To the Top of the Mountain (45 page)

Eurydice had checked into the hotel in Skövde under the name Sonja Karlsson. Afterwards, she became Baucis.

Rajko Nedic’s daughter must have taken the two mobile phones from her father’s restaurant in Stockholm; she must have found out, somehow, that her father was planning to make a large financial transaction and that the meeting place would be decided in Kvarnen on the evening of 23 June. So she sent her beloved Per Karlsson, the Orpheus who had brought her back from the underworld, the Philemon with whom she would grow old and would die alongside, and he found out that the meeting would take place in the Sickla industrial estate. The pair made their way there, and if they had tried to steal from her father’s ferocious gang of war criminals, then they would most likely have been slaughtered. But that didn’t happen. Instead, they were more or less handed the briefcase – by a gang of Nazi robbers, paradoxically enough. They took it and fled. But there was no money inside, only a key. Sonja tried to think of possible safe-deposit boxes. She had no idea, but she knew where her father sold his drugs. They split up, each looking in a different place. Two meandering routes across the map of Sweden.

Paul and Kerstin wandered on through Per Karlsson’s little flat. Strange wooden sculptures stood everywhere, shapes of all kinds, and a box room had been turned into a workshop. The floor was covered in iron filings, and in a rubbish bin there was a piece of sheet iron. From this, a key had been punched. A comparison with the safe-deposit-box key revealed identical teeth and notches.

And then, just over a week after the World Police and Fire Games began, a charity supporting the rights of children announced that a large sum of money had been deposited anonymously into their account. Five million kronor, to be precise. The money had been paid in from Paris.

Baucis and Philemon had found their safe-deposit box.

Kerstin Holm sang, thinking that for the first time in her life, justice had been done.

She looked down to Jan-Olov Hultin, sitting with his wife in the front row, in the middle of the rowdy Chavez family. Pappa Chavez, Carlos, glanced suspiciously from time to time at the man with the enormous nose and owl-like glasses. Hadn’t someone very similar split his eyebrow during a veterans’ football match once?

Hultin was longing for his lawn. He was longing, like Sisyphus, to push his manual lawnmower up and down the slope, avoiding all weeds in accordance with the sadly neglected principle of ‘Live and let live’.

Then he would bathe in Ravalen, make a comeback in the Stockholm Police veterans’ football team, travel to Greece, and never, ever shoot another person. Enough was enough.

Still, he wouldn’t retire just yet.

And it was harder than ever to tell weeds from grass.

He glanced over the aisle to Viggo Norlander. He was sitting, dressed in a much-too-tight dress coat, next to Astrid. Little Charlotte, with her inward-backward-sloping mug, was hanging over his shoulder. From her mouth a chalk-white dribble of vomit ran like bird shit onto the shoulder of his jacket. Then she started to scream. Norlander patted her gently on the back, and didn’t say ‘shut up’ even once.

Norlander looked over the aisle towards a curious gathering of white heads. He had never seen the entire Söderstedt family gathered in one place before. Arto Söderstedt sat, hair slicked back like someone from the 1930s, following Norlander’s eyes as they moved, step by step, over five white-haired children’s heads, over a white-haired mother’s head, and on to the slicked-back white hair of the father’s. He saw these steps, laughed to himself, and pointed at his shoulder. Norlander prodded the mess with his finger and shook his head.

Söderstedt was thinking about the bank loan he had been forced to take out to pay for their brand-new family car, a Toyota Picnic. He knew that he should be thinking about lots of other things, but he didn’t have the energy. Not yet. He thought about how fun it would be, driving again. It was finally time for a holiday – the family had a car, but no money to go anywhere. He thought that he was nearing a fundamental societal paradox. But he didn’t have the energy to work it out. Not yet.

Not as the police choir’s ‘The Time of Blossoming Now Arrives’ died out in a distinctive, drawn-out bass tone which was replaced by the familiar opening notes of a wedding march.

