Papers in binders always work. This is a courthouse, and binders are useful here. This man is some sort of lawyer, and he is about to depart.
“She has things that are mine, and I need them,” he said. “As a matter of fact.” He picked up his binders. “Not even you can keep me from them.”
I’ll explain and then we’ll see what happens, thought Aneta.
“There’s someone else who has kept you from them,” she said.
“Uh, what? What do you mean?”
She told him about the empty apartment. She hadn’t said anything about the theft when they were standing in the empty rooms. She didn’t tell him that she had met the people who cleaned it out.
“Oh, my,” said Forsblad.
“We’re grateful for any help,” said Aneta.
“Of course. But what can I do?”
“You can start by telling me where you live now.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
She didn’t answer. He had put down the binders again. Maybe I should look inside them. He might have an inventory of everything that was taken from Anette’s apartment.
“Oh, come on! Would I have stolen my own furniture?” He smiled, that peculiar smile that made her feel afraid. “Come on!”
“I asked for your address,” she said.
“I don’t have an address,” he said.
“Are you sleeping under bridges?” She looked at his suit. If he’d slept in it, it must have been in a pants press. The wrinkles were gone. No stones were that smooth.
He smiled again.
“I don’t need to give you my address,” he said.
“You just said you don’t have one.”
“And that’s why I can’t give you one.”
“This is a preliminary investigation,” she said. “You know very well that the general public is obligated to cooperate with the police. You of all people should know that.”
“Preliminary investigation of what?” he asked.
“If you play dumb one more time, we’ll have to continue this conversation in a different room,” she said.
“That was a threat.”
Aneta sighed, barely audibly, and took her phone out of the inner pocket of her light jacket.
“Okay, okay, I’m living with a girl.” He licked his lips. She saw that his lower lip had split at one corner. “At the moment, I mean. But it has-”
“The address,” she said.
“There’s no one there now.”
He smiled again, the frightening smile.
Give me strength, she thought. One of the gods from home.
Hans Forsblad was still smiling, or maybe it was her imagination.
“For the last time,” she said.
“There was no one there,” she said. “But the doorknob was still warm.”
Fredrik Halders laughed out loud.
“I think it’s your sense of humor I appreciate the most,” he said.
“And aside from that? What do you like about me aside from that?”
He looked around.
“The children can hear,” he said.
“They’re at your house, Fredrik. It’s on the other side of the city.”
He removed his feet from the edge of the sofa and heaved himself up. He drank some beer from his glass. He looked at her over the edge of the glass.
“We could be sitting there now,” he said.
“But then the children would have heard, right, Fredrik?”
“I would have watched what I said in that case,” he said.
“Mmhmm.”
“What does that mean,
“I was just imagining the combination of Fredrik Halders and watching what you say,” she said, smiling.
He was quiet and took another drink, as though he were thinking about what words he would choose.
“You know what I mean, Aneta.”
“Fredrik.”
“You know what I want. What I think.”
“I know,” she said gently.
He shook the beer can. He got up.
“Do you want more wine?”
She shook her head.
“I’m going to get another beer.”
“All joking aside,” said Halders, “you have to drop it.”
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t see anything under the blanket, but she could hear his voice from the other side. The voice from the other side. She giggled, to some extent because of the wine; she’d had another glass.
“It could be dangerous,” he said. She felt him pull the blanket off her head. “Are you listening, Aneta? Are you listening?”
She felt the light from the lamp on the nightstand in her eyes; she blinked. She saw his face, which was black against the light, black like a black African’s. Someone who didn’t know him might think he was dangerous. Some who did know him still thought he was. That hadn’t always been good.
“You don’t exactly have anything to work with, and a guy like Forsblad can be trouble in that case.”
“What do you mean?”
She pulled down the blanket and wrapped herself in it. She heard the music Fredrik was putting on, James Carr, which he’d brought with him. “The Dark End of the Street,” forty-year-old soul from the South, at the dark end of the street, that’s where we always meet.
“The way you describe him, he sounds like a psychopath. If he gets it into his head that you’re after him for no reason, it could get nasty.”
“Sure, for him.”
“For you, Aneta.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it? If he’s a psychopath, he’ll get it into his head that I’m after him whether he sees a reason or not, won’t he?”
Halders didn’t answer.
“Won’t he?” said Aneta.
“Don’t be so fucking smart, now,” he said. He ruffled her hair. “Listen to what I’m saying, even if I’m putting it more awkwardly than you can accept.”
She sat up straighter. The blanket fell. She put her arms around her shoulders and across her breasts, as though she were freezing.
“There’s something dangerous about him,” she said. “I can feel it. I can see it.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”
“But don’t you understand? He’s dangerous to
“You don’t know that.”
“Oh, yes I do.”
Halders got up and went over to the CD player, which had become silent. She heard him searching through the discs, ungraceful as always. She heard the rhythm and recognized it, of course, and the singer’s voice. It was her CD, after all. Gabin Dabire.
