The Cruel Stars of the Night (13 page)

Sixteen

The murmur from the radio turned into music. Laura reached over and turned the volume up. It was a piece she knew so well but could not place. She turned the volume up even higher.

Should I prove to be weaker than those who have looked down on me all these years? she thought and hit the doorpost as she rushed out of the kitchen, away from the music. She stopped short, whirled around, and glared at the radio, at the shiny volume knob whose rounded slightly glossy, chubby surface seemed puffed up with self-satisfied smugness.

Should I be weaker?

“Never, never!” she screamed and leapt forward, grabbing the radio and throwing it to the ground, stamping on the gray-tinted cover. Albi-noni’s “Adagio in G Minor” was silenced. She continued assaulting the appliance until all that remained of it were broken parts. She left the kitchen panting, then ended up standing in the living room, listening.

“That was a close call,” she muttered.

Her old life had tried to gain the upper hand.

What she feared most of all was to walk down the street and not exist, to step into the elevator at work and discover that the mirror reflected someone else, to exit the elevator and hear the poisonous tongues gabbing behind her back.

Never, never, never again. No one would ever trample on Laura Hindersten again. The music had stopped.

She swept her coat around her, opened the French windows as far as they would go, and then started to empty the bookshelves in the dining room. Fifteen books in each pile. Dust flew up. Some books fell on the floor and she kicked them out onto the terrace. Methodically she cleared case after case. There went the German collection, the early editions of Goethe, the beloved Voigt and the hated Kinz. Ditto two meters of filled bookshelves by and about Schopenhauer.

When Laura reached Virgil she hesitated for a moment but attacked the Roman classics with even greater determination.

Ariosto she tossed out with a laugh. Under “B” she had a difficult job with Bandella, Berni, Boccaccio, and Boiardo, and she was forced to sit down on the edge of the terrace to rest.

On the lawn in front of her feet lay the library Ulrik Hindersten had spent decades of labor collecting. At the very top lay Middlemore’s English translation of Jacob Burckhardt’s
Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien.
Laura picked it up and skimmed through it absently. Her father’s notes and underlinings indicated that he had scrutinized it alongside the original from 1860 in order to find errors and weaknesses.

She tossed it back onto the pile, stretched forward, and took up another that turned out to be a dissertation published in Zürich in the mid forties:
Cicero und der Humanismus. Untersuchungen über Petrarca und Erasmus.

She remembered that one, as she did Mills’s
The Secret of Petrarch
and de Nolhac’s
Petrarch and the Ancient World,
which she also glimpsed in the heap of books. These, and many others, Laura had read in the eighties.

In June of 1987 Laura and Ulrik Hindersten had traveled to Italy. Laura was nineteen years old and had just graduated from secondary school. Her father had received a grant to write an extended research article on Petrarch’s epistolary exchange with Cola de Reinzó. It was intended that the text be included in a monograph published in honor of a professor in Lund who was to retire the following year.

Her father bit the sour apple—the professor was in reality one of his enemies—and set off on a two-month trip to Italy.

The first part of the trip they rented an old house outside of Florence. It sat up on a hill, surrounded by a neglected garden, and the city could be seen in the distance through a blue haze. Laura stayed on the upper floor.

Her father disappeared early every morning, sat in the archives, met with colleagues and old friends, while Laura read and took walks in the surrounding area. Laura liked the house and the little village and June was a pleasant time for walks. But she became depressed and sensed the reason why. June was a critical month. It was June 23—six years earlier— that Laura’s mother had died.

Her father didn’t notice her grief. Quite the opposite, he became more and more enthusiastic the longer they stayed in Tuscany. He repressed all thoughts of the Lund professor, started speaking only in Italian, and again brought up the idea of moving to Italy for good.

One day Laura decided to put him up against the wall. Why had he and her mother not been happy together? Her father put his teacup down on the rough-hewn wooden table, let his head droop with a despondent expression as if Laura had deliberately insulted him. It was an expression she knew well, from when he talked about his department.

“She didn’t fight,” he said finally.

She could tell he had chosen his words with care.

“Fight for what?”

“Pius II once said that a servant could rise to be king.”

