The Blinded Man aka Misterioso

28

It’s night and they’re sitting in Hjelm’s hotel room in central Växjö. Each of them is holding a photo of Göran Andersson; three pictures that they’ve brought along, given to them by Lena Lundberg.

Kerstin Holm is half-reclining on the bed. In her hands she’s holding a group photo of the staff at the bank in Algotsmåla from the summer of 1992. They’re posing outside the bank, all four of them smiling pleasantly. It’s a PR shot. In the front stands Lisbet Heed and a young woman who is Mia Lindström; in back are Albert Josephson and Göran Andersson. Andersson is tall, blue-eyed, blond, wearing a nice suit. He has one hand on Lisbet Heed’s shoulder, and his wide smile shows very white teeth. The bridge in his mouth is apparently in place. There’s nothing special about him. Just like hundreds of similar-looking Swedish bank tellers.

“He was always a model employee,” Lena Lundberg had said, speaking in the distinct, broad accent of Småland as she glanced up from her coffee cup for a moment. “Almost a perfectionist, you might say. Never a day’s absence, except after the accident. A real asset to the bank.”

On the wall behind her was a little framed embroidery that elegantly declared, MY HOME IS MY CASTLE.

Lena kept her hands clasped over her stomach, where a slight bulge had started to show.

“Would you say that he lived for his job?” asked Holm. “That he had a personal investment in his work?”

“Yes, I think so. He lived for the bank. And for me,” she added hesitantly. “And he would have lived for our child.”

“He can still do that,” Kerstin Holm had said without really believing it.

Jorge Chavez is sitting on the edge of the bed at Kerstin’s feet. In his hand he has a photo of an utterly focused Göran, who holds a dart out in front of him and is just about to throw it. There is a tremendous, ice-cold purposefulness in his supremely attentive gaze. The date 12/3/1993 is printed faintly in pencil on the back of the photo.

On the wall directly across from the embroidery was a dartboard with three darts stuck in it. Chavez went over to the board and pulled out one of them. He studied with fascination the strange shape of the dart with its extraordinarily long point.

“Is this how darts usually look?” he asked.

Lena Lundberg stared at him with her sorrowful green eyes. It took a moment before she managed to shift gears:

“He special-ordered them from a company in Stockholm. Bows & Arrows, I think it’s called. In Gamla Stan. A dart can be as long as seven inches,” she told them. “Half for the point and body, half for the flights. He experimented until he found a certain weight that suited him, and the ideal shape turned out to be that long point. But it does look rather strange.”

“Was he a member of any dart club?” Chavez weighed the dart in his hand to find the center of gravity.

“The dart club in town. In Växjö, I mean. That was where he’d been on the night you were talking about, when somebody beat him up. He’d won some sort of record, and when the club closed, he wasn’t ready to stop, so he went over to that restaurant and kept on practicing. Otherwise he doesn’t usually go out to pubs very often.”

“Did you play darts with him?” asked Chavez, throwing the dart at the board. It didn’t stick but instead fell down, puncturing the parquet floor. “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling out the dart and looking at the annoying little hole in the wooden floorboard.

It seemed so irrelevant.

“Sometimes we used to play a game,” said Lena, without casting a glance at Chavez’s dubious activities. “Just for fun. Although it wasn’t really much fun. He always gave me a head start, but he always caught up in the end. He hated to lose. You know, you go from five-oh-one down to zero. You have to finish with the checkout, as it’s called, hitting the double ring with the last dart you throw, so that you end up right at zero, no more, no less. The checkout and zero have to coincide exactly.”

Paul Hjelm is slouched in an armchair in the hotel room, staring at the third photograph. It’s the most recent one of Göran Andersson, taken only a couple of weeks before the bank incident. He has his arm around Lena and is smiling broadly. They’re standing outside in the snow in front of their house; they’ve made a snow lantern, with a little candle burning inside. His cheeks are rosy, and he looks happy and healthy. And yet there’s a certain shyness in his clear blue eyes.

Hjelm recognizes that look. It’s the quiet shyness of a child.

“And he doesn’t know that you’re pregnant?” said Hjelm.

Lena looked down at her coffee cup again and murmured, “I was just thinking of telling him. But he hadn’t been himself after getting the pink slip. It arrived in the mail in an ordinary brown envelope from Stockholm. Not even his boss at the bank, Albert Josephson, knew about it. I watched him open the envelope and saw how something died in his eyes. Maybe I knew even then that I’d lost him.”

“So you haven’t had any contact with him since he disappeared?”

“On the morning of February fifteenth…” said Lena, as if she were leafing through a calendar. “No. Nothing. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.”

Suddenly she looked Hjelm straight in the eye. He had to look away. “What exactly has he done?”

