gazed at the dark window. Would INTERPOL be involved already? Ilkka might have told his wife he’d had a visitor, but she wouldn’t have known why I was there. Suri knew who I was, but she was dead. The bartender had seen me, and so had the cab driver. Neither of them knew my name, though they might remember a tall American woman in a hurry to leave Helsinki.

Still, I wasn’t in a rush to go back to New York. People were already on my ass about Aphrodite Kamestos’s death, plus Anton might have arranged for his friends to meet me. In Iceland a six-foot blond probably wouldn’t draw much attention. If I kept my mouth shut, I might be able to pass as a native.

I couldn’t stay at this hotel: Both clerks would have clocked me as an American. But I had nowhere else to go. The only thing I knew was that I had to find Quinn and lie low. I downed a Vicodin and hoped that Anton Bredahl didn’t have a lot of friends in Reykjavík.

*   *   *

When I woke I felt better, until I remembered where I was. I’d slept almost sixteen hours. The snow had stopped. I showered and dressed, popped two Focalin, grabbed my bag, and went downstairs. The middle-aged clerk stood outside on the sidewalk, his cigarette glowing in the morning dark. There was no way to leave without walking past him, so I pulled on my watch cap and went out. He averted his eyes as I left.

I walked up to Laugavegur. The wind had died; the raw air felt almost balmy. Church bells chimed as a cop on a motorcycle buzzed past. I went to the place I’d had breakfast the day before, but it was closed, chairs stacked atop the tables inside, a fetid smell of beer and spoiled fish around the entrance. From an apartment across the street echoed a thumping bass line, joined intermittently by drums that couldn’t keep the beat. Band practice.

I kept going. At the end of the next block I stopped to stare at some official-looking buildings. A few lights shone in the windows of Legoland houses and apartment complexes, their architectural details lost in the murk. Everything looked grainy and underexposed. If Reykjavík had been a photographic print, I would have tossed it.

I headed for the harbor, where droning boat engines drowned out the hum of traffic, and an iodine glare stained the sky above blocks of unfinished construction. Skeletal high-rises; piles of black gravel and rusted beams; pits surrounded by scaffolding and sonotubes. Graffiti covered plywood barricades. A tarp hung from a girder like a spiral of blackened skin. It resembled some futurist ruin, all that remained of a city sacrificed to the god that had abandoned it.

I got out my camera and picked my way among chunks of concrete and plywood walkways. The wind stung my face, but I hardly noticed: I was rapt, sucked into that place where the vision inside my head merged with what was in front of me. I shot half a dozen frames, and for a few minutes I forgot about everything except for the world inside my viewfinder.

In the last hour the city had awakened. Molten sunlight set steel girders and I beams ablaze as a decrepit orange bus jounced by in a cloud of exhaust, empty except for its driver. I put away my camera and set out to find the flea market.

Along the shore a couple walked hand in hand, a skein of gulls trailing them like smoke. Live music—more band rehearsals—wafted down streets corrugated with frozen slush. I found a crowded hot dog stand where I waited in line with bleary-eyed kids who passed around cigarettes as they kicked at the broken tarmac. I picked up an occasional word or phrase in their hangover chatter—band names, mostly. I bought two hot dogs and, when I was done eating, approached a boy wearing a pink-and-green anorak and matching Vans shoes.

“I’m looking for Kolaportið.”

He gestured at a nondescript white building that took up most of a block. “Over there.”

I crossed the street, walked through a parking lot filled with people unloading cars and pickups, and went inside. There was already a small mob, so I waited between a wizened man in a cowboy hat and a dumpy woman flanked by three kids squabbling over a Game Boy. Another man guarded a rope that separated us from a cavernous, table-filled space flooded with acrid fluorescent light. People jostled past me, and Cowboy Hat shook his head reproachfully until the rope dropped and the crowd dispersed.

Inside was the usual flea-market crap: fast-food toys marketed as collectibles, pirated slasher movies from Indonesia, homemade jewelry, tapestries emblazoned with dolphins or Michael Jackson, used appliances, old paperbacks. It was like the gods of commerce had swallowed all this stuff, then puked it up again. The only thing that marked this as a flea market in Reykjavík rather than Rockville was the glut of woolen clothing. You name it, somebody’s Icelandic grandmother was perched on a folding chair, knitting it while she kept a cool eye on the competition across the aisle.

At least it was crowded, which would make it harder for someone to find me. Harder, too, for me to find Quinn. How the hell would I recognize him? Half the middle-aged men here looked like they’d had the life Quinn probably ended up with: gazes blunted by drugs or alcohol; gray hair, bad teeth, thinning ponytails; stained relaxed-fit cargo pants, Bob Marley T-shirts pulled over slack bellies.

