Sail of Stone

20

I’m melting,” said Siv Winter. “It’s ninety-three degrees here right now. It was over one hundred last week.”

“I know it’s trying and difficult,” said Erik Winter.

“Eh, I didn’t mean it like that, Erik.”

He smiled to himself. His mother had many merits, but she didn’t understand sarcasm. Maybe that’s a good quality, he thought. Too many people go about spreading sarcasm around for others to interpret. Oh, you didn’t mean it like that? Oh, no. Okay, I guess I’m not smart. I should have understood that you meant it the other way around.

In his branch, people often meant things the other way around. But they weren’t being sarcastic. They were just lying.

He lived in a world filled with lies. That was his world.

His job was to interpret lies. How do you end up, then? When you assume that everyone is lying all the time? With whom do you find secure trust, and truth?

“How do the weather reports look for the future?” he asked his mother.

“Eh, it’s probably going to be like this for a few more weeks. Maybe a little cooler in a few weeks.”

“No rain on the way?”

“No, unfortunately.”

“That’s good.”

“What do you mean, Erik?”

“We’re thinking of coming down for a few days.”

“Did you say we? All of you?”

“Yes.”

“That would be so nice. Oh, how nice!”

“We think so, too.”

“What does Elsa think?”

“She doesn’t know yet. I wanted to check with you first.”

“But, Erik, you know very well that you’re all always welcome. And you haven’t been here since… since…”

She didn’t finish her sentence, and she didn’t need to. He had come down the day after Christmas last year, and he had drunk seven bottles of whisky-of course, they were those ridiculous little airplane bottles, but still-and beer on top of that, and it had taken half the ground personnel at the airport in Málaga to get him out and to the car. The police had been there, but only to help. Ringmar had called the police commissioner when Winter had boarded the plane: Here’s what you can expect in Málaga. Ringmar had understood, and their Spanish colleague understood.

Muy borracho. Sí. Comprendo.

Winter had not understood, not when he left after the Christmastime events in Gothenburg. Who could have understood? Really understood everything? He wanted to understand, soon. It was possible to understand. Nothing bad happened without a reason. It came from somewhere. From people. That made the bad into something comprehensible, but it became simultaneously more terrible.

Ringmar had had to do the terrible finishing up last Christmas. Bertil had been strong, stronger than him. Bertil had had his own private hell, but he was a great person, a real person. Without Bertil there was nothing, he had thought then, and he thought so sometimes afterward. I am weak but he is strong. I become weaker and he becomes stronger. Will it be like that for me, too? Will it change? Do I want it to? Do I want to become stronger?

“I’ll let you know the details,” he said to his mother.

“Will it be soon?”

“I hope so.”

“I presume you’re having bad weather as usual at home.”

He looked out at the Indian summer sun, sharp as a knife.

“Yes,” he lied.

Aneta Djanali drove south and turned off toward Krokslätt. Everything felt like it was a few decades ago here: the houses, the streets, the signs, the stores; stucco houses where the plaster had fallen and been stuck on again, cafés with two tables and five chairs.

She wasn’t alone on the streets. She was tailing a black V40 that was one hundred yards ahead, and she wasn’t driving her usual Saab. This was another one of the unmarked cars from the garage under the Police Palace, as it was called, on Ernst Fontells Plats.

Aneta guessed where they were going, but she felt confusion inside of her; not the dizziness from before, but something that reminded her of it.

The V40 was driven by Susanne Marke. Aneta had seen her get into the car on one of the deserted streets in the old part of Nordstan. Aneta had been waiting there. She knew where Susanne would be during the afternoon, because she had asked. She had guessed four o’clock as the end of her workday, and it was a good guess.

But she couldn’t guess where Susanne would drive. Now she was driving into Fredriksdal, and into the familiar driveway. Sigge Lindsten’s car wasn’t there. Aneta drove by and saw Susanne getting out of the car. In the rearview mirror she saw her walk toward the house without looking around. Then the road curved and Aneta could only see other houses that didn’t mean anything to her.

She turned around in a narrow intersection five hundred yards to the north. When she came back, Susanne’s car was gone.

“Forsblad didn’t show up at work this afternoon,” said Halders when she called from the car. “And there’s no one answering in the love nest in Norra Ålvstranden.”

“I saw her ten minutes ago,” said Aneta.

“Are you over there?”

“No, she went to the Lindstens’ house.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“It was just a short visit.”

“How do you know?”

She told him.

“You still don’t know what Anette Lindsten really looks like these days, right?” said Halders.

“No, what…,” she said, and then understood what Fredrik meant.

“You’re totally wrong,” she said.

“It’s important to think outside the box,” said Halders.

