Having had this much experience of Halmus and Nygaard, Wilander speculated that the other two members of the crew might also be mentally deficient, but Henrik Arnsparger, red-cheeked, round-faced, fortyish and plump, his belly overlapping the waist of grease-stained chinos, with thinning blond hair and an affable, garrulous disposition that seemed to fit within the parameters of normal behavior, eased Wilander’s concerns; and when Arnsparger flopped into the swivel chair beside the tiny writing desk affixed to the cabin wall and let his burlap sack drop with a clank onto the floor and started in talking as if they were great friends who hadn’t seen one another for a while, Wilander thought that here was an ally, someone in whom he could confide, someone who would give straight answers to his questions and not carry tales, and thus he asked Arnsparger to explain a few things: Why had Halmus called him the husband of the linden tree; what had he meant by saying that Lunde had no interest in the crew’s performance; and why was Nygaard reticent about going into Kaliaska?
—You can never be sure what’s going on in Nygaard’s head, Arnsparger said. That guy’s got no roof on his attic. Things fly in and fly right out again. But none of us like spending time in town. You’ve seen it. It’s a horrible place. Drunks and snarling dogs and hostile stares. As for Halmus, I suppose he was talking about this linden tree. The one outside your port.
—I can’t think what else he could have meant.
Arnsparger leaned back and blew out air through his lips as if snuffing a candle. Mortensen said something when I first arrived. We were the only two here, then, and he took me under his wing. He was a real talker in those days. Not so much now.
—How long has he been here?
—I’m not sure. He said he came when the snow was still deep. He’s the one who set up the generators, you know. And he got the plumbing going, too. Anyway, he told me Viator had penetrated the forest and consummated a marriage between the organic and the inorganic. His words, not mine. I still don’t know what the hell he was talking about. He said we were all part of the marriage. I was wedded to iron, he said. And he told Halmus he was beloved by glass. He’s always going on like that. Spouting philosophy.
—It sounds more like fantasy.
—Is there a difference? Arnsparger nudged the burlap sack with his foot. What I’m saying, maybe he expanded the metaphor and told Halmus you were the husband of the linden tree. Halmus isn’t smart enough to make something like that up. The guy went to college, but he don’t have a clue. You should ask Mortensen. If you can persuade him to talk, I bet he’ll have a hell of an explanation.
Wilander unscrewed the cap on a bottle of water, but did not drink, puzzling over what had been said.
—It’s an odd situation, Arnsparger went on. All of us have wondered about it. Doesn’t it seem odd to you? Four guys…five, now. Five men of Scandinavian heritage down on their luck. They all seek employment at a temp agency run by another Scandinavian guy. They get to be friends with him and then he sends them to live on Viator. That how it happened for you, right?
—You were friends with Lunde? All of you?
—You thought it was just you, eh? That you were a special case? Me, too. I figured we’d be pals for life, me and Lunde. He bought me lunches, took me to movies, we talked about Sweden…Not that I know shit about it. My family emigrated when I was three. For a while I thought he was an old fag, but eventually I decided he was just lonely, he wanted to reminisce.
—It was the same for the others?
—Yeah, but once we got here, Lunde wasn’t so eager to talk to us. He keeps things businesslike on the phone. Anything to report? he’ll ask. And you say, no…or maybe you tell him some bullshit. Then he’ll ask if you’ve noticed anything out of the ordinary. Nope, not a thing. Okay, he’ll say. Keep up the good work. God knows what work he expects we’re doing. There’s not a damn thing to do.
Wind stirred the branches of the linden, its leaves splayed across the port like simple green hands lovingly massaging the glass, and Arnsparger held forth on the folly of Lunde’s plan, how ridiculous it was, the idea of bringing in forty or fifty men to break the vessel into scrap—you’d be deep in the red after paying for labor, living expenses, all the rest. Now if Viator had reached her destination…Had Lunde mentioned to Wilander that she’d been headed for South America to be scrapped? That’s right. One of those places where shipbreaking is the main occupation. It must be a hellhole, wherever it was. And they must not care about cancer. These old ships, they were full of asbestos, every sort of poison. He’d done a computer search before leaving Fairbanks, at the public library, and the places where they broke ships apart, they were wastelands, long beaches with dozens of hulks listing along the shore, some reduced to skeletons, and hundreds of workers filing inside them, like prisoners marching into death chambers. In a place like that, breaking Viator wouldn’t make extra overhead, and nobody cared how many people sickened and died as a result, not so long as they made themselves a few pesos. Here you’d have start-up costs. Nothing but overhead. You’d have unions looking at you. Labor do-gooders. All that for one ship? It made no sense.
Arnsparger pushed up to his feet, shouldered his sack, and shook Wilander’s hand. Well, Tom, see you around. It’s okay I call you Tom, is it? Thomas seems too formal under the circumstances.
—Tom is fine.
Arnsparger smacked himself lightly on the forehead. I almost forgot. He fished a cell phone from a trouser pocket and passed it to Wilander. Your turn, he said.
Wilander looked at him quizzically.
—We all took our turn, except for Nygaard, Arnsparger said. Making reports and all.
—Oh, right.
—I hate to put you to work right away, but can you order me some jewel boxes? Those plastic cases you keep CDs in? I could use a couple of gross. They’re dirt cheap when you buy them in bulk.
—Why do you need them?
—For my samples. Come over to my place some night and I’ll show you.
—I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying about Lunde, Wilander said. It’s your opinion that he sent us here for no real purpose?
—What can I tell you? When I call him, I always throw in some figures, some revised estimates. To keep him happy, you know. I like this job. But if I try to draw him out, if I ask about the project, when will the rest of the men arrive, or even just say, What’s up? he either says he’s got another call or that someone in the office needs his help. I used to think he was doing his pals a favor, giving us this easy job, but he doesn’t act friendly anymore. Maybe he’ll explain it to you. After all, you’ll be making the calls now. You’re the man in charge. Arnsparger grinned and threw Wilander a snappy salute. You’re the husband of the linden tree.
Two
“…the queen of Kaliaska…”
Viator had come to rest in a nearly horizontal position, wedged into a notch between hills (a circumstance, Wilander noted, that lent a certain clinical validation to Mortensen’s imagery of penetration and consummation), her port side braced against an outcropping of stone that had torn a ragged thirty-foot-long breach in the hull as the ship scraped past. An aluminum ladder was positioned at the lip of the breach, affording access to the ground. To reach the ladder, it was necessary to descend a many-tiered stair to the engine room, all but engineless now, a monstrous rusting flywheel lying amid bolts, wires, and couplings, the mounts and walls painted a pale institutional green, dappled with splotches of raw iron, and then you would pass through a bulkhead door into the bottom of the cargo hold. Light entered the hold not only through the breach, but through hundreds of small holes that Arnsparger had made in the hull with a cutting torch, removing triangular pieces of metal and, subsequently, storing them in jewel cases, and when the sun was high, hundreds of beams skewered the darkness with an unreal sharpness of definition, putting Wilander in mind of those scenes in action moves during which villains with assault rifles turn spotlights on an isolated cabin, a collapsing barn or the like, and fire a fusillade that pierces every inch of the walls, yet by some miracle fails to kill the hero and heroine, as if their true purpose had been to produce this dramatic effect.