Sun and Shadow (37 page)

Not everybody has booked into the Empire State Building, not everybody is flying back and forth over the lines of longitude in order to fool time. We are having a nice, peaceful time here and we can smell the flowers, he thought as one of the floats passed by under his window: a gigantic bouquet of flowers made of wood, or whatever it was, chipboard, surrounded by living flowers.

He felt Angela’s hand on his shoulder.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go out?” he asked.

“Absolutely certain,” she said, sniffing at the long-stemmed rose he’d given her a few minutes before. “We’re having a nice, peaceful time here and we can smell the flowers.”

“All the rest of Gothenburg is down there,” he said.

The phone rang. His mother answered in the hall.

“Erik, it’s for you,” she shouted.

Angela looked at him.

He took the couple of strides necessary to get to the living room phone.

“Hello ... er ... It’s Patrik.”

“Hello, Patrik. How are things?”

“Er ... all right, I guess.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m around at Ria’s place. What do you want?”

“You were trying to get hold of me yesterday.”

“Oh, it was nothing. I had an idea, that’s all.”

“Tell me what it was, then.”

“Well ... er ... that guy who came down in the elevator. You know, in that building where the mur—”

“I’m with you, Patrik.”

“I think he was wearing a uniform.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Under his overcoat, I mean.”

“Why do you think he was wearing a uniform?”

“I dunno, it just looked like that.”

“What kind of a uniform?”

“Well, it was sort of ... with things on. Dark blue ... with things on, maybe his shirt was light blue, and his overcoat sort of opened up a bit ... when he went out of the door and there was a flash of something sort of gold on his shirt. In front of it.”

“You sound as if you’re describing a police uniform, Patrik.”

“Yes, well.”

“Did you think of a police uniform?”

“Not then.”

“Now, though?”

“Maybe.”

“Anything else?”

“What?”

“Did you see anything else that could be part of a uniform?”

“Well ... it could have been a belt or a strap, but I’m not sure if I saw that.”

“What about his head? Now that you’ve had time to think. Did he have anything on his head?”

Winter watched the tail end of the procession wriggling away toward the Avenue. A snake. It looked like a snake now, thinner at the tail end, wriggling from side to side and followed by the black mass filling the street and the park.

Angela was still standing at the window, rose in hand. It sounded as if his mother was filling the shaker with ice in the kitchen. Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny were playing “Message to a Friend” at low volume.

“He didn’t have anything on his head,” Patrik said.

“All right.”

“There is one thing ... I’ve thought about it a lot.”

Winter waited, said nothing. His mother looked into the room. Angela gave her a smile.

“I think I’ve seen him somewhere else,” Patrik said.

 

Bartram followed the procession at a distance, taking parallel streets and giving way to the crowds of people who seemed to be getting forced back from the center of activities.

He waited at the corner. The Goddess had turned left and was coming toward him. There were twice as many people as usually turn out for special festivities.

Some people near him were singing. Others were hugging one another with sudden, jerky movements. Everything was so tremendously big. The newspapers had almost killed themselves in their efforts to outdo each other in hyping the millennium. The television was even worse.

Nobody thought any longer that all things electronic would break down. Everything would work just as badly as usual, he thought. The trams would continue not running. People would still get furious. People would still spit at him.

He continued northward. The procession began to close up as it approached its destination at Lilla Bommen. There were still a few idiots who hadn’t caught on to what was happening, standing by their cars on the road, ringed in for the evening, and indeed the night, by the cheering crowds.

People were keeping an eye on the sky over the river, waiting. It had grown cold again, and people’s breath formed clouds that slowly rose and grew denser. That could start it raining, thought Bartram, but the mist dispersed higher up and suddenly the sky over Hisingen exploded. Two thousand years of pyrotechnical skills came to a climax. It started with a fan of gold that covered the whole province.

 

Winter was in the kitchen preparing the New Year’s dinner. He could hear his mother’s and Angela’s voices in the living room. He took a sip of the champagne he’d served earlier. Dry and light. The best champagne should be served early in the evening. Angela had sniffed at it, then drunk a little of the best table water on the market. Patrik was an observant boy and he was always strolling around town. Half a million people lived in Gothenburg, and that wasn’t all that many. You kept seeing faces. Once, twice, three times.

They could talk to him after the holiday. It was an opening, possibly a beam of light.

He decided to concentrate on the first course. The fish stock was ready and strained. It had been simmering for four hours the previous night, and had been made with fish bones, a leek, shallots, fresh ginger, white peppercorns, and water.

He mixed the dressing and put it to one side: the stock, fresh lime juice, grated horseradish, sea salt, and a little freshly ground black pepper.

He carefully stirred a teaspoon of freshly ground, unrefined sugar and half a teaspoon of sesame oil into three eggs, then fried thin omelets in a little rapeseed oil before letting them cool on top of one another. Then he rolled each of the omelets and cut the rolls into thin slices and put them on one side.

He had just finished opening the oysters, two and a half dozen. He checked them again, then cut twenty-five rinsed sugar snap pea pods diagonally and blanched them in boiling water for thirty seconds before cooling them with cold water. Having drained them, he mixed them in a large bowl with finely chopped red onion, a little watercress, and some leaves of a lettuce known as upland cress that had a delicate, slightly hot, peppery taste. Finally he added the thin slices of omelet.

He heated up some more oil in a deep frying pan and sautéed the oysters very quickly on both sides at a high heat. He repeated this several times, then placed them on top of the salad, one by one. When he had finished, he drizzled over the dressing. He carefully tossed the oyster salad, divided it onto three plates, endeavoring to be as fair as possible in distributing the oysters.

