The Cruel Stars of the Night (23 page)

“Here? Sure. He fell asleep like a little pig.”

“I think I . . .” Ann started, but she didn’t finish her sentence.

All at once she became very sad, not angry, just sad. She accepted the glass of wine that Görel had poured out and was now grateful for the silence and the low light in the apartment. Chet Baker’s voice almost made her cry. It was Edvard’s music.

She sank into the couch, exhausted. Görel sat down next to her and at first said nothing, letting Ann taste the wine and run through the evening in her mind. After a few minutes Ann told her that everything had felt good until they were standing in the street and she realized he had called her a cab.

“What I regret the most is I let him pay. It’s humiliating! As if I was a piece of luggage with no will of my own, that you can just send home.”

“Maybe he’s shy?”

“Shy,” Ann sputtered, becoming more angry. “He’s going to get his money back.”

“He said nothing about a next time, if you were going to see each other again, or . . .”

“Nothing! It was as if it was on his terms, as if I didn’t have any feelings. When he doesn’t want to go out alone to the movies or the pub then I’m supposed to come through as company for him. And then get sent home.”

“Has he had problems with women?”

“I don’t know. He said almost nothing about his life in Umeå.”

“He’s gay,” Görel pronounced in her incomparable way.

Ann tried to smile but couldn’t manage more than a wry grimace. She was ashamed, for herself and her own weakness and because of what she must look like in Görel’s eyes. She felt rejected. He hadn’t even asked her if he could go home with her.

She didn’t know herself what hopes she had had. Confused, sad, and angry, she drained her glass and immediately refilled it. She shouldn’t drink more. But what does it matter, she thought, the bitterness burning.

Görel moved closer, put her arm around her shoulders, and whispered something comforting that Ann didn’t hear.

“He didn’t even give me the chance to say no,” she sobbed.

She knew Görel needed to go home. She had to get up early. Leffe was probably wondering why she was so late. But at the same time it felt good to have Görel there. Her kindness made Ann feel somewhat less miserable and worthless.

She reached for her glass but Görel put her hand over Ann’s.

“Don’t drink any more,” Görel said. “Tomorrow is another day.”

Ann knew she was right but felt her anger return.

“You have to go home now,” she said. “Tomorrow is another day for you too.”

“It’s not a problem,” Görel said. “I have the night shift tomorrow.”

Ann put down her glass and looked at her.

“Am I . . .” Ann started but then hesitated.

“You are beautiful,” Görel said. “Don’t think anything else. That Charles,” and she made his name sound like an insult, “he’s a bad egg. Forget him. Yes, I know,” she said when she saw Ann’s expression, “it’s easy to say, but there are other men. Men who would give everything for a chance to cuddle up to a girl like you. And you know it.”

Ann shook her head.

Görel went home shortly before midnight. Ann returned to the couch, stared at the half-full glass of wine but didn’t touch it, got to her feet, and decided to try to sleep. She was not drunk, but intoxicated enough to stumble and knock over the standing lamp in the hall. The green glass cover shattered and the bulb went out.

She stared at the remains of the heirloom lamp that her grandmother had bought sometime in the twenties. For the first time she realized that she was perhaps not going to be able to manage, with work, with her loneliness, with being a good mother to Erik.

Without having removed her makeup or brushed her teeth she collapsed into bed with a feeling of regret.

Thirty

Laura stopped at the point where all the paths came together. Granted, the sun was shining, but a sharp northerly wind that howled down the slopes of the Alps, sweeping past Lake Garda and striking the Valpolicella district in the back of the head, and the little village in the stomach, forced her to take shelter behind some jutting cliffs.

She was not equipped for a hike in challenging terrain; it felt particularly difficult when the wind grew in force.

She curled up there like an infantry soldier coming under fire. If she had had an axe or at least a knife, and for that matter something to kindle it, she would have gathered up some twigs and made a fire.

She searched the skies to see if the rain clouds were piling up the way they often did this time of day if the winds changed direction from the southwest to the north, but the sky was still an almost metallic blue and that calmed her somewhat.

