The Fire Witness

192

Between Stockholm and Uppsala, on the old highway, is the old Löwenströmska Hospital. Gustaf Adolf Löwenström had it built at the beginning of the nineteenth century in penance for his family’s guilt. His brother had assassinated King Gustav III at a masquerade for the Royal Opera.

Anders Rönn is thirty-three years old and has just received his license to practice medicine. He’s slender and has a handsome, sensitive face. He has just been hired to work at Löwenströmska and today is his first day on the job.

The low sunlight of autumn is playing between the leaves of the trees as he enters the building.

Behind the hospital’s modern main building there’s a structure that, from above, looks like two joined crosses. It’s the psychiatric unit, which includes a secure division for criminals sentenced to psychiatric care.

A bronze sculpture of a boy playing the flute stands near the building on the forested hillside. There’s a bird sitting on the boy’s shoulder and another on his wide-brimmed hat. On one side of the pathway that leads to the building a park stretches out toward Fysingen Lake. On the other side, there’s a fifteen-foot-high barbed-wire fence. Inside it, there’s a shadow-filled dirt yard with cigarette butts around its single park bench.

No visitors under the age of fourteen are allowed. Taking photographs or recordings is forbidden.

Anders Rönn walks up the concrete path, underneath a canopy of flaking tin, and enters the building. He walks quietly across the bone-colored vinyl flooring, scuffed and stained with wheel marks. When he gets to the elevator, he sees that he’s already on the third floor of the building. The rest of it is underground, including the closed psychiatric ward, number 30.

The elevator doesn’t go all the way down. Two floors down, behind a steel gate, there’s a spiral staircase to the bunkerlike isolation unit. The unit has room for a maximum of three patients. For the past twelve years, there’s only been one: Jurek Walter.

Anders has been told that Jurek Walter is sentenced to psychiatric care with special parole requirements, and that when he arrived, he was so aggressive that he was physically restrained and tranquilized.

Nine years ago, he’d been diagnosed: schizophrenia (unspecified) with chaotic thinking. Acute psychotic condition with bizarre, extremely violent features.

So far, that was the entire diagnosis.

“I’m going to let you in now,” says a woman with round cheeks and calm eyes.

“Thanks.”

“Do you know the patient, Jurek Walter?” she asks, but she doesn’t wait for an answer.