I made a circuit of the room and ended at an indoor café with plastic tables and a take-out window. The old man in a cowboy hat had set up an electronic keyboard and was singing Roy Orbison songs. Not bad, either. I checked out the delicatessen area, which was big on food that looked like doggie chew toys—dried fish and the heads of quadrupeds in varying stages of decay. I passed on the free samples and made another loop of the market.

Most of the faces were familiar from my first go-round. Anxiety crept into my frustration as I considered the notion that Quinn and Ilkka’s killer were the same person, which would at least consolidate my growing paranoia. I paused at a bookstall whose proprietor ignored me to speak animatedly into his cell phone. To one side of the bookstall, a woman with close-cropped black hair presided over a makeshift grotto filled with carven animals, handmade leather pouches, and stones painted with runes. Beside her, two teenage girls hawked tie-dyed clothing to a man in an expensive-looking loden-green overcoat. He looked slightly out of place among all the schlubby jumble salers: expensively shaggy dark-blond hair, pinstriped trousers, nice leather shoes ruined by road salt. It was a second before I twigged that it was the same guy I’d seen standing at the bar in Viva Las Vegas.

He must have sensed me watching him: He turned and fixed me with the dispassionate gaze of a fox distracted from the hunt. I stared back. A mistake, but I’d never seen eyes that color before—not on a human being—so pale a brown they were almost topaz. He raised his hand as though to beckon me over.

“Hey,” he said. Good English, but not a native speaker. “Are you lost?”

I darted off, ducked behind a display, and kept going till I reached a crowded aisle. I stopped beside a long table and scanned the room but didn’t see him.

“Góðan dag.” Behind the table, a young guy unpacked a cardboard box. He was very thin, with blanched white skin, a mass of silvery curls, and ruby eyes that glowed like votive candles behind thick-lensed glasses. An albino. “Hvernig gengur?”

I looked to see what he was unpacking—eight-track tapes. Dagny had said that Quinn sold old vinyl. I picked up and then immediately dropped an eight-track of the Starland Vocal Band. The albino gave me a cursory smile, settled into a chair, and began tapping on an iPad.

Crates covered the table. I peered into one that held scores of vinyl LPs, some new, others old but still shrink-wrapped, all arranged alphabetically. I flipped through Rory Gallagher, Art Garfunkel, Marvin Gaye, Gentle Giant, pulled out Gong’s Camembert Electrique, sans shrink-wrap but in pristine condition. The albino nodded in approval.

“That’s the one Pip Pyle played on, before he split for Hatfield and the North. There’s some more rare stuff over there.…”

He pointed to the far end of the table, where a hand-lettered sign reading ESKIMO VINYL leaned against a tower of eight-tracks. “One with Elton Dean and Marc Charig, Lyn Dobson does some amazing sitar. Check it out.”

“I thought those guys never recorded with Gong.”

“It’s a live bootleg of a gig they did in Paris in 1971.”

He flipped through a crate of LPs as though it were a Rolodex, plucked out an album—plain black sleeve, no lettering—and handed it to me, pointing to a turntable. “You can listen there if you want.”

The turntable was a vintage Philips 312, the same model I had in my apartment back in the city. Not top of the line even back in 1976, but it got the job done. This one had been pimped out with Bose headphones, a Graham 1.5 tonearm with a tungsten arm, and a stylus so fine I barely heard it kiss the vinyl. The recording quality wasn’t great—you could hear background conversation and the clink of glasses—but it wasn’t as bad as some bootlegs I’ve heard.

Not my taste, though. I slid the record back into the sleeve and returned it the crate. The albino raised his eyebrows. “What’d you think?”

“It’s okay.” I debated whether to ask about Quinn, decided I’d hold off for the moment. “Not really my thing, that’s all.”

“What’re you into?” He picked up a dome magnifier and examined a packing list. “We have a lot of old-style punk. Bootleg of Johnny Thunders’s L.A.M.F., live at Max’s. Joy Division, Le Terme.”

“Thanks, I’ve got those.”

I perused what appeared to be the world’s most complete collection of Cramps picture discs, including one that featured Poison Ivy in a a red velvet armchair, wearing a plastic tiara and not much else. This seemed more like what Quinn might have been listening to, circa 1979.

And the velvet chair reminded me of something. I shut my eyes for a moment, thinking.

Darkthrone was one of the bands Suri had mentioned. I found the crate holding the Ds. Between Danzig and the Dead Milkmen were several Darkthrone LPs and picture discs available in a range of colors, as long as you liked black. I selected one at random.

“Okay if I play this?”

