The sun still hasn’t hauled itself up over the haughty brick façade of City Hall as I park Lundin’s hearse on Norr Mälarstrand, but a couple of half-hearted rays are reflecting off the three golden crowns at the top of the tower.
In front of the yellow walls of Karolinska Institute, a street sweeper is slowly making his way along the pavement. The whispering sound of the broom against the paving stones is punctuated by the tread of his wooden-soled work boots. His blue eyes flash cheerfully under his cap when he catches sight of something outside the entrance to the morgue. He leans his broom against the cast-iron railing fence that surrounds the buildings, picks up a long cigarette butt and carefully inserts it into his trouser pocket to dry it out.
Shivering from my hangover, I light a fresh Meteor and stay at the steering wheel for a moment, smoking, my head thumping, missing Doughboy. He fills my life, he blocks out my miserable existence, and I can’t think of anything else. Wherever I look I see that boy’s eyes and I seem to have been swept up in an enchantment. Only once I know he really means those pretty words and solemn promises, smuggled to me by couriers on little bits of paper, will I be able to breathe easily again.
‘Five days, that’s nothing, get a hold of yourself, you silly bastard.’
My vodka-hoarse voice sounds pathetic. When blokes are crowded in with other blokes and their physical urges take charge, in prison or at sea or in a navvies’ barracks, there’s a certain way of seeing things; but this can change as quick as a flash once there are women in the frame. I’ve seen it more than once.
The heavy car door slams so hard that a homeless dog on the other side of the road scarpers with its tail between its legs. I cough to get some kind of lubrication into my bone-dry throat. I roll the gob around my mouth and finally let it fall between my black boots.
I drop the car keys into my trouser pocket and, at the same time, double-check that the bullet I dug out of Beda’s wall last night is still there. I put on my leather gloves and stick the cigar in my mouth as protection against the smell.
I’m wearing a three-piece woollen suit with wide lapels and a white-collared shirt. I’m hoping that picking up the corpse this morning won’t be too much of a messy affair.
The stiff-house is squeezed in between two hospital buildings down one of the wings. The entry telephone buzzes angrily. I have to pace about for a good few moments by the scarred green door before a bloke comes to open it.
‘From Lundin’s, you say? We have him in the locker. Please, come in, come in! Have you brought a cart with you?’
The man in front of me smiles, showing the snuff-blackened gaps in his teeth. He’s wearing a grey caretaker’s coat, stained with red. Gaunt, with long white hairs sprouting from his knotty fingers, and a chaotic pattern of thin veins covering his cheeks and nose.
‘These days we’re on four wheels,’ I say, gesturing towards the hearse.
‘And maybe a bit more horsepower?’
‘Should be capable of carrying a load of your tenants to their graves, if push comes to shove.’
‘But today you’re only picking up one of them, is that right? Örjan Nilsson, fourteen years old, tram accident?’
‘Correct,’ I say, handing over the bundle of documents that Lundin gave me over morning coffee.
‘Well come in, then,’ says the caretaker and steps aside.
The smell of autumn is more noticeable indoors than on the outside. It reminds one of damp moss, old trees and rotting flowers. The caretaker rattles a bunch of keys, standing in front of a white-painted, peeling door with a sign on it, Open Weekday Mornings 9–10. He finds the right key. I breathe through my mouth. The door creaks.
‘I hope you’ll excuse us, sir. I can’t remember ever having so many bodies here.’
I take a deep puff on my Meteor before clamping the cigar into my mouth once more, and taking a look around. The lockers are arranged down the long wall: rectangular doors with chrome handles, three up and ten across. The other side of the room is fully tiled in white.
From hooks hang various items of clothing and other belongings, bags and hats. Mostly old junk.
‘In years gone by we were allowed to pile the corpses up along the house wall when it was below zero, but now they have to stay in here even when it gets overcrowded. We’re under orders.’
The caretaker gestures at a double row of bunks running down the middle of the room. I have another puff, letting the smoke rinse every corner of my gob before expelling it from the corner of my mouth. I cough.
Those that have already been autopsied lie silent under their blood-stained sheets. Here and there, washed white skin can be seen sticking out from beneath the soft undulations of the material.
‘They say he was run over by the number 5 on Karlbergsvägen. When they took him away they had to carry his brain along with them, swilling around in a bowl. No open coffin for him, you might say.’
I nod, letting my eyes skim over the dead. I recognise the swollen corpses of the drowned from my years at sea, shapeless piles of human flesh, green and black from decomposition, sometimes so far gone that it’s difficult to see whether they were once men or women. Their hair is slicked back over their temples, always dark as if it never had time to dry properly. They spread their stench through the room. The combination of my hangover with the smell of corpses makes the hair on my arms stand up. I want to double up with nausea.
On the bunk to my right lies a suicide who was cut down from a rope, a purple necklace etched into her skin. On my left is an old woman, still dressed and in a foetal position as if she froze to death. I’m breathing shallowly, I start to gag.
The caretaker points at a locker in the middle of the room. Our steps echo desolately against the grey floor tiles. On the next bunk lie two naked men piled one on top of the other, as if someone had attempted a macabre joke. If so, then surely the caretaker’s son would have to be the prime suspect. As far as I’ve heard, he stands outside the stiff-house in the evenings, selling craniums and other skeletal parts to superstitious old women, or exhibiting naked female body parts to his classmates for a backhander.