Laura stared at him. She didn’t recognize the quotation, she didn’t know what context it came from, but she knew this was a strategy on her father’s part. He used the words in order to conceal the real conditions, or as a way to start a dialogue she did not want to have.

Her father loved to converse in dialectical play, in a labyrinth where nothing could be taken for granted, where all words turned out to be double-edged, carrying multiple meanings. It was an art he had mastered to the fullest extent.

“I am your daughter. I need simple, normal words,” Laura said and tried to catch his eye without success.

“Words can be simple but when they are used in combination they necessarily become—”

“I need true words!”

“I wanted to protect you from everything unpleasant,” he said with unusual mildness. “Your mother did not have this ability.”

“You are no better than Petrarch,” Laura said. “He went on about the pure and the divine but would fuck anyone given the chance.”

Ulrik Hindersten was taken aback by his daughter’s words. He had never heard her speak in such vulgar terms. He tried to interrupt but Laura went on in a frenzy that made her spit out the words.

“I am sick of all the words, all the empty words! You talk about love but when it comes to this life here and now then it’s nowhere to be seen. Not even when Mom died did you say anything to comfort me. I have never heard you say anything nice about my mother.”

“You know as well as I how Alice died,” Ulrik Hindersten said, “but I choose not to talk about it. But if you want to, then go ahead.

“We loved each other,” Ulrik Hindersten said after a long period of silence, “you know that. I have not met anyone after . . .”

“I am talking about the hypocrisy,” Laura said. “On the one hand you valorize the Middle Ages, when you would find living then a hell. You have always wanted to be the best, despised by all colleagues and scholars. You have squashed students who have asked for guidance because you were afraid they would outshine you.”

Unconsciously Laura assumed Augustine’s role in close combat with Petrarch. She had read his
Secretum
and underlined long passages. Now everything was mixed up in a bitter concoction.

“A lack of inititative and indolence are names we today assign to modesty,” Ulrik Hindersten countered with a smile where Laura discerned a streak of pride.

The battle raged on for a month. Ulrik Hindersten’s
“Vallis clausa”
as he often referred to the little valley where they lived, was transformed into a battlefield. They clashed with increasing frequency. Ulrik was in his essence, this was his domain. Laura fought with the implacability and rebelliousness of youth, but she became worn down over time.

She started to imagine that Ulrik was fanning the flames of the conflict, that he loved it for its own sake but also because he wanted to make Laura in his image.

“You must be toughened,” he said.

“I don’t want to be like you!” she cried.

“You are like me. It’s you and me. You are my blood.”

“But also my mother’s!”

“I don’t think you should talk so much about Alice. You are stronger than that and you have the talents that are required.”

“She saw beauty. You only see the dirt. You don’t really see the olive trees, the cypresses and stone walls, they are only a stage set for a fantasy image. It is Petrarch’s landscape, nothing more. You don’t see the farmers who harvest the olives and struggle up the steep slopes to prune the grapevines, you talk to them but you have no words for their world. You laugh and they smile back but out of sheer politeness. You can’t even climb a ladder without a quote by Cicero or Seneca. You think you can capture everything on a page but the sweat on a farmer’s brow is a form of writing you can’t read. For them the ladder is a ladder, for you it’s a metaphor.”

Laura moaned out loud and rocked from side to side. The memories from Tuscany were ambivalent: the upsetting discussions but also the unparalleled closeness she had experienced with her father. It was as if the endless debates had brought them closer than ever before.

He revealed things about his childhood, details about the grandparents she had never heard before. Ulrik’s father, a high-ranking official at the National Customs Service, had been dead for many years. Laura had only a diffuse memory of a large man in a sick bed. Grandmother Hindersten had left the family when Ulrik was five years old. Why, and what became of her, was a taboo subject, but Laura did hear that she had gone to Denmark with a Dutch artist and had settled somewhere on Fyn. News of her death at the end of the seventies was received with indifference by her father.

She got up, stared at the mound of books. She realized that she could not set fire to them where they were, that it could spread to the house. She retrieved the wheelbarrow from the storage and started carting all the books over to the middle of the lawn.

It took a long time but Laura paid no attention to the fact that she was getting tired. To the contrary, she felt as if the soreness of her muscles freed her of a pain that had been too long in her life. The stack of books grew, and with it her conviction that the path she had chosen would lead her to freedom.

