What am I doing, she wondered suddenly. It’s Saturday, a beautiful summer day, and Erik wants to do something fun.
She closed the pad and got up.
“Let’s go now,” she called, and Erik showed up immediately, as if he had been waiting in the hall.
Ann wanted to embrace him, promise him that everything would be fine, but she refrained from hugs and promises. It would just make him even more nervous, and could she really say that everything would be fine?
Thirty-eight
“We’ve sewed on your ear,” someone said.
He assumed it was a doctor, a man in his fifties, with tired, greenish brown eyes, a thin mustache, and puffy cheeks, who was leaning over him. His eyes were fixed on him the way doctors’ eyes do.
Anders Brant had a feeling that the doctor had been talking to him for some time, he could faintly recall someone repeating his name, a hand on his shoulder, a vague odor, antiseptic, but also onion.
“My ear?”
The doctor nodded, smiled a little, probably pleased at having made contact.
Brant closed his eyes. His head was aching, pounding. He remembered Monica, sank bank into the darkness, his body felt heavy as lead, formless, as if it didn’t belong to him. He exerted himself to the utmost to remember anything other than the whore he had bought.
Someone was moistening his lips.
“Señhor Andrés?”
A hand on his chest. Worry, thought Brant, they’re worried. He was not able to open his eyes.
“Ivaldo?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“A bus. You stepped out into the street, the Pituba bus came.”
Geography came first. A map of Salvador slowly appeared in his mind.
“Ondina, Barra, Sete Portas,” he mumbled.
“No, Pituba.”
The map became clearer and clearer. Memories flowed up and merged like dream sequences: Largo Santana. A boy came up and asked for a chicken bone. When he was refused, he spit on the food and ran, rounding the church in the middle of the square and disappearing down toward the sea; a demonstration on a square, a man separated from the group, he spoke without amplification but his voice sounded surprisingly strong; the mussel gatherers, their sinewy backs against the light, the shouts and laughter across the banks and how he loved life then.
“You gave us money. Why?”
Money. It costs money. What does it cost to sew on an ear? I have to ask. The darkness came back, the map disappeared, the memories were eradicated.
“Vanessa,” Anders Brant mumbled.
Thirty-nine
“We’re old sports buddies, after all,” Berglund explained.
He was smiling quietly to himself, as if remembering something. The others-Bea, Ottosson, and Fredriksson-waited.
“Sometimes we run into each other in town. Kurt works downtown, you might say, collects cans and panhandles a little change from people. He’s shrewd in some ways, inventive, but a little out of his mind sometimes. It’s hard to know what he’s thinking. He often starts crying, but then he was a painter.”
“Why do painters in particular cry?” Bea wondered, but Berglund continued as if he hadn’t heard the question.
“This morning when I was out with the pooch, I ran into Kurt outside the old prison. He had been sleeping on a boat down at Flottsund and was on his way to town.”
“Walked from Flottsund? That must be ten kilometers at least.”
Berglund smiled at Fredriksson.
“Kurt has always been in good shape. And he can’t take the bus because then he throws up. Balance, you know. And a bus ride is a lot of cans.”
Beatrice could not keep from smiling at her colleague.
“Today was a good day for Kurt, he remembered things. He was at the party at Ingegerd Melander’s and remembered the quarrel between her and Johnny Andersson. It was about Bo Gränsberg. She accused Johnny of having caused Bosse’s death.”
“Caused, but not murdered?”
“That’s how Kurt understood it,” said Berglund. “What the exact words were he doesn’t know, but it was a big conflict.”
“Was it about something as common as jealousy?” Beatrice threw out.
“I don’t think so,” said Berglund. “Bosse had been out of the picture for a month.”
“Why haven’t the others at the party said anything?” said Beatrice. “They should have heard what the quarrel was about too.”
“They were gone,” said Berglund. “Kurt was the last one still hanging around.”
“So where the hell is Johnny?”
Ottosson’s interjection put the finger on a sore point. Because even though there had been a search warrant out for Johnny for several days and they plowed through his circle of acquaintances for tips, it was as though he had been swallowed up by the earth.
“Dead, maybe?” said Fredriksson.
The discussion went on, they considered various angles, looking for connections between the various investigations. Fredriksson felt like he’d heard it all before and felt more and more tired, excused himself that he had to go see Forss, and lumbered off.
The last he heard was Ottosson, as he asked what business Anders Brant had at Ingegerd Melander’s, and then Beatrice’s reply.
“Urgent needs.”
The meeting with Forss was not a long one. The prosecutor decided not to do anything for the moment about the trouble at the train station. There was no reason to arrest any of those involved. The alleged crimes were too minor.
Fredriksson was both pleased and displeased with the decision. Pleased because he could immediately put this behind him, and displeased because he wanted at least one of the creeps he had encountered in the questioning, the one who probably wrecked the hot dog stand, to have to rattle bars for a while, preferably a long while, and preferably soon.
Instead of returning to the conversation outside of Ottosson’s office, he looked up Myhre. Fredriksson guessed that he was sitting hunched over all the binders and other material they had taken from Jeremias Kumlin’s office.
“Nice of you to visit,” said Myhre without any ceremony, looking sincerely happy that Fredriksson in particular came by.
Myhre was a workhorse. There were those who thought that the success of the financial unit depended on his efforts. He had been recruited from Malmö in connection with the former police commissioner’s decision to make financial crimes a higher priority, and this proved to be one of the few successful personnel efforts on the part of leadership.
In front of him on the desk were papers in such an enormous quantity that even an experienced man like Fredriksson was amazed.
“Is this all Kumlin’s?”
Myhre nodded and threw out his arm toward another table where at least as many papers were piled.
“Oil, gas, and Russia equals money,” he said. “And money equals papers.”
“Money also equals crime,” Fredriksson quipped.
Myhre looked surprised for a moment, as if it struck him for the first time that he was dealing with crime. Most of his colleagues were convinced that Myhre was not driven by any fervent devotion to law or desire to put financial criminals in jail, but that the motivating force for him was numbers, columns, and balance sheets.
“Have you found anything interesting?”
He regretted the question at once, as Myhre would almost certainly go off on a detailed account of Kumlin’s various undertakings, but the financial policeman surprised him by taking out a single sheet from the drift on the table.
“This,” he said.
“And this is?”
“A purchase,” Myhre answered contentedly.
“Of what?”
“Of a certain Sture Millgren,” said Myhre. “Millgren is an expert on energy issues and somehow associated with the Swedish embassy in Moscow.”