‘No one said anything about a bowl.’
Revulsion is passing through my body like an icy northerly wind.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Lundin never mentioned anything about bringing my own bowl. Can I borrow one? For the brain?’
The caretaker smiles and puts his hands in his coat pockets, swaying back and forth on his feet.
‘There’s no need for a bowl. All the spill is sewed into the stomach once the doctor’s done.’
I grunt with relief, and manage to take a couple of proper breaths.
‘There’s a fair amount of blood, isn’t there? When someone gets their skull crushed?’
‘You must know how people bleed from the head? I see you’ve been slugged once or twice yourself. A boxer, right? So, imagine the amount of fluid when the whole cranium collapses.’
‘What about gunshot wounds? Do they bleed a lot?’
‘Depends, but often not. Look here.’
We stop by a man of my own age. With a cleft palate under his blond moustache, he looks as if he’s smiling slightly, as if he dared to grin at the face of the Grim Reaper in his last few tremulous seconds of life. Even in death, his young body looks hardened by physical labour; muscles are sharply chiselled into his pale pink flesh. His sex lollops halfway up his left thigh. I get warm about my ears. I grip hold of the bunk with my scarred hands, the nausea on the verge of overwhelming me. For some reason I feel a strong sense of identification with the dead man; possibly he’s someone I’ve run into at some point.
‘Do you know about Belzén in Birka, the smuggler further up the street? This is one of his boys. The police cut him down last night, down here on the quay.’
The hole in his almost square chest muscle is smaller than a shirt button. My little finger tingles.
‘Sure, I know Belzén all right.’
I fumble through the memories inside my hung-over skull, but I don’t get anywhere with the corpse in front of me. The caretaker nods thoughtfully.
‘When the heart stops beating you don’t get a lot of blood flowing out of a hole like that. More or less nothing. Not like having your head cave in on you, at least. Why do you ask?’
The caretaker rests his hand on the handle of one of the lockers, not far from the head of the dead man.
‘It’s good to know.’
‘If I had a krona for every curious person I’d met, I’d be living in Solomon’s palace by now. Anyway, here he is.’
The caretaker pushes the handle down; the bolt slides away without a sound, but the door screeches as it opens. With a whining sound the caretaker pulls out the gleaming stretcher, a slight bevelled edge all around it. The boy is swaddled in white, the sheet draped smoothly over the outline of his already rigid body.
‘You want to reverse the car in?’
‘No need. How much could he weigh?’
‘I’ll help you. You take the head end. You want a look?’
‘I’ve seen corpses before.’
‘Fourteen years old.’
‘Still a bloody corpse.’
For a moment I think of Doughboy; the way he tastes. The dead boy was not many years younger. No, damn it, I don’t want to see him. The old man laughs, a croaking sound. I grip the sheets with both my hands and close one eye when I get smoke in it. He doesn’t weigh a lot, but he’s ice cold and stiff in my arms.
The caretaker walks backwards and kicks the doors open with his wooden heel. The November sun has managed to drag itself over the top of City Hall, and now disperses its hazy light over the metropolis. The wind has picked up slightly. A few tired autumn leaves are rustling along the pavement. I fill my lungs with fresh, smarting air.
There’s a thud when, with joint effort, we heave the boy’s corpse into the back of the hearse.
Slowly I drive back to Sibirien with the fourteen-year-old boy and all the other junk rattling about there in the back. I go via St Erik Bridge and before long I’m passing the triangular square, Odenplan, in the middle of which stands Guido the Italian, with a bunch of balloons flying from his hand. In the sunlight, his dark, alert eyes look like globules of gleaming syrup. A couple of kids stand there, stooped over his suitcase, which is filled with firecrackers, poppers and bird whistles. My hangover has given me the hiccups; I swallow back a mouthful of sour bile and grimace, listening to the body in the back sliding across the floor as the number 15 tram screeches across the siding ahead of me and I step on the brake. The lad’s head comes to rest against the driver’s cabin with a slight thump. I fumble with a new cigar. Thinking about Gabrielsson, what he said about my daughter yesterday and how I should write her a letter and explain myself, I scoff out loud: ‘Damned black-frocks, always sticking their noses in.’
I get the cigar going. Anyway the lass can probably hardly speak Swedish any more, and my English is not what it once was. I inhale deeply and blow a half-kilo plume of smoke into the driver’s cabin. A pitch-black draught horse clatters to a stop next to the hearse, pulling large flatbed cart. The driver is standing on his board, pulling at the reins; the bit tightens, stretching the horse’s mouth right back to its flat molars. She puts her ears back but obeys good-naturedly. Her body heat hangs like smoke over her back.
‘Although Emma could probably translate for her at a pinch.’
I have another puff, then another. The almost empty tram passes and clangs its bell before the next stop. A telegram delivery boy, with his yellow free-tram pass between his teeth, disembarks with an agile leap while the tram is still moving, landing with both feet on the pavement before he runs off. The driver slaps the reins over the horse’s back and I release the clutch.
I’m home in five minutes. I park outside the undertaker’s, where Lundin is standing, polishing the shop window with an old sock and some turpentine. I wedge the cigar in my mouth and touch the brim of my hat.
Lundin smiles under his moustache: ‘Briskly done. Whatever you lack in other departments, brother, at least you know how to dig in.’
