She leaned back against the mountain of pillows and closed her eyes.
“You’re tired.” He rose and patted her blanket. “Don’t forget Lee Morgan, now.”
Outside, he breathed in the night air. It smelled of salt and sand that had been baked at high heat for months. That’s no Scandinavian smell, he thought to himself. At least not this late in the year. What will all the Mediterranean tourists think?
An ambulance drove slowly by and pulled in front of the entrance to the ER. Two orderlies wheeled up a gurney, hauled a body onto it from the ambulance, and pushed the gurney in through the double doors that were suddenly radiant portals in the darkness.
Winter drove home and parked in the basement garage and then sat at an outside table at the Wasa Kallare restaurant. He drank a beer and listened to, without deciphering them, the conversations at the handful of tables.
Right in front of him the empty streetcars rumbled past and on across Vasaplatsen. Once he saw a face in one of the cars that he thought he recognized, like some vague memory. The waiter took his glass and asked if he wanted another, but he said no and lit up a Corps. He could see the smoke halfway across the park.
He took out his cell phone and turned it on. He had three missed calls and saw on the display that one of them was from Angela. Here I go, he thought, and punched in her number.
20
They sat there and saw the sea silhouetted black against a lighter sky. The roofs appeared sprinkled with ash in the moonlight.
“So you got back yesterday?” Winter asked.
“Like I said.”
She was wearing a soft shirt and shorts, hair in a ponytail, no makeup, and Winter thought about women’s finely chiseled features when he saw her profile against the pale stucco.
“What have you been doing?”
“Sitting out here mostly, as it happens. Yesterday you could see all the way down to the sandbars and those charter boats that take out sports fishermen. I could see them rolling and pitching.”
“It makes me seasick just thinking about it.”
“It didn’t me.” She took a sip of her water. “It was soothing.”
“Sounds wonderful,” Winter said.
“I thought of us.”
Here it comes, thought Winter. We only managed a few minutes of idle chitchat. “How was your mother?” he asked.
“Wonderful,” she said, “until we started talking about us.”
“It’s not as bad as all that, is it? And was that really necessary?”
“What?”
“To have a long discussion with your mother about us. We can reason it out ourselves, can’t we?”
“Reason it out? Since when did you ever want to reason anything out?”
“I’m considered to be quite reasonable.” He dipped a stalk of blanched celery into the cold dip made of sardines and black olives. It tasted salty and bitter, delicious. “This is really good.”
She looked at him without saying anything.
He wanted to be there in the moment with her, but when he bent forward over the bowls again, he saw Helene’s face as it had looked in the dead blue glow of the morgue. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Well, it’s not like this is the first time. And I’m not saying that to sound like a cop’s wife sitting up at night waiting.”
“I’m the one who’s waiting in this case,” he said.
She took his hand as he reached for the glass of water.
“What are you waiting for, Erik?”
What was he waiting for? That was a big question. Everything, from the name of a murder victim and a murderer to eternal peace of mind. For the triumph of good over evil. And for her.
“I waited for you today,” he said.
“Maybe mostly for my body,” she said.
“I resent that. I want all of you,” he said, and squeezed her hand.
She let go of his and drank again. A wind came in from the north and snatched a napkin from the table and took it down into the shaft below the balcony. Winter could see the napkin disappear like a butterfly into the shadow of the moon.
“Your mind is so often somewhere else.”
“I know. You’re right, but not all the time.”
“But right now.”
“It’s this case-”
“You know I’m not asking you to change jobs. But it’s everywhere, covering everything like a layer of dust-on us and over everything around us.”
“Not dust,” he said. “There won’t be any dust on us, since I keep stirring it up all the time. Any comparison you like, only not that.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I can’t help it, Angela. It’s a part of me. And of the job or whatever you want to call it.”
He told her how he’d seen Helene’s face just now, in the middle of a meal. He wasn’t looking for it. It had sought him out.
She didn’t ask anything about Helene, and he knew that was a good thing. Maybe later, but not now.
“You sometimes carry around images of your patients in your mind,” he said.
“It’s different with you.”
“I can’t help it,” he repeated. “And it helps me.”
“Does it? The great magical inspector? Eventually it’ll drive you-It could take over. More and more.”
“Eventually it’ll drive me crazy? Maybe I’m already crazy. Crazy enough to do police work.”
“The fight against evil,” she said. “Your favorite topic.”
“I know-it’s pathetic.”
“No, Erik, and you know that’s not what I think. But it can get to be too much sometimes, so big, you know?”
What was he supposed to say? Crime is an army. He was a policeman but he wasn’t cynical. He believed in the power of good, and that was why he spoke about evil. It was impenetrable, like observing the enemy through bulletproof glass. Anyone who tried to comprehend it with reason went under. He was starting to realize this, but he still had the urge to get in close in order to defeat that monster. If you couldn’t use your goodness and intellect to confront evil close up, what were you supposed to use? The thought had flashed through his mind before-a thought that was like a black hole right in the middle of reality, terrifying: that evil could be fought only in kind.
“There’s nothing to wait for,” Angela said when their breathing had calmed.
His head had exploded into a white light as he once again experienced the sensation where the boundaries between body and soul and body and body disappear, and they were united into a single whole for a few seconds while the white light lasted.
After that came the languorous exhaustion. Then the voice returned.