Suddenly the wind carried a waft of fish. Laura sniffed and looked around. It was an improbability, it had to be at least twenty, thirty kilometers to Lake Garda as the crow flies, but the fact was that the stench was growing stronger. It smelled like the fish market in Venice that she had been to many times.

How could I go so wrong? was the question that she kept turning over in her mind. They had stopped in the village, Ulrik wanted to have a bite to eat and rest a little. Driving on the steep roads outside Fumene had taken its toll and he had become more and more cranky.

Laura had nothing against stopping but did not go with him into the small restaurant that lay very close to the road. She decided to take a walk instead. It felt good to get out of the car and even better to leave her father’s muttering behind.

Now she was lost. She curled up in order to escape the wind, but also to gather her strength. She was convinced that Ulrik would be done eating by now. Maybe he would take a short nap in the car but he would wake up soon and wonder where she was.

He wouldn’t leave the car but simply get more and more angry over her tardiness.

When she had sat sheltered for ten minutes she thought the wind was starting to die down and she braced herself to go out on the path again.

At once the stench returned and this time it was even stronger. After a curve in the trail that rounded a thicket of honeysuckle tangled up with iron oak, she made a horrible discovery. Lying on his back in the middle of the path, covered by a swarm of flies, there was a man. His mouth was wide open, his arms outstretched as if crucified, and his pants pulled down around his knees.

He must have been there for a while because his body was in an advanced state of decomposition. The open mouth was what still lent the face a somewhat human impression. It looked as if he was giving a shout of great surprise, or was it pain?

The knees were eaten down to the kneecaps and the thighs were badly mauled, probably by foxes, and a knife had been sunk all the way down to the hilt in his lower abdomen.

Laura turned and ran. Where her energy came from she didn’t know but she ran at breakneck speed down the mountain, crawled on all fours up a ravine, and once she was up on the crest she saw the village. She could even see the car.

What had happened? Laura did not know. Perhaps it was a nightmare?

She told Stig everything. They lay next to each other. He raised himself on his elbow and looked at her.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You found a murdered man.”

“Perhaps it was the animals.”

“Who had stabbed him?”

“It was a young man.”

“How do you know?”

“He had white patent leather shoes.”

“Oh my God,” said Stig and sank onto his back.

He had gone out into the garden, dialed Jessica’s cell and told her that he was at Laura’s, that he had been forced to stay because she was threatening to take her life.

“Have you been drinking?”

“I had a glass of wine to steady my nerves. She’s had almost a whole bottle, at least. She’s in a bad way, I can’t leave her, that’s just the way it is.”

“Call the hospital,” Jessica said.

“I suggested that, but that made her completely desperate.”

“We were supposed to meet.”

“I know, but then I had to stay. She’s really depressed. It wouldn’t be good for the company if she killed herself. Hausmann wants her on part one. We can’t just say: ‘Unfortunately that won’t be possible, she hanged herself last week.’”

“Do you want me to come over?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. She’s calmed down a bit and we have agreed that she will try to cool it and try to sleep tonight. I’m going to get in touch with Severin tomorrow.”

“Severin isn’t a psychiatrist.”

“I know, but he’s a doctor.”

He kept talking and lying so that he believed it himself, elaborating his conversation with concrete details that made Jessica buy it. Or so it seemed to him.

That was three hours ago. Since then he and Laura had made love with such intensity that Stig had never experienced anything like it.

Laura had fallen asleep but woke up after about twenty minutes, told him that terrible story and fallen back asleep.

He had remained awake and stared up at the ceiling. Was this what he wanted?

What had she said as they made love? Something about “Jessica will never fuck you again.” And then that talk about the restaurant by the sea. She had brought it up before and at that point he had thought she had been there before, that it was an experience she was retelling but now he wasn’t sure.

She wanted to escape, that was clear. Her efforts in the house were no ordinary cleanup, that much he understood. Apart from the bedroom, the kitchen, and parts of the dining room the house was basically empty.

