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a Speed Graphic. It helped to have Weegee’s supernatural gift for knowing when to push the shutter release, a microsecond before your moment disappeared. He once said, “With a camera like that the cops will assume that you belong on the scene and will let you get behind police lines.”
    I held it gingerly, a nice weight. Silken black finish, chrome trim. The chrome marked it as a prewar model, and I looked at Ilkka curiously. “How long have you had this?”
    “I bought it at a pawn shop in Jyväskylä. That’s how I got the police job: I looked the part.”
    The camera even had its original flash attachment, a concave seven-inch reflector with a bulb still attached—an old General Electric Synchro-Flash, blue-coated, which meant it was used for color and not black and white. Those old bulbs were intensely bright, five hundred thousand lumens released over a fraction of a second.
    “You have trouble finding bulbs for this?”
    He smiled ruefully. “Yes. For a long time I had a stockpile, but they’re getting harder to find, even on eBay. That’s the last one until I find a new source.”
    I handed it back to him with great care. He set it in a cabinet and retrieved a white cloth.
    “I don’t know how much time you’ll need for this.” He began to clean the table’s surface. “But Anton is extremely controlling. He needs things to be perfect, orderly. In this case, no doubts about authenticity. You understand?”
    “Yeah, sure. But you’ve worked with him before, right? He owns some of your work. That’s what I assumed, anyway.”
    “Yes, he has some of my work.” Ilkka’s tone grew terse. “Old police pictures that I sold him when I was young and needed the money. But nothing from this sequence. No one has ever seen any of these.”
    “Not even Suri? Or your wife?”
    He shook his head. “I set up a temporary link to one of the images. You saw that?”
    “The guy with the window smashed against his face?”
    “Yes. Gluggagægir.”
    He tossed the cloth into a sink, rummaged in a drawer for two pairs of white cotton gloves. He gave a pair to me and pulled his on, waiting as I did the same. Then he crossed to the map chest, withdrew a key, and unlocked the bottom drawer. With great care he removed a large print, roughly 44 × 28, covered with protective tissue paper. He set it on the table and painstakingly removed the protective tissue. I whistled softly.
    It was the image Anton had shown me online: the black-haired guy in that incongruously bright, blood-striped parka, his broken face shrouded by splintered wood and shards of glass.
    But there was no comparison between the on-screen image and the real thing. It was printed on super glossy paper, probably Crystal Archive, with saturated color so intense it was as though I stood in the photographer’s shoes with the boy’s corpse at my feet. Beneath a moonless sky, snow glittered blindingly from black spars of rock. A drop of blood on the shattered windowpane looked as though it would stain my finger if I touched it. Where the jagged spear of glass pierced the boy’s cheek, Ilkka’s trademark flare shone so brilliantly that I blinked.
    “It’s incredible. But, Jesus. What happened?”
    “As you see. He is dead. This was in Vemdalen, Sweden, near the border with Norway. December 1991.” He ticked off the information as though reading a train schedule. “Gluggagægir is one of the Jólasveinar. The Yuleboys.”
    “The Yuleboys? That’s a cult?”
    Ilkka looked startled. “No,” he said quickly. “A folktale, a Christmas legend used to scare children into being good. The Jólasveinar are trolls. The original legends were quite frightening. Now they’re utterly commercialized, like the Smurfs—cartoons to sell Christmas cards and toys. Like everything else in our heritage, they have been corrupted by Christianity and capitalism.”
    “They’re Finnish?”
    He shook his head. “No. I mean our shared northern culture. Finns are not