The Ghosts of Altona (21 page)

Poe, he had wanted to tell her, had been his god and his devil, his inspiration and his tormentor. In his childhood, Werner had consumed Poe’s work over and over again. His discovery, at thirteen, of
The Pit and the Pendulum
had been like striking the earth and it splitting open to reveal a seam of pure gold. In Poe, the young Werner had found a mind that mirrored his: a labyrinth of shadowed corners and sudden, unexpected dark places. In his twenties, Werner had dreamt of becoming the new Poe but had slowly, inexorably, come to realize that he could never be the great man’s equal. Not even close. Poe’s mind remained an intricate Daedalean labyrinth of bewildering complexity in which one could lose one’s sanity; Werner’s mind, in comparison, was a simple garden maze.

The day arrived when Werner came face to face with his own mediocrity. And at least he had acknowledged it, then embraced it. His former friend from university, Detlev Traxinger, had been an almost perfect analogue in the world of visual art: a mediocrity with a talent for making money out of his banality. The difference between them, as far as Werner could see, was that Detlev seemed to believe his own propaganda. Mind you, from the outside looking in, maybe people would think the same about Werner. The truth was that every time Werner completed a novel and submitted it to his enthusiastic publishers, he felt as if he had voided his gut. And every now and again, he would reread Poe to remind himself of his own poverty of genius.

The pseudonym had been his revenge.

It was an obvious reference, a clumsy device, for a horror writer to use Poe’s first names, albeit in reverse order, as a nom de plume. Poe had, after all, died wearing another man’s clothes and using another man’s name. It seemed ironically fitting to Werner that he should put Poe’s name, at least in part, to his own brand of predictable, shallow horror fiction, while keeping his own, Werner Hensler, unsullied. One day, he had promised himself, one day he would write something worthwhile. And he would write it under his own name.

As he reached his car, thin needles of rain had started to fall. He had just unlocked the car with the remote fob when he was aware of someone behind him. Before he could turn, an arm looped around his throat, holding him firm. There was a sting in his neck and something cold flowed into his veins. He wrestled free from his assailant, who loosened their grip without a struggle.

Werner turned and thought he saw a face he hadn’t seen in such a long time, but the world was already darkening. His legs began to give way and firm hands guided him around to the passenger seat, easing him into the car.

He vaguely heard the driver’s door shut and the engine kick into life, but these noises already sounded like he was hearing them from some great distance. He felt himself fall into a deep, lightless, total blackness.

His last thought was:
I am falling into the Pit
.

33

The storeroom, unlike the rest of the studio and gallery, was not flooded with natural light. Shutters had been fitted and closed over the window wall facing the river and the skylights were black-shrouded with blinds. In any case, it was beginning to get dark outside so Anja Koetzing hit a switch just inside the door and angled spotlights flickered into life.

‘They’re angled to illuminate each painting when you pull it out, but it’s really not the best light for looking at pictures. Of course that’s not the function here. This is just a store.’

Fabel could see that canvases were arranged in rows in floor-to-ceiling rack units, each unit stacked two rows high.

‘You remember the kind of boxes colour slides used to be stored in . . . you know, photographic transparencies?’ Anja Koetzing asked as she walked over to the nearest unit. ‘Or even the carriage in an old slide projector? Well, the principle is the same, just on a much bigger scale. It means canvases can be stored upright in compact units and we can cram lots into the space – but if you want to look at any one of them, you just pull the sliding tray out.’

‘Very clever,’ said Fabel. ‘Your system?’

‘The strange thing about Detlev,’ Anja Koetzing said as she went to the first unit, ‘is that his entire life was complete chaos. Everything about it was totally fucked up in a way you could only manage if you were really working at it. But this . . .’ She yanked on a metal handle and the first stored canvas slid out, held upright in its metal carriage. ‘All of this has nothing to do with me. Detlev planned it, designed it, practically built it. In everything else he was a fuck-up, but with his art, with his studio, he was fastidious to the point of obsession. As you can see, he was very prolific but only chose a few canvases at a time for exhibition and sale. He wasn’t prolific because he rushed his work, it was because he was very disciplined with working. A tough guy to figure out.’

‘So you say these canvases wouldn’t be rotated with the ones on display?’

