The Shadow Woman (19 page)

The question came suddenly. He didn’t know what to say.

“You’re still seeing each other?”

“Yes.”

“It would be nice to actually get to meet her one day.”

 

Ester Bergman stood outside the store and studied the big notice board. They had put it up quite recently. It was the only one she had seen in the area.

Her bag was heavy since she had done the shopping for several days. It had become more difficult for her to find what she was looking for since the store started to stock so many new products that people from other countries bought. Strange vegetables and cans.

She tried to read. The local parish was going to have a sing-along. She’d go and listen, if she had time. The property management company was organizing a party for one of the other courtyards, but it didn’t seem to be open to everyone. She wondered why. The police had put up a poster about someone who’d gone missing. It occurred to her that people seem to go missing a lot, and then she thought about the red-haired girl and her fair-haired mother, who were so quiet and still whenever they walked past. Where are they now? she thought again. I miss that little girl. I enjoyed watching her when she played in the sand.

Where had they moved to? She regretted that she hadn’t at least spoken to the girl. That’s the sort of thing you regret, she thought. There are a lot of things you can regret when you get old. I regret never having had children. It’s strange to think about. We couldn’t have children, and it might not have been my fault. It may have been Elmer’s fault, but he didn’t want to get himself examined and I let him decide. I regret that now. What if I’d known that I’d grow old and sit here regretting all the things I hadn’t done? All the sins I hadn’t committed.

She read the notice posted on the bulletin board again. She had to strain because the print could have been bigger. If they wanted people to read it, they ought to think about not making the letters so small.

When she walked back, she thought once again about the girl who had been so quiet. Why am I thinking about that so much? I’ve been doing that for a few days now.

On the way back to her unit, she walked past the property management office. A sign outside said “Residential Services.” Was that something new? There was also something about a “district superintendent” who manned the office during opening hours. What was a district superintendent? She didn’t know, but it must be someone who knew something about the area or the buildings. She could pay a visit to that district super and ask. It’s not good to go around thinking all the time. She could ask when that mother and her little girl moved away and where they went.

THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED LATE IN THE NIGHT. WHEN WINTER
awoke, the air in the apartment smelled different—of green instead of white. It was colder and darker, like a lingering sadness at the long summer’s passing, finally expired at a record old age.

He put his feet on the sanded fir floor, its coolness soft beneath the arches of his feet. Then he yawned, a leftover from burning the midnight oil with his head bowed over the PowerBook he could now see through the bedroom doorway, screen still open. Today it was a different apartment. He’d grown used to four months of almost constant sunshine and a home that offered no protection from the light.

In the kitchen he raised the blinds without getting dazzled. The sky had no opening. An invisible rain made the awnings across the park glisten. The streetcars passed beneath him with a sound reminiscent of a ship.

Winter walked back into the living room in his robe and opened the door to the balcony. The wet became more audible, as if he’d stepped out of a wheelhouse and found himself at sea.

He drew air into his lungs, as much as he could manage. It felt good. He felt good. The fatigue from the night before was gone, and he realized that the heavy heat had had an adverse effect on him, on his work.

It was like a depression, he thought. Everything started to crumble to bits. We saw the proof. Things exploded. People went crazy and shot each other. A man and his son were at the end of their tether.

A week earlier, the dramatic standoff outside Ullevi had had an undramatic resolution. The man left his gun on the bus and stepped off, holding his son by the hand. Winter heard that the son seemed happy and perky, waving to his mother, who was standing there—she who had pleaded with her husband.

The family’s lawyer had submitted a new application for a residence permit. But the government was following a hard line. Desperation was to be regarded as threat and coercion. Despair, though it may move the hearts of the weak, had no effect on the authorities’ judgment.

It was nine o’clock in the morning and it was Saturday. The dizziness had returned for two split seconds on Friday afternoon, so Winter had decided to stay home in the shadows today.

Now the shadows were gone, as was that nagging sensation of losing his footing. He knew he would not feel dizzy again, not for a very long time. I’m more of a northerner than I realized, he thought. Surround me with crispness and cold and I function better.

Winter stepped back inside and lingered by his desk. He looked at the computer screen but didn’t turn it on. Last night he’d tried to sort through all the various sidetracks, as if he were working in a rail yard. He’d followed different leads until they ended, then reversed course to see if he could spot anything that had fallen off along the way, in a ditch or in the grass.

A lot of time had been spent following up on every public sighting of thirty-year-old fair-haired women at “mysterious” locations or who’d appeared generally confused or suspicious. Winter had sent all the documentation to Interpol. It was a new tack, and he hadn’t received any usable information from there as yet. He didn’t think she came from another country. The fillings in her teeth were done in Sweden, even the ones that were done when she was a little girl. She could have been living abroad, but that was another matter.

He’d called up other police precincts throughout the country.

His staff had continued to question the boys about the boat, and they were telling the truth. But their boat had been used for something. Maybe it was the boat that Andrea Maltzer saw out on the lake. If she really had seen a boat. Winter had thought about her, and her lover, von Holten. There was something—he didn’t know what it was—something that made him not quite swallow her whole story. Why hadn’t she called a cab right away? Had she planned on borrowing the car? Was she there alone? All these questions ran through Winter’s mind, and he’d typed them on his screen before the temperature outside had dropped.

Two officers had spent almost a week trawling through the vehicle registration database in search of the owners of the Ford Escorts located within the geographical area he had decided they should limit themselves to. They would start with all the license plates beginning with the letter
H
. Not even then could they be sure. I don’t know, he’d thought to himself the night before, with the blue glow from the screen on his face. Is this therapy? He’d thought about the woman again. Helene with no name. Inside he knew they wouldn’t make any progress without her identity. He knew that the others knew.

