And so, the piles of junk in his hobby room grew.
It was almost twelve thirty when Nordgren realized he would need the screwdriver with the short handle to finish the night’s self-appointed task: installing a clock in a radio-controlled car. But he had stored the screwdriver and some other tools down in the basement last week.
Was that a sign he should finish up for the night?
He looked at the car on the table. An Opel, perhaps? It was battered and blue, and he didn’t know how it had come into his possession. But he nodded to himself. He would sleep better if he finished it off rather than leaving it until tomorrow. And so he got up, opened the door to the living room and padded silently into the hallway, past Annika, who had fallen asleep in front of the TV.
He found the screwdriver where he had left it, in the toolbox. Just as Nordgren was about to turn off the light, he caught sight of something black on the floor beneath the shelves. For a moment, he thought it was a rat, but then he realized what it was. The lava rock. He went back, bent down and picked it up. It was dry and porous. The reason he had once shoved it into his backpack was that it weighed almost nothing.
His eyes searched for the dark brown packing box where the stone should be. It was closest to the wall, of course, beneath a couple of other boxes. That was why, he now remembered, he had never put the stone back.
Nordgren glanced at his watch.
He decided to overcome his laziness. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to move the other boxes to one side. But it wasn’t the physical effort that was the problem. He knew what would happen when he opened the door to his past, and on that particular night he let it happen.
In the brown box where the black lava stone was meant to be, there were four photo albums. There was also a skateboard, a bag of extra wheels and a couple of trucks that had never been used. There were two BMX pedals he had once ordered in from Germany, and a bottle of special lacquer for treating the wood on surfboards. Another small box, containing gloves, glasses and the climbing harness he had used in Thailand, lay beside it.
He stared at these hidden remnants of a forgotten life and found himself frozen to the spot, the open box on the floor in front of him.
What had happened?
Why had he given up on the skateboard, the surfboard and the bike?
Why had he swapped that kind of adrenaline for a darker, more destructive kind?
He sat down on the cold stone floor and lowered his head between his knees. Life, he reminded himself, was what went on while he fixed radio-controlled cars and food processors from the sixties. The days went by. They turned into weeks and months.
It was six months now since he had been released from prison. What had he done with his freedom? Wake up beneath a pitch-black sky, get dressed, eat breakfast, go to work and then come home as the darkness was once again descending over Lidingö. But that wasn’t living, it was just a way of passing the time.
Nordgren peered into the box and closed his eyes. These were the memories of the life he had once begun.
The waves foaming and thundering onto the beaches in Bali, the way his body had tensed completely as the water reached his chest, hand on surfboard, looking out to the horizon to spot the waves it was worth paddling toward.
The silhouette of the Matterhorn’s dramatic peak; the thin, clear Alpine air, and the way his eyes had sought out the best way up the mountain as he stretched his aching muscles by bending his fingers backward after the morning’s stages.
The pain in his tailbone when a 360 failed on the half-pipe, and the board that had rolled away, leaving him with a friction burn stretching from his knee halfway down his leg. He still had the thin white scar today.
He could no longer explain why he had abandoned that life.
He had loved it.
But something had gotten in the way, he had found a kind of excitement that was even more intense. His criminality had been an addiction. Could he break free of it by searching for his future through his past, by following in the tracks of what was in the brown cardboard box?
He put the black lava rock into the box and folded the flaps down. Then he pushed the box back toward the wall and stacked the two others on top of it so that everything looked just like it had before.
18
“What… I mean… what is this place?”
Michel Maloof glanced around. He was in one of the nightclubs near Stureplan in central Stockholm, it was three thirty in the morning and the beautiful people had been even more beautiful a few hours earlier. Pounding house music washed over the low clusters of sofas where men bragged about their achievements to women who gave fake laughs and flashed their teeth. Lips glistened, drinks were drunk, skin sweated, hands waved and Maloof was in agony.
“Let loose, Michel!” Zoran Petrovic said, laughing at how uncomfortable Maloof looked. “You should get out more. Widen your horizons. There’s nothing wrong with Fittja, but, you know, there are people in other places too?”
The tall Yugoslavian set off toward the bar, and Maloof made sure he was hot on his heels. The nightclubs had been Petrovic’s playground since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Dressed in an Armani suit and with a pistol in a holster beneath his arm, he had been king of these places. His jacket pockets had been full of wads of notes tied with elastic bands, just like in the movies. Some months, he had probably spent more money in the restaurants and bars around Stureplan than Montenegro had in GDP.
They pushed their way over to the long, white bar where people were crowded together, trying to talk over the music with short, confidence-inspiring phrases. As Petrovic approached, a space suddenly seemed to open up for them, something that never would have happened if Maloof had been alone.
“What do you want?” the tall Yugoslavian asked.
“Mineral water.”
Petrovic nodded, but a second later his eyes moved diagonally across Maloof’s shoulder. Maloof turned and found himself staring straight into a blond woman’s décolletage. When he looked up and caught sight of her bright red lips, he understood why Petrovic had temporarily lost interest in their drink order; those lips were precisely the type of attribute he was interested in.
“Can I get you a drink?” Petrovic asked.
The tall blonde was wearing a white dress that she definitely wore only in the summer. June had just arrived, though the air felt more like March.
“Champagne,” she replied.
“In that case, a 1988,” said Petrovic. “Don’t drink any other vintage, they’re not worth the trouble.”
And with that, he had caught her interest.
“Have you ever been hunting with hawks?” he asked.
Equally confused and impressed, she shook her head.
Petrovic told a short story about how, in the vineyards of the Champagne region of France, they trained hawks to wipe out any pests that might damage the vines, and then he leaned his long body over the bar. In doing so, he crossed the invisible but absolute line between the paying guests and the hardworking staff on the other side. The bartender immediately came running. Petrovic ordered two glasses of champagne. He even remembered Maloof’s mineral water.
While they waited for their drinks and Petrovic entertained the blond with the story of why the grape harvest in 1988 had been so good, Maloof noticed a short, wide-eyed man, somewhere in his early middle age, heading straight toward them through the crowd. He was wearing a pair of well-worn jeans and a checked shirt with huge sweat patches beneath the arms.