Before the Frost (38 page)

Wallander shook his head.

“Swedish. They've managed to decipher a lot of what's been written in the margins, and it's all in Swedish.”

They were quiet. Linda waited. Lindman shook his head.

“I have to sleep,” he said. “I can't think clearly anymore.”

“Eight o'clock tomorrow,” Wallander said.

Lindman's steps died away in the corridor. Wallander yawned.

“You should get some sleep too,” Linda said.

He nodded, then stood up.

“You're right. We need to sleep. I need to sleep. It's already midnight.”

 

There was a knock on the door. One of the officers on phone duty looked in.

“This just came,” he said, handing a fax to Wallander.

“It's from Copenhagen,” the officer said. “Someone called Knud Pedersen.”

“I know him,” Wallander said.

The officer left. Wallander skimmed the fax, but then sat down at the desk and read it more carefully.

“Strange,” he said. “I know from way back that Knud Pedersen is a policeman who keeps his eyes open. They've had a murder there recently, a prostitute by the name of Sylvi Rasmussen. She was found with her neck broken. The unusual thing is that her hands were clasped in prayer—not severed this time, but Pedersen has read about our case and thought we should know about this.”

Wallander let the fax fall to the desk.

“Copenhagen again,” he said.

Linda was about to ask a question, but he lifted his hand.

“We should get some sleep,” he said. “Tired policemen always end up giving the perpetrator a chance to slip away.”

They left the station. Wallander suggested they go on foot.

“Let's talk about something completely different,” he said. “Something to clear our thoughts.”

They walked back to Mariagatan without saying a single word.

40

Each time he saw his daughter it was as if the ground disappeared beneath his feet. It could take several minutes before he regained his equilibrium.

Images from his younger life flickered through his mind. Normally he bore his memories with calm; he checked his pulse and it was always steady no matter how upset he felt. “Like the feathered animal, you should shake hate, lies, and anger from your body,” God had said to him in a dream. It was only when he met his daughter that he was overcome with weakness. When he saw her face, he also saw the others: Maria and the baby left behind to rot in the steamy jungle that crazy Jim Jones had chosen for his paradise. Sometimes he longed passionately for those who had died, and he also felt guilty that he hadn't been able to save them.
God demanded this sacrifice of me in order to test me,
he thought.

 

He always varied the times and places he met with his daughter. Now that he had stepped out of his former state of invisibility and shown himself to her, he made sure in turn that she did not disappear from him. He often tried to surprise her. Once, just after they had been reunited, he washed her car. He sent a letter to her Lund address when he had wanted her to come to their hideout behind the church in Lestarp. He had visited her apartment several times without her knowledge, using her phone to make important calls and even once spending the night there.

I left her behind once,
he thought.
Now I have to be stronger so that she doesn't do the same to me
. He had prepared himself for the possibility that she wouldn't want to follow him. Then he would have
disappeared again. But already after the first three days he decided he would be able to make her one of the chosen. The fact that convinced him was the unexpected coincidence that she knew the woman who Torgeir happened upon and killed in the forest. He had understood then that she had been waiting for him to return all these years.

 

This time he was going to see her in her apartment. She had placed a flowerpot in the window as a sign that the coast was clear. A few times he had gone in with the set of keys she had given him without waiting for the flowerpot because God told him when it was safe. He had explained to her that it was important to act natural in front of her friends.
Nothing has happened on the surface,
he told her.
Your faith grows deep inside you for now, until the day I call it forth from your body.

Each time they met, he did something that Jim Jones had taught him—one of the few lessons that was not spoiled by betrayal and hatred. Jones had taught him how to listen to a person's breath, especially those who were new and who perhaps had not yet found the proper humility to put their lives in their leader's hands.

He walked into the apartment. She knelt on the floor of the hall and he laid his hand on her forehead and whispered the words that God demanded he say to her. He reached for a vein in her throat where he could feel her pulse. She trembled but was less afraid now. It was starting to become more familiar to her, all these elements of her new life. He knelt in front of her.

“I am here,” he whispered.

“I am here,” she replied.

“What does the Lord say?”

“He demands my presence.”

He stroked her cheek, then they stood up and walked out into the kitchen. She had put out the food he requested: salad, crisp-bread, two slices of meat. He ate slowly, in silence. When he was done, she came over with a bowl of water, washed his hands, and gave him a cup of tea. He looked at her and asked her if anything had happened since they had last met. He was interested in hearing about her friends, especially the one who had been looking for her.

He sipped the tea and listened to her first words, noticing that she was nervous. He looked at her and smiled.

“What is troubling you?”

“Nothing.”

He grabbed her hand and forced two of her fingers into the hot tea. She flinched but he held her hand there until he was sure she had scalded herself. She started to cry. He let go.

“God demands the truth,” he said. “You know I am right when I say that something is troubling you. You have to tell me what it is.”

Then she told him what Zeba had said when they were at the café and her little boy was playing under the table. He noticed that she wasn't sure she was doing the right thing. Her friends were still important to her. That wasn't unusual—in fact, he had been surprised at the speed with which he had been able to convert her.

