Misterioso (42 page)

Behind his back Nyberg gave him the finger, using his uninjured hand.

Hjelm went in to see Kerstin. She had just put down the phone. “That was Lena Lundberg,” she said quietly. “She wanted to know if she could come up here.”

“What’d you say?”

“That she could.” Holm shrugged. “Maybe one of them will be able to give the other some sort of explanation. I can’t.”

“Is she going to keep the child?”

“It sounds like it … But how would you tell your child that his or her father is a serial killer?”

“Maybe Andersson can do that himself.”

“If he lives that long,” said Kerstin, absentmindedly emptying her desk drawers. “Don’t forget that he murdered a member of the Russian mafia.”

“Right,” said Hjelm. “I won’t forget that.”

He watched the aimless movement of her hands. He found it enchanting.

“What do we do now?” he asked at last.

She looked at him. He felt her marvelous dark eyes riveted on his. “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know either. I’ve forgotten what daily life tastes like. Everything we’ve done has been in a sort of exalted state. How are things going to be between us when we come out of this little compartment? I don’t know. It’s a different world, and we’re going to be different people. My life is in a rather unresolved state right now.”

She shifted her gaze away. “Is that a no?” she asked.

He shrugged. “It’s a maybe. Maybe I’m going to need you terribly. It almost feels like that.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ve got to go back to Göteborg now, anyway, and take care of a bunch of things. I’ll call you when I get back.”

“Call me before then,” he said.

They kissed. They were finding it hard to part.

“It could be,” Paul said as he left her office, “that the pages in my dossier aren’t blank after all. Even though they’re being reused all the time.”

She shook her head and pointed to his cheek. “Today the blemish actually looks like a heart.”

He went to his own office. He was met by the delicious smell of newly brewed, freshly ground Colombian coffee.

“Have time for one last cup?” asked Chavez.

“What do you mean, last?” said Hjelm, sitting down. “I’ve bought myself a coffee grinder and a crate of beans.”

“Blackhead coffee,” said Chavez.

“Yeah, well,” said Hjelm, “I’m getting to be gray-haired myself.”

They laughed for a while. At everything and at nothing.

Hjelm still had a few things to take care of before he turned in his police vehicle. He drove out to Skog Cemetery and stood in the rain, peering through a pair of tree trunks at Dritëro Frakulla’s grave. His wife was sobbing loudly and wildly, and Hjelm felt like a villain. The little black-clad children clung to her black skirts. An entire colony of equally black-clad Kosovar Albanians followed Frakulla through the downpour to see him off on his last journey.

From his pathetic hiding place, Hjelm wondered how many people would come to his funeral. Maybe Cilla would manage to drag herself out of her personal crisis for a few minutes, he thought childishly.

Göran Andersson was alive; Dritëro Frakulla was dead.

He pondered the justice of it for a few seconds. Then he drove on to Märsta.

Roger Palmberg opened the door, using a remote-control mechanism. He was sitting in his wheelchair, looking like a pile of body parts amateurishly stuck together. Somewhere inside was the glimpse of a smile.

“Is it over now?” the electronic speech apparatus asked.

“It’s over,” said Hjelm, then told him the whole story, from beginning to end. It took a couple of hours. Palmberg listened attentively, occasionally slipping in a clever follow-up question
when he found a gap in the reasoning or a sloppily reported passage. There were many.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said the electronic voice when the whole story had been recounted. “It almost sounds as if you’ve found yourself.”

“I’ve looked deep into my heart,” said Hjelm, and laughed.

Then they listened to Thelonious Monk for an hour, and Palmberg pointed out a number of nuances in “Misterioso.”

Afterward Hjelm drove back to police headquarters, turned in his vehicle, and took the subway home to Norsborg. At the main subway station, the headlines flashed at him from every newsstand:
POWER MURDERER CAPTURED. IMMIGRATION POLICE HERO CAUGHT UP IN HOSTAGE DRAMA LAST NIGHT
.

He laughed loudly, standing on the platform in the middle of the frenzied rush hour.

Role switch
, he thought, and boarded the train.

He sat down near a group of people who seemed to be work colleagues; he wanted to hear if they were discussing the murders.