‘I do what I can.’
‘Busy hands have no time for tomfoolery.’
‘Oh really, how do you mean?’
‘Well… You need help with the lad?’
‘Hold the door open.’
Just as I open one of the back doors of the hearse, there’s a high-pitched scream from the neighbouring house, some ten metres away. A yard cat puffs up its fur, the widow Lind on the other side of the pavement stops and removes a short cigar from her mouth, and a little girl with a greasy sandwich paper in her hand freezes to the spot.
The door of number 41 is thrown open and the Jewel comes streaming out into the street with nothing on her feet except her socks. Her hair is on end and her mascara’s running down her cheeks. She throws her shawl on the dirty pavement, stretches up her arms at the sky, then doubles over for yet another piercing scream.
The door opens again, and behind her comes her square-shaped knot of a bloke. His eyes are bloodshot; he’s in his shirtsleeves. He scrabbles for the shawl and throws it over her as if catching a bird with a net. His rough arms envelop her waist. She stamps the ground and screams again. The bloke looks around and then picks her up and carries her back to the door. She wriggles in his arms.
Lundin removes his hat: ‘Nothing for it but to knock up another white coffin.’
‘Think so?’
‘The child was frail from the very start.’
I inhale deeply and remember that time when Ida almost died from a cough when she was small. She had a close shave that time, and a few other times too, but the girl overcame it and struggled to her feet on the ninth count every time. I shudder with unease and push the memories back down into the darkness.
Lundin holds open the door to the undertaker’s as I pick up the dead boy and haul him into the cool-room. By the time I come back, the funeral director has already poured coffee and a couple of morning drams in the kitchen at the back. He takes a sip of java and sucks the moisture out of his moustache.
‘Our little ship’s boy is buried tomorrow afternoon. North Chapel. Until then you’re off duty, brother.’
I take the dram standing up to medicate against the hangover, swilling the glass in front of my second waistcoat button.
‘I have a few things to get on with. Did you know that shrew who showed up yesterday was Beda’s daughter? I’m inviting her for lunch.’
‘Watch yourself with sparky women, remember how it went last time. That film star?’
‘What the hell does that have to do with it?’
‘Mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me.’
‘That stupid old saw! What about us, we take our bloody breakfast together every day.’
‘Unless you happen to be locked up.’
Lundin fills my glass with export-quality vodka and sits down on a kitchen chair with a grimace of pain. He gets out the accounts book from his pocket and slaps its binding a few times against his emaciated legs before thudding it on the table. With a snuff-dyed finger he finds my name under the letter ‘K’ and makes a couple of notes.
He hums to himself and looks up: ‘Widow Lind’s cigar shop is up for sale.’
‘She mentioned as much.’
‘How much?’
‘Don’t remember.’
I dig out my notebook from my inside pocket and give it to him. Somewhere in an apartment above, a couple of penetrating, off-key notes blast out from a brass instrument. It sounds like someone flung two wildcats into a bass tuba and left them to it.
‘Are you listening?’
‘What did you say?’
‘I was wondering if these figures can be right. Twelve hundred including stock. Two hundred profit per day?’
‘That’s what the widow said.’
‘The only figures you keep a careful eye on are the ones in your alcohol ration book.’
‘It seems that people don’t find me very convincing.’
‘Perhaps they would if you stopped getting pickled all the time?’
‘The numbers are right. I noted them down.’
‘You don’t have a nose for business, I always said that.’
I look up at the ceiling and knock back the second vodka. Lundin writes down a few numbers in his notebook and taps the end of his pen against the table, sweat glistening on his knotted brow.
‘Twenty per cent of your profit until you’ve paid off your debt. And ten per cent from then on. So you don’t have to rough up impoverished folk from dawn till dusk and end up back in a penal institution.’
My heart quickens. The horrible cacophony from upstairs finishes as abruptly as it started.
‘It seems your neighbour, the occultist, bought himself a trumpet. When does the widow need the money by?’
‘Wednesday morning.’
‘No time today. How about you drive me to the bank on Monday and then we’ll arrange the financing? I have to go in anyway, to sort out Rickardsson and his damned ten per cent cut.’
I stare at him as if I’ve seen a ghost. Without any expression on his face, he refills my glass for the third time in five minutes: ‘Cheers to a decent business proposition! Now that you’ve come up in the world you have to stop drinking like a bloody fish.’
My head is reeling with all this news, and the schnapps too. I stumble up the flight of stairs to my flat, leaning heavily on the smooth-worn banister. Dixie spins around me, whining, but I push her off with my foot and hang up my coat and hat.
I stop in front of the hall mirror and stare at myself, mouth agape. The colour of my bruise ranges from dark purple to yellow. I get out a comb and try to arrange my stubble as best as I can. Then I clear my throat: ‘Kvist, cigar shop proprietor. My friends call me Kvisten.’
I put away my comb and take out the bullet I dug out of Beda’s wall last night instead. It’s relatively undamaged, the shape and colour of an old blueberry. Possibly a 2.2. I hold it up so that it covers my right iris in the mirror. With a grin at my reflection I tuck it away in my trouser pocket. The cork mat creaks under my shoes as I go over to the oak desk and sit in the easy chair. When I pull out the big desk drawer it jams, and I have to rock it back and forth to get it open.
