56
The birds lay twisted on the asphalt, their wings strangely spread. As she picked her way over their small bodies, Norah clung for a moment to the illusion that they weren’t real, but then she saw a tiny dead eye catch the light from the lamppost and heard Dorotea’s voice, as if she were standing beside her.
Flowers wither. Clocks stop. Birds fall dead from the sky.
Slowly, Norah went on her way. She was now on the central avenue that led through the fair to the big wheel, and she tried to keep to the middle and away from the edges; on either side of her, the fairground was dark and shadowy—anything could have been lurking there. After a little while she heard the waltz music again, clearly audible this time, and far ahead she could see the little statue of Basilio Calafati, the Prater showman. It stood on a plinth, arms outstretched, face frozen in a grimace. That was the place. That was where she would find him. That was where it would end.
•
She didn’t hear it or see it; she sensed it. There was something on her left. Norah wheeled round just in time to see a dark figure slip out of the shadows. It didn’t even occur to her that it might be a harmless passer-by; she was all too familiar with his strange way of moving. He was suddenly in front of her, barely two arms’ lengths away, standing there as if to block her path. Black trousers, black boots, an elegant black coat—his face almost unnaturally white, his pale eyes grave and alert.
‘You’ve come,’ Norah said.
In spite of everything, part of her was surprised that he had turned up.
Grimm looked at her for three or four beats, letting her wait for an answer.
‘What do you want?’
Norah suppressed the impulse to imitate him. She wasn’t here to play games.
‘I want to know what happened back then.’
‘And you want me to tell you?’
‘Who else?’
For a moment Grimm said nothing.
‘Why do I have the feeling you’re not going to believe me, no matter what I say?’
‘Try me,’ Norah said.
‘You’ll leave me in peace afterwards?’ Grimm asked.
‘It’s a promise.’
Grimm laughed and, in spite of the cold, Norah felt herself beginning to sweat. He was only two or three steps from her, the gun was in her bag, the safety catch was on, the bag was open; all she had to do was slip her hand in.
‘You said you had proof,’ he said.
She nodded.
‘It isn’t possible,’ he said. ‘You’re lying.’
He must have noticed that he had raised his voice because he checked himself and added more softly, ‘You have nothing.’
His right hand moved to his side, as if to reassure himself of something in his coat pocket.
‘So why are you here?’
His eyes flashed in the dark. He moved more quickly than she would have thought possible, reaching her in two steps and attempting to wrest her bag from her. Norah just managed to dodge him; his left hand gripped thin air, Norah stumbled, steadied herself, reached into her bag, tossed it aside. Grimm, too, steadied himself and spun round, ready to attack again. Then he saw the gun in her hands. He looked surprised, like someone who has just woken from a dream and finds himself in unfamiliar surroundings. Gasping, he pulled himself up to his full height. His usually inscrutable mask was now the face of a man who knows he has made a possibly fatal mistake. Norah felt her hands trembling and saw that Grimm had noticed.
‘You’re crazy,’ he said.
‘Get back,’ she said.
Grimm stared at her.
‘And if I don’t?’
His shrewd eyes glinted wickedly.
‘Will you shoot me?’
Norah said nothing.
‘It would be murder,’ Grimm said. ‘That won’t bring your little friend back to life.’
‘Get back,’ said Norah.
Grimm looked at her challengingly and Norah made a tiny step backwards to put some distance between them. He saw.
‘You’re not going to shoot,’ he said, sliding his hand into his pocket.
Norah shot.
The noise was so loud that it deafened her for a second—the recoil so violent that it sent fierce pain through her hands, arms and shoulders. For a long ghastly moment, Grimm’s eyes met hers. Then he fell backwards to the ground and lay there motionless. There was immediate silence.
Above them the stars twinkled.
ON FEAR
Fear is something I think about a lot. Fear is a phantom that holds sway over us, without being real. It is of our own making.
I remember the first time I felt the fear of death. I was thirteen years old and still a child—much less mature than the girls on my road who twisted their hair round their fingers and painted their lips with their mothers’ lipstick. It all started in the garden and I still have a clear image of our garden in those days—the lawn that was more moss than grass, the small vegetable patch where my mother grew cucumbers and tomatoes, the gooseberry bushes and, right down at the bottom, the compost heap, which I always avoided because my brother told me there were grass snakes living there—big black snakes with yellow marks on their heads. (I never found out whether he was telling the truth.) Beyond the compost heap, a stream formed a natural border to the garden behind, but could easily be jumped. That must have been how the man got in. I was out in the garden on my own one day, playing football, and when I looked up, there he was, with a knife in his hand. It was all so unreal I didn’t even scream. I just stood there, rooted to the spot, staring at him as if he were a still from a TV series or one of the horror films I loved to watch—a still which, by some magic, had found its way into real life—into my life. To this day, I haven’t understood what happened next. The man came up to me and, with a rapid, almost rehearsed-looking movement, he slashed my face with his knife. Then he turned and ran away. He was never found, but he has fuelled my imagination ever since. Who was he and why did he injure a plump little boy and then steal away? What were his motives? Did he have other plans that he was too scared to carry out? Was he hoping to kidnap me? To kill me? I had nightmares about him for years, and the fear I suffered in those nights was far worse than the fear I had felt in the situation itself. The real horror only set in after the event.
