multitude of other actions.”
“I knew that I could save him.” Hjelm looked up. “That’s all I wanted to do.”
Grundstrom gave him a penetrating stare. “Is that really true? Look deep into your heart, Hjelm.”
They sat for a moment, studying each other. Time passed. Something happened, an exchange took place.
Finally Niklas Grundstrom got up with a sigh, and Ulf Martensson followed. As Grundstrom packed up his briefcase, Hjelm noticed how young he still looked, yet they were the same age.
“To start with, we’ll need your ID badge and your service weapon.” Martensson said. “Until further notice, you’re on suspension. But the interrogation will continue tomorrow. It’s not over yet, Hjelm.”
Hjelm placed his ID and service weapon on the table and left the interrogation room. He closed the door but left it slightly ajar, perfect for eavesdropping, and placed his ear to the narrow opening.
It was possible that he heard a voice say, “Now we’ve got him.”
It was possible that no one said a word.
He stood in the pitch dark taking a leak, for a very long time. Five late-night beers needed to be excreted in a single nightly piss. As he stood there and the stink of urine rose up from the toilet, the contours of the bathroom gradually emerged around him. There was just enough light for the dark to take shape. Thirty seconds earlier it had been so dark that the darkness didn’t exist. Only when he shook out the last drops did it seem real.
As he flushed the toilet, he thought about the fact that the only urine that didn’t stink was one’s own.
He looked in the mirror again, a vague rim of light encircling darkness. In that darkness, in the dark that was always himself, he saw Grundstrom, who was saying,
So empty, so terribly empty.
Everything had fallen apart. Suspended, fired. No unemployment checks. On the dole. Who’d want to employ a used-up police officer?
He remembered the coffee room at the station, the hatred toward welfare recipients there, the epithets about dark-skinned immigrants. Of course he had participated, leveling scorn at those who accepted welfare, the riffraff living luxuriously on public support. Now he found himself in the same situation. There was no floor under his feet. He was floating in a dreadful emptiness.
Where were the police higher-ups? Everybody had abandoned him. He could kill them all.
Grundstrom:
The details of the bathroom had emerged from their dark haze, taken on depth, assumed their proper positions. The light was hauled forth from the night; his eyes had hauled it out. The features of his face should have also taken shape by now.
But they hadn’t. They were still cloaked in darkness.
A silhouette.
5
He is sitting motionless in the darkness, which isn’t truly dark. Through the balcony door light is seeping in from the streetlights below the luxury apartment. If he turned his head, he would see both of the big museum buildings resting quietly in the faint light issuing from inside. But he doesn’t turn his head. The silence is absolute. His gaze is directed unwaveringly across the floor of the large living room toward the half-open double doors leading to the hallway. He has already surveyed the space. A tiled stove and a fireplace in the same room. Next to the fireplace a dull-black big-screen TV and the stacked units of a VCR and stereo. On the floor are three artistically hand-woven
He sits in the same position for over an hour.
Then he hears the front door open. There is a fumbling with keys. He knows that the man is alone. The man swears softly out in the hallway, a noticeable but not extreme intoxication. More like the inebriation of a man who knows exactly where to find the point of greatest possible enjoyment and how to keep himself there all evening. He hears the man take off his shoes and methodically put on his slippers; he even thinks he can hear how the man unknots his tie so that it hangs loose, draped down the front of his silk shirt. The man unbuttons his jacket.
The man pulls open one side of the double doors, already ajar and almost ten feet tall. He enters the living room, stumbles out of one slipper, swears, bends down, and manages to put it back on, then straightens up again and catches sight of him through the pleasurable haze. He tries to get a fix on him.
“What in holy purple perdition!” says the man pompously.
Famous last words.
He raises the gun from his lap and fires two rapid, silent shots.
The man stands still for a moment, stock still.
Then he sinks to his knees and leans forward.
He stays there for ten seconds, then topples over sideways.
He places the gun on the glass table and takes a deep breath.
In his mind he sees a list. Mentally he checks off a name.
Then he goes over to the stereo and turns it on. He lets the cassette door open and the tape slide down and the door close again, and the first piano notes glide through the room. The fingers wander up and down, the hands move up and down. Then the saxophone comes in and wanders alongside the piano. The same steps, the same little promenade. When the sax cuts loose and dances and leaps, and the piano starts to spread out the gentle chords in the background, the tweezers pull the first bullet out of the wall. He drops it into his pocket, then lifts the tweezers to the second hole-and waits. A couple of small drum rolls, and then that strange little Arabian-sounding twitter from the sax, a couple of seconds of Oriental digression. The piano vanishes. Sax and bass and drums now. He can see the pianist swaying as he waits. Yeah, u-hoo. He’s waiting too. The tweezers are raised.
The saxophone keeps climbing toward the heights, faster and faster. Ai. Is the sax player himself producing those little cries that punctuate the crescendo?
And at that moment, with the applause, the audience murmuring, the transition from sax to piano-at that moment he yanks out the second bullet. At that very moment. Splinters fall out of the wall. The flattened lump drops into his pocket to join the first one.
The piano replaces the sax, starting off with a few meandering intervals, apparently fumbling. Then it cuts loose from the established structures. The flights are freer and freer, more and more beautiful. Now he can hear the beauty. Inside himself. Not just as… a memory.
The bass disappears. The piano is meandering again, just like at the beginning. He should really be able to teach himself to understand this. The sax is now following.
The last repetition.
The applause, whistling.
He takes a small bow.
He will never grow tired of listening to it.
6
