Let the right one in (23 page)

No one knew about that, not even his sister, and he had kind of a guilty conscience about that.

His dad's stamp collection, which had not been drawn up in the estate, was worth a small fortune as it turned out. He had raided it, a few stamps at a time, when he needed the cash.

Right now the market was at a low, and he didn't have many stamps left. But soon he would have to sell them anyway. Maybe sell those special ones, Norway number one, and buy a round of beer in return for all the beers he had gotten people to buy him the last while. That's what he should do.

Two houses in the country. Cottages. Close to each other. Cottages cost
almost nothing. Then there was Virginia's mother.
Three
cottages. And
then her daughter, Lena. Four. Sure. Buy a whole village while you're at
it.

Virginia was only happy when she was with Lacke; she had said so herself. Lacke wasn't sure he had the capacity to be happy, but Virginia was the only person he liked being with. Why shouldn't they be able to make things work out somehow?

Lacke set the ashtray on his stomach, flicked the ash from the tip, put the cigarette in his mouth, and inhaled deeply.

The only person he liked being with these days. Since Jocke had ... disappeared. Jocke had been good. The only one among all his acquaintances he counted as a friend. This thing about his body being missing was fucked up. It wasn't natural. There should be a funeral at least. A corpse that you can look at, that prompts you to say: yes, there you are, my friend. And you are dead.

Lacke's eyes teared up.

People always had so many damned friends, tossed the word around so lightly. He had had one, only one, and he happened to be the one who was taken from him by a cold-blooded mugger. Why the hell did that kid have to kill Jocke?

Somehow he knew that Gosta wasn't lying or making it up, and Jocke was gone, but it seemed so damned meaningless. The only reasonable explanation was that drugs were involved. Jocke must have been involved in some drug shit and double-crossed the wrong person. But why hadn't he said anything?

Before he left the apartment he emptied the ashtray, stowed the empty wine bottle on the floor of the pantry. Had to put it in upside down so it would fit with all the other bottles.

Yes, damn it. Two cottages. A potato patch. Earth on your knees and
lark song in springtime. And so on. Some day.

He put on his coat and went out. When he walked past the ICA store he threw a kiss to Virginia, who was sitting at a register. She smiled and pouted at him.

On his way back to Ibsengatan he saw a young boy laden with two large paper bags. Someone who lived in his complex, but Lacke didn't know his name. Lacke nodded at him.

"Looks heavy, what you've got there."

"It's OK."

Lacke gazed after the boy struggling on with his bags in the direction of some nearby apartment buildings. Looked so damned happy. That's how you should be. Accept your burden and carry it, with joy.

That's how you should be.

Inside the courtyard he hung around hoping to bump into the guy who had bought him the whisky drinks. The man was sometimes up and walking around at this time. Walked in circles around the courtyard. But he hadn't seen him the last couple of days. Lacke peeked up at the covered windows to the apartment where he thought the man lived.
Probably in there drinking, of course. Could go ring the doorbell.
Maybe another day.

+

When it was starting to get dark Tommy and his mother went down to the graveyard. His dad's grave was just inside the dike that bordered Racksta Lake. His mom was quiet until they reached Kanaanvagen, and Tommy had thought it was because she was grieving but when they walked onto the little road that ran parallel to the lake his mom coughed and said, "So you know, Tommy."

"What."

"Staffan says that something has gone missing from his apartment. Since we were there last." I see.

"Do you know anything about it?"

Tommy scooped up some snow with his hand, shaped it into a ball, and threw it at a tree. Bull's eye.

"Yeah. It's lying under his balcony."

"It's quite important to him because . .."

"It's in the bushes under his balcony, I said."

"How did it end up there?"

A section of the snow-covered wall around the graveyard came into view. A soft red light illuminated the pine trees from below. The grave lantern that Tommy's mom was carrying made a clinking sound. Tommy asked: "Do you have a light?"

"Light? Oh yes. I have a lighter. How did it—"

"I dropped it."