The bridal couple passed slowly down the aisle. He was dark, she was light, and there were no walls between them.

Sara Svenhagen looked at her father as she walked down the aisle. Chief Forensic Technician Brynolf Svenhagen, cut from a traditional cloth, was already crying loudly. It’s a bit premature, Sara thought to herself. Then she thought about the distorted images of loneliness, about how she had seen far too much for her age, and about the nightmares which had slowly begun to evaporate. The enormous stomach glowed on, undisturbed. She thought of Ludvig Johnsson, about the death of fathers, and about the way that their own steps ploughed a path which could never be followed. She thought about the virtual world, about the weightlessness of cybersphere compared to heavy reality. She thought about the connection between Eros and Thanatos, between love and death; she thought about the strange justice of fate, and about Rajko Nedic’s tongue. And she thought about Jorge Chavez, about how unpredictable love is, about all of the prerequisites which make it possible, and she looked into his eyes and smiled, for the first time, it seemed to her, without any reservations.

Honeymoon in Chile, and then back to the new job. In the A-Unit.

It didn’t sound too bad.

Jorge Chavez wasn’t thinking about much. He was mostly worrying that the enormous Chavez clan wouldn’t be able to toe the line in the cool Protestant church. He thought to himself that the Chileans seemed to be in the majority. The black-headed mass seemed to be bubbling unpredictably. He surprised himself, looking out at the room through Niklas Lindberg’s eyes. Why were they such a threat? What was it they were threatening? Nothing more than a warped self-image. A Swede looking in a mirror, seeing something completely different to what everyone else sees. Where everyone else saw a human being, Niklas Lindberg saw a superhuman. How had that metamorphosis taken place? Was it the same thing as when the geeky young Agne became Bullet, ‘the toughest guy you’ll ever meet’? Or was that too simple?

Then it struck him that this was hardly what he should be thinking about as he walked down the aisle to marry his sweetheart. Certain bachelor tendencies still needed to be washed away. On both sides of the ruined walls. The previously mined areas needed to be rebuilt. Though carefully.

He turned round. Simply put, he was happy. Ecstatically happy. That was enough. For now.

He caught sight of Paul Hjelm, sitting alone, almost out of sight at the back of the church. Paul smiled to him, happily, as though you could actually share happiness. Jorge smiled back, believing for a moment that it was possible.

Hjelm had sat at the back of the room because he was alone. He was alone in being alone. Even Mörner up at the front had his missus with him. Or his mistress, at least. But Cilla and the children had stayed in Dalarö. He had spent a few weeks getting close to them again, returning as the Prodigal Son and slowly, slowly becoming part of the family again. They could stay behind if they wanted to – and why not? Why make a big deal of it?

After the Sickla Slaughter and all that had gone with it, it seemed difficult to make a big deal out of anything. Maybe this was maturity, or maybe it was tiredness. The line between the two is often as fine as a hair.

What he knew for certain was that he was a man who had killed.

He thought about mountain tops. Several different mountain tops. The A-Unit’s, for example, the now-permanent A-Unit’s. They had scaled their mountain, but the official story was partly doctored, partly missing a couple of figures – and with them, the very thing that the entire plot had hinged on. That which had claimed all those lives. Money.

It was always money.

And with that, he arrived at the next peak. Baucis and Philemon’s:

The neighbourhood, said he,

Shall justly perish for impiety:

You stand alone exempted; but obey

With speed, and follow where we lead the way:

Leave these accurs’d; and to the mountain’s height

Ascend; nor once look backward in your flight.

He smiled for a moment, and a Shakespeare quote popped into his head. From
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
‘We will, fair queen, up to the mountain’s top / And mark the musical confusion / Of hounds and echo in conjunction.’

He climbed the next peak. An iceberg’s. His thoughts turned to Conny Nilsson. The Kvarnen Killer. The tip of an iceberg. And now he had seen a lot of the iceberg.