Laura was going to escape and she was convinced he was going to come along. He had only realized that now. In a way it didn’t bother him. It was as if their crazy relationship, or rather, their amazing shared ride in her macabre old bed, had pushed him into a landscape where the old, familiar value scale no longer applied.

She fucked for her life with a heat that exceeded all human behavior, as if life itself was the shared movement of their bodies.

Stig liked it. Laura boiled. Jessica’s embrace was so cool he sometimes felt as if he had made love to the freezer box of an old refrigerator.

Laura licked and sucked, rode and bit. Jessica guided him in and made measured, controlled movements.

If that had been the only thing, but Stig had caught sight of the harbor with the little restaurant, that was on its way to sliding into the sea and splintering into firewood in the first big fall storm, and with a waitstaff that smiled and took you for granted and never asked you if you wanted the check.

Laura woke up and stared at Stig in confusion.

“Did you dream again?”

He felt more than saw how she waved this away with her hand.

“Were you really a virgin?” he asked, “I mean before . . .”

She smiled, and he was happy at her smile.

“I was,” she whispered, almost inaudibly

“How can that be?”

He rolled onto her. The room was so dark he could only make out the contours of her face.

“I didn’t want to,” she said finally, “but with you it’s different. Am I good?”

“You are fantastic.”

He saw her eyelids flutter and after a few seconds she fell back into sleep.

Stig Franklin stood outside Laura’s house. The effect of the wine had faded but he still felt cut off from himself as if he wasn’t really standing in this dark garden late at night, physically satisfied but perplexed about the turn that life had taken.

He stared at the wall as if he could see through the plaster, the bricks, wood paneling, and the striped brown wallpaper. Laura lay in there, slumbering, whimpering like an animal, afflicted by dreams and a desire that never waned. She was like an animal, stripped of human checks and possessed by the resolution to live out life completely, as if in the last days of a destructive war.

Convention and the old loyalties had to make way for her will for a devouring physical intimacy She didn’t appear to care about anything. She threw everything into the trash.

He was sickened by the filth in her house, the bad-smelling piles of old clothes and soiled sheets, the stench of molding food scraps in the kitchen, and the dishwater that only drained reluctantly from the sink and left behind a film of grease and a ring of grayish dirt.

Water was dripping from the rusted gutters. A couple of cat eyes glimmered and were gone. The rope ties on the neighbor’s flagpole snapped weakly a few times. The faint burnt smell from the remains of Laura’s book-bonfire made Stig feel as if he was in a strange place in a foreign land.

He should be going home but he knew that before he did so he had to make a decision. Should he tell Jessica what he had really been doing at Laura’s or try to construct an even more advanced lie?

It was just before one o’clock. He took several decisive steps toward the terrace door but stopped abruptly. Did he want to return to his old life? That question was too big. The fatigue made his thoughts jump from one thing—running away with Laura—to another: leave her for good and try to puzzle his life with his wife back together. If she even wanted to. Stig realized that Jessica was going to find out what had happened, Laura would see to that if he betrayed her.

He stared at the outside of the house. It was probably worth a great deal and he knew it was paid off. What would Laura get if she sold it? Three million, maybe more. He could only come up with a couple hundred thousand at most. The house in Sunnersta was in Jessica’s name and his own shares in the company weren’t worth much.

Three million, he thought, and tasted it. Maybe Laura had money in the bank and other assets? He had the idea of riffling through her desk. He could probably find some ATM receipts.

Where would they go? How would they live? A life with Laura, he thought, and the thought was overwhelming.

He returned inside only to find that Laura was still sleeping. In the faint light from the lamp in the hallway he studied her features. So relaxed, the dark hair fanned out over her pillow, one leg pulled up, her right hand on her stomach and the left one straight out from her body as if she was waiting for him to lie down and rest on her arm. So beautiful, with the pale skin and the consummate beauty of a woman who has made love and thereafter fallen into a deep sleep.

Stig Franklin made up his mind, walked out into the kitchen, found a piece of paper and a pen, wrote a few lines, and left the note on the floor outside the bedroom door.