Autumn Killing

53

Stockholm, 1997 and onwards

Jerry feels the cool air stroke his cheeks. Below him, on the other side of the polished office windows, Kungsgatan snakes down towards Stureplan in the late-summer sun. In Humlegarden, red lawnmowers are moving over tired grass, their blades in his dreams like bearers of all he thinks he has left behind. The blades force him onward, give him no time to rest, but he knows that at some point he will have to stand up to them.

He is standing here for the sake of money, at least that’s what he thinks, unless it’s because having an office here makes a good impression when he’s standing at the upstairs bar of the Sturehof. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care.

The boxes from the move haven’t been unpacked yet, and he has just had a call from his first client at Petersson Legal Services Ltd. Jochen Goldman wanted help setting up an endowment insurance in Liechtenstein.

This room. Its fine lines, free from dirt, the opportunity it gives him to create his reality himself. The sofa in the corner upholstered in shiny white fabric.

Clients come and go through the room. People and buses and cars hurry past in all seasons along Kungsgatan, a young man, little more than twenty years old, sits before him and explains an idea, an opportunity, an advanced piece of technology that might come in useful in the new economy.

Jerry is amused by the young man and gives him and his idea two million kronor, and three years later, a year after foreign minister Anna Lindh was murdered, the company is sold, and the man in the room on Kungsgatan is several hundred million kronor richer.

A bigger flat at the top of a turn-of-the-century building at Tegnerlunden, where the art comes into its own, is all he treats himself to. He could have bought it long before, but never actually got around to it until now.

A balcony railing to balance on in his memory, the park like a mirage of the life that was once his, swallows that fly close yet so far from their shadows.

Sometimes he thinks he sees her in other people. Her hair, way of moving, a smell in the NK department store one Saturday. He keeps himself up to date about her life, there are ways, but he never approaches her. He thinks that what he feels will disappear as the years pass, but it doesn’t. It gets deeper and deeper.

Instead he gets to know all of them.

The superannuated gold-diggers of the Sturehof, their tragic, slack genitals, the Russian whores out in Bandhagen, the casual fucks that seem to pop up all over the place, body to body, hard and quick, arms tied to a bedstead, maybe. Sometimes he pretends that they are her, gives them her face, but he no longer knows what she looks like, she’s become a hazy memory.

Then an acquaintance phones, the estate agent who helped him with the flat in Tegnerlunden, to tell him that a castle south-west of Linkoping is for sale — wasn’t that where you’re from? — thought he might be interested.

The memory becomes clear again.

Sweeps through his body.

He stands in all the rooms that have been his and feels all the cold hands that have ever caressed his cheeks or chest. He feels that he has always been on his way there: that is where I shall go, maybe one black autumn night full of fluid darkness. But I shall get there.