The Ghosts of Altona (20 page)

‘Oh . . .’ Fabel laughed again. ‘And what would that be?’

‘I don’t know what you’re fucking laughing at,’ she protested. ‘Under our business agreement, I get the whole thing. He had a couple of ex-wives who he didn’t want to get a bean if anything happened to him, so we set this all up as a business, a partnership. As I said, we both were paid a salary from it – Detlev’s bigger than mine, obviously – but the work produced, the paintings, became capital assets of the business. Detlev is dead, but the business isn’t.’

‘But, if you don’t mind me pointing out, Herr Traxinger won’t be producing any more paintings.’

‘Exactly. Which means the value of his work will go up enormously. Or at least it will as soon as I can get the fuck in there and start raising the sticker prices. Detlev was a complete screw-up in every respect, except as a painter. He may not have been a great talent, but he made the most of the abilities he had. And he was prolific and very fussy. He would only let me sell what he thought were his best paintings. That means there’s two hundred, maybe more, canvases in there. The funny thing is a lot of them are his very best work – he had what he called “personal” canvases that he didn’t want to sell. He wouldn’t even let me see half of them – but a lot of what I did see was really good. Some of it was pure crap, though, like the one they found with his body. I mean, what the fuck was going on with the whole
Picture of Dorian Gray
shite?’

‘So that painting had been moved all the way from the storeroom?’

‘Yep. That was a canvas Detlev kept very private. I only saw it by chance and he didn’t even like me talking about it, but that was mainly because I kept asking him what the hell he’d been on when he’d painted it. That’s one painting I won’t be selling. The rest definitely. Now Detlev’s dead I can clear the lot and get one hundred per cent of the sale price.’ She sighed resignedly and held out her wrists. ‘Go on, slap the cuffs on me.’

‘I’m not quite ready to arrest you yet.’ Fabel smiled. He didn’t tell her that Glasmacher and Hechtner had already checked and double-checked her account of where she had gone after leaving the studio and her movements for the rest of the night.

‘Why don’t you put me in handcuffs anyway?’ she grinned, taking a step towards Fabel again.

‘Could you show me these canvases?’ Fabel asked, making his tone businesslike. ‘The ones in storage?’

Anja Koetzing let her held-out wrists drop, shrugged and said, ‘Sure . . .’

*

Fabel left Glasmacher and Hechtner talking to the forensics team leader in the studio and followed Anja Koetzing out into the double-height reception hall. Like the studio the walls were whitewashed to maximize the abundant light and to emphasize the intense colours of the large canvases hanging in the reception, illuminated by the huge tent of skylights. Despite the size of the reception hall, even here the rich, oily aroma of paint and turpentine slicked the air.

‘Did Herr Traxinger buy the studio?’

‘No, it’s rented. I always thought it was too far out of town, but he liked it.’

Fabel examined the canvases in the reception hall. Again there was an odd, unpleasant stirring in his gut. Traxinger’s style seemed very familiar, but he couldn’t work out why. The artist’s use of colour was very striking – deep reds and dark greens, velvet blues – and he was clearly accomplished, but Fabel didn’t care for Traxinger’s work at all. There was an overdone Gothicism to it, making it almost adolescent. He paused in front of one canvas, a scene of the Gothic Revival spire of the Sankt Nikolai church. In the painting, as in reality, the Nikolai was a shattered ruin. The spire was silhouetted blue-black against a fractured sky of umber, orange and deep red. The effect was to make the sky look like the diffuse but still intense glow of a great fire through lozenges of stained glass; the lead between the panels formed by the dark trails of British bombers. It was a clumsily done metaphor and, Fabel thought, bordering on comic-book art.

‘How much would this sell for?’ he asked Koetzing.

‘That one? About a hundred and fifty thousand euros.’

‘How much?’ Fabel was astounded and leaned closer to the canvas, as if he had missed something in it. ‘But it’s only about a square metre.’

