Sail of Stone (15 page)

“It could be dangerous,” he said. She felt him pull the blanket off her head. “Are you listening, Aneta? Are you listening?”

She felt the light from the lamp on the nightstand in her eyes; she blinked. She saw his face, which was black against the light, black like a black African’s. Someone who didn’t know him might think he was dangerous. Some who did know him still thought he was. That hadn’t always been good.

“You don’t exactly have anything to work with, and a guy like Forsblad can be trouble in that case.”

“What do you mean?”

She pulled down the blanket and wrapped herself in it. She heard the music Fredrik was putting on, James Carr, which he’d brought with him. “The Dark End of the Street,” forty-year-old soul from the South, at the dark end of the street, that’s where we always meet.

“The way you describe him, he sounds like a psychopath. If he gets it into his head that you’re after him for no reason, it could get nasty.”

“Sure, for him.”

“For you, Aneta.”

“It doesn’t matter, does it? If he’s a psychopath, he’ll get it into his head that I’m after him whether he sees a reason or not, won’t he?”

Halders didn’t answer.

“Won’t he?” said Aneta.

“Don’t be so fucking smart, now,” he said. He ruffled her hair. “Listen to what I’m saying, even if I’m putting it more awkwardly than you can accept.”

She sat up straighter. The blanket fell. She put her arms around her shoulders and across her breasts, as though she were freezing.

“There’s something dangerous about him,” she said. “I can feel it. I can see it.”

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”

“But don’t you understand? He’s dangerous to
her.
He’s going to go after her again.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Oh, yes I do.”

Halders got up and went over to the CD player, which had become silent. She heard him searching through the discs, ungraceful as always.
She heard the rhythm and recognized it, of course, and the singer’s voice. It was her CD, after all. Gabin Dabiré.
Afriki Djamana: Music from Burkina Faso. Afriki Djamana
reminded him of her.

The music moved like a caravan through the desert, swaying, stepping and sinking. The song was called “Sénégal,” and it was about longing, maybe longing for the sea to the west.

“He’s not going to leave her alone,” said Aneta.

“What? Who?”

“Forsblad, of course. He can’t accept that she doesn’t want him.”

“But he’s already living with someone else.”

“Yeah, so he says.”

“Let him say so, then. Even if it’s not true, maybe it will help him.”

“How so?”

“I’m not a psychopath,” said Halders. “I don’t know how he thinks, but I can imagine—”

“It’s just more lies,” interrupted Aneta.

“I’m not a psychologist either, but if he’s creating a world for himself where he thinks that he’s with a new woman, maybe it’s a good thing.”

“A new woman he can beat?”

Halders didn’t answer.

“The guy is dangerous,” said Aneta. “We do happen to agree on that, you know.”

“Leave it,” said Halders. “Leave him and her and that entire family, whether it exists or not.”

She didn’t say anything.

“And the furniture.” Halders smiled.

“I haven’t even met Anette, not really,” mumbled Aneta, but Halders heard. “She hasn’t ever reported any assault herself,” she said, and she heard him sigh. “But the neighbors called. Several times. And the woman in the same stairwell saw injuries on her face.”

“Aneta. She doesn’t live there anymore.
He
doesn’t live there anymore. She lives at home, safe with her parents. He might be living with a new woman. Maybe he’s going after her, too, and in that case we’ll nab him right away. But now ca—”

“Do you know how many of these conversations you and I have had while there are new violent crimes happening?” she said. “Assault? While
we, who are supposed to prevent crime, arrive at the conclusion that there’s no danger and hardly any reason to prevent this particular threat or crime, it happens. It happens again.”

“Do you want anything else to drink?”

“Are you listening to what I’m saying?”

“I’m listening.”

“Well, answer then, Fredrik.”

“I just don’t know what we can do in a situation like this,” he said, turning to her and reaching for her arm. “We actually can’t bring him in, not now.”

“We could keep him under surveillance.”

“Who would do that?” said Halders.

“Me.”

“Come off it. You’d be the last one.”

“Someone else, then. This isn’t personal, if that’s what you think.”

“Really?”

