Anders was smart. She realized that right away, and he quickly understood connections. But now it was his penis she was thinking about. Smart or not, he was the most all-around best lover she had encountered. He made her feel beautiful and desirable. He saw lines in her body like no one before. I’m over forty, she protested, but he just smiled, and caressed her across her back and down over the rounding of her rear. “Dead man’s curve,” he said, letting his hand continue toward her womb and she had lightheartedly parted her legs, but his hand made its way across her thigh toward the hollow of her knee.
He was slow but sometimes heated as well, and he sometimes talked about Tantric sex, which she’d never heard of. Always attentive to her mood and desires, he was, in short, a “keeper” as Görel would put it.
For three weeks they had been seeing each other, but only at her place. It was the most practical, he thought, saying that his place was cramped and that he didn’t like to clean. She thought it was a good arrangement, as she avoided having to get a babysitter. Erik had not taken any great notice of the man who came and went. Anders was always gone before Erik woke up in the morning, and Ann was not sure whether he knew that Anders slept over. One evening they played computer games together, and the next morning Erik asked where the “old man” had gone.
They had made love three times in the past twelve hours-that was more than she had done the last two years before meeting Anders. She glanced at the clock; it was only an hour since he had slipped out of her.
She felt her belly contract. He had licked her like no one else, along her spine down toward the tailbone, and further, parted her cheeks and let his warm tongue run. Carefully he had drawn patterns with the tip of his tongue.
“… that’s what I think.”
Fredriksson fell silent.
Lindell reached for the pen that was on the table in front of her.
“Do you have a fever too?” asked Fredriksson.
“No,” Lindell assured him.
“You look a little warm.”
She laughed. She heard how wrong it sounded, girlish and nervous. Her colleagues around the table observed her: Haver with a look of admiration, Beatrice mildly indulgent, and Ottosson with that unbelievable furrow between his eyes. Fredriksson looked completely uncomprehending while Sammy Nilsson smiled and made the V sign.
“I’m just a little-”
“A little what?” said Ola Haver.
He knows, thought Lindell. Their eyes met before she looked away. With a mental exertion of will she tried to gather her freely floating limbs and thoughts, and return them to her body.
It only struck her now that she had declined an invitation from Ola Haver and his wife Rebecka the evening before. Every summer they organized a barbecue. She had been there the past few years but this year she stayed away. No doubt they had discussed her absence.
Ann Lindell looked at Fredriksson.
“What do we know about his circle of acquaintances?”
“Have you had a stroke, Ann? Allan was just telling us that we don’t have an identity.”
Sammy Nilsson’s words made her look down at the table top.
“I was somewhere else for a while,” she said quietly.
“Where were you?” asked Beatrice Andersson.
He licked my armpit, she thought, and smiled and raised her eyes.
“I was in a place you’ve never been, Beatrice,” she answered after a few seconds, still smiling. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to make an urgent call.”
She got up and grabbed the notebook and pen. It shows, she thought as she left the room, well aware of their looks.
“Urgent,” she mumbled quietly to herself outside the door, and grinned.
After her panicky flight from the morning meeting, Ann Lindell barricaded herself in her office, unplugged the phone, and sat down, not at her desk, but in the visitor’s chair that was pushed up against the wall between a pair of gigantic file cabinets. The office was so small that the chair was always in the way when it was in front of the desk. If anyone were to crack open the door and look in, they would think she was out. She also felt like she needed to be somewhere else.
Little by little the satisfaction of the early morning had turned into a feeling of vague worry.
She was sore, but above all confused. She had to stick to what had happened. It had been a long time since she needed to handle emotions like passion and hope. Regret and longing she had been able to parry with pretty good success. But this? Should she make a comparison to Rolf or Edvard, two past lives? Can you start from zero, she asked herself, and immediately knew the answer.
They had met a couple of months ago at Görel’s and sure, she had been interested even then, and she sensed it had also been Görel’s intention to bring them together. She had tried earlier without any results and jokingly complained about Ann’s lack of involvement.
He had an open face and she liked that, got the idea that it corresponded to what was inside him. She needed a man like that, a man who talked about what he liked and thought, without reservation. She longed for painful honesty. No obstacles, no unspoken reservations, no point-taking.
Then she had not heard a word from him, even though he had said something about calling, but as the days and weeks passed she had resigned herself.
A month later he called. They decided to have dinner, the most civilized act two people can do together, as he put it. He suggested an Italian restaurant far up on S:t Olofsgatan and she said yes. She arranged for Erik to sleep over with a playmate from preschool. Anders Brant would pick her up and arrived half an hour early. She was still in her underwear, peeked through the peephole in the door, wrapped a stained bathrobe around herself, and opened the door.
They never made it to the restaurant. Ten minutes after he had stepped into her apartment they were in her bed.
This had been going on for three weeks. Violent fucking, there was no other word for it. He was loving. Unaccustomed to all this attention, these hands and this tongue, this cock, made her confused to start with, and sometimes she thought it was too good, too much of a good thing.
This morning he got out of bed, drew his hand over his sex, which in all likelihood was sore too, and said that he had to go away for a week, maybe two. She asked where he was going but did not get a reasonable answer. That’s how much of an investigator she was! I got caught with my pants down, she thought gloomily, still intoxicated and tired.
A shiver of fear passed through her. Would he come back? She tried to calm herself by thinking: Why wouldn’t he come back? He seemed happy with her. He came of his own free will, seemingly gladly and often to her home and bed.
After an hour there was a careful knock on the door. She knew it was Ottosson. The door was opened slowly by the unit chief who peeked in, and discovered Lindell between the massive cabinets.
“How are you? You look a bit tired out,” he began unusually directly, without commenting on her placement in the office.
She could tell that Ottosson was exerting himself to sound relaxed, despite the furrow between his eyebrows.
Lindell pulled the chair out into the office, patted him on the arm, and sat down behind the desk. Ottosson took a seat in the visitor’s chair.
“Warmed up,” he said, and it took a second before Lindell understood that he meant the chair.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” she said. “Ask around at ‘The Grotto,’ they might have some idea who he is.”
“Ola and Beatrice are on their way there,” he said with a smile.
“The Grotto” was the fixed point in existence for many of the homeless. The operation was run as a non-profit by a few activists and got some municipal backing and private sponsorship. There the mournful existences that no one really wanted to take responsibility for or even know about, could get a meal, some clothes, and consideration.