My scarred hands dive in and pull out a thick pile of letters, naval logbooks, testimonials and match summaries from Boxing Monthly! magazine, which I could never bring myself to throw away. There’s also a bit of green cloth that I used to soak in sugar water and let Ida suck on – those were the Saturdays when I couldn’t afford to give her anything better.
I find the three American letters that were posted almost twelve years ago. The last of them was posted from Arvilla, Grand Forks, North Dakota. My heart judders and my palms start to sweat. I don’t have the strength to read it again; instead I just tear out a sheet of lined paper from my notebook and wet my pen against my tongue. I notice myself trembling with a sort of excitement as I scratch the words onto the paper:
Sibirien, Friday 22 November in the year 1935.
Dear daughter, this letter is written by my own hand. The way things stand now I have my own cigar shop and so I hope in future I will be able to send you a bit of money now and then. I have seven decent suits and can wear a new one every day if I like. A man thinks of his loved one’s even if it might not seem that way. Take care of your mother, she is a first class woman. If you cant read this letter you should ask her to read it to you.
PS. I am inclosing a photograph.
I read through the letter and put it in an envelope. Not a single spelling mistake. If I get a move on I can get down to Bruntell with the Kodak before the lunchtime rush.
I change into a clean white shirt and my Sunday suit from Herzog’s Tailors. I spend an age dithering over whether to wear a waistcoat, seeing how I look with and without, but in the end I decide to simply button up the jacket to the very top.
With the letter in my inside coat pocket and Dixie’s lead wrapped around my wrist, I shuffle down the stairs and go into Lundin’s. I find him in the kitchen stooped over the classifieds in Stockholms-Tidningen. The coffee cups and schnapps glasses are still on the table. On the gas hob, a dented copper lid is rattling on a saucepan that occasionally gives off little puffs of steam. On the draining board is a keg of herring, ready to be cut up and fried.
‘You have to put some make-up on my bruise.’
I notice that I’m slurring my words. Lundin gazes up at me with a giddy gaze and coughs. Outside in the yard, there’s a racket when some snotty Friday truant climbs up on the dustbins to scale the fence into the next-door yard.
‘Have to, do I? Why do people always expect to get something for free these days?’
‘Bruntell’s taking my portrait.’
Lundin points at the newspaper on the table.
‘Listen to this, for example: “Girl asking those of better means for a little help with her teeth. Replies to Poor.”’
‘You’re drunk.’
‘Or this one: “Is there some humane person who wants to help two young people from going under? We lack even the basic necessities, don’t have enough food to get us through the day, in fact we have nothing except the love we have for each other. We need help.” Yes, so they do for all I know. But at least they can afford to pay for the advertisement.’
Lundin looks up from the newspaper with shiny, red-rimmed eyes: ‘The make-up for the corpses is costly. I only use powder imported from France.’
‘Put it in the book.’
The undertaker taps his snuff tin against the table a few times before he stands up with a sigh: ‘Take a seat, then, you miscreant! I’ll see to it that you’re fairer than Queen Nefertiti.’
Losing his footing, he grips the edge of the table with bony fingers, his rangy body shaking for a moment, and I worry he’s about to have an attack of his falling sickness. But he stays upright, and I let out a sigh of relief: I won’t have to see him thrashing on the floor, foaming at the mouth like a hound of hell.
He straightens the lapels of his jacket and disappears into the kitchen. I sit on one of the wooden chairs, tipping it against the wall. The occultist next door to my flat starts tormenting his trumpet again, but after a few blasts he rounds off the performance with a prolonged, braying note. Dixie, who has placed herself under my chair, looks around in confusion.
Lundin returns with a brightly coloured make-up box. He opens it and makes his selection from brushes, pots of colour and powder. The pipes sigh when someone makes use of the water closet in the corridor.
‘Last year I painted a driver from the brewery, who’d been kicked in the face by his horse. If I managed to make him presentable, I should be able to handle your mug.’
Squinting, he leans up close to my face. I feel his heavy breathing; the smell of schnapps, coffee and throat lozenges.
‘But there’s not much can be done about your nose, and your scars will have to stay where they are. Close your eyes.’
Lundin applies some sort of salve to my eyelids. It stings my skin. Maybe they use different face-paints for stiffs than for poor bastards still walking around on their own two legs.
‘Did you know that Beda sent Petrus to school for two years?’
‘I don’t expect she got much benefit from it. Keep still now.’
A brush dabs my sore skin. A scent of roses seeps into my battered nose.
‘The Asplunden Institute for Deaf Mutes or something like that. That was more or less everything there was in the Parish Register.’
‘Let go of what’s in the past, damn it. You’re going to be a bloody till rat now. You want some colour on your lips as well?’
I run my hand across my Sunday-best trousers and feel the hard, round contours of the pistol bullet in my pocket.
‘A promise is a promise.’
‘Handsome as a prince on a black Arab steed with a gold bit and a silver saddle.’
Lundin’s American timepiece strikes half past ten. I rise and go through the dimly lit vestibule to the undertaker’s, where there’s a mirror. Dixie limps along behind me; the lead drags along the floor behind her. She runs her nose over the floorboards and manages to walk right into the urn with the sad-looking palm in it, by the front desk. She lowers herself onto her rump and wags her tail half-heartedly. That animal’s about to drink herself to death, mark my words.
