to come, Mans was running about chatting to everybody as they looked at the trees. And if somebody thought a tree was too tall, he offered to chop the top off then and there. Nobody could resist, a nipper with a saw nearly as tall as he was. And this is the best bit: he took the top part that he’d sawed off, chopped off the branches and bound them together into big bundles, then sold them for five kronor apiece! And those five kronor went straight into his own pocket. The tenant-what the hell was his name, was it Martensson-was absolutely livid. But what could he do?”
His brother would pause at this point in the story and raise his eyebrows in a gesture that said all there was to say about the tenant’s powerlessness in the face of the landowner’s crafty son. “A businessman,” he would conclude, “always a businessman.”
Even when he was middle-aged, Mans was still defending himself against the label. “The law isn’t the same thing as business,” he said.
“Of course it bloody is,” his brother used to reply. “Of course it is.”
His brother had spent his early adult life abroad doing God knows what, and in the end he’d come back to Sweden, done a degree in social sciences, and was now in charge of the benefits office in Kalmar.
Anyway, Mans had gradually stopped defending himself. And why did you always have to apologize for success?
“That’s right,” he’d reply nowadays, “business and money in the bank.” And then he’d tell him about the latest car he’d bought, or some smart deal on the stock market, or just about his new cell phone.
Mans could read all about his brother’s hatred in his sister-in-law’s eyes.
Mans just didn’t get it. His brother had kept his marriage together. The children came to visit.
No, he thought, getting up from the creaky chair, I’m going to do it now.
Maria Taube chirruped a “bye then” into the telephone and hung up. Bloody clients, ringing up and churning out questions that were so vague and general it was impossible to answer them. It took half an hour just to try and work out what they wanted.
There was a knock on her door, and before she had time to answer Mans appeared.
Didn’t you learn anything at Lundsberg? she thought crossly. Like waiting for “come in,” for example?
As if he’d read the thought behind her smile, he said:
“Have you got a minute?”
When did anybody last say no to that question? thought Maria, waving at the chair and switching off her incoming calls.
He closed the door behind him. A bad sign. She tried desperately to think of something she’d overlooked or forgotten, some client who had a reason to be dissatisfied. She couldn’t come up with anything. That was the worst thing about this job. She could cope with the stress and the hierarchy and the overtime, but there was that black abyss that sometimes opened up right beneath your feet. Like the mistake Rebecka had made. So damned easy, to lose a few million.
Mans sat down and looked around, his fingers beating a tattoo on his thigh.
“Nice view,” he said with a grin.
Outside the window loomed the grubby brown facade of the building next door. Maria laughed politely, but didn’t speak.
Come on, out with it, she thought.
“How’s…”
Mans finished off the question with a vague gesture in the direction of the piles of paper on her desk.
“Fine,” she replied, and stopped herself from launching into details of something she was working on.
He doesn’t want to know, she told herself.
“So… have you heard anything from Rebecka?”
Maria Taube’s shoulders dropped a centimeter.
“Yes.”
“I heard from Torsten that she was staying up there for a bit.”
“Yes.”
“What’s she doing?”
Maria hesitated.
“I don’t really know.”
“Don’t be so bloody difficult, Taube. I know it was your idea for her to go up there. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think it was such a brilliant idea. And now I want to know how she’s doing.”
He paused.
“She does work here after all,” he said in the end.
“You ask her then,” said Maria.
“It’s not that easy. The last time I tried she made a hell of a scene, if you remember.”
Maria thought about Rebecka, rowing away from the firm’s party. She was crazy.
“I can’t talk to you about Rebecka, you know that. She’d be bloody livid.”
“And what about me?” asked Mans.
Maria Taube smiled sweetly.
“You’re always bloody livid anyway,” she said.
Mans grinned, perked up by the insult.
“I remember when you started working for me,” he said. “Nice and sweet. Did as you were told.”
“I know,” she said. “What this place does to people…”
Rebecka Martinsson and Nalle turned up outside Sivving Fjallborg’s door like two casual laborers. He greeted them as if he’d been expecting them and invited them down to the boiler room. Bella was lying in a wooden box on a bed of rag rugs, sleeping with the puppies in a heap under her stomach. She just opened one eye and thumped her tail in greeting when the visitors came in.
At around one o’clock she’d called at Nalle’s house and rung the doorbell. Nalle’s father Lars-Gunnar had opened the door. A big man, filling the doorway. She’d stood out on the porch feeling like a five-year-old asking her friend’s parents if her friend can come out to play.
Sivving put the coffee on and got out thick mugs with a pattern of big flowers in yellow, orange and brown. He put some bread in a basket and took margarine and sausage out of the refrigerator.
It was cool down in the cellar. The smell of dog and fresh coffee blended with faint traces of earth and concrete. The autumn sun shone down through the narrow window below the ceiling.
Sivving looked at Rebecka. She must have found some clothes stored at her grandmother’s. He recognized the black anorak with the white snowflakes on it. He wondered if she knew it had belonged to her mother. Probably not.
And it was unlikely that anybody would have told her how much she looked like her mother. The same long, dark brown hair and distinctive eyebrows. Square-shaped eyes, the iris an indefinable light sandy color with a dark ring.
The puppies woke up. Big paws and ears, tumbling playfully, tails like little propellers against the side of the box. Rebecka and Nalle sat down on the floor and shared their sandwiches with them as Sivving cleared away.
“Nothing else smells quite this good,” said Rebecka, inhaling deeply with her nose pressed against a puppy’s ear.
“That particular one isn’t spoken for yet,” said Sivving. “Want to stake your claim?”
The puppy was chewing on Rebecka’s hand with needle sharp teeth. His coat was chocolate brown, the hair so soft and short it felt like silky skin. His back paws had been dipped in white.
She put him back in the box and stood up.
“I can’t. I’ll wait outside.”
She’d been on the point of saying she worked too hard to have a dog.
