Berit looked drained of energy. Lindell got up and went to check on Erik, who was sleeping in his stroller in the hall. He would be waking up soon. Haver and Berit talked in the kitchen.
Suddenly Lindell came to think of the ham still on the stove at home. She hurried out to the others and said she had to go home immediately. Haver gave her a quick look but didn’t say anything. She went up to Berit in order to say something comforting but couldn’t find the right words. Berit looked at her without expression. May the boy be safe, was all that went through Lindell’s head.
She ran over to the car with Erik whimpering in the stroller. There was a parking ticket on her windshield. She tossed it into the backseat.
Her parents would be arriving in a few hours. I’ll have to buy a new ham, she thought and turned onto Vaksalagatan. At the same time the cell phone rang. She picked it up, convinced that it would be Ola.
“I know, I know,” she said, “but the ham is going to be ruined.”
“Hi,” said a familiar voice, and she almost rammed the car in front of her as she braked for a red light at the intersection of highway E4.
Thirty-seven
Justus knew where to go. There was a hole in the fence. The construction site nearby made it even easier since the scaffolding shielded him from the street.
A feeling of power surged through him. No one saw him, no one heard him, no one knew what he was about to do. He stopped by a puddle of oil that shone with metallic darkness against the white ground, and looked back. He had left tracks in the snow but he didn’t care. He was planning to take the same route back and he could erase his tracks then.
A piece of sheet metal sticking out of a container vibrated in the wind and the sound made him stop one more time. He looked up at the familiar building but it was only now that he saw how worn down the place was. When he was little, this had been a palace and John had been king. This was the place of the good sounds and smells. This was where his father grew to a giant in the shower of sparks, handling the black, heavy steel plate with ease. When struck, the metal resonated at a deep pitch and left a distinct smell that stayed on your fingers for days, just like the stainless steel burnished as fine as a mirror and that reflected light all over the blackened shop ceiling.
When John and the other workers took a break in the back room, the shop seemed to rest. Justus would walk around in the silence and touch the welded seams that ran like scars across the metal. He heard voices and laughter from the back room. Often they called his name and he would sample the hawthorn juice from the Finnish archipelago and eat sandwiches with black fingerprints on the cheese.
A car drove by on the street and Justus sneaked in behind the container, continuing on to the back of the building where there were a few windows closer to the ground. He smashed one of these with an iron pipe. He wasn’t particularly afraid of being discovered because a high fence ran along the back of the property and no one was working on the construction site.
He cleared glass and debris from the window and hoisted himself up with the help of a pile of crates. The back room looked like it always did. There was a newspaper on the table where John usually sat. He pushed it to the ground. Where Erki sat there was a book of matches, which he picked up. Now there was no hesitation in his movements. It was as if the sight of the old lunchroom strengthened his resolve. He opened the makeshift plywood door of a storage area and dragged out a few containers of gasoline and oil. There were also jars and bottles filled with various chemicals. He carried the containers to assorted places in the shop. In Sagander’s office he poured out five liters of ligroin.
He did a final walk-through of the shop floor, looking around John’s old workplace. He was getting dizzy from all the smells. He poured out a whole container of gasoline in and all around the lunchroom, squirting some on the table and chairs, and then crawling out the back window.
The wind was picking up. He waited outside the window for a while before he took out the matches. The first match went out immediately, as did the second. He counted the ones that were left and worried that there wouldn’t be enough. He crawled in again and grabbed some newspaper, soaking a corner in the gasoline before he crawled out again.
Before he lit the newspaper and threw it in he thought about John. What was it he had said about dreams?
He heard a whoosh from inside and then came something like an explosion. The remaining window was blown out and Justus was almost hit by the glass projectiles flying through the air. In awe he watched as a pillar of fire shot out from the window. Then he ran. As he was crawling out through the fence, he suddenly remembered about erasing his footprints. He hesitated before crawling back through it and looked around for something he could use to sweep the snow clean.
Many small explosions came from inside the building and he thought about the gas. There were a number of gas bottles inside and he knew how dangerous they were. John had talked about that. He grabbed a piece of metal and ran to the back of the building. It was impossible for him to get all the way to the window, but he wiped the snow as far as he could, then ran dragging the piece behind him until he reached the street. Then he tossed the piece of metal onto a heap of scraps and ran off, laughing.
He ran westward, into the city, but stopped himself after fifty meters. John would have walked calmly. That was smarter.
He worried about the tracks outside the window but suddenly realized that the intense heat would melt all the snow around the building. He had been wearing gloves, so there would be no fingerprints. The man who had put his hand on Justus’s shoulder, the one who had compelled him to get up from the snowbank and who had given him a ride into town, would never connect him with the fire. He had dropped him off on Kungsgatan, probably a kilometer from the shop. Justus had told him that he wanted to go see a friend, had tried to take a shortcut through the forest, and had gotten lost.
The emergency call came at 2:46 P.M. from someone who happened to be driving past the shop. A fire truck was on the scene in seven minutes. Two patrol cars arrived a few minutes later. They immediately cordoned off the area with yellow tape.
“A machine workshop,” the commanding fireman explained succinctly to the police officer who walked over. “Sorry to hear about your colleague, by the way. We lit a candle at the station when we heard the news.”
For a moment the uniformed policeman stood completely still before he picked up his phone and called in to work. The first thing he had seen was a sign saying SAGANDER’S MECHANICAL WORKSHOP. He knew that was where John Jonsson had worked.
“I have an aquarium,” he later explained to Haver.
Ola Haver got the call when he was on his way back from Berit’s, and he arrived on the scene some five minutes later. He had had to negotiate the blockades on Björkgatan.
“It’s burning like hell,” the uniformed policeman had said.
Haver, who was looking at the smoke and sparks rising into the sky, became unexpectedly irritated for some reason and snapped at his colleague that he could damn well see that. The latter had only stared back at him and mumbled something to himself.
The wind was blowing from the east and drove the flames toward the building that was being constructed. A pile of lumber under a tarp caught fire but was immediately extinguished by the firefighters.
Haver stared at the building. The fire had broken through the roof and yellow-orange flames were shooting up. It was a hauntingly beautiful sight. Haver saw the stress and focus in the firefighters’ faces. Haver was unable to do anything to help them and it bothered him. He grabbed the fire commander’s shoulder.