Once he was inside the gate to the graveyard Tommy stopped and looked at the map; the different sections were marked with different letters. His dad was in section D. If you thought about it, it was actually pretty sick. To do this. Burn people up, save the ashes, bury them in the ground, and then call the spot

"Grave 104, section D."

Almost three years ago. Tommy had fuzzy memories of the funeral, or whatever it should be called. That thing with the coffin and a lot of people who alternated between crying and singing.

He remembered he had been wearing shoes that were too big for him, Daddy's shoes, that his feet had slipped around in them on the way home. That he had been afraid of the coffin, sat staring at it the whole time, sure his dad was going to get up out of it and come alive again, but...changed.

Two weeks after the funeral he had gone around with a total fear of zombies. Especially when it was dark, he looked in the shadows and thought he could make out the shrivelled being in the hospital bed, who was no longer his dad, coming at him with arms held out stiffly, like in those movies.

The terror had stopped after they interred the urn. It had only been him, Mom, a gravedigger, and a minister. The gravedigger had carried the urn and walked with a dignified stride while the minister comforted his mom. The whole thing was so fucking ridiculous. The little wooden box with a lid that a guy in carpenter overalls carried in front of him as he walked; that this had anything whatsoever to do with his dad. It was one big joke.

But the terror had lifted and Tommy's relationship to the grave had changed over time. Now he sometimes came here alone, sat a while by the gravestone, and ran his fingers across the carved letters that formed his father's name. That was what he came for. Not the box in the ground, but the name.

The distorted person in the hospital bed, the ashes in the box, none of that was Dad, but the name referred to the person he could remember and therefore he sometimes sat there and rubbed his finger over the depressions in the stone that formed the name MARTIN SAMUELSSON.

"How beautiful it is," his mom said.

Tommy looked out over the graveyard.

Small candles were lit all over. A city viewed from an airplane. Here and there dark figures moved among the gravestones. Mom walked in the direction of Dad's grave, the lantern dangling from her hand. Tommy looked at her thin back and was suddenly sad. Not for his sake, or his mom's sake, no: for everyone. For all the people walking here with their flickering lights in the snow. Themselves only shadows that sat next to the headstones, looked at the inscription, touching it. It was just so ... stupid.

Dead is dead. Gone.

Even so, Tommy walked over to his mom and crouched down next to his dad's grave while she lit the lantern. Didn't want to touch the letters in his name when she was there.

They sat like that for a while and watched the weak flicker make the shading in the marble block crawl and move. Tommy didn't feel anything except a certain embarrassment. To think he went along with this pretend play. After a minute he got up and started to head home. His mom followed. A little too soon, in his opinion. As far as he was concerned, she could cry her eyes out, sit there all night. She caught up with him and carefully put her arm through his. He let her. They walked side by side and looked out over Racksta Lake, where ice had started to form. If this cold snap kept up you'd be able to skate on it in a few days. One thought kept going through his head like a stubborn guitar riff.
Dead is dead. Dead is dead. Dead is dead.

His mom shivered, pressed up against him.

"It's awful."

"You think?"

"Yes, Staffan told me such an awful thing."

Staffan. Couldn't she keep herself from mentioning him, here of all. . .
I see.

"Did you hear about that house that burned down in Angby? The woman who . .."

"Yes."

"Staffan told me that they did the autopsy on her. I think that kind of stuff is so awful. That they do those things."

"Yes. Sure."

A duck was walking on the thin ice toward the open water that had formed near a drain that let out into the lake. The small fishes you could catch in the summer smelled like sewage.

"Where does that drain lead from?" Tommy asked. "Does it come from the crematorium?"

"Don't know. Don't you want to hear about it? Do you think it's too awful?"

"No, no."

And then she told him while they were walking home through the woods. After a while Tommy got interested, started asking questions his mom couldn't answer; she just knew what Staffan had told her. In fact Tommy asked so much, became so interested, that his mom regretted having brought it up in the first place.

+

Later that evening Tommy perched on a crate in the shelter, turning the small likeness of a man firing a pistol this way and that. He placed the statuette on top of three boxes containing cassette tapes, like a trophy. The cherry on top.

