other side of the road. The last thing Nyberg saw before everything vanished in a sea of fire was Alexander Bryusov’s bloody face being dragged across the asphalt.
27
That’s the only thing he’s thinking.
He sits motionless for a while on the living room sofa, imagining that he’s listening.
The body performs no dance of death, as it lies there on the floor, without moving, with two holes in the head. It’s a piece of dead meat; nothing more.
Without joy, he mentally checks another name off the list.
Art has become a trade, and a mission has become an execution. All that’s left is an inexorable, imperative list.
In the wall he leaves behind two slugs from Kazakhstan.
28
It’s night and they’re sitting in Hjelm’s hotel room in central Vaxjo. Each of them is holding a photo of Goran Andersson; three pictures that they’ve brought along, given to them by Lena Lundberg.
Kerstin Holm is half-reclining on the bed. In her hands she’s holding a group photo of the staff at the bank in Algotsmala from the summer of 1992. They’re posing outside the bank, all four of them smiling pleasantly. It’s a PR shot. In the front stands Lisbet Heed and a young woman who is Mia Lindstrom; in back are Albert Josephson and Goran Andersson. Andersson is tall, blue-eyed, blond, wearing a nice suit. He has one hand on Lisbet Heed’s shoulder, and his wide smile shows very white teeth. The bridge in his mouth is apparently in place. There’s nothing special about him. Just like hundreds of similar-looking Swedish bank tellers.
“He was always a model employee,” Lena Lundberg had said, speaking in the distinct, broad accent of Smaland as she glanced up from her coffee cup for a moment. “Almost a perfectionist, you might say. Never a day’s absence, except after the accident. A real asset to the bank.”
On the wall behind her was a little framed embroidery that elegantly declared, MY HOME IS MY CASTLE.
Lena kept her hands clasped over her stomach, where a slight bulge had started to show.
“Would you say that he lived for his job?” asked Holm. “That he had a personal investment in his work?”
“Yes, I think so. He lived for the bank. And for me,” she added hesitantly. “And he would have lived for our child.”
“He can still do that,” Kerstin Holm had said without really believing it.
Jorge Chavez is sitting on the edge of the bed at Kerstin’s feet. In his hand he has a photo of an utterly focused Goran, who holds a dart out in front of him and is just about to throw it. There is a tremendous, ice-cold purposefulness in his supremely attentive gaze. The date 12/3/1993 is printed faintly in pencil on the back of the photo.
On the wall directly across from the embroidery was a dartboard with three darts stuck in it. Chavez went over to the board and pulled out one of them. He studied with fascination the strange shape of the dart with its extraordinarily long point.
“Is this how darts usually look?” he asked.
Lena Lundberg stared at him with her sorrowful green eyes. It took a moment before she managed to shift gears:
“He special-ordered them from a company in Stockholm. Bows & Arrows, I think it’s called. In Gamla Stan. A dart can be as long as seven inches,” she told them. “Half for the point and body, half for the flights. He experimented until he found a certain weight that suited him, and the ideal shape turned out to be that long point. But it does look rather strange.”
“Was he a member of any dart club?” Chavez weighed the dart in his hand to find the center of gravity.
“The dart club in town. In Vaxjo, I mean. That was where he’d been on the night you were talking about, when somebody beat him up. He’d won some sort of record, and when the club closed, he wasn’t ready to stop, so he went over to that restaurant and kept on practicing. Otherwise he doesn’t usually go out to pubs very often.”
“Did you play darts with him?” asked Chavez, throwing the dart at the board. It didn’t stick but instead fell down, puncturing the parquet floor. “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling out the dart and looking at the annoying little hole in the wooden floorboard.
It seemed so irrelevant.
“Sometimes we used to play a game,” said Lena, without casting a glance at Chavez’s dubious activities. “Just for fun. Although it wasn’t really much fun. He always gave me a head start, but he always caught up in the end. He hated to lose. You know, you go from five-oh-one down to zero. You have to finish with the checkout, as it’s called, hitting the double ring with the last dart you throw, so that you end up right at zero, no more, no less. The checkout and zero have to coincide exactly.”
Paul Hjelm is slouched in an armchair in the hotel room, staring at the third photograph. It’s the most recent one of Goran Andersson, taken only a couple of weeks before the bank incident. He has his arm around Lena and is smiling broadly. They’re standing outside in the snow in front of their house; they’ve made a snow lantern, with a little candle burning inside. His cheeks are rosy, and he looks happy and healthy. And yet there’s a certain shyness in his clear blue eyes.
Hjelm recognizes that look. It’s the quiet shyness of a child.
“And he doesn’t know that you’re pregnant?” said Hjelm.
Lena looked down at her coffee cup again and murmured, “I was just thinking of telling him. But he hadn’t been himself after getting the pink slip. It arrived in the mail in an ordinary brown envelope from Stockholm. Not even his boss at the bank, Albert Josephson, knew about it. I watched him open the envelope and saw how something died in his eyes. Maybe I knew even then that I’d lost him.”
“So you haven’t had any contact with him since he disappeared?”
“On the morning of February fifteenth…” said Lena, as if she were leafing through a calendar. “No. Nothing. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.”
Suddenly she looked Hjelm straight in the eye. He had to look away. “What exactly has he done?”
“Maybe nothing.” Hjelm lied, feeling ill at ease.
Jorge Chavez gets up from the bed, stretches, and gathers the photographs. He hesitates for a moment. “Maybe we should tell Hultin about this?”
“Let them spend one last night guarding the Lovisedal board members,” Hjelm says tersely. “Nothing’s going to happen there anyway.”
“Besides, we should probably wait for that sketch of our so-called colleague,” says Kerstin Holm, yawning.
“The guy who stopped the whole damned investigation,” says Chavez, and after a moment continues: “No, listen. That’s enough for today. A good day’s work. Although with a rather bitter aftertaste.”
He places the photographs on Hjelm’s nightstand and leaves the room in the midst of a huge yawn.
Kerstin is still lying on the bed, tired and incredibly… erotic, thinks Hjelm. He’s still uncertain whether the previous hotel room incident actually took place or not.
“Do you know anything about astrology?” he asks abruptly.
“Because I’m a woman?” she replies, just as abruptly.
