Bad Blood

32

Paul Hjelm emerged from police headquarters and lingered at the entrance, feeling that something was wrong. He went back in to retrieve his umbrella.

He came back out again, feeling as if he had been wandering around the hold of a ship for a month. In the raw autumn night, he opened the umbrella; the small police logos beamed down at him powerlessly. The storm pummeled the rain horizontally, from all directions at once. After he’d gone just a few yards on the flooded Bergsgatan, the wind shredded his umbrella; he chucked it into a garbage can at the subway entrance.

He had called Ray Larner and told him every detail of the case, without inhibition. He didn’t give a damn about the consequences. Larner had listened, then said, “Whatever you do, Yalm, don’t keep looking. You’ll go crazy.”

He wouldn’t keep looking, but he would keep thinking-he wouldn’t be able to stop; he didn’t want to stop. The case of K would always be in his consciousness, or just under it. He hadn’t yet absorbed its horrible, awful knowledge more than superficially. Knowledge was always good, after all; he was enough of an Enlightenment rationalist to be certain of that. The question was what effect one would allow knowledge to have on one’s own psyche. The risk in this case, he realized, was that it would make him crazy.

Wayne Jennings had turned an apparently hopeless disadvantage into a pure victory. Hjelm felt a reluctant pang of admiration.

But who could really tell whether it had been a success or a setback? Who knew, today, what the three Iraqi officers’ disclosures would have resulted in had they been able to speak to the press? Was it true that the media today were the only counter-force against military and economic might? Or were the media themselves the actual threat? And was fundamentalism the only real alternative to an unrestrained market? Nothing anywhere seemed particularly attractive.

What is the worth of a human life? What sort of life do we want to have, and what sort do we want others to have? What price do we pay for living as well as we do? Are we ready to pay that price? And what do we do if we’re not?

Simple, basic questions echoed within him.

“I haven’t tickled the bass in six months,” Jorge had said, plucking a few strings on a fictive double bass. “Now I’m going home to play all night, until the police come and take me away.”

People had died in their arms, heads had been torn off before their eyes, other people’s blood had washed over them, and no one outside their own little circle would ever know. What could they do? Play. And put their whole blackened souls into it. It had to come out somehow.

He bought an evening newspaper and took the subway for the brief stretch from City Hall to Central Station, then switched to the train to Norsborg. He read the headline: “Still no trace of the Kentucky Killer. The police defend their passivity, citing limited resources.”

Mörner was the one who was quoted. Hjelm laughed. His fellow riders looked at him. It did not interest him.

Nor was he interested in the behind-the-scenes action that would follow. Right now he just felt like sticking headphones on his ears and sinking down into his train seat.

John Coltrane, Meditations. He stepped into that vague state between wakefulness and sleep-the privileged space of serenity.

We thought something had only just come to Sweden, he mused. The truth was that it was already here, and had been for a long time. It just had to be aroused.

He would get himself a piano. That decision ripened as he got out of the train at Norsborg and ambled through the rain. The standardized row houses seemed to watch him through the flying mists. He crept along slowly, allowing the rain into every pore. He needed to be thoroughly washed. Time after time.

It had been a long time since he’d seen the moon, and there was none tonight. In the United States he hadn’t thought to look. He had become close to Kerstin in a way he hadn’t expected. Somewhere inside he had longed for her, but his childish wish for a hot affair on the side had changed to something different. Was he getting old? Or was he growing up?

He arrived at his row house. It looked gray and dreary, as impersonal as a high-rise, but disguised as a tiny rise in status. It was all fiction. Nothing was as it seemed.

Above all, it wasn’t gray and dreary inside. On the inside, nothing is the same. That was something, at least. Some little trace of comfort after what he had been involved in.

He had, as Larner said, caught the Fucking Kentucky Baby all on his own. Well. The inspiration had been his own, anyway. And not just one, but two. That the other had slipped away was not his fault-it was more a law of nature. Or at least he could pretend that that was the case for a while.

Cilla was sitting on the sofa. A little candle was burning in front of her. She was reading a book.

“You can’t read in that light,” he said. “You’ll ruin your eyes.”

“No.” She put down the book. “That’s one of those lies that people spread. You can’t ruin your eyes by reading in too little light. There can never be too little light.”

He smiled faintly and walked over to her.

“Wait, don’t sit down.” She disappeared, then came back with a few towels and placed them on the sofa.

He sat on them. “I could have gotten them myself,” he said.

“I wanted to get them,” she said, “if that’s okay.”

There was silence for a moment.

“What were you reading?” he asked at last.

“Your book,” she said, holding up Kafka’s Amerika. “You never have time to read, after all.”

“What do you think?”

“Tricky,” she said. “But when you get into it, you can’t put it down. You think you understand, and then you realize you don’t understand anything.”

“I understand,” he said.

“Do you?” she said.

They laughed briefly.

Then she fingered his clothes. “You’re really wet. I’ll help you get them off.”

“You don’t need to-”

“Yes,” she said, “I need to.” She slowly undressed him.

He allowed himself to enjoy it, wholeheartedly.

“I’ll probably have more time to read now,” he said as she pulled off his pants. “And we’ll probably have a little more time together, too.”

“But you haven’t caught that Montana Murderer yet.”

“Kentucky Killer.”

“When are you actually going to catch him?”

“Never,” he said calmly.

She pulled off his soaking-wet underwear and threw it onto the pile of drenched clothes on the floor. “You don’t look too bad, Paul Hjelm,” she said, “for a middle-aged, lower-level official.”

“You don’t look too bad, either,” he said. “As you can see.”

She smiled and started to undress.

He reached for the candle. He put it out-and burned himself. “Ow, hell.”

“You’re so clumsy,” she laughed, lying down beside him.

He watched the wick. The glow ebbed until no light was left. “There can never be too little light,” said Paul Hjelm, letting himself go.

Outside, the rain streamed down.