Detective Inspector Barbarotti was sitting at a poker table.
A low-hanging lamp cast a sallow light over a green baize surface. A considerable pot made up of coins, counters and banknotes took pride of place in the middle of the table while cigar and cigarette smoke spiralled slowly up towards the ceiling, dissolving in the gloom above the lampshade. Quiet music, a silky female voice singing jazz, was issuing from invisible loudspeakers as he slowly, slowly slipped a third ace behind a ten and transformed two pairs into a full house.
There were three of them playing. Apart from Barbarotti himself there were two other gentlemen, whose faces he could not really see because the confounded lamp was so low, but he was sure they were worthy, not to say superior, opponents.
On the other hand: a full house with aces was not to be sniffed at. He scrabbled in his jacket pockets for extra money to add to the pot, but soon discovered that the only funds he had left were a few superannuated and worthless Polish złoty notes and a postage stamp of very dubious value. He could see that his opponents were aware of his awkward situation and before he could reach any kind of decision, one of them bowed his head into the circle of light and smiled a very sardonic smile, his cigar still in his mouth.
‘It is your soul you are expected to stake, Monsieur Barbarotti,’ he said with studied oiliness. ‘Nothing less than your soul.’
The other gentleman did not lean his face forward for inspection but contented himself with a curt ‘Correct’, and Gunnar Barbarotti realized all at once who he was playing against. They were the Devil and God, not just any old players, in other words, and the instant this came home to him, he was no longer in his seat but floundering on his back amongst the coins, counters and notes in the big pot beneath the lamp, a poor, pathetic, Lilliputian figure dressed in nothing but his pride, his watch and his underpants and without the slightest chance of influencing the course of events.
‘That’s right, my little friend,’ mumbled Our Lord distractedly. ‘You’re nothing more than a pawn in the game, had you forgotten that simple precondition?’
‘No talking to the pot, dear brother,’ the Devil chided him. ‘Is that puny little thing all you want to stake? It certainly points to the direction this game is heading.’
‘He is as he is,’ commented Our Lord in a slightly mournful tone. ‘You have to take the rough with the smooth.’
‘Sometimes you really hit the nail on the head, I have to give you that,’ chuckled the Devil.
Gunnar Barbarotti tried to get to his feet but slipped on a five kronor coin that had missed its mark, came down hard on his backside and woke up.
White walls, white ceiling. Bright light, some kind of disinfectant smell and a taste of metal on his tongue. He was lying on his back, feeling sick; one of his legs was as heavy as lead, and there was a distant echo of voices and footsteps out in a corridor.
I’m in hospital, was his first thought after God and the Devil had deserted him. I’ve just come round, something must have happened, but there’s nothing wrong with my head. It must be that leg, of course.
Satisfied with these conclusions, he fell asleep and woke again after a period of time that was probably only a minute or a few seconds, because he had no difficulty taking up the thread of his thoughts where he had left it.
That leg. It was in plaster. His left leg, the whole foot and the entire lower leg, up to the knee. But he could move his arms, he could clench his fists and when he gave the order to his packaged foot to wiggle its toes, they wiggled.
So, thought Gunnar Barbarotti, closing his eyes, I’ve broken my left leg. It happens in the best families. Everything else is in order. They’ve operated on it and they had to put me to sleep, of course.
Then he went back to sleep again.
Waking for the third time, he remembered the whole story. The poker game in the dream came back to him as well, and in some way it felt as if the one was interconnected with the other.
His falling off a roof, and God and the Devil playing poker for his soul.
Rubbish, he thought irritably. I can’t have been that close to death, and Our Lord would doubtless have given me a heads up if that much danger were imminent.
Our Lord was currently thirteen points above the existence line – Barbarotti was taken aback for a moment that he could remember the exact figure so clearly – and had every reason to keep on good terms with the inspector. So that was that.
