The Cruel Stars of the Night (24 page)

Thirty-one

Ann Lindell was awakened by the sound of the phone ringing. She reflexively threw herself over the phone and at the same time registered the time on the clock radio: 01:03.

Twice this angry signal had woken her up in the middle of the night. The first time it had been work related and on the other occasion, about a year ago, it was her mother calling at half past two in the morning to say that Ann’s father had been taken to the hospital because of heart problems.

This time it was about Ann herself. She answered sleepily and the first thing she heard was music.

“Hello?”

The dryness of her mouth made her wet her lips.

“Hi,” a voice said on the other end, and Ann immediately knew it was the voice of a drunk person, “it’s me, Challe.”

Challe, Ann thought, drawing a blank until she realized who it was. She sat up in bed. Her mouth was like a desert and she felt the throb of a headache.

“It’s one o’clock in the morning,” she said.

“I’m sorry, but I had to call,” Charles Morgansson said and Ann heard him straining to sound somewhat sober.

“You’re drunk.”

“I had to call,” he repeated, “everything went so wrong. You understand . . . it went wrong. I . . . we have to talk.”

“Now?”

“Can I come by?”

“Are you still at the restaurant?”

“I stayed,” Charles said and suddenly Ann was wide awake.

“You call me up in the middle of the night, drunk out of your mind, and you want to talk. What the hell about?”

“Can I come by?”

Ann got up out of bed. Never, she thought, I’ll never let in a drunk Morgansson, a man who has treated me as if I were an escort.

“I don’t think so,” she said, at the same time pulling away the curtain and looking out at the parking lot. The electric lights were reflected in the roofs of the cars. It had rained. A lone person came walking along the street and turned into the parking lot, stopped, and lit a cigarette.

In the receiver she heard Frank Sinatra’s voice and the clinking of glasses. The man in the parking lot stood in place while he puffed once on his cigarette and looked around. For one moment Ann thought he was going to steal a car but the man continued his lonely walk, walking diagonally across the parking squares, and aiming for one of the building entrances. As he came closer she recognized him as one of the neighbors. They had exchanged a few words outside. Ann knew he lived alone but sometimes was visited by his teenage son.

“Charles,” she said, and she could imagine him sitting on a high bar stool, leaning over his glass with the tall bartender on the other side of the counter. “I don’t know what you want. You invited me to dinner and then sent me away like a piece of mail. Now you call me at one o’clock in the morning and you want to come over. What kind of a person do you think I am?”

“I’m sorry,” Morgansson said again, “I just want to talk. I know I’ve behaved like an idiot but sometimes I get stuck.”

Stuck, Ann thought and shook her head.

“I like you,” Morgansson said, “but things went a little wrong. I chickened out and . . .”

Ann heard a voice thundering in the background.

“. . . I have to stop now. I’m not allowed to talk anymore. I’m disturbing you . . . ?”

His voice sounded incredibly sad.

“We’ll be in touch,” he said. “My apologies . . .”

“Wait,” Ann said quickly. “The code downstairs is four-three-one-one.”

“I know it,” Morgansson said and Ann realized his cousin must have given it to him. “Does that mean I can come over?”

“I can’t fall back asleep immediately anyway,” Ann said and hung up, afraid of more words, tired of excuses, and amazed at her own compliance.

Charles turned up twenty minutes later. During that time Ann had brushed her teeth and washed her face, looked at herself in the mirror, pulled on her robe, had time to figure out her approach, and had time to change her mind several times.

“Thanks,” was the first thing Morgansson said.

She let him in and walked without a word to the living room, where she had turned on the lamp in the window.

He had sobered up somewhat but looked like a sad dog. They sat quietly for a moment before he started to talk.

“I left a woman in Umeå,” he started.

Ann closed her eyes. I should have guessed, she thought tiredly Why do I let this happen?

“I liked her but I couldn’t stay there, and she didn’t want to move. She is a researcher at the university.”

“Why did you have to leave?”