I take one of Lundin’s tearful-relative tissues from the box on the desk, fold it into a triangle, then tuck it in my breast pocket. After adjusting my tie I scrutinise myself in the mirror. Not bad at all. The skin under my eye is whiter than the rest of my face but it probably won’t show in the photograph.
Outside, the grey clouds have mopped up the sparse sunlight of this morning. With Dixie in tow I cross Roslagsgatan and head south towards Bruntell’s. Further down I see a couple of navvies from the tram company, checking the rails between the cobbles. One of them thumps the right-hand track with a mallet, and a ringing sound travels along the rail.
In Bruntell’s shop window is a handwritten sign: JEWS AND HALF-JEWS BARRED. The deuce knows what he and his kind have against them. They’ve never done me any harm, and the only one I know sews the best damned suits in town.
Inside the shop, the ladies are lined up behind the counter, their aprons bunched up around their stomachs like sad, limp sails. The proper lunch rush hasn’t quite started. I tie Dixie’s lead to a lamp post.
Inside the shop, there’s a jumble of conflicting smells: herring, roasted coffee, lip snuff, cleaning agents and cured pork in a net at 2.75 kronor per kilo. On the other side of the counter are shelves and little drawers of everything from horseshoe tacks to gift items. From the ceiling, a couple of pairs of boots are hanging by their straps.
Bruntell himself is on duty between the scales and the till. In front of him, the large customer ledger weighs heavily on the counter. His eyes are red, and there’s a crumpled white cap on his head. Just behind his jawbone, on his emaciated neck, is a little sticking-plaster. A wedding band gleams on his skinny left hand. His wife is usually found sitting somewhere in the back of the shop, gluing the bottoms of the grocery bags.
‘Still having trouble with that shaky left hand, are we?’
I nod at his plaster. Bruntell makes a wheezing sound. I think he’s laughing.
‘Th-that was a nice party the other night. P-plenty of folks booked themselves in to have p-pictures taken.’
I count out the money and put it on the counter.
‘I was going to ask you about Beda…’
‘A s-sad story. I always thought a b-b-bit of excitement would be good for business, but it s-seems not.’
‘Did you see them when they came to pick up Petrus?’
‘No, I was here.’
‘Did any of your customers see them?’
‘N-n-not as far as I heard. Apart from Ström, that is. He spoke to one of them the d-day after.’
I push my hat back with my finger and look around the shop: ‘Say, I’d like my portrait taken.’
Bruntell squints at me.
‘I h-have a few pictures left on the roll before it needs developing.’
‘Splendid.’
‘Y-y-you can have them by the weekend, but it’ll c-cost you.’ Bruntell wheezes again. That sod is even meaner than Lundin.
‘Whose names do you have in that book there? There must be a few of them that don’t pay up.’
‘Ho-how do you mean?’
‘Who owes you the most?’
‘That would be O-o-olsson a few d-doors up, but he is sick with TB.’
‘Who else?’
‘The Lapp woman.’
I nod and get out my notebook.
‘I was thinking we could take that portrait outside the cigar shop. I’ll keep my hat on.’
Just before lunch, Dixie and I stroll the short distance down to the corner where Standards is. There’s still no rain, but it’s cold, and I wrap the coat tightly around myself. I should have put on my long johns.
The doorbell tinkles cheerfully. I look around. Elin Johansson is standing at the far end of the boutique. She’s wearing a finely checked city dress, which clings to her voluptuous figure. Her red hair is neatly parted to the right, although it looks slightly fuzzed up. She’s showing a young man a poplin overcoat.
‘Obviously there’s no smoking in here!’
A gangly girl with a boyish face has sneaked up on me. She’s wearing a green dress with a wide sash. Her left eye seems to move a touch slower than her right.
‘I do apologise.’
My cigar bobs up and down in my mouth as I speak. I open the door and toss it out into the road.
‘Much better. How can I be of assistance?’
‘I was going to invite Miss Johansson for lunch.’
The boyish face bursts into a full smile. Her teeth shimmer against her red-painted lips. Both eyes start glittering at the same time, much to my relief.
‘Elin is busy with a customer for the moment. Do you have time to wait a moment?’ the assistant twitters, putting her hands together across her bust. Her bony fingers have well-manicured nails, painted the same colour as her lips.
‘Naturally. Maybe you can help me, while I’m here. I was going to buy a suit for my nephew.’
‘Of course. Standards is a fashionable choice for young people. Is he coming out?’
I shake my head.
‘He just needs a proper suit, simple as that.’
‘Everyone needs a proper suit. What size does your nephew wear?’
I rub my chin. At the other end of the boutique, Elin recoils when she catches sight of me. She smiles in confusion at her customer and glances over at me with a raised eyebrow.
‘He’s a bit shorter than me. Slimmer.’
A double furrow appears between the assistant’s eyes.
‘He’s blond.’
The assistant shakes her head, smiling: ‘You really should find out what size he wears.’
‘That could be difficult.’
‘Maybe you should just try on something while you wait. At the moment we have promotions on old boy suits in both wool and serge, topcoats for sixty-five kronor and trench coats for sixty-nine.’
‘Thanks, but I already have six decent suits at home.’
‘I think Elin has finished with her customer now.’ The sales assistant leans forward and lowers her voice: ‘She’s fond of cut flowers. Preferably hyacinths. Difficult this time of year, but have a try in Klarahallarna.’
