THE FLATSCREEN TV on the shelf over Dráva’s long, narrow bar lacked sound, but it didn’t matter. Out of the moving puzzle of events without voices, a strange slide show emerged.

Ivan smiled as the excited cops in helmets with black visors and automatic weapons in their hands ran after each other in a long line. They looked like the tail of a large rat slinking down into the underground station next to the police station. At least fifteen, maybe twenty of them.

What the hell were they doing down there?

It was up here where things seemed to be happening.

From multiple angles, video cameras showed the Kronoberg police complex was blocked off and the entrances were barred. Uniformed cops guarded flapping plastic—like a large package no one was allowed to open before the crime was solved.

A smell of tannic acid was being spread from the percolator behind the coffee machine and the bottom of the glass coffee pot was covered with black film. Neither Dacso nor his wife had filled it and now they were gone. There was no one behind the counter, and not a living soul could be seen through the little round window in the door leading out to the kitchen and the big work surface.

The restaurant was empty apart from the woman sitting a few tables away in the corner, where it was a little darker. Her thin fair hair was nearly invisible but formed a hairstyle that didn’t really agree with the orange-yellow face and dry lips. She usually sat there, at the same table, every day, and drank a demi-carafe of the house white wine.

He made an effort to ask her if she had seen the owner of the restaurant but changed his mind. People alone at places like Dráva were always looking for a chance for a drunken conversation, and it never stopped but ground on and on. It was still possible to see that she had been beautiful, though she was doing her best to spoil it. Her self-image was likely still there, in which she was probably just as beautiful. That was how she smiled and moved, unaware of how years of daily consumption of alcohol had carved away at her at the same time and created a false image that was so easy to hold on to. He too had been close to being caught up in it before he made the decision to change.

The plastic-wrapped police complex on Kungsholmen had been replaced by a bombed house on the West Bank. How something could look so black when the sky in the background was so blue. . . . He couldn’t bear wars that had been around longer than his sons. Instead he was heading in behind the checkout to the kitchen door, to look for Dacso and his fucking coffee beans, when he noticed that the sky on the TV changed again and now it was as gray as lead. The news report from the West Bank had switched to pictures of a Swedish plot of low-growing spruce forest around a bumpy gravel road.

And the feeling bit him on the neck. Again.

And deceit’s ice-cold blade landed. Again.

And it had to do with Leo. Again.

He reached over the bar, looking for the goddamn remote control. He recognized that particular gravel road and knew it ended at an abandoned farmhouse and a barn with its large doors hanging on rusty hinges.

Now.

Now he must hear what the voice had to say.

But the oblong box with little buttons in various colors and strange icons here and there was gone, just like the coffee and Dacso. He had to continue staring at a mute screen. The barn—which he recognized as he had the gravel road—was burning. It was burning! The reddish yellow fire was devouring the wooden walls and climbing further up to the sky as black smoke.

It was in there that Leo kept his tools.

What am I doing? Planning our future. You said it yourself—if you can change, I can change.

All they needed to build everything anew was in the truck. Father and son. Together.

It’s great that you aren’t hesitating anymore because I seriously need your help.

Now it was burning down. Leo had stood so close to him, displaying everything, explaining.

Everything was being consumed by red-and-yellow flames.

The telephone was always in the inner pocket of his suit jacket. Their own pathway of communication, just between them. He pressed the button for the preprogrammed number, as Leo had taught him, and waited. . . . Nothing. Leo’s telephone was switched off. Their line, broken.

Leo? Was your brother right?

Are you using me?

Ivan closed his eyes and tried to remember. What had Leo actually given as an answer to his question? No, he didn’t remember. Or was it that he didn’t want to remember the sentence that had sounded so convincing at the time?

Yeah. I mean what I’m saying.

“Coffee?”

It was burning on the screen, burning and burning.

“Do you want some, coffee?”

Everything . . . everything is a lie and is burning up, he thought. A big, fat fucking lie. Everything you attempt, everything you accomplish burns sooner or later.

That’s how it is. It burns.

It turns into flames.

It turns into soot.

That’s why you didn’t come to pick me up. I was on time and you didn’t come.

“Hey, Ivan? Coffee?”

“What?”

“I just put on some fresh coffee.”

Dacso. He had come back, from somewhere.

“No . . . no coffee.”

Leo had used his own father. Ivan didn’t know how or why but he was certain that Vincent had been right—that he had been reduced to a pawn in some kind of fucking game. A little green plastic soldier, a game piece. With no understanding of what it meant in the big picture. He felt it in his neck, chest, stomach, and it felt as if there was only one way to stop the pain gnawing him inside and out.

“Give me a bottle of wine.”

The grip fell on his neck, the second time in one week. Once too many—and the reason Ivan Dûvnjac could no longer manage what he’d promised himself.

“But you . . . you don’t drink? Wine, I mean.”

“The bottle, for fuck’s sake!”

Dacso shrugged.

“Okay. You’re a customer. You can do as you like. It’ll cost two hundred and twenty-five kronor.”

The fine row of bottles stood next to the loudspeaker on the shelf circling the bar. Dacso pulled one of them down, a bottle of red.

“And you’re sure about this, Ivan? Even though you’ve stopped.”

“The bottle.”

Dacso slowly pulled out the cork and reached for a fresh glass.

“Two hundred and twenty-five. If you want the whole bottle. Or sixty kronor by the glass.”

A promise to yourself, what the fuck is that?

Nothing.

Because it can’t change other people.

“All of it. The whole bottle. And you can take it out of the money you got from Leo.”

“I didn’t get any money for wine from your son. But he paid in advance for the dinner you’re going to eat here.”

If I can change, you can change.

Even that was a lie.

It burns, like everything burns.

“Yes, that money. For the shitty food we haven’t eaten and aren’t going to eat at your dive.”

“Your son said I should hold on to it until he came back.”

“My son isn’t coming back!”

Ivan pulled the room-temperature bottle out of Dacso’s hand. It felt better to fill the glass himself. Egri Bikavér, bull’s blood in Hungarian. He knew fucking well what it meant. As he swallowed the first lukewarm drops, he saw Dacso putting five-hundred-kronor notes, four of them, on the bar. Money that belonged to his son and now he would drink it up. And it felt so pleasant in his throat, in his whole body, like an old friend you’ve hated for two years, who suddenly makes you laugh again.