Morgansson lifted his head and looked at her. Now he looked completely sober.

“I ran over a little girl,” he said. “Every time I went downtown I replayed it over and over again. It became a nightmare.”

“What girl?”

“She ran out from between two cars. I didn’t have a chance to brake or veer. She died after half a day. It was ruled an accident but for me it was . . . she was eight years old.”

He stopped.

“Do you want anything?”

Morgansson shook his head.

“Her mom was standing on the other side of the street.”

“I’m sorry,” Ann said.

She was struck by the thought of checking into the story with an Umeå colleague that she knew.

“It became impossible for me to work,” Charles continued. “I thought about that girl all the time. Ronja was her name, like that robber’s daughter in Astrid Lindgren’s book. And about her mother’s scream.”

“So you left Umeå?”

“I had to, so I wouldn’t go crazy.”

“And your girlfriend?”

“She stayed. I think she was a little tired. I dreamed a lot at night. Went a bit cuckoo. She was working at home on her dissertation and I was on sick leave. It didn’t work. In the daytime I walked around like a restless spirit and at night . . . well, you know.”

Ann stood up and moved to the couch.

“Let’s go to bed,” she said and saw him tense up.

“We can hug but nothing more, okay?”

He looked at her quickly and nodded.

“Okay,” he said, his voice cracking.

Thirty-two

The wind grabbed hold of the large evergreens and shook them. After a few gusts, everything was calm again. Jessica Franklin leaned forward and peered out. The dark, pillar-shaped trees stood like sentries outside the kitchen window but Jessica thought they looked more threatening than protective. She had wanted to remove them and plant roses instead.

Once they had been little. The man at the nursery had said they wouldn’t get bigger than two meters. Now they were twice that. Stig thought it a pity to cut them down.

She looked at the clock. For which time she didn’t know. She had driven home right after Stig’s call, made a simple dinner, and then anxiously walked to and fro in the house, unable to do any of the things she had to.

She didn’t know what to think. His story about Laura was plausible for all its outlandishness. Laura was unstable and Stig was thoughtful and gullible. Was Laura trying to use him to change the course of the Hausmann deal? She had been forced to give in on several points and had been upset and mortified. Now perhaps she was using the nice and understanding Stig to alter the plans.

The longer the evening went on the more upset she became. Several times she decided to call Stig but changed her mind each time. Her pride forbade her. If he wanted to sit there and coddle Laura then that was his decision.

When it was close to twelve o’clock she first started having thoughts that Stig was having an affair with Laura. Jealousy bored in and spread like a cancerous growth. Again she wanted to call but did not want to give either Stig or Laura the satisfaction of appearing like a spurned wife who was anxiously calling for her unfaithful husband.

Jessica sat down at the computer, opened one of the Hausmann documents, and tried to work but the letters and numbers on the screen had lost their meaning. She left the study and walked around the house, furious and beside herself.

When she heard the car on the street she ran to the desk, sat down, and logged in again on the computer.

She heard the garage door open and shut. The door to the kitchen opened. Stig poured himself a glass of water and brought it down forcefully onto the counter. He must have had wine. That always made him thirsty afterward.

He called out but not how he usually did. She sat absolutely still and read a sentence in German, reading the words quietly to herself. An early memory of a German lesson at school came back to her. The lesson was about the Müller family visiting some relatives in the countryside. The thought was that the schoolchildren should learn words that had to do with farming. When Jessica had recited all the words she could remember in this context she heard Stig walking up.

“Hi,” she heard him say.

She didn’t turn around, but sensed he was standing in the doorway.

“You’re working,” he observed.

He sounded normal, but wasn’t there a mocking tone in his voice? She turned around and got a shock. Stig’s red-flushed face bore witness to what she had feared. He could look like that sometimes after they had made love.

“Are you proud of yourself?” she asked and made an effort to keep her voice from breaking.

He shook his head.

“We have some things to sort out,” he said in a mechanical voice.