“Telling me about this was the right thing to do,” he said when she was finished. “It is also only appropriate that you hesitated in this. Hesitation is a way to prepare to fight for the truth and not take it for granted. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her for a long time, scrutinizing her.
She is my daughter,
he thought.
She gets her seriousness from me.

He stayed a while and told her about his life, wanting to bridge the years of his long absence. He would never be able to convince her to follow him if she did not fully understand that his absence had been ordered by God.
It was my time in the desert,
he had said repeatedly.
I was sent out not for thirty days, but twenty-four years.

When he left her apartment, he was sure she was going to follow him. And even more significantly, she had given him yet another opportunity to punish a sinner.

 

Langaas was waiting for him at the post office, since they always tried to meet in public. They had a brief conversation, then Langaas leaned forward so his pulse could be checked. It was normal.

Later that same day they met at the parking lot. It was a mild, cloudy evening with rain likely at night. Langaas had replaced the truck with a bus that he had stolen from a company in Malmö, being careful to put on a new license plate. They drove east, passing
Ystad and continuing on minor roads toward Klavestrand, where they stopped at the church. It lay on a hill, approximately four hundred meters from the nearest house. No one would be likely to notice the bus where it was parked. Langaas unlocked the church door with the key that he had copied. They used shielded flashlights as they erected the ladders and covered the windows looking out onto the road with black plastic. Afterward they lit the candles on the altar. Their footsteps made no sounds; all was silent.

 

Langaas came to see him in the vestry, where he was making his preparations.

“Everything is ready.”

“Tonight I will let them wait,” Westin said.

He gave the remaining hawser to Langaas.

“Put this on the altar. The hawser inspires fear, fear inspires faith.”

Langaas left. Westin sat down at the pastor's table with a candle in front of him. When he closed his eyes, he was back in the jungle. Jim Jones came walking out of his hut, the only one that was supplied with electricity from a small generator. Jim was always so well groomed. His teeth were white, his smile carved into his face
. Jim was beautiful,
he thought,
even if he was a fallen angel. I cannot deny that there were moments with him when I was completely happy. I also cannot deny that what Jim gave me, or what I believed he gave me, is what I am trying to give the people who now follow me. I have seen the fallen angel; I know what to do.

He folded his arms and let his head come to rest on them. He was going to let them wait for him. The hawser on the altar would be a stimulus of the fear they should feel for him. If the ways of God were inscrutable, so too would be the ways of his servant. He knew Torgeir would not disturb him again. He started to dream. It was like stepping down into the underworld, a world where the heat of the jungle penetrated the cold stone walls of the church. He thought about Maria and the child; he slept.

 

He woke up with a start at four o'clock in the morning. At first he wasn't sure where he was. He stood up and shook life back into his stiff body. After a few minutes, he walked out into the church.
They were all sitting in the first few pews, frozen, fearful, waiting. He stopped and looked at them before letting them see him.
I could kill them all,
he thought.
I could get them to cut off their hands and eat themselves. Because I too have a weakness. I do not completely trust my followers. I am afraid of the thoughts they think, thoughts I cannot control.
He walked out and stood in front of the altar. This night he was going to tell them about the great task that awaited them, the reason they had made the long journey to Sweden. Tonight he would pronounce the first words of the text that would become the fifth gospel.

He nodded to Langaas, who opened the old-fashioned brown trunk on the floor next to the altar. Langaas walked down the row of people, handing out the death masks. They were white, like masks in a pantomime, devoid of expression, of joy or sorrow.

God has made man in his image,
Westin thought.
But no one knows the face of God. Our lives are his breath, but no one knows his face. We have to wear the white masks in order to obliterate the ego and become one with our Creator.

He watched while they put on the death masks. It always filled him with a sense of power and strength to see them cover their faces.

Finally, Langaas put on a mask. The only one not wearing one was Westin.

He had learned this too from Jim. The disciples always have to know where to find their Master. He is the only one who should not be masked.

He pressed his right thumb against his left wrist. His pulse was normal. Everything was under control.
In the future, this church may become a shrine,
he thought.
The first Christians who died in the catacombs of Rome have returned. The time of the fallen angels is finally over.

The day he had chosen was the eighth of September. This had come to him in a dream. He had found himself in a deserted factory with puddles of rainwater and dead leaves on the floor. There had been a calendar on the wall. When he woke up, he remembered that the date in the dream was the eighth of September.
That is the day everything ends and everything begins again.

He stepped closer to them and started to speak.

“The time has come. I had not intended that we should meet before the day that you undertake your great task, but God has spoken to me tonight and told me that yet another sacrifice is necessary. When we meet again, another sinner will die.”

He picked up the hawser and held it above his head.

“We know what God demands of us,” he intoned. “The old scriptures teach us the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. He who kills must himself be killed. We must remove all doubt from our minds. God's breath is steel and he demands hardness from us in return. We are like the snake who wakes from his winter sleep, we are the lizards who live in the crevices of the rock and change color when threatened. Only through complete devotion and ruthlessness will we conquer the emptiness that exists inside men. The great darkness, the long days of degeneration and impotence are over.”