Things like this tickled Hans Peter’s curiosity. Immediately he began to research who this Hedman was, and eventually he found out that Axel Hedman had been a former instructor in Latin who was condemned for the murder of his housekeeper a few years after this book had been published.
She was certainly not just his housekeeper, thought Hans Peter. The woman had been fairly young, as he discovered in an old newspaper from the time which had published a photo of the dead woman. She had thick, pronounced lips and appeared sensual. Instructor Hedman had defended himself by saying that the woman had used him and was after his savings. Apparently, the court didn’t put much stock in that.
Perhaps instructor Hedman had been sitting in his cell on Långholmen and reading this very book? Right now Hans Peter was sitting at the reception desk with the book open behind a newspaper, which he used to cover it the moment anyone came and needed his help.
This didn’t happen all that often. Actually, each guest could be given a key to the outer door so that they could take care of themselves and that would have been fine. But Ulf, who owned the hotel, didn’t want that. He wanted class at his establishment. And there was no class in a place without a night receptionist.
The hotel was called Tre Rosor and was centrally located in the middle of Drottninggatan. It had ten double rooms and the same number of single rooms. The standard was simple, a washbowl in the room with the toilet and shower down the hall. Many of the guests were regulars, and a fifty-year-old man seemed to have moved into one of the rooms for good.
“He’s all right,” said Ulf. “He pays and takes care of himself. He likes living in the middle of the city without worrying about the responsibility of his own place.”
Sometimes, middle-aged couples came who were definitely not married to each other. Hans Peter was good at noticing the signs. They paid in advance, and at midnight, they often departed, with a different bearing-eyes more shiny, they spoke with softer voices.
“We’re just going to take a little walk,” the man might say as he placed the key on the desk.
But they didn’t return. At any rate, not that particular night.
Ulf owned many different hotels. Every once in a while, he asked Hans Peter out to lunch or dinner; he probably thought he had a bit of responsibility toward him, since they had been brothers-in-law.
“You bookworms,” he said, indicating his sister the librarian.
Ulf didn’t much care for reading.
“Made-up stories, what’s the point? People that some guy just thought up. Shouldn’t you care more about real people in real life?”
“The one doesn’t necessarily exclude the other.”
“I don’t know about that. Wouldn’t it be better for you to get out more and find yourself a new little lady that you could throw in your lot with?”
Sometimes he came to Hans Peter’s place and was always surprised at the number of books. He stroked the spines and wondered how many volumes Hans Peter had.
“Have you really read all these?”
“You ask that every single time.”
“How many hundreds and hundreds are there?”
“Hundreds? You mean thousands!”
They were very different types, but they got along well. Ulf was also divorced and some time after Hans Peter’s divorce, they took a trip together to London where they pubhopped and talked about life.
He had found a good job. Ulf was a great boss. Even if there was no real status in being a night clerk, the most important thing must be what he himself felt about it.
At the end of January, it turned cold. A great deal of snow came and Hans Peter started taking long walks when he woke up right before lunchtime. Sometimes he thought about getting a dog. Maybe a boxer or some other kind of pleasant dog. The problem was that he couldn’t take the dog to work. People had allergies; the hotel would lose customers.
He thought about the dog he had once taken care of when he was a boy. His family had rented a summer cottage on the island of Gotland. Next to them was an older couple with a little roly-poly dachshund which looked like a sausage, and for the first few days, Hans Peter was afraid of it. The woman showed him how to hold out his hand with a piece of sugar cake and tell the dog to sit. Then the dog bent her hind legs behind her and sat; he could see her long tummy and her small white teats. She would not touch the sugar cake until Hans Peter let her. “Here you go,” you were supposed to say. Then she put her head to one side and gulped down the cake.
He forgot what the dog was called, but he remembered that the woman would let him take the dog out on a leash. She would sink up to her tummy in the sand and whined and wanted him to carry her. Margareta was there, too; she was little, maybe two or three. She would grab the dog with her small, hard hands and the dog would yelp, but the dog never hurt Margareta. She understood that Margareta was herself just a puppy.
He sat in his chair behind the reception desk and the snow blew like smoke outside on the street. It was dark, and all the shops had closed. If he had a dog today, he would name her Bella and she would be at home in his bed waiting for him, warming up the bed. He usually had frozen toes after sitting at the hotel all night long. Could you leave a dog that long? Well, why not. Dog owners usually didn’t have to get up in the middle of the night to take out their four-footed friends?
Would it be the right thing to do? What if Bella missed him? And what if she started howling, night after night? How would that go? He could lose his apartment and then where would he be?
The reception area was not very large, but it was pleasantly decorated with a set of wicker sofas and cushions that had a large flower design. On the glass table, there were some magazines: Allt om mat, Reader’s Digest, some Christian magazine, and the newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet. To the right, on its own table, was an aquarium with two kinds of fish, some black fish and some see-through fish. Hans Peter imagined that the black ones were called Black Mollies. The cleaning lady had told him once, but she spoke Swedish poorly and he didn’t really understand what she had said.
The cleaning lady was responsible for the aquarium. She made sure that they received their food and once a week she cleaned their home with a big plastic scoop. She was a Greek immigrant and her name was Ariadne.
Of course, Hans Peter thought when he first met her. A Greek woman named Ariadne! He tried to talk to her about the Labyrinth at Knossos, but she had just covered her mouth with her hands and laughed. She had noticeable gums.
At times when she didn’t have a babysitter, she brought her daughter with her. Her daughter was blind. She would stay on the cot behind the curtain. Hans Peter knew at once when she had been there. The pillow smelled and the pillowcase was wet and a bit sticky. The girl usually lay there sucking on raspberry candy ropes.
Next to the cot was a door that led to the small kitchen. For the guests who wanted it, Hans Peter could make sandwiches with shrimp or cheddar cheese and olives, which he would cut in half and fasten with toothpicks. Part of his job was to make the rounds at two in the morning and pick up all the shoes that had been left out for cleaning. This service from days gone by was something that Ulf chose to preserve. He was careful with his services and Hans Peter didn’t care one way or the other. This way he got a break from the night’s monotony. He went around with a big basket on his arm and collected the shoes, writing the room number on their soles with chalk. The first night he was on the job, he thought that he would be able to remember which shoes went where, but it was much more difficult than he imagined. He had to take a chance on guessing right. Two pairs of men’s shoes landed up at the wrong door, but the guests didn’t get upset. They thought it was a funny episode that they could tell when they returned home.