It is afternoon when Mickel Cardell glances in through the crowds at Cellar Hamburg and catches sight of Cecil Winge on his chair under a window covered with frost, emaciated as never before and as pale as the snow outside, holding his handkerchief over his mouth. Outside, the cold cuts through flesh and bone, but inside a fire is crackling in the hearth. The heat is increased by the fact that every inch of the place is packed. Cardell holds his wooden arm in front of him and makes his way over to the table. With a sigh, he sinks down across from Winge, relieved to take the weight off his legs. Cardell notes with a wide smile that Winge already has a glass on the table in front of him, so he waves for some hot punch for himself. Cardell is in high spirits.
“Quite a crowd here today, but I guess it should be expected. They’ve just beheaded a wife murderer on the hill, and people come here to have a lucky drink from the murderer’s glass. I heard them talking at the door. They said no one had seen Mårten Höss quite as drunk as he was today, and that he can hardly be expected to remain at his post after the mess he made of the poor bastard on the block. I don’t understand why you wanted to meet at the Hamburg, of all places. Do you know this is the very place I was sitting the night when I fished Karl Johan out of the lake? That feels like an eternity ago now.”
Cardell blows on the warm drink and then downs it with such gusto that he has to pause his commentary. He is smiling from ear to ear, so broadly that his chewing tobacco is in danger of falling out.
“You should have been there. Widow Fröman rounded up some twenty widows, their grown children, and many grandchildren, all at one time or another driven to the brink of ruin by our soon-to-be police chief’s handling of the widows’ pension fund. We loaded them all onto a cart and drove across the ice to Oakenhill on the Hessian Islet, where Blom said that Ullholm had planned to spend his last night before going through customs. You know that I have been to war, but I swear that I’ve never seen a more bloodthirsty crew. We set off in the dead of night so we could arrive before anyone was up, and when Magnus Ullholm—ugly as a toad, I might add—came out of the front door ready to leave, they had already frightened the horses away and stripped the wheels off the carriage. They let him come halfway across the yard before he realized anything was amiss. I’ll be damned if it wasn’t Mrs. Fröman herself who sniffed out the dung heap and realized it wasn’t frozen. She hit him straight in the face with her first salvo, taking his wig off—never mind her blindness. He was dressed for the occasion, I must say, with an ermine fur collar and a watch on his thigh. But he managed to set off at a sprint I would not have guessed him capable of—now covered in dung from head to toe—and secured himself behind the inn door by a hair’s breadth. But there were no escape routes. The women and their children made a ring around the whole house and didn’t let a soul in or out. The siege lasted long into the night before anyone managed to get out a message and alert the City Guard. And so I can proudly declare my mission completed. Well, were you able to do what you had hoped with your extra day?”
“Yes, Jean Michael, thank you for everything you have done. I could have expected no more.”
“Are your conversations over?”
“Yes.”
Cardell leans back and rubs the sleep out of his eyes.
“And a broken heart is the answer to our mystery?”
“It is the oldest of all motives. Johannes was right in what he first told me. He was raised to become a monster, and become one he did. But love will heal hate, and in Daniel Devall’s company he regained his humanity. Until it dawned on him that the love was a lie, and then the monster returned, worse than ever.”
They sit silent for a while. Winge is the one who speaks first.
“What will you do now, Jean Michael?”
“There are still some loose threads to gather up, enough to keep me occupied until 1794. I have a bone to pick with Madame Sachs, if I am able to find her. There are others that I would also like to have a word with. I should not be surprised if that slave driver Dülitz should be awoken one night by the sound of wood on wood. And if the spirit should move me, the Order of the Eumenides would prove a reasonable challenge for the one who managed to put a stick in the wheel of the police chief himself.”
He empties his refilled glass.
“That is, as long as I don’t allow myself to be distracted by the brandy. There is a pub that I’ve found that I think I will like and where my credit is good. Name of the Scapegrace. How about you? How will the trial against Balk proceed?”
Winge doesn’t answer. Cardell notes with concern how shallow and rapid his breaths are, how his cheeks have sunk and made a hollow on either side of his face, how his eyes have retreated into his skull, and how something about him has changed. He feels a cold shiver run down his back.
“You’re different. It’s not your illness. Something has happened. Something is wrong.”
Winge’s voice is so low that Cardell has to lean in to catch what he is saying.
