4

Bredahl worked fast. In moments another e-mail arrived: a link to his Web page, with instructions to click on the icon of a raven, follow that link to a second site, where I should click on a rainbow, then on to a site where I should sign in pseudonymously and, after receiving a password, type in the long string of numerals that he provided.

All this took me to Anton’s site. No photo, no personal information of any kind; just a white screen crowded with totemic-looking animals—wolves, whales, puffins, eagles, serpents. It took me a minute to find the raven, which brought me to a page that looked as though it had been created by a fifth-grade girl, all pastel clip art of unicorns and fairies. I clicked on the rainbow, which drew up a spreadsheet for the accounting office of a furniture company. There was a place to log in, and I did, under Cam Lucida. I entered the numeric password and found myself staring at a screen deep in the darkweb.

Plukke rune

I hesitated, then clicked an icon. Up popped a black-and-white daguerreotype of a wizened infant, swaddled in a christening gown and lying on a bed. The baby’s eyes were shut, its tiny hands like a dead bird’s claws.

A Victorian postmortem daguerreotype. Photographers cranked them out in the early days of studio work, memento mori that were handed to the grieving family for display in the parlor or family Bible. They were highly collectible, though not particularly valuable: Too many had been produced by anonymous photographers eager to make a buck when the art was still new. I couldn’t afford to turn down Bredahl’s money, but this kind of macabre kitsch was definitely not to my taste.

I clicked another link. Up popped a second postmortem photo, of a dark-skinned young woman lying in a coffin surrounded by tall vases of white roses. Billows of lace and satin frothed down the sides of the casket; her clasped hands held an immense bouquet of white lilies. She’d been buried in her wedding dress.

James Van Der Zee, 1920s

This was more like it. Van Der Zee was a black photographer who shot tens of thousands of photos in the early twentieth century. I had a copy of his Harlem Book of the Dead I’d nicked from the Strand when it first came out. That book would cost you five bills and change now. Van Der Zee was almost a hundred when he died, and kept shooting nearly to the end—celebrity portraits, mostly. I could only guess what one of his early Harlem photos would go for.

If this online archive was for real, Bredahl owned several. He also owned a bunch of photos by Weegee, the notorious New York newspaper photographer who earned his nickname because of a seemingly supernatural ability to arrive at a murder scene while the corpse was still warm, usually before police or ambulance.

I had one of Weegee’s books, too, but I’d never seen the pictures that Bredahl showed here. A naked woman splayed upon the boardwalk at Coney Island, torso split from throat to groin so her skin flapped like soiled bedsheets. A headless man slumped on a barstool, his spinal column protruding from a polka-dot shirt. A black Chihuahua lapping at a pool of blood beside a severed hand. There were also several Witkins I didn’t recognize, as well as contraband photos from the FBI’s Body Farm that showed cadavers scattered across a bucolic landscape.

I now had a good suss on Bredahl’s esoteric taste. Also of how much discretionary income he had. Enough to invest in legitimate works, some of them one of a kind, and to subsidize runners who specialized in black-market pictures that had probably been stolen. I should have asked for more money.

I wrote him an e-mail.

Interesting site. Where’d you find those Weegees?

Bredahl’s reply was terse.

www.saatavissatumma.com

I thought the URL might be for a private auction site or gallery. Instead, the link took me to a screen pulsing with silvery light.

Astua Sisään. Enter.

I clicked.

There were no Weegees here. Dreamy, vaguely familiar images filled the screen: bruised women sitting in office cubicles on an ice floe; square-jawed men in eyewear forged of rusty nails; a line of solemn blond children marching across a rocky beach, arms laden with leafless birch twigs. The locations were arctic, even when the models wore acid-green shantung sheaths or skirts of distressed chiffon: ice-locked lakes, barren tundra, evergreens so thick with snow they resembled alabaster topiaries. In one image, disheveled women in fur leggings and camisoles harnessed reindeer to a sled piled with raw meat. The photos were shot on film, not digitally; a highly saturated palette of indigo, silver, ochre deepening to the coppery black of dried blood; a pure, snow-blind white nearly impossible to capture without washing out the faces of the models.