He told her calmly what had happened and that it was best if they separated. What scared Jessica the most was his control as he told her his reasons. It was as if he was making a presentation about the marketing of a new product.

There were none of his usual apologies or the awkward tiptoeing when he came to subjects that he felt were difficult or that he knew she didn’t like to speak about, instead there was simply a methodological analysis of their life together and the conclusion that it was time to bring it to an end.

When he had finished she turned off the computer, stood up, and threw herself on top of him. The attack came without warning and he fell backward with Jessica on top of him. She hit him in the face with her fists and on his chest. He tried to shield himself, grabbed her wrists and held them in place. She spit in his face, bent over, and tried to bite him but Stig pulled away and managed to throw her off.

“You’re crazy,” he managed to get out.

“Says you, you bastard,” Jessica screamed and Stig caught sight of features in her face he had never seen before.

She resembled an actress he had seen in a play on TV, wild, with distorted, naked features that radiated hatred and a bottomless sorrow. But for the first time he also saw fear in her eyes.

He jumped up from the floor but sank down again on his knees almost at once when he realized she was crying.

“Jessica, I’m so sorry,” he said, “but we’re no good together.”

She curled up, writhing, pulled her arms in front of her face while her body was wracked with sobs.

He put his hand on her shoulder, unable to comprehend what was happening. He had expected many reactions, but not this.

The sobbing stopped after several minutes.

“Please, Jessica,” Stig tried again.

She turned and looked at him with swollen eyes.

“Why?” she said.

“I’ve already explained.”

“I love you.”

Stig stared at her. It had been years since they had said those words to each other.

“I’d rather die than get divorced,” she continued.

“Don’t say that,” he pleaded. “That’s sounds so terrible.”

Jessica pulled herself into a sitting position. Stig stood up. It looked as if they were in the midst of a choreographed dance routine.

“That woman!” Jessica suddenly burst out. “What do you see in her? She’s crazy, you’ve said it yourself.”

“I don’t want to talk about Laura,” Stig said. “We have so much else to talk about.”

“That damn whore!” Jessica screamed. “She hates me. That’s the only reason. She doesn’t love you, she just wants to hurt me, don’t you get it?”

Stig saw how this idea took root in Jessica. He realized it would become her interpretation and that Jessica’s artillery would now be directed at this point in their shared terrain and that she would bombard him with explanations, stories about Laura’s years-old hatred of her, her treachery, and how Laura would dump him when she had achieved the goal of separating the two of them.

“Don’t you understand? She wants to get to me. That’s why she keeps going on about Hausmann. It’s not about phase B, it’s me. That was my suggestion and that’s why it had to be shot down. When she couldn’t do it, when you backed up my idea she had to think of something else.”

Stig pulled himself away. The unpleasantness increased as he observed the frenzy with which his wife presented her arguments.

“I’m having a beer,” he said and walked out to the kitchen.

Jessica got to her feet and followed him and kept talking with an intensity that made him draw back from her.

“We’ll have to talk more tomorrow,” he said in an attempt to interrupt her.

She stopped for a second and stared at him.

“We have to straighten this out right now.”

“We’re exhausted, both of us,” Stig objected.

“So you think we’re going to go to bed as normal, sleep soundly, and then eat breakfast tomorrow morning as if nothing has happened?”

“I know it won’t go back to normal,” he said calmly and sipped his beer.

“Did you get drunk over there?”

“No.”

“You drank wine.”

“A couple of glasses. To keep her company.”

“To keep her company! She got you drunk in order to get you in bed. You are so damned gullible!”

“Calm down, Jessica, nothing is gained by us screaming at each other.”

“Calm down,” she spat.

“I’m going to bed,” he said and put the beer down on the counter, changed his mind and shoved it down into the garbage pail under the sink instead, struck by the thought that the beer bottle could become a weapon.

He walked toward the bedroom and awaited a physical or verbal attack from Jessica, but she had sunk down onto a chair and was staring unseeing at the new tile above the stove.

It was three o’clock, the night leading to Thursday, the twenty-third of October.