Seventeen

On her way to the police headquarters in Salagatan, Ann Lindell walked past what was to be her new workplace come fall. A giant of a building was rising up at the end of Kungsgatan and it was already giving the city a new skyline.

It was not only a geographic shift. It also accorded police authority a more central position from a purely psychological standpoint. The building on Salagatan gave an uninspired and mundane impression. The first time she laid eyes on it, it made Ann think of disconsolate individuals at an unemployment agency. In contrast, the new creation with its provocative façade of glass and plaster promoted the position of the police in the city, gave them a more contemporary flair. Someone had compared it to a palatial bank or the offices of an insurance company.

Ann thought about the police headquarters in Malaga that she had visited on the job a few years back, an enormous building with an imposing exterior, but still with a relaxed atmosphere in the airy entrance, despite its location in an area with chaotic traffic.

In front of Uppsala’s new police station the motorists now wound their way rather gingerly around the newly constructed and, according to many, unnecessarily complicated roundabout. Several accidents had already occurred there and letters to the editor called it a new traffic disaster.

Several of Ann’s colleagues had been by on study trips and admired the view of the city they were there to protect. Sammy Nilsson said something about Uppsala being enjoyed best from above and that the uppermost floor was most likely reserved for the senior administration. From there they could both look down on their fellow citizens and be close to heaven.

“The higher up you get, the smaller the problem looks,” Sammy said.

“We’re already cramped,” Ola Haver filled in, “even before moving in. The Recovered Goods department is moving to the Fyrislund industrial area.”

“That’s only so people won’t be able to find it,” Sammy said. “Then we can sell the loot and throw parties for the police club.”

Ann Lindell smiled as she traced her way around the roundabout and was still in a good mood when she turned onto Väderkvarnsgatan. She was looking forward to leaving Salagatan. It would be a fresh start, she imagined, kind of like leaving a rundown rental in some far-flung suburb to a centrally located, sophisticated loft.

Whether their crime-fighting efforts would become more effective was not as certain. She recalled Sammy’s comment that it would be better to have ten, fifteen smaller stations scattered over town. That was his alternative to “the fortress” as he called the new structure.

“And anyway it’s built on such slippery ground that we’re probably going to sink into the Uppsala clay.”

Sammy’s brother, who worked in construction, had told them about all of the problems with the foundation. Marked heights changed from one day to the next as if the ground was playing tricks on the workers.

“But they used piles,” Haver objected.

“Piles,” Sammy said with a snort. “Nature has her own laws.”

Ann drove into the parking garage, parked the car, and took the elevator up to Violent Crimes, where things were almost completely quiet. A copier was spitting out paper, someone shut a door, and another colleague was whistling the theme song from the movie
Titanic,
another colossus that nature had taken care of.

She wondered who the building’s Celine Dion was and deduced that it had to be Asplund, the new recruit, a young man who seemed as if he had recently stepped into the big world outside his boyhood bedroom. They should talk but he would have to wait. The work on the passenger lists was probably not done yet.

Ann Lindell knew that the investigation of the two murders was floundering. The conditions were not ideal. They had not found anything to lead them forward. Ottosson would talk about the “blindness of a lack of imagination.” A good criminal investigator, or technician, had to have the ability to read the scene of a crime, and even be able to identify the victim’s landscape.

Ann thought she had been able to come up with an idea of Petrus Blomgren. His landscape was known to her; she could articulate the connections that had directed Blomgren’s life. With two exceptions: the intended suicide and the prescribed sleeping pills. These constituted a tear in the fabric that drew the gaze, that nagged at her.

She had encountered this before. It could be a person’s dream, an old injustice, a humiliation that needled, itching like a stubborn mosquito bite.

Sometimes it was love, or the absence of love. Ann knew what that meant. Petrus Blomgren had lived a quiet life in an environment that he knew through all his senses. Everything was familiar and reassuring. Blomgren had had work, food, firewood and therefore warmth, and he could live, function as a citizen in Vilsne village, Jumkil county, Sweden, but something was missing: love, closeness to another person. Hadn’t he written something about the fact that he had to make all of his decisions alone? There was the tear in Blomgren’s life.