They mostly talked about their jobs at a small messenger company, about who had done what with the boss, about raises that had been given or not given, and about people who had made fools of themselves in various situations. Only once did they mention the solving of the Power Murders case. They were disappointed. They had hoped for an international plot, and it turned out to be nothing more than a bank teller from Småland who had lost his mind. They were convinced that the police had made a mistake. Somewhere out there was the real conspiracy.

Maybe so
, thought Paul Hjelm, and fell asleep.

It was late at night. Hjelm was staring out the window of his row house in Norsborg. The rain was still pouring down. Spring seemed to have vanished from the Swedish climate. It wasn’t even June, yet it already felt like fall.

Even so, the children were going out to the summer cabin on Dalarö for the weekend. To Cilla. While he had nowhere to go. Loneliness settled over him.

He was so unaccustomed to just being home. And being there without hearing Cilla’s sounds in the house felt doubly strange. He’d been inside an enclosed space for two months and was finding it hard to come back. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to do so a hundred percent.

He missed Kerstin. And he missed Chavez.

He drank a can of strong beer and tried to imagine the long, long days ahead of him. Sometimes the vacation seemed more like a big, open pit instead. From total activity to total passivity in less than twenty-four hours. That was a difficult transition to make.

But maybe the vacation didn’t have to be as passive as it had always been in the past. Maybe there were other things he could do. Besides, he was just starting to notice how abandoned he felt. And he needed room for that too.

He drained the beer can and went into the bathroom. He stood there, pissing into the pitch darkness for a long time. As the stink of urine rose up from the toilet, the contours of the bathroom took shape around him. He saw himself in the mirror, a faint band of light around a darkness.
Like a helmet
, he thought. A protective helmet.

He waited as his face emerged from the dark. He was afraid
of what he would see. But what he saw were not the Erinyes, and not Göran Andersson, but his own expressionless face, straight nose, narrow lips, dark blond hair cut short, a T-shirt. And a few gray hairs. Plus a red blemish on one cheek. The helmet was gone.

He ran his hand lightly over the blemish. In the past, as he stood in front of the mirror, he used to think,
No distinguishing marks, no marks at all
. Now he had one. For the first time he felt no hatred toward this facial defect, none at all.
A distinguishing mark
, he thought.

For a moment the blemish did look like a heart.

But at least it was himself that he saw, not Göran Andersson. And for a moment he actually liked what he saw.

He closed his eyes and saw instead the vast darkness.

Two months of accumulated fatigue washed over him. For the first time in two months he allowed himself to feel it.

He thought about Göran Andersson, about the fine line between them, and about how easy it was to cross it and never be able to go back. This thought of his came from deep inside that vast, all-encompassing darkness. But he himself was not in there. Not really.

The doorbell rang, one short ring, quite distinct. He knew at once who it would be.

When he opened the door, she was standing in the rain. Her expression was the same as that time in the kitchen. And that time on the pier. Abandoned. Infinitely lonely. But also so much stronger than his.

He let her in without a word. She didn’t speak. She was shaking. He led her over to the sofa and poured her a glass of whiskey. Her hand shook as she raised the glass to her lips.

He studied her powerful, small face in the faint light. The light flickered a bit, was about to disappear. That tiny, tiny flame of life. He made up a bed for her on the sofa and went upstairs
to the bedroom. Everything could wait. There was finally a tomorrow.

He put his Walkman on the nightstand, slipped in the tape, crept into the unmade bed, and thought of the millions of dust mites that he was cohabiting with. Every person a world, he thought sleepily, then put on the earphones and pressed the button to start the tape.

As the piano began its indolent strolling up and down, back and forth, she came into the room. She crawled in next to him, and he put his arm around her. They looked at each other. Their expressions were identical, their worlds so irretrievably separated. He felt her breath against his chest and heard the saxophone join the piano.

The mystery was gone, but the mist still remained.

Misterioso.

The strolling duet had ended. The sax cut loose.

There’s so much in this music
, he thought as he fell into a deep slumber. A world had flown right past his nose. Maybe it was time to sniff it out.

The light went out.

He’d reached the zero mark.

Now only the checkout remained.