She leaves me with an imperceptible nod. I tighten my tie.
The two women meet halfway up the narrow shop and have to twirl around each other, as if in a dance. They exchange a meaningful look. The boyish assistant laughs. A slight scent of herring reaches me before Elin does. It must be her favourite food. She wrinkles her face into a frown and rests her right hand on the daring curve above her hip.
‘Lunch? What is this idea you and Alice have cooked up between you?’
She purses her mouth. I attempt a smile: ‘You have to have something to eat either way…’
‘I hope you’re not getting the idea that…’
‘It’s only a question of a friendly lunch, nothing else.’
‘What for?’
She turns her head, as if this might improve her hearing.
‘Lunch and an amicable conversation…’
‘You’re just the same, the whole lot of you. You bait the hook with flattery and gobstoppers.’
‘Gobstoppers?’
‘And then once you’ve made a mess of things you scarper.’
‘I can assure you that—’
‘Nonsense! Let me get my coat.’
Elin bends her neck slightly and turns on a sixpence.
Her fat behind sways to and fro as she clears a path back through the shop. Her colleague, Alice, inclines her head and shoots me a certain kind of glance. I fold up my collar, open the door and step out into the overcast November day. I met another Alice once. A bandy-legged carpenter’s daughter who was whoring on Kungsgatan, had a liking for Madeira wine. Our story didn’t have a very happy ending.
A horse and cart are parked outside. The chestnut mare scrapes her hooves impatiently against the cobblestones. My extinguished Meteor lies on the pavement. I snatch it up while pretending to do up my bootlace.
At the beer café on the crossing of Roslagsgatan and Odengatan, a mouthy waitress tries to direct the flow of lunch guests. Her rumbling laugh cuts through the clatter of crockery and the diners’ raised voices.
On her tray: stacks of chipped sandwich plates and greasy soup bowls.
‘I’ll wager two cards.’
Four men in City District postal-delivery uniforms are playing auction behind me. The cards make a thumping sound every time one of them slams them down on the table.
‘I’ll pass as well.’
At a table next to us, an old-timer with blue-veined cheeks fills his glass of pils to the rim. He nods to himself, fully satisfied, and opens his newspaper, Social-Demokraten.
Behind Elin’s back, a gang of lads from Norra Latin are making a ruckus. They all wear the grammar school badge on their caps; they’re drinking milk. One of them is clumsily rolling a cigarette when his friend thumps him on the arm. The bottling machine gives off a dull thud at regular intervals.
‘So, how long has Miss been working at Standards?’
I take a bite of my egg sandwich. Elin brushes a few crumbs off the table.
‘Too long.’
‘And in the meantime you had no idea that your mother and half-brother were living only a few blocks away?’
‘Like I told you earlier.’
Elin takes a sip of coffee. Outside Oden-Bazaar on the other side of the street, old Johnsson is limping about with a broom in his hands. He’s had that limp ever since I paid him a visit. The number 57 bus pulls into its stop. At the café entrance stands a gang of grubby vagrants with weather-beaten, furrowed faces under their king-of-the-road Borsalinos, gesticulating wildly as they argue some point.
‘Laying it on a bit thick with your spades, aren’t you?’ hisses a throaty voice from the card game behind me.
I take a puff on my Meteor and rub my chin: ‘Do you live around here?’
‘What concern is that of yours?’
Elin’s eyebrow is raised again.
‘Just an innocent question.’
The beer is lukewarm but refreshing. I drain my glass in two gulps and refill it. The vagrants have come to the end of their negotiations, and they sway in through the door. Their commander wears his cap cocked at a three-quarters angle; there’s a fag butt behind his ear, and traces of a nose bleed dried into his moustache. The leather uppers of his boots have split, and each of his laces is decorated with four or five emergency knots.
‘We have to get a move on,’ one of the grammar school boys exclaims behind Elin, and there’s a hustle and bustle as the lads stand up and put on their coats. I have another sip of beer and clean off the foam around my mouth with the back of my hand. Elin leans forward slightly.
‘So, Mister Kvist, tell me about Beda.’
I turn on the charm: ‘I liked her a lot. You’ve been graced with her green eyes.’
Elin’s mouth forms itself into a thin streak above her broad chin.
‘What was she like?’
‘Confused, at the end. Some say she was a compulsive liar but I don’t know if that’s anywhere near the truth.’
‘Damn it!’
I gaze at her, feeling my smile falling off my face; but I manage to stick it back on: ‘Everyone in Sibirien knew who she was. She was well liked.’
‘And the other one?’
‘Your brother?’
‘Half-brother, thank you very much.’
‘They say he was retarded but I don’t think so. Just unusually good-hearted. A deaf mute, though. He helped as far as he was able. Beda used to say he came into the world back end first.’
‘I don’t understand what the purpose of this is!’ Elin clenches her fist on the table. Her cheeks are flaming. ‘First you near enough scupper my sale and then you turn up out of the blue and make the most chilling insinuations.’
I try out another smile. The muscles are straining in my face. Elin flushes with anger.
‘I reckon Joel’s sitting on the diamonds,’ hisses the drunken voice behind my back.
I rummage in my trouser pocket while she catches her breath.
She raises her coffee cup to her mouth, with a shaking hand. There’s a ringing sound as I reach across the table and let the little lead bullet fall onto her saucer.