Ann wrote a few lines on her pad, got up from her desk, walked over to the window, and tried to link her line of reasoning with the second victim, Jan-Elis Andersson. He appeared just as alone but in this case the loneliness was of a different order.

“A load of shit,” she said out loud and returned to her desk.

The primness of the Andersson household gave a different impression. Suddenly she thought of what it was: there was something calculatingly parsimonious about the house.

At Petrus Blomgren’s the impression had been of something else, a kind of warmth that suffused the house in Jumkil. You could sense it in the small details like the occasional decorative items, the pictures on the walls, the little TV room, predictable in its simple, worn appearance, but nonetheless radiating a personableness that was absent in the house in Alsike.

At Jan-Elis Andersson’s the bookshelves were the dominating feature, filled to bursting with light brown folders in hard-pressed cardboard, carefully arranged in chronological order. Why did one keep accounts, receipts and vouchers, ancient sale agreements and contracts with such meticulous care?

Money, Ann decided and doodled a little on the page. It was the concern about his own finances, need for order and a nervous cataloging of debit and credit that controlled Jan-Elis Andersson’s life.

Perhaps he was happy with his folders, but there was probably also a source of concern and perhaps even anxiety. Was that the tear in Jan-Elis Andersson’s life?

“BLOMGREN—LOVE” she wrote in capitals on her pad, followed by a heart. On the next line there was “ANDERSSON—MONEY” and a dollar sign.

The investigation into Andersson’s life was in full swing. Sammy Nilsson and Ola Haver were the ones who were doing the digging and Ann believed they were going to verify her theory that money was the driving force in the murdered Andersson’s life.

Lindell was speculating, she knew this, but from the swaying tower of loose theories that she was now constructing she would perhaps be able to provide herself with an overview.

She saw the process in an inner graphic, how she scrutinized the landscape, binding together Vilsne village, Jumkil and Norr-Ededy village, Alsike, and in the intersection between the imagined lines she would find the answer.

“It’s that simple,” she muttered, drew a few lines, and threw down her pen, suddenly aware of the fact that it was the first time she could see Uppsala and the surrounding area in her mind, exactly as she could with her childhood Ödeshög. She had become an Upplander.

With this conviction she left the office but returned immediately. It’s not quite so simple, Upplander or not, she thought and opened the telephone directory. There she quickly found Birger Rundgren’s name and number, and pulled the phone over.

The voice that answered betrayed the fact that Ann Lindell was speaking with an old man. He could not remember Petrus Blomgren, which did not surprise Lindell. Blomgren was not the one who ran to the doctor at the slightest twinge.

“But his medical entries are most likely still there,” Birger Rundgren croaked. “My son, who has taken over the practice, can surely help you.”

Lindell took down the number to Lars-Erik Rundgren, thanked him for his help, dialed the number, and smiled to herself as the phone rang.

It turned out that Rundgren Jr. sounded like his father.

“I have an upper-respiratory infection and shouldn’t be speaking at all,” he managed to squeeze out.

Lindell explained what she was after, gave the doctor her e-mail address, asked him to look for Blomgren’s records, and then send her the information he felt was relevant.

The mail arrived in five minutes. Petrus Blomgren had, of his own accord, contacted Birger Rundgren, whose office was on Kungsgatan at that time, on the eighth of June 1981. They had never met before. Blomgren had cited sleeping difficulties as the reason for the visit. The reason for the problem was “that the pat. has felt anxious for a while.” The doctor had noted that “not fin., wk, rel., loss.”

Otherwise he appeared healthy, employed as a farmer and construction carpenter. He was prescribed Ansopal, one tablet per night. No follow-up visit was required.

Lars-Erik Rundgren concluded with an explanation of his father’s cryptic abbreviations. According to his father there were four main reasons for poor sleep: bad finances, unhappy at work, love problems, or the loss of someone close to you. In other words, in Blomgren’s case Rundgren senior had ruled out all four explanations.

What does that leave? Lindell wondered as she read the mail a second time. She surmised that the doctor’s conversation with Blomgren had been short, that no real examination had taken place, that no diagnosis had been made, and that Rundgren had taken the easy way out.