Sail of Stone

Drive! the boy had screamed. He had hesitated.

Drive! The boy screamed again and his white hair stood straight up. His body looked old. It was old, but not as old as his.

The boy was blue in the face. His heart. The blue color disappeared. The boy walked on his own on the other side of the little lake, and he prayed.

Jesus!

A cry over the mountains.

We are all lost, he had said afterward. I will wash away our sins, wash us. I am glad that you sent for me. Drive now!

At night the dreams came back. Dreams of gold, of silver, of the money that destroyed everything.

How often had he sat with this pistol in his hand? First it was the threat, soon after. When he was staying hidden in cliffs, huts, on rotten ships. He had shot once.

Then there were the thoughts of doing it by his own hand. On his own.

He didn’t know what would happen.

He carried it with him night and day.

He’d had it when he heard the voices in the Three Kings, when he saw them. They came from the other world.

Now his memories flowed on, flowed up. There was water everywhere; the sea washed over him. He had placed the dinghy in the shadow of the waves. The Marino had already begun to sink.

It was necessary. Egon had already been lost then. The trawler was lost.

He had felt Frans’s face in his hands. Jesus! There had been no one to listen out there. God wasn’t listening; not God’s son. On the beach there were only stones. He made his choice. No, not then. It was long before.

There was still money in the oilcloth bags. The weapons were on the bottom or had been carried farther north, like the bodies.

The boy’s boy hadn’t asked any questions.

The boy’s boy.

Here!

Bring it here!

They would never find him. Never! His face was different, his body. His name. His life, what was left.

He saw them out on the street, but it was a coincidence. They had been standing in front of the telephone booth, a coincidence. They had walked by.

None of them would find out!

49

Aneta Djanali was sitting in Halders’s kitchen. She had wrapped a blanket around herself; she was freezing and the kitchen was the warmest place. Hannes and Magda were at a birthday party at a house three blocks away. It wasn’t evening yet. Halders was making a quiche for some reason. A good smell was coming from the oven. Halders let Lucinda Williams sing from the living room in her cracked voice, lonely girls… heavy blankets cover lonely girls.

Aneta had had a short conversation with Anette Lindsten. Anette had been on her way down to the house by the sea, she said.

Was she running away again?

Everything about this was running away, sometimes invisibly.

This was part of the hell that struck the women, she thought. A horrid combination of guilt and fear and control and ownership.

She didn’t want to think about it, but she couldn’t stop.

It was about a woman’s right to her own life. That was exactly what it was about.

Control over the woman’s life. What it was about.

She didn’t doubt for a second what it was about for Anette. Hans Forsblad wouldn’t give up control, would not give up control. Nothing stopped him. He stayed hidden, but he was there. Aneta had seen his eyes. His eyes when he looked at her.

Two things were missing from her home.

She had discovered this while she was waiting for her colleagues from Lorensberg, or maybe it was after they were there.

The shell that had stood next to the telephone on the shelf in the hall. It was large and shimmered blue. It was almost transparent. Aneta had found it in a cove outside Saro, and it had been standing in the same place for two years and she hadn’t even dusted it, as far as she remembered. The traces the snail left behind had been visible, a bare spot in a sea of fine dust.

And Kontome. The Kontome mask on the wall in the hall was gone. Who would want to steal that? It had no financial value.

Kontome was there to show her the path through the future.

The person who had gotten into her apartment had taken these things with them.

She knew who it was.

Anette had sounded out of breath on the telephone. Aneta had heard the roaring sound of a motor.

“She’s afraid for her life,” she said to Halders, wrapping the blanket more tightly around herself.

Lucinda Williams sang in a broken voice about broken lives and broken words. “Can’t you play something else, Fredrik? That’s making me shiver even more. And freeze.”

Halders was about to take out the quiche. He placed it on a trivet and walked out of the kitchen and Lucinda Williams was cut off in the middle of the song about the half sentences. After ten seconds of silence she heard beautiful vocal harmonies and a bright and gentle melody.

“Will the Beach Boys do?” Halders said from the door. “Is that warm and sunny enough for you?”

“At least on the surface,” she said.

“Do you know your Beach Boys?” Halders asked.

“No,” she said, listening again. “But you can hear that something is wrong with those guys, behind those sunny voices.”

“That’s absolutely right,” said Halders, “but why not forget it for two and a half minutes? After that the song is over.”

Aneta chose not to listen. She saw Anette’s face in front of her again.

“She seems to be in constant movement between different addresses. On the run between them,” she said.

Halders nodded.

“Isn’t that a common pattern?”

“But she has her family,” said Aneta.

“Yes?”

“But they don’t seem to offer any protection. Or support.”

“Well, she’s not the only one keeping her distance there,” said Halders.

“What do you mean?”

“Her father. We stumbled into his business through his daughter. He hadn’t counted on you getting stuck on this. Maybe not even on you showing up in his… Anette’s apartment.”

“Business?”

“He’s sure as shit involved in this stolen goods ring. The theft ring. But how would we have known that if it weren’t for his daughter?”

“Does she know, do you think? Is she afraid of that, too?”

“Maybe that is exactly what she’s afraid of,” said Halders. “That he might think that she will expose it.” He put the quiche pan on the table. There was already a bowl of salad there, and a little bottle