His life in the country had begun.
2
The ship inside the bottle was a little work of art, in Henrik’s opinion: a three-masted frigate with sails made out of scraps of white fabric, almost six inches long and carved from a single piece of wood. Each sail had ropes made of black thread, knotted and secured to small blocks of balsa wood. With the masts down, the ship had been carefully inserted into the old bottle using steel thread and tweezers, then pressed down into a sea of blue-colored putty. Then the masts had been raised and the sails unfurled with the help of bent sock needles. Finally the bottle had been fastened with a sealed cork.
The ship in the bottle must have taken several weeks to make, but the Serelius brothers destroyed it in a couple of seconds.
Tommy Serelius swept the bottle off the bookshelf, the glass exploding into tiny shards on the new parquet flooring of the cottage. The ship itself survived the fall, but bounced
across the floor for a couple of yards before it was stopped by little brother Freddy’s boot. He shone his flashlight on it with curiosity for a few seconds, then lifted his foot and smashed the ship to pieces with three hard stamps.
“Teamwork!” crowed Freddy.
“I hate things like that, fucking handicraft stuff,” said Tommy, scratching his cheek and kicking the remains of the ship across the floor.
Henrik, the third man in the cottage, emerged from one of the bedrooms where he had been searching for anything of value in the closets. He saw what was left of the ship and shook his head.
“Don’t smash anything else up, okay?” he said quietly.
Tommy and Freddy liked the sound of breaking glass, of splintering wood-Henrik had realized that the first night they worked together, when they broke into half a dozen closed-up cottages south of Byxelkrok. The brothers liked smashing things; on the way north Tommy had run over a black-and-white cat that was standing by the side of the road, its eyes glittering. There was a dull thud from the right-hand tire as the van drove over the cat, and the next second the brothers were laughing out loud.
Henrik never broke anything; he removed the windows carefully so they could get into the cottages. But once the brothers had clambered in, they turned into vandals. They upended cocktail cabinets and hurled glass and china to the floor. They also smashed mirrors, but hand-blown vases from Smaland survived, because they could be sold.
At least they weren’t targeting the residents of the island. From the start Henrik had decided to select only houses owned by those who lived on the mainland.
Henrik wasn’t keen on the Serelius brothers, but he was stuck with them-like a couple of relatives who come to call one evening and then refuse to leave.
But Tommy and Freddy weren’t from the island, and were neither his friends nor his relatives. They were friends of Morgan Berglund.
They had rung the doorbell of Henrik’s little apartment in Borgholm at the end of September, at around ten o’clock when he was just thinking of going to bed. He had opened the door to find two men of about his own age standing outside, broad-shouldered and with more or less shaven heads. They had nodded and walked into the hallway without asking permission. They stank of sweat and oil and dirty car seats, and the stench spread through the apartment.
“Hubba bubba, Henke,” said one of them.
He was wearing big sunglasses. It should have looked comical, but this was not a person to be laughed at. He had long red marks on his cheeks and chin, as if someone had scratched him.
“How’s it goin’?”
“Okay, I guess,” said Henrik slowly. “Who are you?”
“Tommy and Freddy. The Serelius brothers. Hell, you must have heard of us, Henrik… You must know who we are?”
Tommy adjusted his glasses and scratched his cheek with long, raking strokes. Henrik realized where the marks on his face had come from-he hadn’t been in a fight, he had caused them himself.
Then the brothers had taken a quick tour of his one-bedroom apartment and slumped down on the sofa in front of the TV.
“Got any chips?” said Freddy.
He rested his boots on Henrik’s glass table. When he unbuttoned his padded jacket, his beer belly protruded in a pale blue T-shirt with the slogan SOLDIER OF FORTUNE FOREVER.
“Your pal Mogge says hi,” said big brother Tommy, removing the sunglasses. He was slightly slimmer than Freddy and was staring at Henrik with a little smile playing at the corners of his mouth and a black leather bag in his hand. “It was Mogge who thought we should come here.”
“To Siberia,” said Freddy, pulling the bowl of chips Henrik had provided toward him.
“Mogge? Morgan Berglund?”
“Sure thing,” said Tommy, sitting down on the sofa next to his brother. “You’re pals, right?”
“We
“We know, he’s in Denmark. He was working in a casino in Copenhagen, illegally.”
“Dirty dealing,” said Freddy.
“We’ve been in Europe,” said Tommy. “For almost a year. Makes you realize how fucking small Sweden is.”
“Fucking backwater,” said Freddy.
“First of all we were in Germany-Hamburg and Dusseldorf, that was fucking brilliant. Then we went to Copenhagen, and that was pretty cool too.” Tommy looked around again. “And now we’re here.”
He nodded and put a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.
“Don’t smoke in here,” said Henrik.
He had been wondering why the Serelius brothers had left the big cities of Europe-if things had indeed been going so bloody well down there-and traveled up to the isolation of small-town Sweden. Had they quarreled with the wrong people? Probably.
“You can’t stay here,” said Henrik, looking around his one-bedroom apartment. “I haven’t got room. You can see that.”
Tommy had put the cigarette away. He didn’t appear to be listening.
“We’re Satanists,” he said. “Did we mention that?”
“Satanists?” said Henrik.
Tommy and Freddy nodded.
“You mean devil worshippers?” said Henrik with a smile.
Tommy wasn’t smiling.
“We don’t worship anyone,” he said. “Satan stands for the strength within human beings, that’s what we believe in.”
“Exactly,” said Tommy. “‘Might makes right’-that’s our motto. We take what we want. Have you heard of Aleister Crowley?”
“No.”
“A great philosopher,” said Tommy. “Crowley saw life as a constant battle between the strong and the weak. Between the clever and the stupid. Where the strongest and cleverest always win.”
“Well, that’s logical,” said Henrik, who had never been religious. He had no intention of becoming religious now, either.
Tommy carried on looking around the apartment.
“When did she cut and run?” he asked.
“Who?”