Fear has an aesthetics all its own. A frightened woman, for instance, is almost always beautiful. Hitchcock understood that—though his icons of fear are blonde, while mine are dark. I, for my part, didn’t overcome my fear until I began to take pleasure in it. These days, there is practically nothing I am afraid of.
57
A sound she couldn’t identify and then dazzling light. For a second, Norah was as disoriented as a newborn baby confronted with the world after months of soothing blackness. She blinked and looked around her. Floodlights—somebody had switched on floodlights. And weren’t they footsteps behind her? She turned to look, her arm raised to shield her eyes.
Then she saw him.
Tall. Burly. He was coming towards her from the big wheel, his silhouette emerging in the glare, like an image on a developing Polaroid. Norah stared at him. She had recognised him instantly; his hulking figure was as unmistakable as that of the cruel ogre in the book of fairytales she had read as a child. He was only a few metres from her and very smartly dressed; you might have thought he was on his way to a wedding or the opera. He wore a black dinner jacket and white shirt and carried something tucked nonchalantly under his arm. As he approached, Norah realised that it was a top hat.
Eventually he stepped out into the light. Now Norah could see his face—the coarse features that looked as if they were hewn in rough clay, the large-pored skin, the harsh mouth, and the tiny, disarmingly astute eyes. Professor Wolfgang Balder.
The man who made action art involving electric shocks.
The man who poured pig’s blood over passers-by.
The man who tortured women and called it art.
The nastiest man Norah knew.
The man who had destroyed Coco’s face, her mind, her life.
The Professor. Big B.
Norah’s overwrought brain must have short-circuited; she found herself recalling all the things she’d called him in her article. A charlatan. A violent criminal disguised as an artist. David Copperfield’s brutal brother. A poor person’s Houdini.
And she suddenly understood the meaning of his get-up. He wasn’t dressed for an evening at the opera; he was dressed as a magician.
In the cold glare of the floodlights, there was something ghostly about the professor; his face looked as rigid as a death mask. But his eyes were twinkling. He came closer. And closer. Then he raised his hands and, with infuriating slowness, began to applaud. Norah stared in stunned shock. He was only an arm’s length from her and now she could smell him too—that sickly sweet smell that was peculiar to him, as revolting as blood; as revolting as pipe smoke.
Norah moved away from Balder until at last he stopped clapping and looked at her calmly. Then his impassive gaze wandered to Grimm and he stared at the motionless body lying in the dark at the edge of the path. He stared for a long time. Then he raised his eyes again.
‘The curse has struck,’ he said and it took Norah a moment to realise that he wasn’t speaking to her, but to someone behind her.
She wheeled round and saw Theresa holding a video camera.
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Norah asked.
The hulking man with the quick, cold eyes that looked too small for his face tossed his top hat onto the ground and smiled.
‘My dear Miss Richter,’ he said, ‘have you still not worked it out?’
Norah stared at him mutely. She hadn’t seen Balder since their last meeting in Berlin and had forgotten how intimidating he was with his massive form and sinister smile.
‘Art,’ Balder said soberly. And then, smiling, ‘Raw, real, bloody, sweaty, filthy, grim, throbbing art.’
Norah took another step backwards.
‘I don’t understand.’
That shark’s rictus again.
‘I think it’s only fair that I explain it to you,’ said Balder.
Norah glanced at Theresa. Balder noticed.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She’s one of mine.’
Theresa stared at the ground. Norah was about to say something, but didn’t have a chance.
‘Curse,’ Balder cried, ‘is my last great work of art.’
‘Curse?’ Norah asked.
The professor nodded.
‘On February 11 you will kill a man called Arthur Grimm,’ he said dramatically. ‘With good reason and of your own free will.’
‘How do you know what the woman said?’ Norah asked.
Balder bared his teeth.
‘Because I paid her to say it.’
He studied Norah’s face, evidently satisfied with what he saw.
‘But why?’ she asked.
Balder tilted his head, as if waiting patiently for her to work it out for herself.
‘Art,’ Norah said dully.
‘An experiment,’ Balder explained.
‘But…Valerie…’ Norah stammered.
He tilted his head again.
‘Do you know what a self-fulfilling prophecy is?’ he asked.
Norah stared at him in silence.
‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Of course you do. It’s not hard, after all. A fortune teller prophesies to a superstitious woman that a tall, dark stranger will soon appear in her life and, unconsciously, that woman does everything to fulfil the prophecy. Her world is suddenly full of tall, dark men; she begins actively to seek their company. Looking back, the prophecy will seem to her confirmed, but in fact, she herself has done all the work.’
Norah still said nothing.
‘Curse was based on the same principle. As I said, it was an experiment. What happens if we prophesy something completely absurd to someone sane, intelligent and not remotely superstitious? Will it be fulfilled?’
‘You wanted me to kill Grimm?’ Norah said.
She could hear her voice trembling.