Koetzing laughed. She moved over beside Fabel to look at the picture. Again she stood too close. ‘We don’t sell art by the square centimetre, Herr Fabel. This will sell . . .’ she waved a dismissive hand at the picture, ‘eventually. What a lot of people don’t understand about the art business is that the real money is made by selling prints, and that the prohibitive price of original artwork is to allow us to sell limited-edition prints for what seems a reasonably proportionate price. Before this is bought, I will have sold one thousand numbered prints, each at six hundred euros each. The same goes for the rest of the work, so I stand to make a lot of money. Are you sure you don’t want to give me the third degree? I’m sure you could break me . . .’

Despite himself, Fabel laughed again.

‘Can I see some of the other work?’ he asked.

*

Koetzing led Fabel through the entrance hall and into the other half of the building. She explained that it had in turn been divided into two areas: a spacious, bright gallery and a darkened storeroom, where the canvases not on display were stored. The gallery was a large, square space, again with light coming in from a river-facing wall that was almost all glass and from a row of wide skylights in the roof. The exhibition hall had been turned into a maze of partition walls designed to increase the hanging space available. Fabel, with Anja Koetzing close behind him, walked around the collection, examining each canvas briefly, feeling he was becoming lost in the maze. There seemed little variation, other than in subject matter, in the works. He guessed that Traxinger had found a formula that sold, a ‘brand’, and had stuck with it.

*

Fabel felt something leap in his chest as he looked at the painting. He now was right at the centre of the exhibition and, although it was clearly Traxinger’s work, there was a distinct difference in the tone of this picture. As he stood gazing at it, Fabel felt his heart pick up pace and he was transported back somewhere he did not want to be.

The painting was huge; much bigger than the version he had seen in print form. And seeing the full-size original painting, he could see that which a print could never capture. There was a three-dimensionality to the picture: the oil paint had been applied thickly, sometimes layer upon layer, and Fabel guessed that for much of the work Traxinger had used a palette knife rather than a brush. It was a painting that had been built as much as painted.

‘Are you all right?’ Anja Koetzing had obviously noticed Fabel’s startled expression. He didn’t answer for a moment, instead staring at the picture.

‘It’s the same one . . .’ he said eventually, stepping closer and examining the signature at the bottom right of the canvas. ‘Exactly the same one . . .’

‘The same what?’

Fabel made an effort to pull himself together. ‘I’ve seen this painting before.’

‘You can’t have,’ said Koetzing. ‘This was one of Detlev’s darlings. This is one of the oldest paintings here, done long before I met Detlev. It’s never been out on exhibition anywhere other than here. And see . . .’ She pointed to a red dot stuck to the wall next to the painting. ‘He marked it sold, even though it wasn’t, just so no one would pester him with enquiries. But he was proud enough of it – egotistical enough – that he wanted people to see it here in his collection. There’s simply no way you could have seen it.’

‘Not this,’ Fabel said frustratedly. ‘Not the original – I saw a print of it.’

‘That’s not possible either.’ Koetzing was emphatic. ‘I would know if Detlev had run off any prints.’

‘I’m telling you, I saw it.’ Fabel raised his voice slightly, then, taking a breath, controlled himself. ‘Listen, Frau Koetzing, I know that I saw this painting –
exactly
this painting – in print form. Believe me, it was in a very challenging situation, one I am never likely to forget.’ He leaned forward and examined the word written carefully and delicately in white paint at the bottom of the picture. ‘I remember that too.
Charon
. To start with I thought it was the artist’s signature. Then I realized it referred to the figure in the picture: Charon the boatman. And I thought the river was the Styx. But it’s not. It’s the Elbe.’

Fabel took out his cell phone and called Anna, telling her that he needed her to come down to Traxinger’s studio right away. When he was finished, he turned back to Koetzing.

‘Why did Traxinger title this painting
Charon
? All the others have nothing other than his monogram, his initials.’

‘I don’t know. Like I said before, Detlev experimented with different forms, different themes. He had this thing where he believed his art fell into distinct areas. He didn’t do a lot of alternative stuff, mainly because he refused to sell it later, but what he did was all this kind of thing, overlaying classical or Gothic themes on a contemporary Hamburg. I really don’t know why he titled this piece or what significance the character Charon had for him.’ Koetzing paused for a moment, frowning something back into her recall. ‘There was another painting I saw once. Again I wasn’t meant to see it because it was a work in progress and Detlev kept those covered up. It was some kind of historical study of a woman, but she was more outline than anything. I remember seeing he had written a title for it at the bottom, but I can’t remember what the title was and I never saw the painting again. I guess he scrapped it or painted over it.’

