“Did you ever suspect anything?”
Ann shook her head.
“Never. But I guess that’s how it is. You don’t see the cracks, or pretend not to. I feel hate, but perhaps mostly self-contempt. That’s how much of an investigator I am. And now Klara Lovisa. I thought I’d solved the whole thing. First Fredrik and then Andreas, and I had to let both of them go. Andreas said finally, when I pressed him about the necklace, that he put it in Klara Lovisa’s mail slot the morning she disappeared. And I can’t disprove that.”
“That may be so. But you think it’s Andreas?”
“I don’t really know. I can’t separate lies from truth there either.”
“Only hate and self-contempt?” Sammy asked.
“If it were only hate, I would manage better.”
“Hate burns,” said Sammy. “It may feel good in the short term, but you get deformed.”
“As if I didn’t know,” Ann hissed.
She got up, stole a glance at the sideboard-he guessed that was where she stored the wine-before she went up to the kitchen counter, filled a glass with water from the tap, and drank it.
“You still want him,” Sammy observed.
Ann slammed the glass on the kitchen counter.
“Are you going to take sick leave?”
She turned around.
“You know the answer to that question,” she said. “It would be fatal to stay home and brood.”
“Maybe you can go somewhere for a few days.”
“My job is the only thing I have left.”
“One thing,” said Sammy Nilsson. “What would you say if I e-mailed Brant a few questions, maybe asked him to call? I mean, it’s more awkward for you to get hold of…”
The question hung in the air between them. Then she shook her head, but tore off a piece of the pizza carton anyway and wrote down his e-mail address.
It was eleven before Sammy went home. He was tired, but happy about the long conversation with Ann. She needed it, and maybe he did too. They seldom sat down and talked things out.
The air was still warm, people were walking on the streets or sitting on balconies and patios, enjoying the night. Sammy was struck with a bad conscience, he ought to have been at home. But Angelika would understand.
During the short walk from the parking space to the town house he thought about Henrietta Kumlin. That besides the terror and grief at her husband’s violent death, she seemed relieved.
Thirty-five
Twenty-three murders in the course of forty-eight hours. Anders Brant read the headline in A Tarde, let his eyes run over the photographs of the murder victims-among them a local politician, two shopkeepers, a coconut vendor, three teenage boys, a young mother and her two-year-old son. A gallery of young men and women, famous for a day.
All of them looked serious in the photos, as if they were aware that they would meet a violent death. Who would I vote for, thought Brant.
No picture of any perpetrators. He skimmed through the text. No, no one had been arrested.
With those figures it was not particularly surprising that the jails were overcrowded, even though many of the crimes of the past few days would remain unsolved. He was also convinced that more murders had been committed, deeds that would never be reported, either in the statistics or in the mass media. People simply disappeared, were buried, thrown into the bay, or incinerated.
Perhaps a few of those pictured had been victims of police bullets, not policemen in service, but moonlighters, earning an extra buck by taking the lives of criminals and homeless youth. Contract jobs, where the payment was settled when the victim had his picture printed in the newspaper. A newspaper the victims seldom if ever read themselves.
He pushed the paper aside. He was not surprised at the sensational headlines. He was aware of the Brazilian reality, but could never get used to the ever-present violence. Once he had a taste of it himself, but got away with only a scare, and a scar. It was during an outdoor concert at Farol da Barra. He had walked around the lighthouse to find a place to relieve himself. On the slope down toward the sea a couple was necking, a few others were sleeping off a bender. The sea, which had gathered momentum all the way from Senegal, was whipping its white cascades against the rocks.
Out of nowhere a gang of boys and young men suddenly appeared. They came toward him on the narrow cast-iron passageway. He sensed the danger and stepped aside, looking around. It was dark, there was no one nearby, the loud music would drown out all calls for help. The group surrounded him. There was no hesitation in their movements, this was not the first time. No pardon would be given.
Immediately, without a word having been spoken, he took a blow to the back of his head and fell forward, was caught up by a swipe that hit above the eyebrow. He felt the pain and the blood, and now felt really afraid. Someone laughed, it sounded like glass cracking.
He had a rather slender build and knew that he would never escape by muscular strength, but he was agile and limber and that was his only chance. Blinking away the blood in his eyes he saw a gap between two of the attackers, feinted to the right but threw himself to the left.
His experience from bandy helped him. He knew, as he slipped between two bodies, vainly grasping arms that reached out a tenth of a second too late, that he would escape. A feeling of triumph made him let out a howl. With blood running down his face he ran crouching like a rugby player around the lighthouse, and was soon surrounded by people.
A group of policemen took care of him, and at the Portugal Hospital he got seven stitches. The scar, a white line right above his left eyebrow, was the only evidence of what he had experienced.
He had never told anyone about his experience. Even if it was a true picture of Brazilian reality, it felt like a betrayal of the country to brag about the incident behind the lighthouse. He could tell about anything else-the landless, the poverty, the homeless, the struggle for justice, the corruption, but what people would remember was that he had been assaulted.
He had not seen Ivaldo Assis since they visited Vincente in the jail. The neighboring building, or what was left of it, was silent. Brant peered through the window several times a day. The scene was deserted, as was the alley. The dark stain on the cobblestones was the only evidence of what had happened. The trash along the wall had been removed and nothing new had been collected. The carts with which the Assis family gathered rags and boxes were quietly parked with their shafts in the air. Perhaps the Assis family had gone away?
There was no peace and quiet, and he accepted that in the time until his departure not much would be accomplished. He could only wait. The problem was that things were not going very well. It was not just the murder and his false testimony that worried him, but above all, thoughts of Vanessa and his own life.
The day before he had decided to go back to Itaberaba, took a taxi to the bus terminal, bought a ticket, but then never got on the bus. Instead he remained sitting on the bench and watched it disappear in a cloud of exhaust fumes.
The 10,000 reais he should have given her were now rolled up in a sock hidden under the sink. What should he do with the money? In a few days he would be going home. He could exchange them again, at a significant loss, or save them for the next trip, but he sensed it would be a while before he returned to Brazil, if he ever did.
The material he had collected was more than enough-statistics, a hundred interviews with homeless people, politicians, public officials and others, and thousands of photos. He was perhaps the Swedish journalist who best knew the conditions of the most marginalized in Brazil, the smiling country, the country with the samba and Carnival, but also the devastation of nature, especially to produce agrofuel.