Was it growing bigger, or about to melt?

Of the Nazi gang, only the humiliated Bullet Kullberg remained. How dangerous were men like that? How many were there? Were they a real threat to democracy? Were they in the process of – more subtly than with the Sickla Slaughter – infiltrating the whole of society? Were their values and judgements slowly gaining ground? Or were they just the modern equivalent of the inhumane undercurrent which had always flowed beneath society?

The only thing Paul Hjelm knew was that he didn’t know.

Still, you could also twist the reasoning slightly. If Conny Nilsson hadn’t cracked Anders Lundström’s head in the Kvarnen bar at 21.42 on 23 June, then the Sickla Slaughter’s complicated web would never have been revealed. It was a Gordian knot.

He tried to find a
sens moral
in that fact. It didn’t work especially well. But he would keep looking.

The bridal pair had reached the front of the church. The marriage service began.

But Paul Hjelm didn’t hear much. He was elsewhere. Trying to understand the
meaning
. He wondered if there was one. After all, it wasn’t a work of literature he was living in.

But for a brief moment, he thought that he could make out the invisible pattern.

Maybe the meaning was the metamorphosis. The constant, necessary, lengthy, unavoidable, difficult-to-master transformation. Keeping your chin above the water, whatever the weather.

The marriage service ended. The bridal couple kissed. The police choir – led by a bellowing bass – broke into a paean. And Paul Hjelm thought to himself: a new millennium. He thought: Sweden. He thought: mankind.

And through him – the entire time, non-stop – a voice coursed; a voice which, with its last ounce of strength, said: ‘Paul, I love you.’

His eyes drifted to Kerstin, to her chorister colleague Gunnar, to the bridal couple Sara and Jorge, to Jan-Olov, to Arto, to Viggo.

The song bounced off the church walls, blending with its own echo and becoming a confused tune. And suddenly, for a short, short moment, he imagined that he understood Rilke’s
Duino Elegies
.

‘For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear.’

And Paul Hjelm sang.

He didn’t really know what he was singing, but he sang.

Until the end.

49

HE HAS LOST
his language. He sits, waiting, hunched over. He is a wordless little bundle. The footsteps come closer, and he waits wordlessly. He lies on the floor and pulls the sheet towards his face, as though it could protect him. He is lying on the floor because he can no longer sleep in a bed. Beds scare the life out of him. He hears the door swing open in that unmistakable way that should be soundless but isn’t, it echoes through him, and he knows that it will echo through him for the rest of his life. However long that will be. The sheet is ripped away, a zip is opened, a crude laugh rings out and he cries and cries, beyond tears, and he cannot say a word, because he has no words for it.

His tongue is gone.

He is in the shadowy depths of Thanatos.

50

THE RED LIGHT
of dawn spills out over the pale, shining blue sea. The azure blue carving its way up out of the display of colours. A faint heat haze dances on the horizon, and above the treetops at the edge of the forest, a light, fleeting mist floats. Several small rain clouds gather above the little stone house – without blocking out the sun, still hesitating just above the curvature of the Earth.

The curvature of the Earth, so visible.

All weather conditions, all times of day seem to be gathered in one place.

On the porch of the little house, a man sits reading. It is warm but raining slightly. The rain patters gently on the roof of the porch, and when he looks up from his book, steam is rising between the falling raindrops.

A woman comes out of the house and stands beside him; she places a hand on his shoulders, and receives his arm around her hip.

She can see the foam along the edge of the pale blue water. And she hears a sound, a mysterious clicking sound. And she understands what it is.

It’s the dolphins’ song.

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Epub ISBN: 9781448189694

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Published by Harvill Secker 2014

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Copyright © 2000 Arne Dahl

English translation copyright © 2014 Alice Menzies

Arne Dahl has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, and all names of places and descriptions of events, are the products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons or places is entirely coincidental.