“Maybe nothing.” Hjelm lied, feeling ill at ease.

Jorge Chavez gets up from the bed, stretches, and gathers the photographs. He hesitates for a moment. “Maybe we should tell Hultin about this?”

“Let them spend one last night guarding the Lovisedal board members,” Hjelm says tersely. “Nothing’s going to happen there anyway.”

“Besides, we should probably wait for that sketch of our so-called colleague,” says Kerstin Holm, yawning.

“The guy who stopped the whole damned investigation,” says Chavez, and after a moment continues: “No, listen. That’s enough for today. A good day’s work. Although with a rather bitter aftertaste.”

He places the photographs on Hjelm’s nightstand and leaves the room in the midst of a huge yawn.

Kerstin is still lying on the bed, tired and incredibly… erotic, thinks Hjelm. He’s still uncertain whether the previous hotel room incident actually took place or not.

“Do you know anything about astrology?” he asks abruptly.

“Because I’m a woman?” she replies, just as abruptly.

He laughs. “Presumably, yes.”

“The alternative way of thinking,” she says sarcastically, sitting up on the edge of the bed and tossing back her black hair. “I know a little about it.”

“This morning-was it really this morning?-my daughter said that this… blemish on my cheek looked like the astrological sign for Pluto. What does that mean?”

“I’ve never thought about that,” she says, coming over to touch his cheek. “Maybe your daughter is right. Lately I’ve thought it looked like a hobo sign.”

“Have you really been thinking about my blemish?” He closes his eyes.

“Pluto.” She takes her hand away. “It can signify a lot of different things. Willpower, for instance. But also a lack of consideration.”

“Hmm. Really?”

“Wait. I’m not done. The sign of Pluto also signifies an individual’s ability to handle change. And catharsis, the final purification.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Hjelm’s eyes are still closed. “But does it really look like the sign for Pluto? What do you think?”

Again he feels the light caress of her hand. He keeps his eyes shut.

“I think it looks like you have an erection,” she says lightly.

“I’m sorry,” he says without feeling sorry. “And the blemish?”

“It’s disappeared in the rest of the crimson on your face.”

He opens his eyes. She’s now sitting on the edge of the bed a couple of yards away, looking at him with an inscrutable expression through the dim light.

“It’s the only way to make it disappear.” He sits up. “I have to ask you about the last time in Växjö. Did anything really happen?”

She laughs. “The masculine need to demystify everything,” she says. “You can’t live with uncertainty, can you?”

“But believe me,” he says, “the mist is still there.”

“I interpreted your wish,” she says. “That question about Anna-Clara Hummelstrand’s Gallic lover… I assumed you’d fantasized about me masturbating, that you had a certain preference for masturbating women.”

“Good Lord.” He’d hit the mark. “But how did you get into my hotel room?”

“You know very well you left the door open.”

“So the whole thing was about fulfilling my wish? But what about you? You didn’t look as if you were suffering.”

“One person’s pleasure is shared by the other. As long as there’s no coercion, no forcing the other person. It’s all a matter of being viewed as a human being.”

A warmth spreads between them. Kerstin continues, her voice a bit hoarse: “Have you interpreted my wish?”

He closes his eyes to think. Images of her fly past, phrases, words. He is feverishly searching for clues, hints, glances. He merely sees her with her feet propped up on the desk and her hand inside her panties.

He feels like a little boy. “Give me a clue,” he squeaks.

“Take off your clothes,” she says curtly.

He takes them off. He stands there naked, confused. He’s holding his hands in front of his genitals.

“Take your hands away and put them on top of your head,” she says. She’s still lying on the bed, fully dressed, with her hands clasped behind her head.

He’s standing there in front of her. His penis is sticking straight up, strutting with nowhere to go. Without ever getting there.

“Come here and stand next to the bed, near my feet.”

He walks over there, with his hands on top of his head. His penis sways back and forth as he moves. His knees are resting against the edge of the bed. His penis is sticking out over the bed. She comes closer. She studies it carefully without touching it.

“The scourge of woman,” she says without taking her eyes off his cock, “and most of us have fallen victim to it in one way or another. Me, I was raped when I was fifteen, and then over and over again by my dear husband, the cop, although he had no idea about it afterward, of course.”

Hjelm feels himself going limp, all at once.

“Come here and lie down,” she says.

He lies down next to her and closes his eyes. She lightly touches the blemish on his cheek. He lets everything happen.

“Can you forgive me?” she asks him softly. She sounds like a little girl.

He nods; his eyes are still closed. He hasn’t stopped feeling like a little boy.

“Look,” she says in the same bright voice. “Now the blemish looks like a tiny cross.”

He smiles and understands.

And yet understands nothing.

But it feels good.