“Gärdet,” he said. “You live there, Steffe. As you may recall.”
“But you drove around all of fucking Gärdet! We shouldn’t have let you drive.”
“Says the man who blew the driving test six times.”
“Come on, try to go the right way. I know you’re from Nynäshamn, but you must have been to Stockholm once or twice.”
“Or heard of it.”
“The king lives there. Maybe that’ll help.”
“Does he really live in the palace? Or is it Drottningholm? Trick question.”
“What the hell? Are you going to send him fan mail?”
“ ‘Dear King, can you send a lock of Victoria’s pubic hair to a pining bachelor with roots in the working class of Säffle?’ ”
“Take a right. A right, you moron!”
“Dumbass!”
He got tired of it all and turned left out of pure spite. A general bellow spread through the minibus.
“Psycho!”
“Dipshit!”
“Idiot!”
The minibus glided on along a little dark road that split into four; he randomly chose one of them, and it seemed like the bus might be stopped at any second by a sudden iron fence and a severe, macho Latino border guard with a cigar in the corner of his mouth.
That didn’t happen. Instead, he could see a Volvo station wagon fifty yards away. Exhaust was rising from its tailpipe. The car was blocking the road.
He braked until they were almost standing still. They were thirty yards from the car when he saw a man next to it. He was in full motion. His head was covered by a balaclava. He shoved something into the back of the car, threw himself around the side, and roared away with shrieking tires. When the smoke settled, Matte noticed something lying on the ground. A large package with alarming contours.
Three of the guys who were somewhat sober leaned forward, above him.
“What the fuck was that?”
“A burglary?”
“Fucking hell! What have you gotten us into, Matte? Let’s split.”
He let the bus slowly glide up to the blanket-wrapped package. The headlights made the rain come alive. It whipped at the blanket.
He stopped the bus and went out into the storm. They followed him. He bent down and started to unwrap the blanket.
A face stared up at him. Chalk-white, with surprising facial features under the ruptured eyes. The rain beat against the eyeballs. The eyelids made no effort to avoid the drops.
They recoiled and stared silently at the white face that stuck out of the dripping blanket, shining through the night.
“Shit!” someone whispered.
“Let’s split,” someone else whispered.
“We can’t just leave him,” he said.
Someone grabbed the lapels of his jacket and brought his face close. “Yes. We can. Do you hear me, Matte? This has nothing to do with us.”
“You’ve been drinking,” someone else said soberly. “Think of the consequences.”
They went back to the minibus. The mood was different now.
He remained standing there for a moment, observing the corpse with reluctant fascination. It was the first time Matte had seen a dead person.
He returned to the driver’s seat. The bus was dripping with rain that would eat its way into the upholstery and make it mold. But that was the farthest thing from his mind as he turned the key in the ignition.
12
Gunnar Nyberg lived in a three-room apartment in Nacka, just one block from the church where he would much rather be, singing loudly. When his bed had collapsed a few nights ago, he saw it as an omen. He awoke with two microscopic pincers driven into his throat. They grasped his vocal cords; he would never be able to sing again. It took a long time to get them out-not out of his throat but his head. He lay there among the wreckage of his bed and let the pincers fade away. Sharp, broken planks were sticking up around him. It slowly dawned on him how lucky he’d been. He started to laugh. It was several minutes before he was able to stop.
His near-accident resulted in two concrete actions. For one, he started a diet. It was hardly the right time, with the Kentucky Killer running riot outside his window, but his need for it had become more and more acute, and the collapse of his bed was the last straw. For another, he bought a new bed, specially designed for overweight sleepers; it was looking the truth in the eye, he thought, pulling himself together.
In this specially designed bed for the overweight, a classic bachelor dream about intensely horny young women was interrupted by a horrible ringtone. It had been a long time since he had received a nighttime phone call, and it took a long time for him to realize what it was. At first he thought it was, strangely enough, his ex-wife. Had something happened to Gunilla? When he heard a typical police voice echo through the receiver, it struck him that he was probably the last person who would be contacted in that case.
“Is anyone there?” the police voice said for a second time.
Nyberg got some life into his voice, which he thought sounded like a threshing machine: “Nyberg here.”
“This is the Stockholm police,” said the voice. “We have standing orders that so-called ‘suspicious deaths’ must be reported directly to you. Is that correct?”
“I don’t really know what it means, but that’s correct, yes.”
“We have a murder in Frihamnen that can probably be classified as such.”
Nyberg’s reaction was immediate. “Does the victim have two holes in his neck?”
“Are you awake?” the police voice said suspiciously. “Vampires belong in dreams.”
“Just answer the question.”
“I don’t know,” the voice said tersely.
Nyberg obtained directions, hung up, shook some life into himself, pulled on his customary sloppy clothes, got his apartment key and car key, dashed-he thought-down the stairs, and drove off in his old Renault.
He had the rain-whipped streets to himself. He tried to think about the Kentucky Killer; about the little pincers that, with one simple motion, could rob a person of her most unique outward feature, her voice; and about the series of similar American influences, but it didn’t really work. His awakening had forced onto him the thing he was trying to repress most of all.
During the early 1970s, Gunnar Nyberg had been Mr. Sweden, an internationally recognized body builder; he was simultaneously on active duty with the Norrmalm police and had a certain amount of contact with what would later be called the Baseball League, the most ruthless cops in the history of the Swedish police. But by then he had already moved to Nacka and shelved the steroids. And lost his family.
He had been a truly rotten bastard. When he thought of it, he always had to close his eyes, which actually worked very well out on the empty Värmdöleden.
Everything poured through him when he closed his eyes for just a second… all the abuse, all the patience he’d lost before anything even happened, all those steroid attacks of extreme rage.
About a year ago he’d started speaking in schools pretty regularly. He was an early victim of the side effects of anabolic steroids, and in his work he saw each day how their abuse was increasing out on the streets; he could sniff out a steroid user immediately. His pastor had asked if he might consider helping out, and with great reluctance he had gone to the first high school and spoken. But they listened; even though most of his muscle mass had gone to the fat that broke his bed, he was still an impressive figure. He kept a low profile and showed frightening pictures while talking in a matter-of-fact voice, and possibly someone somewhere had abstained from using steroids thanks to him.
But the veil of penance was thin and was torn away again. Behind his eyelids came what he knew would come-it always did. The last time he abused his wife, he split-no, burst-Gunilla’s eyebrow, and her frightened look, and the frightened looks from Tommy and Tanja, settled in his brain forever. He knew that those memories still existed. The family had moved to Uddevalla to get as far away from him as possible. He hadn’t seen them for over fifteen years, not once. If he had run into his children on the street, he wouldn’t have recognized them. His life had closed up around a giant void.