“Not personal in that way.”

“You know just as well as I do that Winter would never put people on something like this,” said Halders.

“It’s preventative. Erik is all for prevention.”

“He’s also for realism.”

“What is more realistic than a battered woman?”

“What do you want me to say to that, Aneta?”

“I don’t know, Fredrik.”

“And even if Winter gave the okay, Birgersson would say no.”

“Birgersson? Is he still around? I haven’t seen him in years.”

“That’s how he wants it,” said Halders.

Aneta got up and walked across the room.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she said.

Halders had made grilled sandwiches. She was still warm from the hot shower, relaxed, a bit comfortably numb after all of her thoughts earlier today. “I couldn’t find pineapple,” he said, “there was cheese and ham and mustard, but no pineapple.”

“You aren’t
required
to have pineapple on a warm sandwich, Fredrik.”

“Oh, really? Great. I was feeling like a failure there for a minute.”

“You’ve done well, Fredrik.”

“A cup of tea?” He held out the pot like the servant of a countess.

“You changed the disc,” she said, meaning the music.

“I will never cease to be amazed at all the guitars you collect,” he said, and she listened and understood what he meant when the guitar solo in “Comfortably Numb” arrived.

“I think he knows the people who stole that whole apartment,” she said.

“Oh, Aneta, please.”

“Who else would get the idea to do it? How did they get in?”

“Now drink your tea and relax for a minute.”

“Answer me. They just went in.”

“And then out.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t think he wants that crap,” said Halders.

“I think the exact opposite,” said Aneta. “If he can’t own her, he can at least own everything that is hers.”

Halders didn’t answer.

“You’re not answering.”

“I didn’t realize it was a question.”

“Come
on,
Fredrik!”

“That analysis seems, well, a little too homemade, if you want an honest opinion. And there’s another snag.”

“What?”

“Well, even if that crazy Forsblad guy is batshit insane, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the rest of the world is, does it? He had to convince those two characters you met that the apartment had to be emptied.”

“Like they needed a reason? Are you kidding? Do you mean that today, in this country, it’s difficult to get two criminal henchmen to empty an apartment? There are always people for sale who will do anything you need.”

“Can people really be so awful?” said Halders.

“Don’t joke away your naïveté, Fredrik.”

“Do you know what, Aneta,” said Halders, reaching for the teapot again. “There is no man born of a woman who can beat you in a debate.”

“Debate? Are we having a debate?”

Bergenhem walked across Sveaplan with a strong wind at his back. A sheet of newspaper flew in front of the neighborhood store.

The houses around the square looked black in the twilight. A streetcar passed to the right, a cold yellow light. Two magpies flapped up in front of him when he pushed the button next to the nameplate. He heard a distant answer.

It was just like last time.

But this time he wasn’t here on duty.

He didn’t know why he was standing here.

“I’m looking for Krister Peters. It’s Lars Bergenhem.”

“Who?”

“Lars Bergenhem. I was here last year, from the county CID.”

He didn’t get an answer, but the door buzzed and he opened it.

He went up the stairs. He rang the bell. The door was opened after the second ring. The man was Bergenhem’s age.

His dark hair hung down on his forehead just as it had last time. It looked as deliberate now as it had then. His face was unshaven now, as it had been then. Peters was wearing a white undershirt now, as he had then; it shone against his tanned and muscular body.

“Hi,” said Peters. “You came back.”

“I can have that whisky now,” said Bergenhem.

Bergenhem had worked on the investigation of a series of assaults. A friend of Krister Peters’s, Jens Book, had been attacked and seriously injured near Peters’s home.

Bergenhem had visited Peters and questioned him. Peters was innocent. Peters had offered him malt whisky. Bergenhem had declined.

“I’ll pass this time,” Bergenhem had said. “I have the car and I have to go right home when I’m done.”

“You’re missing a good Springbank,” Peters had said.

“Maybe there will be another time,” Bergenhem had said.

“Maybe,” Peters had said.