Stolen from a .. . policeman!

He carefully locked the shelter back up with the chain and padlock, put the key back in its hiding place, sat down in the clubhouse, and kept thinking about what his mother had told him. After a while he heard tentative steps walking down the corridor. A voice that whispered,

"Tommy?..."

He got up out of the armchair, walked up to the door, and quickly opened it. Oskar was standing on the other side, looking nervous. He held out a bill.

"Here's your money."

Tommy took the fifty and stuffed it into his pocket, smiled at Oskar.

"You going to become a regular here? Come in."

"No, I have to ..."

"Come in, I said. There's something I want to ask you." Oskar sat down in the couch, hands clasped. Tommy flopped down in the armchair, looked at him.

"Oskar. You're a smart guy."

Oskar shrugged modestly.

"You know that house that burned down in Angby? The granny who ran out into the garden in flames?"

"Yes, I've read about it."

"Thought you would. Have they written anything about the autopsy?"

"Not that I know of."

"No. Well, they've done one. An autopsy. And you know what? They didn't find any smoke in her lungs. Know what that means?" Oskar thought about it.

"That she wasn't breathing."

"Right. And when do you stop breathing? When you're dead, right?"

"Yes," Oskar said eagerly. "I've read about that kind of stuff. That's why they always do an autopsy when there's been a fire. To make sure that there isn't... that no one started the fire to cover up the fact that they murdered the person who's in there. In the fire. I read about it in ... well,
Hemmets Journal,
actually, about a guy from England who killed his wife and who knew about this so he had ... before he started the fire he stuck a tube down her throat and ..."

"OK, OK, so you know. Great. But in this case there wasn't any smoke in her lungs and even so the granny managed to get herself out into the garden and run around out there for a while before she died. How can that be?"

"She must have been holding her breath. No, of course not. You can't do that. I've read about that somewhere. That's why people always . . ."

"OK, OK. Explain this to me."

Oskar leaned his head in his hands, thought hard. Then he said: "Either they made a mistake or else she was running around like that even though she was dead."

Tommy nodded. "Exactly. And you know what? I don't think these dudes make those kind of mistakes. Do you?"

"No, but..."

"Dead is dead."

"Yes."

Tommy pulled a thread out of the armchair, rolled it up into a ball between his fingers, and then flicked it away.

"Yes. At least that's what we like to think."

PART THREE

SNOW, MELTING AGAINST SKIN

And after he had lain his hand on mine. With joyful mien, whence I was
comforted, He led me in among the secret things.

—Dante Alighieri,
The Divine Comedy,
Inferno, Canto III

[trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]

'Tm not a sheet. 1' am a REAL ghost. BOO.. .BOO... Tou 're supposed to
be scared?' "Butrmnot."

—
Nationalteatern," Kaldolmaroch kalsipper

'Swedish rock/performance group

5 NOVEMBER

Morgan's feet were freezing. The cold spell had arrived at about the same time as the submarine foundered, and it had only gotten worse during the past week. He loved his old cowboy boots but he couldn't fit thick socks in them. And anyway, there was a hole in one sole. Sure he could get some Chinese takeout for a hundred but he'd rather be cold. It was nine-thirty in the morning and he was on his way home from the subway. He had been to the junkyard in Ulvsunda to see if they needed a hand, maybe make a couple of hundred, but business was bad. No winter boots this year either. He had had a cup of coffee with the guys in the office, which was overflowing with spare parts, catalogs, and pinup calendars, then headed to the subway.

Larry emerged from between the high-rises and, as usual, looked like he had just received a death sentence.

"Hey there, old man," Morgan yelled.

Larry nodded curtly, as if he had known from the moment he woke up this morning that Morgan would be standing here, then walked over to him.

"Hi. How's it going?"

"My toes are freezing, my car's at the junkyard, I have no work, and I'm on my way home to have a bowl of instant soup. How about you?" Larry walked on in the direction of Bjornsonsgatan, taking the path through the park.