For 25 reais they got a room to use for an hour, and a condom. The woman took the key and he the condom. She led the way up the stairs; he plodded behind, stumbled, laughed.
The air was stifling and still. The woman, who introduced herself as Monica, seemed to be familiar with the room, because she went up to the window at once and opened it. The breeze of the trade wind immediately came in with an odor of sea and rotting garbage. A threadbare curtain billowed listlessly. She fastened the curtain to a nail, turned her head, and smiled.
Anders Brant had the feeling that she was buying a little time, that she wanted a moment with the view over the Atlantic. He went up and stood beside her.
On the other side of the bay was Itaparica, the island where he had stayed so many times. For a few moments they stood together as if they were a couple who had just arrived on vacation to a charming beach hotel and were taking in their first impressions, not wanting to say anything before they each formed an impression of the place and tried to judge whether they would like it.
His eyes spanned the coastline south of Mar Grande and tried to work out on which beach he had stayed.
Monica slipped out of her dress with minimal movement. She had a white lace bra and matching tanga, which shone against her dark skin. Afterward he wished they had frozen the scene there. She could have leaned her head against his shoulder, he could have put his arm around her waist, told about Itaparica, about the fishermen who pulled their nets and about the carnival where the men dressed up like women.
She would tell him something about her family, about where she came from, what she dreamed about, perhaps lie a little, but he would be treated to a story, something personal, testimony that he could store along with all the others.
Without having said more than perhaps ten words to each other she kneeled before him and loosened his belt, pulled down his fly, and then his shorts and underwear. She did it slowly, carefully, and patiently, careful not to scratch him with her long, red-painted nails, as if he were a little boy being lovingly undressed by his mother at bedtime.
He observed her pale belly and her blackness, which in the folds around her armpits took on a bluish-black hue. He was leaning against the windowsill, she was on her knees.
She sucked him off while he tried to remember the names of the villages on Itaparica, from Mar Grande all the way down to Cacha Pregos. It went fine, he could remember almost all of them.
Monica disappeared into the bathroom, he heard the gushing of the shower. When she came back a minute or two later she was naked. On her belly a few water drops glistened like pearls.
She lay down on the dirty-brown, stained bedcover, and looked at him with what seemed to him a peculiar smile, perhaps critical, taunting in an elusive way, perhaps conditioned by boredom or fatigue, probably both. She turned indolently onto her belly, thrust up her ass, but changed her mind almost immediately and rolled over on her back again. Her eyes were warmer now, he wanted her to say something that reconciled them, something forgiving, but he was not able to meet them in earnest to see. Instead he inspected her body, she was very beautiful, the light ruptures across her breasts and crotch revealed that she had a child. A child who could be his grandchild.
“What does it cost?” he asked, regretting it at once, but it was too late.
The illusion that they had come together because life was an inferno could no longer be maintained.
A drop of sperm fell from his shriveled sex to the floor. He happened to think of the desk clerk who would have to mop up after him. Or certainly there was some woman who had to clean, the man in the lobby appeared to be stuck behind his counter, and he too was probably always five hours too late.
He lay down beside her and pushed his head into her dark hair.
When Anders Brant came home to the pension, Ivaldo Assis and his nephew Vincente were sitting outside the gate. Between them on the sidewalk was a bottle of Primus beer.
On Ivaldo’s face Brant saw for the first time a hint of a smile, relief, that made him years younger, while the darkness from the jail still rested heavily over Vincente’s facial features.
Brant opened the gate, signaled with his hand that they should wait, went up to the apartment and returned after half a minute. The two men had gotten up, there was something guardedly compliant about them. In his hand Brant was holding a sock, stuffed like a sausage. Without a word he handed it over to Ivaldo.
“Obrigado,” said Vincente.
“De nada,” Brant replied, who did not want to be thanked, actually did not want to hear anything from anyone.
A group of schoolchildren came running on the sidewalk, their uniform T-shirts, white with a blue line across the chest, made them look like a soccer team. Brant backed up a step out into the street to give the noisy youngsters free passage, happened to see Ivaldo’s gesture, the outstretched arm, before the right side of his face was hit by the side mirror on a bus. He fell headlong to the ground and struck the sidewalk face first.
Thirty-six
Becalmed. A feeble wind from the south that was making a half-hearted attempt on Saturday morning to create a little movement in the air quickly gave up, settled down over the Uppsala plain, and created a trembling haze of heat over city and countryside.
Allan Fredriksson was sweating. He was upset besides. For the nth time in a row he was on duty over a weekend with brilliant weather, and he felt a major injustice.
The building was quiet. Everyone who could had fled of course. He was sitting in his office, tapping away on a report of a disturbance at the Central Station. The whole story was simple and predictable. Two loosely composed gangs had collided. Five personal injuries, one of which somewhat more serious, a knife in the buttock of a twenty-year-old youth from Märsta, eight police reports including damage, unlawful threat, unlawful possession of weapons, everyone blamed everyone else, what a life, five of them in jail, a real mess that only created paperwork, because he knew it would all run out in the sand. In six months, maybe a year, a few fines levied, possibly a suspended sentence for one of those involved, if that. The issue of guilt was not crystal clear.
No one was particularly worried, besides a Lebanese whose sausage stand was destroyed and an elderly woman who fell down the steps in the disturbance outside the railway station and broke her wrist.
Fredriksson wiped his brow with a napkin. This was really not his job. Why should he, an experienced detective, have to deal with such trifles when they had three murders on their agenda?
The whole procedure took two hours. Then he left the building and tried to think about considerably more pleasant things, horses that were running at Solvalla and hopefully crossed the finish line in the right order and made the cash register jingle.
Allan Fredriksson was a successful gambler who in just the past six months had pulled in over 150,000 kronor. The free time he did not spend in the forest he devoted to gambling programs and speculations and tips in the newspapers. The fact was that he also spent more and more of his work time thinking about horses.
Sometimes he thought about resigning to become a full-time gambler. He was casually acquainted with a few people who devoted their lives to harness and quarter horse racing, and they seemed to be thriving and living well. Why not? It seemed worry-free, no cocky, loudmouthed youths creating piles of paper, no weekend shifts, no nagging sensation that the job occasionally, and more and more often, was meaningless.
In an hour he would be meeting the on-duty prosecutor, Gunnel Forss, and decided to take a walk before that. He walked through Svartbäcken, followed Timmermansgatan, and made his way in among the villas north of Gamla Uppsalagatan. A climbing rose against a wall made him stop.