He was aware that this line of argument wasn’t exactly unimpeachable, logically speaking, but the sharp, metallic taste in his mouth was no doubt affecting his concentration. But there had been no anaesthetic, after all. He found he could remember the whole operation, one excruciating detail after another, so perhaps they had given him some kind of sedative afterwards. That must be it. If it were left to him he would always prefer to sleep through the whole thing; that sort of decision, however, was entrusted not to the patient but to the orthopaedic specialist. For good reason, he supposed.
One thing was indisputable, anyway, and that was the fact that he had tumbled off the roof. He had landed left foot first in a wheelbarrow some idiot had left out on the soft lawn – presumably that idiot was himself – and it had hurt so bloody much that he had fainted.
Marianne had rushed to the rescue with that prize pest Brother-in-law Roger hot on her heels, and eventually they were joined by a neighbour called Peterzén, a retired pilot and fanatical supporter of the Stockholm football team AIK, and then the ambulance and its crew, who set to work twisting his foot straight, and he fainted again, because it hurt more than anything conceivably could.
Then something for the pain and the trip to the hospital, and a host of nurses and doctors pushing and pulling, breaking and observing and conferring, and finally making sure he didn’t pass out for a third time, because it would be a shame for him to miss something as interesting as his own operation.
And now the operation was over. Now he would be fine. Now all he had to do was lie in a bed and be looked after for days and weeks, he would never . . . Well, at any rate, he would never go up on the roof and hammer nails into laths and try to prove to Brother-in-law Roger what a handy devil he was. Or to Marianne or her children or anybody else.
You had to be aware of the possibilities open to you, but above all of your limitations, thought Gunnar Barbarotti. Admittedly he was a detective inspector and had had a degree in law hanging around unexploited ever since his student days in Lund, but he was born all fingers and thumbs and had always been slightly afraid of heights.
And even though the pain had sent him to the very edge of consciousness, he had not managed to avoid hearing what one of the paramedics said to the other.
‘Here he is with five hundred square metres of soft grass, and he goes for a wheelbarrow. Smart guy.’
The door opened and a nurse came into the room.
‘So you’re awake?’ He’d thought people only talked like that in old movies and books, but evidently not.
He tried to agree with what she had said but his metallic mouth had stopped working. Nothing came out but a sort of wheeze, followed by a coughing fit.
‘Try to drink something,’ she said, passing over a cup with a straw in it.
He did. He cast a meaningful glance at the lump of plaster and then an enquiring one into her blue eyes.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It went well. Dr Parvus will be coming in to talk to you. You’re not in any pain?’
He shook his head.
‘Press the button if you need anything. Dr Parvus will be in to see you soon.’
She studied a chart hanging at the foot of the bed, then gave him an encouraging look and left the room.
Before he nodded off again he lay very still in the bed and looked out of the big window, where he could observe a yellow building-site crane moving with slow gravity against the bright-blue autumn sky. It had a beauty to it, thought Gunnar Barbarotti, a kind of majesty. And dignity. I want to be a crane in my next life, he decided, and then the women will come flocking round me.
As he watched its beautiful, dignified motion, he also took the opportunity of reflecting a little on the situation; even if the fall from the roof hadn’t been a near-death experience, it somehow seemed natural to do so.
His own personal situation, that was to say – his place in the system of coordinates known as life in his forty-ninth year – and whatever attitude one took to cause and effect and consequence, one could only endorse the view that quite a lot had happened recently.
In the past year, in fact. This time last autumn – September, or the end of August anyway, if you wanted to be particular – he had been living all alone in his three-room flat in Baldersgatan. Hard to believe, but it was true, and he remembered his habit of sitting on the balcony in the evenings, watching the swarms of jackdaws circle over the steep roofs of the Cathedral School as he brooded on strange events in Finistère in France and wondered what would become of him in life. Whether he would spend his remaining ten or twenty or thirty years in the same solitary, increasingly depressing and tucked-away life – or whether Marianne would say yes and a new spring would lie ahead for him.
Yes, they had been pretty much the options, thought Barbarotti, taking his eyes off the stately crane for a second to behold his gigantic – and, like the crane, not unimpressive – plastered lump of a leg. There was something itching in there, but he assumed he would just have to grin and bear it. He didn’t think they would be prepared to crack open their splendid handiwork just so a simple DI could scratch an itch.