He raised his gaze from the PowerBook and returned to the kitchen to put on the electric kettle for tea. He poured the leaves into the pot and toasted two slices of French bread from the day-old loaf he’d bought at a convenience store on the way home. He could have pulled on his trousers and shirt and taken the elevator down to the bakery across the park. Why don’t I do that, he thought, and left the bread where it was and went back into the bedroom and threw off his robe and put on a pair of shorts and a shirt.

He bought fresh poppy-seed buns and a brioche, returning across the grass and feeling his sandaled toes get wet. Back upstairs he made himself a café au lait instead of tea and squeezed three oranges and poured the juice into a glass. He ate the still-warm bread with butter and cherry jam, and with a boiled egg that he peeled and sliced up and ground black pepper over. He drank two cups of coffee and read the paper. He felt ready for anything.

 

Ester Bergman cautiously stuck her hand out the window and felt the dampness. It was good for the skin. She kept her hand there long enough that tiny droplets of water formed in the folds of her palm. She thought the world looked dark when the sun wasn’t there to wash everything out.

She’d stayed indoors for several days because she hadn’t been feeling well. She hadn’t had the energy to go to residential services, or whatever it’s called. Then the woman from the home-help service had come—the new one whose name she didn’t know—and had futzed around the apartment as if she were cleaning. But Ester knew she wasn’t actually cleaning, that everything looked almost the same when she left as it had when she arrived. Sometimes she does the dishes even though I’ve already done them, Ester thought. When she thinks I’m not looking, she takes out the glasses and washes them again, as if I couldn’t look after myself.

She may be nice, but she’s not family. Ester Bergman had thought about that sometimes, but there was no point in thinking like that. No family was going to drop in for a visit, no matter how much she wished for it. That’s just the way it was. An old woman couldn’t have a family if she’d had an old man who didn’t want more people in the house.

“Seems like you’ve got a little fever, Ester,” the home-help woman had said, and put her hand on her forehead.

“I’m lying here thinking about something.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Do you notice the people who live around this courtyard?”

“How do you mean, Ester?”

“Do you recognize them, you people who work around here, visiting with old people and such?”

“You mean, do we recognize our clie—the ones we go to visit? Of course we do.”

“No no. I mean the other people around here. The others who live here.”

“The others?”

“The children and the others on the street! The children and their mothers!”

“Are you thinking of anyone in particular, Ester?”

“No, never mind.”

“Tell me if you’re thinking of anyone special, Ester.”

It’s always Ester this and Ester that with this woman, she’d thought to herself. She was getting a headache from hearing her name all the time. “There used to be a little girl with bright red hair. She would sit out there with her mother sometimes or play while her mother sat nearby. They’re not here anymore.”

“You haven’t seen them, Ester?”

“I haven’t seen them for quite a while. I was just wondering if you’d seen them.”

“A girl with red hair? How old?”

“I don’t know. A little one, five or something maybe.”

The woman from the home-help service looked like she was thinking. I wonder if she really is thinking, Ester Bergman thought. She smells of smoke. She wants to get out of here and have a smoke out on the steps.

“The mother smoked too.”

“What did you say, Ester?”

“I said that the girl’s mother smoked too. If she was her mother.”

“What did her mother look like?”

“She was fair and looked like all young people do these days, I guess.”

“She was young, you say, Ester?”

“Everyone’s young to me, I suppose.”

The home-help woman smiled. She looked like she was thinking again.

“I can’t picture them,” she said. “But I don’t get to see much of the courtyard. We just come in here, after all, and into the entranceways.” She appeared to be thinking again. “No, I can’t picture them.”

“Ester would like some coffee now,” said Ester Bergman.

The service woman again placed her hand on Ester’s forehead. “Now, you just lie still here while I go fetch the cup.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Then she’d been left on her own again. She thought about this now, as her hand grew increasingly wet. The rain felt good. Old people have a hard time in the heat, she thought. Even old people from other countries stay indoors when it’s hot outside.

She pulled in her hand but left the window open. There were streaks running down the pane. It smelled like when she was a child. Through the rain-washed window she could see the children outside.

Suddenly it was as if something struck her hard in the chest. She thought she saw a head of red hair through the window. She leaned forward, then pushed open the window to get a better view. But she didn’t see anyone with red hair or anyone else for that matter—there was nothing outside her window right now. Look how I’m behaving, she thought. I’m seeing ghosts.

 

Aneta Djanali returned home with the fall. It smelled stagnant in her apartment. She opened a window, and despite the total absence of wind she saw a little fluff of dust whirl in the center of the room. The first thing she did was put on some music, and it wasn’t jazz.

It was early afternoon, but it felt like evening, when the light is gone and doesn’t pierce through everything anymore. This light lingered around things. It was discreet, relaxing for the mind, she thought, pouring herself a glass of whiskey from the bottle on the kitchen counter. The last time she’d poured from it was the evening she was beaten up. It was a strange feeling. She’d sat here with Lis, sipped at a whiskey, and then gone out. Now she was back and sipping another as if it had just been a little parenthesis in time. She drank a little more and grimaced as much as she dared with her patched-up mandible. The alcohol flared up at once and became a little flame that flickered around inside her body, swept down her nerve endings, and flushed out into her bloodstream. Better than painkillers, she thought, and took a little whiskey in her mouth and let it slowly trickle down into her throat. I feel pretty good, she said silently to herself.

ESTER BERGMAN TOOK A SIP OF HER COFFEE, BUT SHE WAS
thinking about something else. The young man on the radio had just said that it was eight o’clock. She was all dressed and ready to go. The woman from the home-help service wasn’t coming today, and that was a relief.