That ethereal white twigged it for me. The site belonged to the Finnish fashion photographer Ilkka Kaltunnen. He’d been a prodigy during the late 1990s, when he was only in his twenties, and had a flash of notoriety for a Vogue shoot where the models all appeared to have died of heroin overdoses in a sauna. He’d also shot album covers for a couple of obscure Scandinavian bands excoriated for their involvement in church burnings and other satanic hijinks in Norway and Sweden.

Those scenes were mostly off my radar. I knew Kaltunnen for his real work. Among serious photographers, Kaltunnen was noted for that signature white: a burst of radiance in a model’s eyes or the silver clasp of a bracelet; a brilliant, malign flare no one else could replicate in a darkroom.

His heroin chic seemed a little off-topic for Bredahl’s collection. No rough edges. No dead people.

And I was no longer in the darkweb. I scanned Kaltunnen’s site and found more fashion pictures, none more recent than 1999; a few music videos; some bleak winter landscapes and panoramic black-and-white shots of an industrial waterfront.

Nothing seemed to fit Bredahl’s remit. I returned to his archive, searched for anything credited to Kaltunnen.

Nada. I was still brooding when the next message from Bredahl arrived. I checked the time: If he was in Oslo, this guy kept late hours. The e-mail consisted of another complicated set of links into the darkweb.

“Holy shit.” I refilled my glass, staring at what was on the screen.

It was a night photo, deep focus, color—an expanse of jagged, snow-drifted rocks, spare and bleached as the surface of the moon. Near the center, a young man lay on his back as though sunbathing. He wore a candy-striped parka with a white fur hood, black jeans, and black motorcycle boots. He was thin and had long black hair.

But it was impossible to get a clear look at his face, because a window, frame and all, had been smashed against it. Broken glass shone like ice on the parka; the stripes on his parka were streaks of blood. A hank of black hair was snarled around a splintered muntin. A spar of wood split his lower jaw so that it gaped open, tongue lolling between crimson teeth. His cheek had been pierced by a triangular piece of glass. Where it split his flesh, a tiny sun glowed, the most brilliant thing in that surreal, glittering world. There was a single word on the screen:

Gluggagægir

If it was fake—Photoshop or a still from some slasher movie—it was the most convincing fake I’d ever seen. If not, it was the most beautifully composed crime-scene photo on Earth. I hadn’t followed Kaltunnen’s career since he’d retired from the fashion world, but it had always been a point of pride for him to work only with available light, and he’d broken contracts rather than allow magazines to retouch his work.

That radioactive flare was his signature; but how had he gotten it on a moonless night, working without a flash, with no available light? It was impossible.

And who kills someone with a window?

If this photo was for real, Kaltunnen would be crazy to leak it, unless he was up for a long afternoon with the police. Bredahl would be crazy to buy it.

And I was crazy to be looking at it. Before I could quit the screen, my phone rang again. It was Anton.

“Forget it,” I said.

“Oh, he didn’t kill him; he didn’t kill any of them.”

“‘Them’?”

Bredahl made a dismissive sound. “Did Weegee kill the people in his photographs?”

“So this is, what? A crime-scene photo? A fashion shoot?”

“You really do have a good eye, Cassandra.”

“For what?”

“You recognized it as Ilkka’s work.”

“You just sent me a link to his goddamn Web site.”

“Yes, but most people would have been looking at the people and the clothes. And you knew this photo was authentic. You recognized the light.”

“Kaltunnen was famous for his light; CameraArts did a cover story on it twelve years ago.”

“Yes, and you remember that, too.” He sounded gleeful. “I’ve made your flight arrangements. Direct to Helsinki tomorrow evening; you’ll arrive early Friday morning. The bus goes from the airport to the train station; you can take a cab or bus to Ilkka’s house. I will arrange to have half your fee delivered to you there; the rest I will give you after I have completed my own transaction with Ilkka. You must be certain that all the photos are original and that the sequence is complete: There should be six of them. If you incur any other expenses, let me know; also how you would like the rest of your fee to be paid.”

“You’re sending me to Ilkka Kaltunnen?”

“Yes, of course. I envy you. No one has seen this sequence, not even me. Only that one photo. His wife is very nice. What is your mobile number?”

“I don’t have a fucking cell phone.”

“Get one in Helsinki. The whole country is fucking cell phones!”

He laughed, and the line went dead.