He only fell asleep as morning came, worn out by his distress. When his office rang to find out why he hadn't come in, Mrs Savage couldn't wake him. She shook him and slapped his face, but he was sleeping the sleep of the dead, pale and cold as a corpse. When she saw the bottle of tablets on the floor, Mrs Savage put her hand over her mouth and tiptoed out of the room.
Several times she was tempted to call an ambulance but put the receiver down each time. Pacing the room, she fought the temptation to feel his pulse. But when he rose from the bed in the evening, she cried out as though she'd seen a ghost.
Savage didn't leave his room. Watching him through the keyhole, his wife saw a trembling bundle on the bed. He woke in a sweat so cold it iced up the windows and he felt frozen under his blanket as if it were a snow drift. «No regrets, no regrets…» he whispered, trying to work out why the way to himself was longer than a lifetime. Turning his life inside out like a jacket, he realized that he was living it back to front and that in order not to go out of his mind he had to become part of the general madness.
Several days later the fever passed and feeling better Savage went into the kitchen. The kettle was boiling, its lid tapping gently, and the window had steamed up. Savage felt as though he had been released from an obsession. Only then did he realize that he hadn't eaten during all that time. He made some coffee and chewing a sandwich on the go, he saw Trebenko smirking in a corner. His head like a deflated ball, the colonel reached out to him with burnt hands. Savely covered his face and the cup fell from his hands.
Savely made a dash for his medication to get rid of his oppressive memories. He searched his room, turning out the drawers of his desk, looking under his pillow, emptying out his pockets but found only an empty bottle that had rolled under the desk. He trod on it and it snapped like a branch in the forest or a broken bone. Savage felt better as if he had been dusty and stuffy inside and had opened a window to let in the cold, fresh air.
«I was so beautiful once,» he heard and, taking his head in his hands, he burst into tears.
Savage put his arms into the sleeves of his coat and plunged into the twilight. He had put on his old life too, like his coat, but it fitted him as if it didn't belong to him. «You can't stick life back together once it's broken, you just can't,» he said, shaking his head as he roamed the dark sidestreets.
The evening was thick as coffee and a nibbled moon hung over the town like an apple core. «Demons are eating it,» the old Saami woman had said, poking her finger at the moon, and Savage grew wistful at the thought that he would never go back to the Saami encampment where the slant-eyed herders kneaded their songs like dough and Salmon, legs stretched out by the fire, wandered through the days of her youth, which had broken off like a conversation in mid-word.
Bent into a question mark, Lapin came towards him. Flinching from the cold wind that blew into his face, he was muttering something to himself and waving his arms, and Savage realized he wasn't the only one seeing ghosts. When he noticed Savage, the investigator slowed down and when Savely stopped, he too froze expectantly.
«Just a wink. What would it cost you?» Savage read in his tormented face. Lapin had grown a moustache that bristled over his top lip. His sunken cheeks were blue with stubble and the end of his nose twitched nervously. The biting wind got under his collar and Savage felt he was drowning in Lapin's eyes that were as restless as the waves. Reining in his shadow, he went on by.
The awnings on the veranda at the Three Lemons had been folded up and the plastic furniture stacked away but Coffin's chair stood off to one side like a naughty child. Its seat sagged and a leg had broken. Savage thought that things last longer than their owners.
A security guard, shrouded in sheepskin, stamped his feet in the doorway and the first frost nipped at them like mischievous puppies. Savage peeped through a faint twinkle of multicoloured sparks in the bar window. His breath clouded the glass and he wiped it with the palm of his hand until he spotted Saam. His face looked like wax in the dim light and the dark circles under his eyes like empty sockets packed with earth. The bar was wreathed in cigarette smoke and the gangsters' heads bobbed in the smoke, as if cut off from their bodies.
Savage imagined going into the bar down the worn wooden steps, rapping out the rhythm of the Saami rites on the railing. The security guard, hand over his holster, would follow him in and with a practised gesture the cloakroom attendant would reach out for his coat, his other hand proffering the tag. Savage would take his coat off slowly, watching the guard's frightened eyes monitor his every move in the dusty mirror. He would smooth his thinning hair, exchange a meaningful look with his reflection and hurry into the bar-room. The tables would be occupied while couples out on the dance floor shuffled their feet. Savage would sit in a free chair at a table right in the corner where the night was thickest and tobacco smoke coiled as soft as cotton-wool.
To keep his emotions under control, he would take out a cigarette, strike a match behind his hand as if to keep the flame from the wind and light up. He would blow the smoke noisily through his nostrils and call the barman.
The latter would start up his usual refrain: «In the North people huddle together to get warm…» Hearing it out, Savage would order a drink.
The dancers would look askance at him and his daughter, sitting on the lap of some beefy guy with a squashed nose, would throw back her head and laugh loudly and deliberately. One of the gang would come and sit next to him, right up close and search him with his deft fingers, his sour breath hitting him in the nose. Then, with a sign to the others the gangster would down the drink the barman brought Savage and go back to his table.
With a click of his fingers, Savage would ask the barman for another and, stubbing his cigarette out in the ashtray, he would head for the toilets.
Savage would have already been in the bar earlier in the day when it had just opened, shaking off its drowsy torpor, and, unfazed, the sleepy security guard would have let him into the empty room. In the gents, behind a rusty pipe leaking water that pooled on the floor, Savage would have hidden the kitchen knife his wife used for cutting onions, wiping away her tears with the edge of her apron.
Savage would take it out, tucking it into his sleeve blade first. Rehearsing in front of the mirror, he would take out the knife and smile at his reflection. The door would bang open and, leaning over the tap, Savely would turn it on and pretend to be washing his hands.
«Great evening, eh?» a drunken hulk would grin, unfastening his flies at the sink and Savage would nod in reply. «Just a habit,» he would add with a laugh and Savely, looking at the urinals, would hurry out.
Crossing the bar-room, he would head towards Saam who would be hunched over the table, cleaning his nails with a matchstick. A neglected cigarette would be smoking on his lower lip and a fat fly would land on the back of his head. Waving it away, Saam's hand would brush against him and the gangster would stare at him expectantly, his teary eyes covered in red thread veins. Savage would stand there in front of him, hands at his sides, one clutching the handle of the hidden knife, the other turning over and over the tiny stone from the grave of Salmon-Severina who had died, mouth open wide as though she didn't understand why she had ever lived.
Savage would lean over Saam and rasp out: «But she was so beautiful once, you know!» Saam would look at him blankly and Savage would calmly wait until he could read in his eyes, like a response to his own words, «You poor, unfortunate things. What have you got to live for?» Then, like a cardsharp with the ace of spades, he would draw the knife from his sleeve and run it across Saam's thick throat.