‘What’s that supposed to be?’
‘It’s a pistol bullet. I dug it out of the laundry wall last night.’
‘Put it away.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Put it away. At once.’
Her voice aches with held-back tears. I do as I’m told. My manoeuvre hasn’t quite gone to plan.
‘I don’t understand. Last night I was out having a good time with Stina at the old Fenix, and now I’m sitting here with you, and… I don’t understand.’
‘Your mother. She made me promise something, and a promise is a promise.’
‘What?’
‘That I’d look after Petrus if anything happened to her.’
‘And now?’
‘Now something has happened.’
‘Jesus bloody wept!’
This boutique assistant curses more than many sailors I’ve met.
Beside us, the old man with his Social-Demokraten chuckles loudly at something in the newspaper. I inhale deeply on my cigar and wonder where I should begin when giving her the whole story. Elin shakes her head when the waitress approaches with the coffee pot for a refill. The tramps have sat down behind Elin and pooled their collective assets on a handkerchief on the table. They order two bottles of pils and three glasses.
I choose my words carefully: ‘When I came home a few days ago from a lengthy trip, I learned that your mother had died about a month back. People said Petrus had crushed her skull, which sounded unbelievable. He couldn’t even kill a sick rabbit. And she was going to die before long anyway. She had cancer.’
A shiver runs through Elin’s stout body.
‘It started in her eye but before long it spread.’
I get out Beda’s letter and hand it over.
‘When I was released this was waiting for me.’
‘Released?’
‘Came home, I mean.’
Elin looks as if I just handed her a dead latrine rat by the tail, but she grips the envelope and slides out the letter. I have a sip of beer and watch her while she reads. The sheet of paper starts to tremble slightly; she takes a deep breath.
‘I have seen to it there’s a monthly bob or two for Petrus,’ she quotes.
‘Precisely. Yesterday I checked the Parish Register to see if the father was named, but he wasn’t.’
‘Was there anything about me?’
‘Regarding your father?’
The words get stuck in her throat; she swallows a few times, then finally manages to whisper: ‘Yes?’
‘Don’t know a thing about it. What I do know is, the police came to Roslagsgatan in the middle of the day to pick up Beda’s body and Petrus, but no one saw them being brought out, at least not close up. A jumble dealer by the name of Ström spoke a few words with a plain-clothes officer when they came back the day after, and he found out that Petrus had crushed Beda’s skull with a stone from a mangle. Or an iron. It’s a little unclear.’
I take a deep breath – I’m not sure I’ve ever said so many words in one go. Elin grows pale and looks as if she’s had one cup of coffee too many. I have a mouthful of beer to wet my whistle.
‘And?’
‘And there’s not a trace of anything in the laundry to show that anyone had their skull flattened in there. On the other hand I did find, like I said, a bullet lodged in the wall.’
‘Who would put a firearm in the hands of a retard?’
I push my hat back.
‘There’s no bloody way it was Petrus.’
‘What do you mean?’
I raise my voice: ‘I mean someone is letting a deaf-mute bloke, who maybe’s not all there and can’t defend himself, take the blame for a murder he never committed.’
‘I’d say you’re the one who’s not all there.’
Elin puts on her beret and picks up her handbag.
‘Your brother is locked up in Lunatic Palace.’
‘Half-brother, if you please. And as far as I can see it seems the right place for him.’
‘The problem is he hasn’t even been put on trial.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I spoke to a senior constable I know. No crime scene investigation has been carried out, no post-mortem or interrogation. That goes right against everything I know about coppers. Within twenty-four hours, Petrus was locked up in Konradsberg.’
Elin sinks back into her chair.
‘Do you have a cigarette?’
She sounds very tired.
‘Sorry, no.’
Looking out of the window, she mumbles: ‘Stina’s fiancé is a policeman.’
‘Stina?’
‘We share a flat.’
‘So check with him, then.’
I stub out my cigar and look out of the window. A few drops of rain have streaked the glass. A tramp ambles along the pavement. A horse-drawn cab brakes hard for a stray dog crossing the wide street.
The three vagrants behind Elin get their pils bottles at last. They share the contents between them.
Elin sighs desolately: ‘It’s not long till advent now.’
I bite the end off a new cigar.
‘That’s right.’
‘I’ve never liked Christmas very much.’
‘Father Christmas and all that crap.’
‘Who would kill an old lady in that way?’
‘Haven’t got a clue.’
Tears gleam in Elin’s green eyes when they look into mine. For a moment I think of Beda and the way she kept rubbing her running eye until they cut it out.
‘The man mentioned in the letter. If we assume he’s Petrus’s father… Maybe he’s married to someone else? Maybe he’s the one who’s behind all this? It wouldn’t be the first time some rich swine left an impoverished woman with a baby on her arm.’
Elin’s eyes burn behind their veil of tears.
‘Maybe so,’ I said.
‘Men will be men. You can never keep your hands to yourselves.’
I fumble with the matches before I manage to get the cigar going. The coarse smoke fills my mouth. I let it drizzle out of the corner of my lips.
‘As I said, no father is mentioned by name.’
Elin peers at me. She puts down the handbag, takes off her beret and breathes deeply. Then her gaze meets mine with a different sort of light in it: ‘So how do we go on from here?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Surely you don’t imagine you can just show up and tell me these stories, and that’s the end of it?’