‘Not really. Or at least not all of them. Most of the art in here falls into three categories: a stock of satisfactory work for future sale, the stuff he wasn’t happy with but wanted to revisit in the future, and his “alternative” works – different styles and different ideas, mainly what you could say were personal favourites. There are a couple of paintings here that I can’t wait to sell, because some of them really are much better than his usual output.’

‘And will you? Sell all of these?’

‘You bet. Not all at once, and none until the exhibition work has been sold. By that time the Detlev Traxinger brand will sell at a premium. You think I’m a cold-hearted bitch, don’t you?’

‘I don’t make judgements like that, Frau Koetzing,’ said Fabel, but the truth was her hard-headedness was beginning to cause him to think about checking her alibi again.

The door opened behind them and Anna Wolff stepped in. ‘You wanted me,
Chef
?’

‘Frau Koetzing, this is Criminal Chief Commissar Wolff . . . Anna, this is Frau Koetzing. Herr Traxinger’s business manager.’

The two women shook hands. Fabel thought he picked up an odd vibe from Anja Koetzing, her smile on the grudging side of perfunctory. The dynamics of inter-female relationships was the one mystery Fabel had never been able to solve, more elusive for him than quantum physics. He shook the feeling off and turned to Anna.

‘There’s something I need you to see.’

*

‘Shit,’ said Anna. ‘That’s the picture, all right.’ She and Fabel were alone, back out in the main gallery area, at the heart of the maze of partition walls. The gallery lights were now also on and a pool of light illuminated the huge canvas. ‘My mind was on other things, it has to be said, but I remember it all right.’

‘I certainly remember it,’ said Fabel. ‘I thought it was the last thing I was going to see. But according to Anja Koetzing, it was impossible for Schalthoff to have a print of it.’

‘You mean Vampira?’ Anna snorted. ‘Whether she believes it or not, the print was there on Schalthoff’s wall.’

‘I don’t think she likes you either, by the way,’ said Fabel.

‘Well she likes you. I’d watch yourself there. She’ll have her fangs into you as soon as the sun goes down.’ Anna focused again on the painting. ‘Why did he sign this painting
Charon
?’

‘It’s not a signature, it’s the subject: the central figure in the painting is meant to be Charon, the boatman who conveyed the dead across the river Styx to Hades. As you can imagine, when I first saw it I thought there was a message in there for me. According to Frau Koetzing, Traxinger liked to experiment with different themes and styles and almost brand them differently.’

He leaned closer and examined the painting. The sight of it still caused a churning in his gut, but he knew he had to get beyond that, to apply professional focus. He could see now that the draped figure was actually dressed in modern clothing: a hoodie with the hood pulled up to put all but the lower half of the face in shadow, a long leather coat over the top and reaching down to the ground. It was cleverly done, creating the impression from a distance of an almost monk-like cowl and habit. He again saw the fire behind the figure, represented in diamond facets of red, amber and yellow. But it was clearer now, seen close up and in full size.

‘It’s a riot . . .’

‘What?’

‘The fire. The background. It’s a riot. That’s supposed to be Hamburg, you can see the spires of the Michel and the Nikolai. Look. And if you look into the shapes behind the figure you can see barricades amongst the flames. The hooded figure isn’t Charon, he’s a rioter. And the river isn’t the Styx, it’s the Elbe.’ Fabel shook his head in admiration.

‘You okay?’ asked Anna. ‘It must be a shock to see it again.’

Fabel gave a small laugh. ‘More a surprise than a shock. It was just so bizarre to see it here.’ He examined the figure more closely. The eyes shone out from the shadow cast over the face by the cowl of the hood. Green eyes.

He turned away from the painting. ‘We need to find out what connection, if any, there is between Detlev Traxinger and Jost Schalthoff.’

‘I’ll get onto it,
Chef
. Do you want me to bring Henk in?’

‘No, leave him to tie up the loose ends on the old people’s home case.’

Walking away from the
Charon
painting, Fabel saw through the vast windows of the former machine hall the sun set over the Elbe. The colours in the sky were not unlike those in Detlev Traxinger’s habitual palette. It had been a good place for an artist’s studio.

‘Thom and Dirk are still here, in the studio, why don’t you update them on what we’ve got so far,’ Fabel told Anna. ‘In the meantime, I’ve some other paintings to look at.’

Anna grinned and nodded to the sunset beyond the glazed wall. ‘Sun’s going down. If you’re going back in there with her, you should maybe get your hands on some garlic . . .’

