“Happy summer, Anja,” he says.
Saga Bauer is dancing over the grass between the trees. She’s chasing soap bubbles with Magdalena Ronander’s twins. Her flowing blond hair with its entwined colored ribbons shines in the sun. Two middle-aged women pause to admire her.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” says the leader of the band after the applause dies down. “We have a special request.”
Carlos Eliasson smiles and looks at someone behind the stage.
The singer smiles. “I have my roots in Oulu, and I am going to sing a special Finnish song for you. It’s a tango called ‘Satumaa.’ ”
Magdalena Ronander is wearing a wreath of flowers in her hair as she heads toward Joona and tries to catch his eye. Anja stares at her feet. The band starts playing the tango.
Joona has already turned to Anja and he bows slightly. He asks quietly, “May I have the honor?”
Anja’s face, and even her neck, blushes bright red. She looks up at him and nods seriously.
“Yes, yes you may.”
She puts her fingers on Joona’s arm and throws a proud glance at Magdalena. She steps onto the dance platform with her head high.
Anja concentrates on her steps at first, a furrow on her brow, but soon she relaxes and her face is calm and happy. She had fashioned an elaborate arrangement of her hair on the back of her neck, even sprayed it heavily to keep it in place, but now it looks just right. She follows Joona’s lead, and her steps become lighter and lighter.
As the sentimental song nears its end, Joona feels a nip on his shoulder, which doesn’t hurt.
Anja gives him another nip, a bit harder, and he feels forced to ask, “What are you doing?”
Her eyes are shining brightly like glass.
“I just felt like it,” she says honestly. “I wanted to see what would happen. You never know unless you try…”
At that moment, the music ends. Joona releases her and thanks her for the dance. Before he can escort her away, Carlos hurries over and asks Anja for the next dance.
Joona steps to one side and watches his colleagues dance, and others, dressed in summer white, gather on picnic blankets, eating and drinking happily. He decides to head to his car.
Reaching the parking lot, Joona Linna opens the door to his Volvo. In the backseat, there’s a huge bouquet waiting, wrapped in gift paper. Joona climbs into the car and phones Disa. The call goes to voice mail.
Lars Kepler
The Nightmare disa helenius
Disa sits in front of her computer. She’s in her apartment on Karlaplan. She’s wearing her reading glasses and has a throw draped over her shoulders. Her cell phone is on her desk next to a cup of cold coffee and a partially eaten cinnamon bun.
The photo of a worn cairn of stones in the middle of a green meadow is on her screen. The stones mark a mass grave of cholera victims near Skanstull in Stockholm.
She’s tapping notes into a document on her computer. She stretches her back and lifts her coffee mug halfway to her lips and then thinks better of it. She gets up to brew a new pot of coffee when the telephone on the desk buzzes.
Without reading the name of the caller, she shuts it off. She stands by the window, looking out. She sees dust dancing in the sunlight. Disa feels a tightness in her throat. She sits back down at her computer. She intends never to speak to Joona Linna again.
Joona Linna
There’s a festive feeling in the air as Midsummer draws near. The traffic is light on Tegnergatan as Joona slowly walks along. He’s stopped trying to reach Disa. She’s turned off her phone and it’s obvious she wants to be left alone. Joona passes the Blue Tower and then turns down Drottninggatan, which is lined with antique stores and small shops. At the new occult bookstore Aquarius, an old woman pretends to admire the display. As Joona passes by, she gestures toward the glass and then begins to follow him.
It takes a few moments for him to realize that he’s being followed.
He stops at the black fence by Adolf Fredrik Church and turns around. The woman is ten meters behind him. She’s about eighty years old. She peers at him and holds out a card.
“This is you, isn’t it?” she says as she shows it. “And here is the crown, the bridal crown.” She holds out another.
Joona walks over to her and takes the cards from her hand. They’re playing cards from one of the oldest card games in all of Europe, tarot.
“What do you want from me?” Joona asks calmly.
“Nothing at all,” says the old woman. “But I have a message for you from Rosa Bergman.”
“You must be mistaken. I don’t know anyone by-”
“She’s wondering why you pretend that your daughter is dead.”
It’s early autumn in Copenhagen. The air is clear and cool when a group of men, discreetly transported in four separate limousines, arrives at the Glyptotek Museum. The men walk up the stairs and enter. They walk past the fruitful winter garden beneath its high glass ceiling. Their footsteps echo on the stone hallway floor as they pass antique sculptures and enter the magnificent concert hall.
The audience is already seated. The Tokyo String Quartet is in its place on the low stage. The musicians hold their legendary Stradivarius instruments, the ones once played by Niccolo Paganini himself.
The four late-arriving guests find their seats around a table in the colonnades to one side of the hall. The youngest is still almost a boy, a fine-limbed blond man whose name is Peter Guidi. The other men wear expressions that are determined but also one step from fear; they are prepared to enslave themselves. They are all soon going to kiss his hand.
The musicians nod to one another and start to perform the Schubert String Quartet no. 14. It begins with great pathos, a deep emotion held in check, a power restrained. A violin calls, painfully and beautifully. The music takes a breath one last time and then it all pours out. The melody seems happy, but the instruments have, at the same time, an underlying tone of sorrow as if it were breath left behind from many lost souls.
Every single day, thirty-nine million bullets are made. Worldwide military spending, at the lowest estimate, is $1,226 trillion a year. In spite of the fact that enormous amounts of armaments are manufactured, the demand never lessens and it is impossible to estimate the volume. The nine largest exporters of weapons in the world are the United States, Russia, Germany, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, and China.
