Give up! Vanessa is a good woman and you’re a childish prick. Go up to the gate now and ring the bell, don’t tell her everything, but enough. Offer her support, money, whatever, to make things easier and smooth. Give her everything except your faithfulness and love. Give her betrayal. Then flee. Fight back the disgust and bad conscience, keep building on the myth of Anders Brant, the unreliable Swede, who for twenty years never paid for sex or even started a relationship on all his travels in Third World countries. On the contrary, he had maintained, with a type of moral superiority, that it would be cruel and unjust.
The men, Scandinavians, Germans, Americans, or wherever they came from, who with the power of the dollar bought sex and temporary intimacy, for a day, a week, a vacation, to feel like kings, with their cocks as a scepter, left devastated women and a sick system behind them, a prostitution economy.
Vanessa was no whore, and he was no traditional john. They had not met with a business transaction as starting point, there had been genuine attraction and sincere joy, perhaps love. He did not know whether he was in love or if he was only a victim of the Western middle-aged man’s need to feel potent and desirable.
He could not see a life together with Vanessa, it was that simple. She had many good qualities, she was beautiful as a dream and easy to be around, in short, an amazing woman, but still there was no future for the two of them. She could see a future, but he could not.
Of course he had asked himself why, but could not formulate an explanation that was entirely convincing. So how could he convince her?
It was more a feeling of inequality. He would always be the stronger one, the one with money, and above all the one who had a possibility to leave. Then, when he did leave, and he would sooner or later, he would leave a Vanessa with considerably worse opportunities than she had today. She was twenty-nine, talked about children, inconceivable for him. He was fifteen years older and could not imagine becoming a father at that age. Besides, it was doubtful whether he had the purely physical prerequisites. During the last two years of a five-year relationship with a woman they had tried to have a child, but failed. Two years later she was pregnant by another man and now had four children, no fertility problems there.
Were those only excuses to be able to flee with honor intact, albeit somewhat tarnished? No, he answered himself.
He did not want to give up his independence and he did not want to tie Vanessa down in a relationship, it was that simple. There was nothing chauvinistic about this, he maintained, on the contrary it was an expression of concern for her.
He still felt like a traitor.
The bell rang. If only she weren’t at home, he thought before the door opened. First surprise on her face, which quickly changed into a broad smile. He tried to smile.
She ran up to the gate. He adjusted the money belt.
Sixteen
Lindell met Fredrik Johansson in town. When she got hold of him-once again it was Elina who helped locate a current cell phone number-he was on his way to a workout session at the old Centralbadet, and they agreed to meet first at the Cathedral Bridge.
“I have to get going,” he said. “I’m going to meet some buddies and work out, I told you that.”
“Okay,” said Lindell. “Let’s meet here in an hour, then we’ll go up to the police station.”
He turned on his heels and disappeared without a word. Lindell started to follow him but stopped at the square and sat down on a bench. She watched as he slipped into the health club.
Her stomach was growling but she could not bring herself to go to the Kurdish hot dog vendor on the pedestrian street, much less fight the crowds for a nondescript daily lunch special at a restaurant.
She decided to wait on the bench. There was a lot to think about with the investigation of Klara Lovisa’s fate, but she immediately started speculating about Anders Brant-who he really was, what he had to do with Bosse Gränsberg, and where and why he had gone away. Somewhere warm, she decided. He was strikingly tan all over his body, obviously he had sunbathed naked. “I go away sometimes,” he said casually when she asked whether he’d been on vacation, but did not explain where, or whether it was for pleasure or business.
What hurt was just his casual attitude. For him perhaps it was just a short-term love affair, one of many. There was no doubt that he appreciated her company and their sex together, he had both said and shown that openly. But there was something, and it was only now that she could put it in words, something tacitly apathetic in his attitude, as if he did not really take their developing relationship seriously.
Then, and that was only a few days ago, she had not thought about it that much, fully occupied as she was with simply experiencing this rebirth in the area of love. The intoxication of passion made her inattentive. Now she had a serious hangover, with the demon of loneliness perched on her shoulder. He jeered at the futile castles in the air. He would remain sitting there a long time, she realized that.
Treachery, she thought. It is treachery if he leaves me now. It is treachery if he is mixed up in something illegal. I am never going to forgive him! Or myself either!
Those were her thoughts on the bench. It was summer, people were strolling slowly along, enjoying the heat. A few tourists photographed the milldam. A young couple lifted up their children so they could peek over the railing of the Cathedral Bridge and look down at the current. Lindell could sense their delight and the parents’ quiet joy, which even at a distance could be seen on their youthful, innocent faces. There was a playfulness in the woman’s manner when she set her kid down on the sidewalk again. The man said something and she smiled at him. That’s what being a couple looks like, thought Lindell, bitterly envious.
The onset of her period did not make things any better, the plague that had started hitting her again with full force and made her body slack and her mood low. It was as if nothing mattered when the periodic torment approached.
And she had dreamed of a vacation together! A vacation full of laughter and intimacy, Ann, Erik, and Anders on an expedition somewhere, it didn’t matter where and how, just the idea of a joint project made her laugh to herself and move with a different lightness.
Was it over? Unconsciously she was becoming convinced that this was the case. She would be sad, but not let herself be totally crushed. She would put up walls inside, hate her way out of the pain, convince herself that it was good for her and Erik when Brant definitively disappeared from their life.
Beside her on the bench an older man was sitting straddle-legged, with his hands resting on a cane. He was dressed in heavy shoes, gabardine pants and a worn jacket, with a soiled hat on his head. His face was weather-beaten. Wind and sun had hollowed out furrows in his cheeks and made his skin leathery. Lindell imagined that he was a Greek shepherd, sitting on a mountain slope watching his herd.
Tell me something, she wanted to encourage the old man, tell me about your life.
Suddenly he turned his head very slowly, as if the movement required the greatest effort, and observed her. The whites of his eyes were streaked with red.
“A beautiful day,” he said.
Lindell nodded and smiled.
“I usually sit here, or there,” he said, pointing toward a bench on the opposite side of the square. “It depends on the sun.”
His accent reinforced her impression that he came from the Mediterranean. Why not Greece, she thought?
“Are you from Greece?”
He nodded, but showed no surprise at her correct guess.
“People come and go, I watch them. In the summer it’s mainly the women I’m interested in. I like fluttering skirts.”
He laughed, a boyish, giggling laugh.