He went back to the crane and his life. Mused on how immensely remote Baldersgatan now felt, like something he had left behind him long, long ago – in a life that had actually been nothing but a waiting room. A pause for breath after his divorce from Helena. Waiting for something new and real, you might say.
He had hibernated there for five years, sharing the place with his beloved daughter Sarah, who had most certainly provided a bit of light in his darkness; then . . . well, then it had happened, a new life had started. All of a sudden, just like that. Or so it might appear in retrospect. Now he had 350 square metres to play with, in a big old wooden house by the shore out at Kymmen Point. Neighbours pleasantly far removed, a garden that had run rather wild, a loan of one and a half million from Swedbank, and a woman he loved.
And that amount of floor space really was needed, seeing as there were currently – he paused and tallied them up – nine people living there.
Good grief, he thought. From a one-person household to a family of nine within a year. Talk about consequences. He stared at the crane and found he was smiling. There was a quietly purring sense of satisfaction deep inside him, no point trying to hide it, and it was all about . . . well in actual fact, it was only about him and Marianne, when it came down to it.
But a lot of other baggage had come as part of that deal, and as Inspector Barbarotti had always liked making lists – since right back when he was in short trousers – he made one in his head now.
A list of the residents of Villa Pickford, as Mr Hugger, the factory owner whose house it originally was, had named his creation. He was an early film fan and when he built the house in the mid-1930s he named it after his favourite actress.
So there were Gunnar and Marianne for a start. They were the ones who had decided to get hitched and now lived together as man and wife – though she had decided to stick to her maiden name of Grimberg. He had never criticized her for it, and if she felt like changing her name to Barbarotti at some future date, it could no doubt be organized. Who else then?
His kids, of course: Sara, 20; Lars and Martin, 14 and 12.
Marianne’s children: Johan, 16; and Jenny, 14.
Sara’s boyfriend Jorge, 20, but they would both be moving out soon because they had a flat – a shabby but cheap bedsit in Kavaljersgatan in the Väster district that they were doing up, a project that was now into its third month, but by all reasonable estimates it ought to be finished before Christmas. The problem was that both of them had their studies and their jobs and all sorts of other things to take into consideration, and they evidently felt very much at home at Villa Pickford.
They had known each other for six months and Papa Barbarotti thought they could very well wait a while before moving in together, but in this – as in much else – he had no say.
Anyway, for now they were still living at Villa Pickford, and as there were at least ten rooms in the big old place, it didn’t present any problems.
Problems abounded, on the other hand, in the person of the extended family’s ninth member, Brother-in-law Roger. The prize pest.
Roger Grimberg was Marianne’s brother, ten years older than she was, and of course the intention was not for him to stay indefinitely.
But he was as handy as a MacGyver; if you gave him an egg, two pencils and a rubber band, he could make a helicopter in eight minutes. It was practical having him in the house while renovations were still in progress, there was no denying that. And renovations had been in progress ever since they moved in on the first of November. Ten and a half months now. Brother-in-law Roger had been with them full-time for the last five of those, which was the period for which he had been unemployed.
Normally – when he wasn’t banging in nails or sawing or painting or replacing window frames or laying floors or rewiring or installing stoves at Villa Pickford – he lived in Lycksele and worked as a traffic warden.
I can’t imagine there’s much call for traffic wardens up there in a little place like Lycksele, Barbarotti would often think. So of course he’s bloody unemployed.
The thing about Roger Grimberg, apart from the fact that he was so horribly handy that he brought the backs of Barbarotti’s knees out in a rash, was that he liked his drink, and was very fond of airing his views on the state of the world.
The alcohol was relatively under control; he limited himself to a six-pack of beer a day, weekdays and weekends alike. His analysis of the world about him, on the other hand, was harder to put up with.