He thought that should keep them going until the more substantial course, which was rack of veal with mashed garlic potato and pesto. The meat had started to turn brown and interesting smells were coming from the oven. It was spiced with coarsely chopped cloves of garlic, newly ground black pepper, and olive oil—he’d put the ingredients into the mixer and turned them into a paste, then rubbed it into the veal and allowed it to marinate for five hours.

 

For Morelius, Gothenburg was like a sea of fire. No. It was the sky that was a sea of fire, constantly shifting shades of red, never still. The official fireworks display had been followed by the unofficial ones, everybody competing with everybody else. He’d heard that five or six people had had accidents with rockets already, and it wasn’t midnight yet. You could hear ambulance sirens occasionally, but as far as he knew, nobody had died so far.

The slopes leading up to Skansen were full of people, mainly youngsters. The police were in position. Many of them were in uniform. He saw a girl hanging around Ivarsson’s neck, trying to give him a kiss. Ivarsson allowed it to happen, then bowed graciously by way of thanks. All was calm. No panic. It was just after eleven. Skanstorget, below where he was standing, was starting to fill up, like a semiarctic Times Square. Morelius had never been to New York, but he’d seen pictures.

He was a bit to one side of the worst crush when the couple emerged from the crowd. They recognize me, of course, he thought. This is a small town, really. They seem to be sober enough. Now they’re coming to me.

“A happy New Year,” Maria said.

Morelius nodded in acknowledgment.

“You’re keeping calm, I see,” Morelius said.

“Straight edge.”

“Eh?”

“We’re not getting carried away,” she said. “We’re taking nothing, drinking nothing.”

“Very sensible.”

“You enjoy everything all the more,” the boy said.

“Exactly.”

‘Are you busy tonight?“ she asked. ”Is there a lot to do?“

“It’s all been very quiet so far.”

“But the fun will be starting soon.”

“Yes.”

“Will you be working all night?”

“Until four in the morning.”

“All over town?”

“In the town center. But they might call out the circus to somewhere else, of course.”

 

“This is amazingly good,” Siv Winter said.

“It was hard to find decent calamari,” explained Winter.

“Just as well,” said Angela.

“Oysters are even better when they’re cooked,” Winter’s mother said.

“I agree.”

“Anyway ...” Winter said. He raised his glass of Sancerre. “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” said Angela and his mother, raising their glasses.

They drank and put their glasses down again.

“I think it’s going to be a lovely year,” his mother said. She looked at them. Winter hadn’t noticed any difference in her voice or movements. She had drunk two glasses of champagne earlier and said no to a Tanqueray and tonic, which was a good thing, good for the taste buds apart from anything else. Anybody who drinks liquor before a gourmet meal should have it injected intravenously. “Is it awful of me to say that? After what’s happened ... your father and the ...”

“It’s good that you can say that, Mom.” He could still taste the trace of dry earthiness after the wine. “It is going to be a lovely year.”

“It hasn’t even started yet,” Angela said, looking at the clock and thinking about fate again. She took a sip of bottled water. The baby was calm just at the moment. She ate a little more and thought about all the things that were going to happen in the next few months. Nothing would be the same as before. It’s going to be a new life. I’m not sentimental, but there’s something special about New Year this year. The millennium coincides with us.

 

The new millennium boomed its way over Gothenburg, the churches sang. Two thousand people stood arm in arm in Skanstorget and sang “Auld Lang Syne” in exactly the same way as they were doing in Ab erdeen, in a straight line westward over the North Sea.

Twenty jet planes appeared as the clocks struck. One for every century after Christ. Two thousand people held their hands over their ears and screamed in delight. The jets crisscrossed the sky in a series of highly dangerous maneuvers, then headed off back to the south.

Patrik and Maria were holding hands, and some of the people around them burst into tears. One girl threw up into a snowdrift. Two men fell backward into the snow and made snow angels. That tempted several more to start a sort of wave of snow angels. After three minutes there was a long line of people making angels in the snow. The fireworks display seemed never-ending. The angels shone red and gold.

“Do you feel anything special?” Patrik yelled.

“I feel a bit older,” Maria yelled back.

“We’re a thousand years older,” Patrik yelled, and a gang of revelers who had set up a meal on some stones started cheering.

 

“A happy New Year, Angela,” he said, kissing her. She tasted of the four drops of Lanson champagne she’d allowed to moisten her tongue. “A happy New Year, Mother,” he said and bent down over his mother, who had lain down and was crying.

The twelfth chime from the radio died away. The apartment seemed to change its proportions as the red sky was shattered by all the shooting stars from the fireworks display. They heard the jet planes.

Then they heard an ambulance in the street below, the first of the night.

Angela kissed him.

“A happy New Year, Erik.”

“It will be the best yet, I can promise you that.”

 

When the door opened he said what he’d intended to say and the man smiled, or gave a laugh. Then he kicked the door in and hit the man twice in the stomach and the chest with his baton. He put on the mask.

She shouted something from inside and he walked through the hall that was striped from the explosions outside, the wall was changing all the time, new patterns were appearing. He heard the man groaning on the floor behind him. Hard to breathe.

She was getting up from the sofa but he was there before she could stand up and he did the same to her. She made the same kinds of noise after half a minute, groaning, gasping for breath. A wheezing sound from somewhere farther down.

He was panting so much himself that he thought he’d be forced to take the mask off in order to get some oxygen to his brain. He turned to the window, pulled his mask halfway up, and gulped in air. The world out there was a glittering slit through his almost-closed eyes. His headache was getting worse.