“Do you really think so?” said Aneta, mostly to herself. “No, she can’t have changed that much.”

“Best to check, isn’t it? To be completely certain.”

She sat with the phone in her hand. Susanne Marke was Anette Lindsten, who was Susanne Marke, who was…

No.

But Sigge Lindsten had called. That is, if he was Sigge Lindsten. He could have had a fake ID. The house in Fredriksdal was fake, maybe just a set like in a movie studio. This was just a movie. She suddenly thought of the film festival in Ouagadougou. She had been to the movies in Ouagadougou, a drafty bunker where the white light from outside filtered in through ten thousand holes in the curtain. It was a domestic film, which surprisingly enough was about people who lived in a city in the desert. The city seemed to lack gods, or spirits. The movie was in Mossi with French subtitles, and she understood the words but never the true meaning of what the people said. It wasn’t just another culture, it was another world.

Maybe the two men she had met in the apartment that might have been Anette Lindsten’s really were Anette’s father and brother. But the apartment was in her name. Susanne Marke’s apartment was in Susanne Marke’s name. The car was in Bengt Marke’s name. Who was Bengt Marke? Was he also named Hans Forsblad? Or Heintz Fritsfrütz? She almost giggled. Then she felt a chill.

She started the car and drove south, far south.

Winter got hold of Steve Macdonald during lunch.

“Guess what I’m eating,” said Macdonald.

“I know where it came from,” said Winter.

“The fish or the chips?” said Macdonald.

“I know the fisherman who hauled up the haddock,” said Winter.

“That’s fantastic,” said Macdonald. “Is there a stamp or something here under the breading?”

Winter told him about his visit to Donsö.

“And now his father has gone walkabout in the Highlands.”

“He is still missing, at least. Or he hasn’t contacted anyone.”

“Have you put out a bulletin?”

“Yes.”

“Send over all the information and I’ll have a chat with the people up in Inverness.”

“Thanks, Steve.”

“Otherwise?”

“I’m going to build a house. By the sea.” Winter paused. “I think.”

Macdonald laughed.

“I like your resolve,” he said.

“It’s a nice plot of land,” said Winter. “You can smell the sea.”

“Good.”

“Do you ever go home?”

“Home? You mean to Scotland?” said Macdonald.

“Yes.”

“Not very often. And our farm and our city aren’t by the sea.”

“No, I think you told me that once.”

“Dallas is in its own little world.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You can see for yourself when you come here.”

“Why would I go there?”

Half a second after Winter said it, he knew that he would go there. Go there soon. It was a feeling he didn’t want to feel, that complicated intuition he didn’t want to be without.

He felt a chill. Something was about to set sail; he couldn’t see what. He suddenly wanted to go south, far south.

Aneta shivered as the wind came in through the half-open window. It cleared her thoughts. The sun glowed weakly over the fields. Everything was green, but only for another week. Then it would turn gold like everything that lies out in the sun too long.

This was the countryside; there were cows. She met a tractor that was driving in the middle of the road. The driver had a cap and seemed a bit backward. He was chewing on hay. He wouldn’t have noticed if he’d smashed into her car.

She drove past a farm where pigs were rooting around in the ground next to the road. It smelled like pig shit, but she didn’t close the window. This was the earth and the country they all came from; well, maybe she didn’t, but all the other hicks in this frozen land did. Freeze-dried, as Halders had once said. We are freeze-dried, we’re dry as fuck, and when we’re warmed up and get liquid in us, we swell up times ten. She wasn’t sure she understood, but it sounded great, like a lot of what Fredrik said. Crazy, but great. At the very least funny. Except for the black jokes, but those were gone now.

She stopped at a pullout and read her notes. The last time they’d met she had asked Sigge Lindsten where the cabin was. Suddenly a car came from the opposite direction at breakneck speed, and gravel flew up in her face. She didn’t have time to see the car. She felt a sting on her forehead. She looked in the rearview mirror after the fleeing car, but she only saw dry dust from the road and then her own forehead, on which there was a drop of red. She wiped away the drop with her left index finger and licked up the blood, which tasted like red iron.

She knew that people drove like fugitive lunatics in the country. It was their country, but they rushed around it as though there were no laws. Wanted. Wanted dead or alive.

She had driven too far. She continued for a few hundred yards and found a turnoff and turned around.

She drove back, and there was still dust from the road in the air. She passed the pullout sign, which was old and almost colorless.

She found the right turnoff. Grass was growing in the middle of the desolate road. She was able to park in a natural pocket under a cliff that stuck out from a slope. She got out, and it smelled like the sea, but she couldn’t see it. Seabirds were shrieking on the other side of the slope, which was overgrown with pine trees. She started to climb between the trees. The ground was warm.