The trunk of the Tesla magically opened without any obvious push of a button on Lukas’s part. Brand hefted in her duffel bag herself. She noticed the car held no passengers. She searched her mind for the names of Lukas’s wife and children. Her memory proved too fogged to function.
“Isabella and the girls went separately,” he said.
The two of them experienced an awkward moment as they both approached the driver’s side door of the sedan. “Okay if I drive?” Brand asked.
The request stopped Lukas Dalgren cold. He halted mid-step, like a cartoon character.
“You drive? But it is my car.”
“I get terribly car-sick unless I am behind the wheel,” Brand explained. “Do you mind?”
Brand could see at once that Lukas did indeed mind. “You are exhausted from the flight,” he said. “You don’t want to fall asleep while driving.”
“I slept on the plane,” Brand lied. She wondered if she looked as worn out as she felt.
“I’d rather you do not drive,” Lukas said firmly. “The vehicle is brand new.”
“Then you probably don’t want me to vomit inside it,” Brand said. They stood facing each other in front of the driver’s side door.
“I did not expect this,” Lukas said, exasperated.
“I can go ahead and rent my own car, if you prefer.” Brand wondered if this would be possible. She didn’t have an international driver’s license. Was one necessary in order to get a rental car in Sweden? She didn’t know. Lukas Dalgren looked as though his gleaming, polished head might explode.
“It’s okay.” Brand spoke softly. The technique was one she had picked up in her former life as a street cop, two simple words uttered confidently and directly but in a quiet, non-confrontational undertone. Pronounced the right way, the phrase brought everyone back to earth. She had employed the strategy often to defuse explosive situations.
“How will you know where to go?” Lukas asked. His manner resembled that of a petulant child.
“You’ll tell me,” Brand said.
Heaving a theatrical sigh, Lukas offered up the expensive vehicle’s key fob.
2.
A cold day to sit motionless on a tarmac sidewalk, thought Jonas Nordin. An absent sun, a February sky the color of wet wool.
Nordin worked as a security guard at the front entrance to Åhléns, the big Stockholm department store. Almost daily, a Romani beggar posted himself across the street from Nordin’s own station. The beggar’s method of eliciting coins from passersby involved planting himself on the pavement, swaddled in a heavy blanket, a dirty paper cup in front of him. He would remain unmoving like that for hours.
The poor wretch was probably dreaming of the cloudless blue heavens of his childhood in Romania. Now he found himself plopped down on freezing Drottninggatan, a busy shopping street in the heart of the Swedish capital.
Our modern world, thought Nordin. A marvel and a mess.
He attempted one of the empathy exercises suggested by the self-improvement programs to which he was addicted. Nordin focused on the unimaginable journey that had led the foreign mendicant across Europe from where his life began. The exercise failed. Other thoughts kept intruding, wicked, narrow-minded opinions.
Nordin knew he should think as a good sympathetic person would. He believed in an open and welcoming Sweden. His spiritual beliefs centered on the equality of souls. But a deep-seated impulse in his mind wished the beggar would simply vanish. A turd on the sidewalk, whispered his prejudice, which he found impossible to damp down entirely. Sweep it up and throw it in the trash.
The beggar-person was actually familiar to him. He even knew the unfortunate soul’s name, Luri Kováč. Attempting to behave like an upstanding Swedish citizen toward the less privileged, Nordin had reached out. Several times he brought Luri cups of hot chocolate, or water in the hot summers. But still some part of Nordin wished him away.
A second Romani beggar posted nearby summoned up a much different response. Nordin knew her name, too. Varzha Luna held a particular fascination for him. The girl embraced a more theatrical approach than the sidewalk lump across the street. She made for an arresting sight. Varzha always wore whiteface makeup, always dressed in the same snow-white wedding gown.
Normally she stayed as motionless as the other one. Nordin saw her often in her spot on the street, bride of stone, bride of none. The girl might be beautiful if only she would remove her makeup, since otherwise her face remained lost behind an impenetrable disguise. No one would stop for her, Nordin noticed. No one paid the least attention. The pedestrians passed by, eyeless and heartless, unseeing and unfeeling, their shopping bags bouncing alongside beside their well-toned thighs.
But then, two or three times every hour, the girl roused herself. In a sweet, pure voice, she would sing the popular Romani songs of love and pain. The one Varzha Luna began now was a modern carol left over from the Christmas season.
Open the door, oh wandering bride of Christ
Long have I wearied and far have I come
She always went accompanied by a sidekick. Her feeble-minded twin brother Vago stood beside his sister Varzha. He played a child-size violin that was too small for him, scratching out the song’s melody. Dressed in loose, harlequin-style pajamas, Vago also wore whiteface, a clownboy acolyte of a street-level madonna.
Nordin couldn’t help but feel for Varzha. For him, the sound of the young girl’s voice was like a knife to the heart, floating as it did over the oblivious buzz and hustle of the street. Here was a pure young woman offering up a priceless gift. A few passersby heard what Nordin heard and stopped in their tracks, delivering gold ten-kronor coins into her paper cup. But many turned their faces away and kept walking, denying the miracle happening right in front of them.
Thus far, Jonas Nordin’s life had not gone the way he intended. He had just turned thirty. His ambitions