‘No, you’ve got it all wrong,’ said Balder, clutching his chest in a dramatic gesture of innocence. ‘I never wanted you to kill him, young lady; it was an experiment. Did Jackson Pollock know how his pictures would turn out before he threw the paint at the canvases? All I wanted was to see what would happen. I had no idea how it would turn out. There were thousands of possible outcomes. You might have ignored the whole thing, gone to the police, lain low, gone on holiday, moved to another city. Every step that has brought you here this evening was a conscious decision on your part. You decided to seek out Grimm. You decided you had a reason to kill him. And you killed him. All I did was to plant the words in your head: On February 11 you will kill a man called Arthur Grimm in the Prater, with good reason and of your own free will.’
Norah was still holding the gun; she could feel the weight of it in her hand. She looked across at Grimm’s lifeless body, rushed over to him and put her hand to his throat to feel for a pulse. It was no more than a gesture. Grimm’s pale face was turned away from her so that she couldn’t see whether his eyes were open or closed. She took a deep breath and realised that she was trembling, but didn’t know whether it was with cold or hatred. She pulled herself up and forced herself to turn back to face the professor.
‘I’ve just killed somebody,’ she said tonelessly.
‘Yes,’ said the professor and Norah saw him bite back a grin. ‘How does it feel? How does it feel to destroy a life?’
‘That’s not how it was,’ Norah shouted. ‘Valerie. And Grimm. The evidence. The guns that kept turning up in my flat…’
She broke off.
‘You’re lying,’ she said eventually. ‘It wasn’t just a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was you! You did this to me! This is your work!’
Balder was silent. He looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to look proud or caught out.
‘How did you do it?’ Norah asked.
‘I didn’t do a thing. You did all this.’
Norah laughed mirthlessly.
‘There’s no point lying to me. I was there. I know it wasn’t me who got hold of the gun. I know there was someone in my flat. I know that Grimm knew Valerie and—’
Norah cleared her throat.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘He killed Valerie. He—’
She heard Balder laughing softly and broke off again.
‘Do you remember our little talk in Berlin?’ he asked abruptly. ‘Our first talk. In the Adlon.’
Norah stared at him.
‘We talked about magic tricks. You knew that I’d incorporated stage magic into my action art and asked whether I could explain a conjuring trick where someone was made to disappear. Do you remember?’
Norah nodded.
‘I told you the key to every magic trick,’ said Balder. ‘Do you remember?’
‘Distraction,’ Norah replied automatically.
‘That’s right,’ said Balder. ‘All great conjuring tricks rely on distraction.’
He looked at her patiently.
‘I’d told you,’ he said smugly. ‘You should have known.’
‘Valerie—’ Norah began, but Balder interrupted.
‘Everyone has some driving force—an incident, a relationship, a trauma—something that defines them, makes them who they are. And whatever it is, it’s like a lever; once you know what’s driving someone, you have that person in your grip. I didn’t have to dig very deep to find out what was driving you; it was soon obvious that it was the death of your best friend.’
Valerie.
Again, Norah’s eyes drifted across to Grimm’s motionless form. She felt her gorge rise.
‘So this wasn’t about Valerie?’ she said.
It hurt just to say her name.
‘No. Never.’
‘Valerie was only the distraction.’
‘Precisely.’
Balder nodded, apparently amused at
her confusion.
‘So, do you mean—’ Norah began.
‘You’re getting there,’ he said encouragingly.
‘You mean he didn’t kill Valerie at all?’
‘No, I don’t think he did.’
‘I don’t believe you!’ Norah yelled. ‘You’re lying!’
Balder shrugged.
‘I shot him,’ Norah said in the same toneless voice as before.
‘Indeed,’ said Balder deliberately, as if he could scarcely believe it himself, ‘you shot him. You weren’t exaggerating in that article of yours; you really are a fantastic shot!’
For a moment he said nothing.
‘I don’t understand,’ Norah cried. ‘Why him? If he was innocent… Why Arthur Grimm?’
Balder looked at her indulgently as if she were an obtuse child.
‘We looked for men who were living near your friend at the time of her death and had since moved to Vienna—men who might possibly have known Valerie. We weren’t exactly spoilt for choice; finding Grimm was a real stroke of luck. He was just the job. That face! Undeniably good looking. But sinister, too, don’t you agree?’
‘And he had to die because of that?’
‘I didn’t shoot him,’ Balder cried in mock outrage. ‘You did.’
He bared his teeth again—his version of a smile.
‘In Berlin it would have been Leon Weiss,’ he added.
‘What?’ Norah asked, confused.
‘Yes!’ said Balder. ‘I had it all worked out; you very nearly foiled my plans. The whole thing was originally supposed to take place in Berlin: On February 11 you will kill a man called Leon Weiss. And so on. Then you moved away in a rush and that was the end of that. We had to improvise. But in the end, Vienna was the better backdrop. Death is at home in Vienna, don’t you agree?’
‘And that was what you were aiming for?’ Norah asked, pointing vaguely in the direction of Grimm.
Balder was silent.
‘You’re just as guilty of his death as I am!’
‘All I did was make a prophecy. Nobody forced you to do anything,’ Balder replied calmly.
‘You gave me reason to believe he’d murdered Valerie.’
The Shadow Page 21