“When I think back upon my life, Jean Michael, I see a braided cord of cause and effect. The ideals to which I adhered in my youth steered my actions when I fell ill and wanted to ease my wife’s suffering. To ease my own, I went to Norlin and asked him for work. He did me a service, and when he asked me for a favor in return, I could not refuse. Then we met, you and I, over Karl Johan’s dead body, and we began to walk the path we have followed all the way to where we are now.”
He stifles a cough. Cardell leans across the table.
“Life is like two roads heading in opposite directions. One follows emotion, the other reason, and the latter has been mine. Johannes knew my name and reputation, and assumed that I would continue along the path of reason without discrimination, as I have always done. I am certain that he would have been successful in his efforts if I had not decided to break the pattern that I have followed my entire life.”
Cardell shakes his head helplessly before this stream of words.
“Tell me what you have done.”
“I showed Johannes the letter from Daniel Devall that we found among Liljensparre’s correspondence, in which Devall resigned from his duties and expressed his love. Johannes killed an innocent man. The monster found that it had a conscience, that it deserved to be punished, and that the thoughts which had caused it to want to doom our entire race lacked foundation. I offered him an arrangement that was in my power to realize. In the cell next to Balk, there was a prisoner by the name of Lorentz Johansson, sentenced for killing his wife and scheduled to be brought to the gallows this morning. Balk’s own name was nowhere in the arrest ledgers, as you know, something I made sure of when we brought him to Kastenhof. Yesterday evening, I offered Johannes the place on the block that should have been Lorentz Johansson’s. And he accepted. I pawned my pocket watch, and these last few coins that I own I gave to the guard to help me and to swear him to silence. When the executioner’s cart came, we put Johannes Balk in it and sent him to his death in Johansson’s place.”
“But Devall’s letter was written in code. How could you decipher its contents?”
“I couldn’t.”
Cardell has to lean back to get some air. Winge goes on.
“I used the time you gave me to construct a key that made Daniel Devall’s letter say what Johannes needed to read to accept my offer. It was not easy, Jean Michael, and it cost me a great deal, but I managed it. All I then had to do was mark the letter with a later date. I’m no great forger, but that detail was too insignificant for Johannes to notice any difference in handwriting.”
Cecil Winge slowly pushes a glass across the table, filled to the brim with brandy.
“The glass before you is the same one that Johannes was offered this morning on his way to his execution, the final drink that is given to each prisoner headed beyond the city walls. He emptied it, not ten steps from where we are sitting now. I was here, and he saw me in the crowd, and when our eyes met, I found only gratitude there. With my lie, I had shown him that the world was not the hell that he had hated so. He trusted me and could not know that in reality I had just proven that the depravity of our species is a rule without exception. I took his life, Jean Michael, with my papers, as surely as if I had used them to separate his head from his body. He gave me a final glance across his shoulder as the cart rolled on towards the Sconce Tollgate and then I lost sight of him. Mrs. Norström carved the name on the glass with a nail. Now it bears the date and the name Johansson, even though the real Johansson is sitting on a wagon headed to Norway, there to help in the breweries under his mother’s maiden name. This glass belongs to Johannes Balk. And now I ask you, Jean Michael, if you would drink to my health one last time?”
Cardell sits silently for a while before he stretches out his hand, wrapped in rags, across the table. It trembles as he picks up the small beaker with its sloppy writing and downs its contents. The liquid stings his throat and turns his exhalation into a hiss as Winge watches him.
“You asked me earlier about the child, if it is mine or the corporal’s. I still don’t know, but I hope with all my heart that it is his.”
Winge stands up, leaning heavily against the back of the chair, and begins to make his way to the door. He is not halfway before Cardell calls out to him in a voice strained near to breaking.
“You told me once of how you stood before an abyss and how you found comfort in a flame you cupped in your hands. Will there be only darkness now?”
Cecil Winge smiles in return, a smile filled with sorrow but free of remorse, where victory and defeat both share a place. Night starts to fall, settling over Stockholm, one of the last of this year. It rises above the batteries that stand guard against the sea, climbs up the palace walls and onto the spires of the church towers. Night reaches over the waves towards the Quayside and the City-between-the-Bridges, past Polhem’s Lock and beyond. Out of the alleys of the city, shadows rise in answer.
The coughing fits now strike Cecil Winge ever more frequently as the hours go by. He can no longer hold them in check and sees no reason to do so. When he smiles back at Mickel Cardell in the light of the fire, his teeth are all stained red.