When you were crawling about with him on a hot roof, for example, knocking nails into things called laths. Was that what made me fall off? thought Barbarotti. Was it one of Brother-in-law Roger’s pronouncements? He couldn’t remember exactly what had preceded his plunge into the wheelbarrow, but he did recall Roger going on at some length about Swedish companies that moved their production abroad – to Eastern Europe and South East Asia – but that was while they were still down on the ground, packing nails into their hernia belts. He and Roger, that was, not the companies. Presumably they weren’t really called hernia belts, but Gunnar Barbarotti liked giving his own names to all those workmen’s accoutrements. It was a matter of integrity and the right to defend your own philosophy of life, and if it got on the prize pest’s nerves into the bargain, then that was a bit of a bonus. If he could annoy him so much that he decided to move back home to his little flat in Lycksele, then that was a hell of a bonus.
Marianne had hinted at it, just the other day. She said her brother was homesick.
It would undeniably be ideal, thought Inspector Barbarotti, adjusting the pillows under his head, if that numbskull could finish banging in the nails on his own while I’m in hospital recovering. Then shove off back up north to his parking meters and stay there.
With this optimistic thought in his head, and the image of the stately crane before his eyes, he fell asleep again, and neither God nor the Devil saw fit to trouble him any further that day.
Not with poker games nor with anything else.
A woman turned up instead, and it took him a few seconds to realize he was actually awake.
She was standing at his bedside, a woman of about fifty. She was sturdily built, though you couldn’t exactly call her fat, and her hair colour, reminiscent of a glass of burgundy, really did not go with her restless, pale-blue eyes.
She was dressed in white, and he realized she must be on the staff in some capacity.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘My name is Alice Ekman-Roos. I’m a nurse on this ward. You aren’t one of my patients though, and perhaps you don’t remember me?’
He read the name badge on one side of her chest. Her name was indeed Ekman-Roos, and it was also very true that he did not remember her. He shook his head and tried to look apologetic.
‘No, I’m sorry.’
‘We were in the same class at upper secondary,’ she said. ‘Only for one year, but anyway.’
Alice Ekman? he thought. Yes, maybe. Maybe there had been someone of that name, though not that hair colour, he was sure of that . . . in the first year, he assumed, because he’d changed to a different course at the start of the second year. Yes, it could be her.
‘I know you’re a police officer and all that, and if you’re too tired you must just say. I was wondering if I could ask you something.’
He could see that she was uncomfortable. That she felt some sense of shame about approaching him in this way. Perhaps she’d been there for a while, waiting for him to wake up?
‘Alice Ekman?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, I think I remember you. You had a friend called Inger, didn’t you?’
Her face relaxed and looked a little less worried for a moment.
‘That’s right. Inger Mattsson. We always went around together.’
‘What can I do for you?’ he asked. ‘I’ve just had an operation, but I’m sure you know that.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘That was why I thought I should grab the chance . . . while you’re on my ward, that is. You’ll be going back to orthopaedic soon.’
‘Where am I now?’
‘This is post-op. You’ll only be here a few hours.’
‘Ah, I see,’ said Barbarotti.
She ran a hand over her hair and glanced uneasily towards the door.
‘The thing is . . . the thing is that I’ve got a problem and I don’t know whether to tell the police or not. I don’t know anyone I can ask, either.’
Barbarotti let his eyes rest on the crane while he waited.
‘It’s a bit embarrassing and I don’t really want it to get out. But on the other hand . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘On the other hand, it could be serious. I’ve been thinking about it for two days now and I simply don’t know what to do. So when I saw your name here, well . . . I thought maybe I could ask your advice, at least.’
She paused and cleared her throat, clearly nervous. ‘I’m sorry for barging in like this, it’s not something I’d do in normal circumstances, of course, but . . . well, I’m a bit desperate, basically.’
‘Desperate?’
‘Yes.’
Gunnar Barbarotti clutched the mattress with both hands and tried to pull himself more upright in the bed.
‘What’s happened, then?’ he asked.
She looked at his plastered leg for a while before she answered. She bit her lower lip as her index fingers restlessly massaged the insides of her thumbs.
‘It’s my husband,’ she said. ‘He seems to have gone and disappeared.’