The albino had clipped what looked like a pair of tiny telescopes onto his glasses and was examining a twelve-inch as though it was printed in cuneiform. He nodded absently. “Yeah, sure.”

Darkthrone’s lead singer sounded like he’d taken vocal lessons from Hasil Adkins. Most of the lyrics were in Norwegian, but I suspected I’d have no trouble understanding them if I’d been a fifteen-year-old boy with anger-management issues. Whatever he was saying, he seemed to mean it. The guitar work sounded like an electric razor jacked on ice. I gave the band props for that before removing the album from the turntable.

“There’s some good Mayhem there, too.” The albino indicated another carton. “And we do special orders.”

Mayhem was another band Suri had mentioned. I got a good suss on their worldview from the song titles—“Chainsaw Gotsfuck,” “Carnage,” “Necrolust.”

“Here’s the original 1987 Deathcrush.” The albino handed me an LP wrapped in Mylar. “By the way, I’m Baldur.”

“Like the Norse god?”

He grinned. “Yeah. A joke—in Norse, Baldur is called ‘The White One.’ There were only a thousand copies of that demo, all hand-numbered. See?” He pointed to the sleeve—number 666. “That was Necrobutcher’s own copy. That’s what I was told, anyway.”

I wondered if Necrobutcher’s mother had christened him that, but a guy named Baldur probably wasn’t the one to ask. “Can I listen to it?”

He shook his head. “Not that one. There’s a 1993 reissue on CD; we don’t have it, but it’s easy to find. I don’t even know why Quinn keeps that here. He’ll never let it go. Ozzy Osbourne’s manager offered us three thousand dollars, and Quinn said no.”

“Quinn.” I handed back the LP, trying to sound nonchalant. “So is he around?”

“Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow. He’s been gone for a while. Excuse me,” he said, and turned to a girl holding a copy of Astral Weeks.

I flipped through the rest of Mayhem’s oeuvre. Their fashion sense was early Nazgul—black leather, white corpse makeup, stringy hair. KISS for depressives. Quinn had always been more of a classic Chuck Berry, Rolling Stones, New York Dolls kind of guy, but maybe prison had changed his musical taste, or maybe he aimed strictly for the collectors’ market. After a minute I withdrew another LP: Dawn of the Black Hearts.

The cover was a color photograph of a young man in a bloodstained T-shirt and plaid flannel shirt, lying on the floor. A shotgun pointed at a hand slick with blood, and lying across the gun’s stock was a blood-spattered carving knife. Blond hair swept back from a forehead that dissolved into a porridge of shattered bone and brain tissue. I squinted to read the logo on the bloody T-shirt.

I ♥ TRANSYLVANIA

Ilkka’s photographs hadn’t triggered my sense of damage, but this picture reeked of it. It was like walking into a room where there’s a gas leak.

“It’s a nasty picture, that one,” said Baldur, returning from his customer. “Especially if you’re not expecting it.”

“Seems like it would have limited commercial appeal.”

“Yes. It’s revolting. That’s another rare one Quinn doesn’t want to sell. If we put it on eBay, we’d get some good money for it. Which right now, we could use.”

“You don’t worry about someone ripping them off?”

“Oh, sure. But Brynja…”

He pointed across the room, and I saw the woman in the New Age grotto watching us. “That’s our guardian. My sister. ”

“She’s your sister?”

Baldur laughed. “Yeah, I know. We’re not a family of albinos. Just me.” He waved at the dark-haired woman, who fixed me with a thousand-yard stare before turning away.

“She doesn’t look too happy to see me.”

“She hates Quinn.” Baldur picked up Dawn of the Black Hearts. “Probably she thinks you’re one of his friends.”

“Why does she hate Quinn?”

“You know.” He shrugged. “So you’ve never heard Black Hearts?”

“Nope. But that’s a real photo, right?”

“Oh sure. It’s real.” He tapped the cover. “That’s Dead.”

“I mean, it’s not, like, Photoshopped or—”

“No—his name is Dead. Or was, until he killed himself. Then Dead was really dead. His Christian name was Per Ohlin. He was Mayhem’s lead singer—not the first, but he did the vocals on Black Hearts. Their lead guitarist, Euronymous, owned a record store in Oslo, and that’s where Dead pulled the trigger—after he used the hunting knife. Euronymous found the body. He ran out and bought a camera, then rearranged the body to make it look prettier, and took a photograph—that photograph. A few years later it showed up as the cover of this bootleg.”

“Christ. Nice bunch of guys.”

“Yes, very nice.” Behind their thick lenses, Baldur’s ruby eyes glittered. “Dead used to carry around a dead raven in a plastic bag. He liked the way it smelled. He’d bury his own clothes in the dirt, then wear them when he sang onstage. He was in love with being dead: That was his romance.”