34

Edgar Allan Poe sat across the writing desk from him. They were in a dark room that smelled of earth and damp. Behind Poe was a wall made up not from bricks, but mossy fragments of stone, inscribed with Hebrew. Werner had no idea how he had got there and for some reason didn’t feel the need to ask how the great man had come back to life. It surprised him, but only for a moment, when he noticed that Poe was a handsome man. The darkest hair above a broad, wide, pale brow; penetrating, crystal eyes. Werner, the Poe enthusiast, of course had known that before: that some of the later daguerreotypes of the author had been taken during his darkest period and were far from flattering, showing a sunken-eyed, hollow-cheeked wraith who fitted better with the type of fiction he had written. And, of course, there had been a malicious obituary and post-mortem biography written by Poe’s executor, who actually envied the dead man’s genius and painted him as a drunkard and wastrel.

‘Where am I, Mr Poe?’ Werner asked in English.

‘My name is Reynolds,’ said Poe.

Werner shook his head. ‘No it’s not, sir. Reynolds was the name you were using on the night you died.’

‘My name is Reynolds.’ Poe coughed, twice, but his eyes remained unblinking. ‘I do believe that I may have the cholera spasms. I was travelling through Philadelphia and there was an outbreak . . .’

‘Please, Mr Poe . . . please tell me where I am.’ Werner again looked past Poe at the wall of gravestone fragments. ‘Are we under the cemetery in Altona?’

‘My name is Reynolds. This place knows no geography; it is a place of the inner, not outer, universe. You want to write tales such as mine,’ said Poe. ‘This is the place whence those tales come.’ He gave another unblinking cough and a dribble of blood, so dark as almost to be black, found its way out of the corner of his mouth and down his chin.

‘It feels like we are under the ground. Am I dead?’ asked Werner.

‘Not yet,’ said Poe. ‘Death and the mind construct great mansions. There are rooms in the mind we occupy before and during death. This is one such room. This is the room you must look into – your own words I believe – before you can write great dark fiction. But do not worry, you will be dead. Soon. And your name hereafter will be Edgar just as mine is Reynolds. There are some fictions that endure through death.’

Werner wanted to protest, to ask more, but Poe began coughing again. Another shiny, black-red dribble came from the lips, but this time it defied gravity and began to writhe, to probe the air with its tip, and Werner realized it was a blood-slicked worm.

Werner tried to scream, but suddenly felt his mouth sealed shut.

*

Werner Hensler left the drug-induced dream behind and regained consciousness. There was no Poe, no gravestone wall; there was nothing he could see in the darkness.

Werner knew that he was now fully conscious but panicked at the thought that he had lost his sight: everything around him was the blackest dark; so completely lightless that there was no difference between having his eyes open or closed. He could see nothing but, when he thought it through, knew somehow he wasn’t blind, just as the total, stifling silence did not mean he was deaf.

He was lying on his back. He tried to move but someone had tied him up so tightly as to rob him of even the smallest movement. His wrists had been bound with tape in front of him and his arms fastened tight to his body by rope. At least he guessed that it was rope from the way it dug into him when he struggled against it. His legs too had been pinioned by bonds that bit into his skin at the ankles, calves, knees and thighs.

He was naked: he could feel the varnished hardness against his skin of the wooden table or bench they had placed him on, and every time he tried to move a centimetre, his abrasively tight bonds would bite directly into his flesh. Something chill ran through him at the idea of his abductor having stripped him as he had lain exposed, senseless, naked and vulnerable.

He tried to call out but was stifled by the tape placed over his mouth. A powerful claustrophobia began to seize him: a primal instinct reacting against being robbed so totally of movement. It took a conscious effort not to lose himself to a blind panic and he concentrated on breathing through his nose slow and easy, trying not to think about his mouth being sealed.
Think
, he told himself,
reason it out
. He peered into the darkness. He thought he could sense a depth to it, imagined he perceived a distant corner, perhaps where walls and ceiling met. He was being kept in a darkened room. Lightproof and perhaps even soundproof. The air in his nose felt vaguely damp. The purpose of his confinement was a mystery; perhaps he had been kidnapped for money and, in another room, his abductors were negotiating a ransom with his publishers. A darker thought: perhaps his abduction had nothing to do with who he was, but was the random act of some madman. Maybe the door would swing open any moment, flooding the chamber with light and torment as his insane captor carried in his instruments of torture.