‘Listen to me. I wanted to know if you had any information about the case. I’ve worked on private investigations for dozens of years and the last thing I need is a…’
‘A what?’
‘This is a man’s job, simple as that.’
‘She was my mother.’
Elin glares at me defiantly, bursting with conviction.
A sudden headache cuts through my skull. I shut my eyes tight and massage the thick bridge of my nose with my thumb and forefinger: ‘Petrus spent a couple of terms at the Asplunden Institute for the Deaf, Mute and Blind. That trail’s been cooling down for the last twenty years, but I was going to see if anyone still remembers him there. Above all I plan to speak to Petrus himself.’
Elin puffs up her unruly hair with one hand. Again her herring-breath cuts through the smells of cooking and tobacco. For the first time I see her smile. Her top-left incisor is chipped.
‘You’re planning on having a word with a deaf mute who’s banged up?’
‘I know one of the asylum nurses. A drunk, a neighbour of mine.’
Elin opens her eyes wide and stares dumbly at me.
‘And you waited this long to tell me?’
She picks up her handbag, pushes back her chair and offers me her hand. There’s something very mannish about her, although not quite in the way I can usually appreciate.
I stare at her hand. Her nails are dirty.
‘Come on! Too damned right I may not have known my mother, but maybe I can do something for my poor sod of a half-brother.’
I push my hat up even further with my finger, then put my cigar in my mouth and give her my hand. She shakes it firmly.
‘Let me call Alice and ask her to cover for me this afternoon, then we can take the number 4 to Fridhemsplan and change to the number 2.’
‘Wallin might not even be at work yet. Sometimes he does the night shift.’
Elin stands up and smiles again:
‘So much the better.’
Wallin’s bedsit is acrid with a smell of sweat and stale hangover. Across the room runs a washing line, empty apart from a couple of pathetic grey clothes pegs. On a bureau is a crystal transistor marked with the manufacturer’s name: DUX. By its side, a sunken leather armchair is surrounded by empty bottles. One of them has been shattered, and blood is visible on the jagged glass of the broken bottleneck.
The dirty wallpaper, which has come away from the wall along the edges, is covered in brown blotches from squashed wall-lice.
He’s nailed up a bookshelf that he’s cobbled together from a few sugar crates. A couple of years’ worth of Sports News is kept there. The twat often brags about some nephew who, apparently, plays as centre half for Djurgården.
Wallin is in need of a couple of hours of sleep and a few cups of hot coffee before he goes to work. His left hand is swaddled with a dirty piece of cotton. We take a seat around the kitchen table on some chairs with high armrests. The blinds are down but in the middle of the table is a lamp, which is switched on, and next to it an enamelled tub filled with grey soapy water, and two detachable celluloid shirt collars floating on the surface.
‘Well, I have to apologise for the state of the place. I don’t often get womenfolk visiting here.’
Wallin slurs his words and rubs his unshaven chin. God only knows when he last saw hips like Elin’s swaying through his room.
‘No need to apologise on account of that.’
Elin’s twittering tone has something brisk and hearty about it. It doesn’t quite suit her, but it brings a smile to the face of the asylum nurse.
‘I can go down to Nisse’s Eva and make a few purchases. They have decent buns. Nice big ones.’
‘Don’t you worry about that.’
Elin gently pats Wallin’s uninjured hand on the tabletop. I peer at the studio photograph on the window shelf. I assume that the pale-faced teenage lass is that daughter of his who committed suicide. She looks alarmed, almost as if the photographic flash has caught her unawares. They say Wallin himself had to tug her out when the midwife showed up late, which left her with a pitted skull and crooked spine; apparently the lass never learned from experience, and it was on account of an unwanted pregnancy that she walked into the sea many years later. The letter that I wrote earlier suddenly burns inside my coat pocket.
‘Are you visiting that film star, Kvisten? Is that why you want to come with me to work?’
I can feel Elin’s eyes on me. I avoid them. Wallin’s mouth twitches: ‘Hasn’t he told you? Kvist was a friend of Doris Steiner, from the movies.’
‘We want to visit Petrus,’ I interrupt.
‘Petrus? He’s not at Konrad?’
‘Not for more than a month. Not at the Stora Mans clinic anyway.’
‘They’re probably keeping him in isolation, then. I had no idea. Well, I can’t turn up with the pair of you in tow. I hope you understand, Missus…’
‘Miss.’
‘Miss, you must understand, we have all sorts there, and outsiders can’t just walk about without good reason.’
‘Of course. I suppose it takes quite a strong man to wander around there at night with all those freaks and morphinists and retards.’
‘It’s not for your average person, it really isn’t.’
‘I should think not.’
I chuckle silently and glance at Elin. She rearranges her red hair behind her left ear. Without any great fuss I haul out the litre-bottle wrapped in crêpe paper that I picked up at Lundin’s place before our visit, and put it on the table. There’s a glint in Wallin’s eye. He rubs his chin and smacks his lips.
‘You don’t even need to come with us,’ I say. ‘All you have to do is lean back in your armchair and listen to the world singing, with your one and only best friend, Mister Kron.’
Wallin peeks shamefacedly at Elin from under his fringe, and gives me a crooked smile. I twist the bottle top so he can smell the vodka. He flinches at the sound. We’ve got him now, he’s caught in the trap.