Peters turned his back to Bergenhem and went into the apartment. Bergenhem followed Peters, who sat down on his dark gray sofa. Magazines lay on a low glass table. Three glasses and a bottle stood to the right of the
magazines. Bergenhem sat in an easy chair that had the same covering as the sofa.

“How are things?” said Peters.

“Not so good,” said Bergenhem.

“Do you feel like you need someone to talk to?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ve come to the right place,” said Peters.

“Everything is so confusing,” said Bergenhem.

I
t was still daylight on Donsö. Winter stood on the
Magdalena
’s quarterdeck. The sun was starting to burn low over the sea. It would soon disappear. Does the sun go out when it goes down in the water? Elsa had asked last summer, when they had been swimming down in Vallda Sandö and lingered there for a long time. It was a good question.

“There must be a lot of sunsets like that out at sea,” Winter said to Erik Osvald, standing beside him.

“Well, we don’t exactly sit there applauding a sunset,” answered Osvald.

“But you must see the beauty in it.”

“Yes …,” answered Osvald, and Winter understood that the weather and sun and rain and hours of the day and nature’s beauty were something different for Osvald than they were for him, for everyone who lived on land.

Osvald watched the sun, which was in the process of sinking.

“Soon it will be a season when you can miss the light,” he said in the twilight. “Soon we’ll have to have lights on from three in the afternoon to ten in the morning.” He looked at Winter. “And in the summer we complain that the sun stings our eyes at four in the morning.”

Winter nodded. Everything must be so much sharper out there.

“But there’s really no day at sea, and no night.”

Winter waited for him to continue. The sun was gone.

“There’s no day, there’s no night,” repeated Osvald.

It sounded like poetry. Maybe it was poetry. Work and everyday life make up poetry because everything unessential has been scrubbed away.

Osvald looked at him again, back in the reality of his job.

“We never really have any morning or any night like this out there, you know. Days and nights go on; every five or six hours the trawl has to come up.”

“No matter the weather?” asked Winter.

Osvald squinted at him. He had fine lines all over his face; none were
longer or wider than the others. He had a tan that would never disappear when it was dark between three and ten. The slits of his eyes were blue. At that moment, Winter wondered what Osvald thought about when he was out on the lonely sea. What did he think in a storm?

“The weather isn’t a big problem for us these days,” said Osvald, nodding as though to emphasize his words. “Before, boats went under in storms.” He looked out across the sea again. “Or were blown up by mines …,” he said, as though to himself. He gave Winter a quick glance again. “Last fall we had very bad weather, but there were only two nights we didn’t fish because of a storm. If the wind is over forty-five miles per hour we don’t put out the trawl.” He gave Winter a smile. “At least not if the bottom is bad. It’s not so good if it gets caught when it’s forty-five miles an hour.”

He turned around to see if his sister was standing there. But Johanna had excused herself for a second and climbed down the ladder off the boat and gone in among the houses, which came almost up to the quay.

“We’re a little split on the weather, of course,” said Osvald. “If it’s bad weather it’s good pay. There might not be any others who will risk going out. And there’s no fisherman yet who lost by betting on a storm! Prices go up after a storm. And the storm stirs up the stew on the bottom, too. Storms are good for the sea.”

The storm stirs up the stew, thought Winter. That’s true. Everything is moved around, comes up, is turned over, stones are turned over, everything old is new, everything new is old, round, round, up and down.

That’s how it was with his work. That’s how he wanted it to be. The past didn’t exist as a past; it was no more than an abstraction. It was always there in reality, present in the same manner as the present, a parallel state that no one could sail away from.

He looked at Osvald. This man was at home here, in his own harbor, or rather he was at home out at sea, but the sea was nearby.

“What’s the best part out there?” asked Winter. “Out at sea?”

Osvald seemed not to hear. Winter repeated his question. Osvald kept looking out across the water, as though he were waiting for company, as though a ship would become visible on the horizon, like a replacement for the sun that had gone down there. A pillar of smoke. A distant ship’s smoke on the horizon.

“Man is king,” said Osvald suddenly. He let out a laugh. “If you stand
up on the bridge and look around you’re higher than everything. As far as you can see, you’re higher. In a lot of ways, spiritually, too.”