‘Do you know if Herr Traxinger ever mentioned someone called Jost Schalthoff?’

Koetzing looked shocked. ‘No . . . Christ no. Isn’t that the creep who killed that little kiddie in Altona?’

‘He never mentioned him?’

‘No. Of course he didn’t. What on earth has Schalthoff got to do with Detlev?’

‘That’s where I saw the print. On the wall of Schalthoff’s apartment. Ever since I first saw Traxinger’s paintings I knew they reminded me of something.’ He nodded towards the painting. ‘That’s it. That’s what it was.’

‘I just don’t see—’

‘I’d like to see the other paintings,’ Fabel said abruptly. ‘The ones in the storeroom . . .’

32

The bookstore event lasted longer than he had thought it would. He was grateful that it had, in a way. Being the horror author Alan Edgar for a couple of hours gave him temporary refuge from being Werner Hensler and from the ghosts that haunted that identity.

The reading had gone well. The Q and A session afterwards had been okay too: nothing too demanding, except for one, well-intentioned but irritatingly penetrating question. Werner knew that his writing, just like his Alan Edgar identity, did not possess the depth for close scrutiny.

The Demon’s Devices
was the latest in the Alan Edgar oeuvre. Like all of his novels, it was set in America, in a fictitious New England town. The last three novels had been about a centuries-old family of vampires who had settled there and who now struggled between their consciences and their thirst for human blood. Werner’s opinion of his own work, or more correctly of ‘Alan Edgar’s’ work, was very clear: it was complete and utter crap. And it sold by the bucketload. Hardbacks, paperbacks, audio books – they all flew off the shelves. E-books too – from whatever e-books flew off.

To start with, his readers, when they came to events such as this, were disappointed to find that the American ‘Alan Edgar’ was really Werner Hensler from just outside Buxtehude; but as time went by his sales and his fan base grew exponentially, making him one of Germany’s most popular authors, although his American-set novels under his Anglo-Saxon pseudonym were never published outside the Federal Republic, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland.

The only mildly awkward question from the audience came from a late-middle-aged woman sitting right at the front, which suggested that she had arrived before the others. The manner in which she posed the question too suggested it had been prepared and rehearsed in advance:

‘Why is it, do you think, that we as a society seem obsessed with Gothic horror – with the undead, with vampires, boy wizards, werewolves and zombies? And do you think that your writing is a natural continuation of the works of Poe, Shelley, Polidori and Stoker?’

Werner had smiled his best Alan Edgar smile. ‘I think as a society we have always been fascinated with the Gothic, even if that hasn’t always been the name we have given it. Our oral and folk traditions, through the stories collected by the brothers Grimm, the Gothic greats you mentioned, the marvellous Expressionist films made here in Germany in the twenties and thirties, even into
film noir
and crime fiction, through to the great horror writers of today . . . there is a clear continuum of expression. The truth is that there always has been and always will be a dark side to human nature. We keep that dark side under lock and key, in some shadowed place deep within ourselves. But the truth is that sometimes we like to unlock the door and peer in. That’s what Gothic horror is. What it always has been.’

The answer sounded good, as it always did, every time he used it. The audience actually applauded. The middle-aged poser of the question beamed as if her cast line had hooked a bigger fish than she had hoped.

Alan Edgar smiled back; Werner Hensler screamed deep and silent.
You stupid, stupid old bitch. Do you honestly think the shit I write is comparable to Poe? Do you think Hollywood movies full of cartoon-computer-effects about boy wizards, zombies, and mopey teenage fucking vampires have ANYTHING to do with classic Gothic literature?
He wanted to scream in her face, to spit her own stupidity back at her. Instead, after the applause, he said,

‘Very good question, thank you.’

The woman beamed some more.

*

It was already getting dark by the time Alan Edgar transformed once more into Werner Hensler. The reason the event had taken so long was the number of books laid before him at the signing desk, always a sign of how successful an appearance had been. He had written a special dedication in the three copies of his work presented to him by the stupid bitch who thought Poe could be compared to
anyone
writing contemporary horror fiction, far less himself.