“Looks like it was consummated.”

“He was not the only one. Euronymous was murdered by someone in his band. Then there were all the church fires, and some other stuff, too, stuff you never heard about. Very bad shit.”

I stared at the grisly photo, thinking of Ilkka’s sequence and what Suri had told me about the Oslo music scene. Not that Europeans have a lock on that kind of stuff. In rock and roll, the fine line between showbiz and psychosis can be summed up in two words: Phil Spector.

I said, “I guess that would be some very bad shit. This stuff big in Iceland?”

“There are fans, but no one takes it seriously. And there are no murders here in Iceland, even by black metal singers.” He laughed. “Iceland is very safe, very tolerant. They are very anti-Christian, those Norwegian bands. That’s why they like the old gods, Odin and Thor and Loki. And me! Baldur the Beautiful—that works good to pick up girls, you know?

“Here we have almost as many heathens as Christians, but nobody gets too worked up about it, you know? And the Satanists are ridiculous. Even the black metal bands know that. Now they are mostly heathens. Some Viking metal is very good, but the rest—songs about human sacrifice, Gorgoroth impaling sheep’s heads onstage—it’s too much. My sister says we should get rid of their albums, not just Mayhem—all those bands. And sometimes I think she’s right, but it’s worth too much money.”

“What does Quinn think?”

“Quinn? Nothing like that bothers him. That’s why they call him Quinn the Eskimo. He’s a cold one.”

He slipped back behind the table. I hung around for a few more minutes, hoping Quinn might materialize, but finally gave up and left. As I passed her stall, Brynja turned to stare after me, her eyes narrowed and lips mouthing words I was glad I couldn’t hear or understand.

*   *   *

Before leaving the market I invested in a secondhand Icelandic sweater that was way too big but about a hundred bucks cheaper than anything else, then went to find a bar. Outside, the wind nearly knocked me over. I headed away from the center of town, trudging up one gray street after another, trying in vain to escape the gale. The sun showed fitfully, revealing shreds of sky that glowed a brilliant, lacquered blue before they were extinguished by scudding pewter clouds. I stared into passing cars and shop windows, slowed down at street corners, always hoping to recognize Quinn.

But everyone I saw looked nineteen: walking arm in arm, singing snatches of songs in Icelandic or English; huddled in doorways, smoking. I felt like a ghost in the Land of Youth. The few places that looked like they’d serve alcohol were shuttered or, in many cases, closed for good.

After about an hour I reached a desolate stretch of black gravel in the lee of more unfinished construction—high-rises surrounding a square pit filled with rust-colored water. The place was a dumping ground for bashed-in fuel tanks and discarded tires as big as wading pools. Three old men stood beside a fire in a metal bin, smoking cigarettes and watching me with reddened eyes. One shouted something in Icelandic. The others laughed. I kept going.

Up ahead, a heap of soiled mattresses had been pulled beside a row of abandoned box vans, minus their 18-wheelers. Flames leapt from a tower of huge radials, accompanied by plumes of greasy black smoke. I covered my mouth, coughing, and glanced back.

The three men were gone. A solitary figure strode quickly across the vacant lot, a tall man in a loden-green overcoat, blond head down against the wind, as incongruous here as he’d been in the market. He lifted his head to gaze at me, teeth bared in a smile, and reached for his pocket.

I turned and sprinted for the abandoned trailers, blinded by acrid smoke. A sudden gust sent me reeling. I caught my balance, saw a gap in the smoke, and staggered toward it. I’d gone only a few steps before someone grabbed me by the throat. I kicked out, but my assailant elbowed me so hard I doubled over, gasping. My knees gave way as he dragged me across broken asphalt, up a set of metal stairs, and into the black interior of a box van. My head struck the floor, and the darkness took me.

*   *   *

Much later I opened my eyes, blinking as I tried to focus on something, anything, in the dark. It was useless. There was a pervasive smell of mold beneath the stench of scorched rubber. I sat up, head aching, and inched across the floor until I bumped a wall. Someone touched my leg. Before I could scream a hand covered my mouth.

“Shhh. Listen…”

I froze. Whoever was beside me didn’t move. After a long moment he exhaled and withdrew his hand. There was a soft click, and I shaded my eyes, dazzled by the glow of a lighter. I could just make out a silhouette in the darkness and braced myself against the wall as he reached toward me. A hand touched my cheek and gently tilted my face to the light.

“Cassie…”

Only two people have ever called me that. One was my mother, dead for almost half a century. My voice broke as I breathed the other’s name.

“Quinn.”