The Nightmare

38

Saga Bauer is distracted, thinking about Carl Palmcrona, and she barely manages to move her face, even slightly. She’s seen the hit coming from the side, but too late. A low hook that passes over her left shoulder and hits her ear and chin. She’s rocked. Her head protector has slipped to the side again and she can hardly see a thing. Still, she knows the next blow is on its way and sinks her chin and protects her face with both hands.

It’s a hard hit followed by one to her upper ribs. She stumbles backward onto the rope. The referee rushes over but Saga has already figured a way out of the trap. She moves to the side and toward the middle of the ring and at the same time she is weighing her opponent: Svetlana Krantz from Falköping, a wide woman around forty years old with sloped shoulders and a Guns N’ Roses tattoo. Svetlana is breathing with her mouth open and is hunting Saga with elephantine steps; she believes she’s on the way to a knockout.

Saga dances softly backward, whirling like an autumn leaf over the ground. Boxing is so easy, she thinks, and a wave of joy fills her chest. She stops and smiles so broadly that her mouth guard almost falls out. She knows Svetlana is her match, but she had planned to win on points and not a knockout. However, when Svetlana’s boyfriend howls that Svetlana should turn the blond cunt’s face into mush, Saga changes her mind.

Svetlana is moving too quickly around the ring. Her right hand is eager, almost too eager. She is so convinced that she’s going to beat Saga that she’s no longer concentrating. She’s already decided to end the match with one or more direct right-hand blows. She’s thinking that Saga is already so groggy she won’t be able to land a punch. But Saga Bauer is not weakened. Instead, she zeroes in on her concentration. Saga dances a bit in place as she waits for her opponent to rush forward. She holds her hands over her face as if in defense only. At the perfect moment, Saga executes a surprising shoulder-and-foot combination so that, stepping to the side, she glides away from her opponent’s line of attack. Saga is now beside her and uses all her momentum for one blow-right into Svetlana’s solar plexus.

She feels the edge of Svetlana’s breast shield through her glove as Svetlana’s body simply folds in half. Saga’s next blow glances off Svetlana’s head, but the third is a clean, hard uppercut right to the mouth.

Svetlana’s head snaps backward. Sweat and snot spray out. Svetlana’s dark blue mouth guard flies away and her knees give out. She falls straight to the mat and rolls over once, remaining still for a second before she starts to move again.

After the match, Saga Bauer pads around the women’s dressing room feeling the tension run out of her body. There’s a taste of blood and tape in her mouth. She’d had to use her teeth to undo the fabric tape around her glove’s lacing. She looks at herself in the mirror and wipes away a few tears. Her nose is throbbing. She’d been thinking of other things during the match: her conversation with her boss and the head of the National Criminal Investigation Department and the decision that she was supposed to work with Joona Linna.

Inside her locker door is a sticker with the name Södertälje Rockets and a picture of a rocket that looks like an angry shark.

Saga’s hands shake as she pulls off her shorts, pelvic protection and underwear, a black tank top, and the bra with the breast shield. Shivering, she steps into the showers and turns on the stream of water. Water pours over her neck and back. She forces her mind to think of things other than Joona Linna as she spits blood-tinged saliva into the floor drain.

There are about twenty women in the dressing room when she returns. A round of KI aerobics must have just let out. Saga doesn’t notice them stop and stare at her in disbelief.

Saga Bauer is astonishingly beautiful, beautiful in a way that makes people weak in the knees. Her face is perfectly symmetrical and free of makeup, her eyes remarkably large and sky blue. Even with her pumped-up muscles and recent bruises, at five feet seven she’s finely shaped; most of the women in the dressing room would take her to be a ballet dancer, not an elite boxer or an investigator with Säpo’s security department.

Or they’d see her as an elf or a fairy princess, like Tuvstarr the valiant princess, able to stand fearlessly before the huge, dark troll in the paintings of the legendary artist John Bauer. John Bauer had two brothers: Hjalmar and Ernst. Ernst was Saga’s great-grandfather. She never met him, but she still remembers well the tales her grandfather told about his own father’s grief when his brother John, wife Esther, and their baby son drowned one November night on Lake Vättern just a few hundred meters from the harbor of Hästholmen. Three generations later, John Bauer’s painting seems to have miraculously come to life in Saga.

Saga Bauer knows that she’s a good investigator, even though she’s never brought an investigation to its conclusion. She’s used to having her work pulled out from under her or being excluded after weeks of hard work. She’s used to being overprotected and overlooked for dangerous assignments. Used to it. But that doesn’t mean she likes it.

She did very well at the Police Training Academy; after that, she went to the Security Service to be trained in counterterrorism and there rose to the rank of investigator. She’s worked on both investigative and operational duties, and all the while, she’s never neglected continuing education and she’s always kept to a tough physical-training routine. She runs daily, boxes at least twice a week, and not a week goes by where she fails to make the shooting range with her Glock 21 and an M90 sharpshooter rifle.

Saga lives with a jazz musician, a pianist named Stefan Johansson, whose group won a Swedish Grammy for their sorrowful, improvisational album A Year Without Esbjörn. When Saga gets home from work or training, she’ll lie on the sofa, eating candy, watching a movie with the sound off, while Stefan plays the piano for hours at a time.

Leaving the gym, Saga spots her opponent waiting by the concrete plinths.

“I just wanted to congratulate you and say thanks for a good match,” Svetlana says.

Saga stops. “Thanks.”

Svetlana turns red. “You’re amazingly good.”

“So are you.”

Svetlana looks toward the ground and smiles.

Garbage is caught in the twigs of square-cut bushes meant to decorate the entrance of the parking lot.

“You taking the train?” Saga asks.

“Yeah, I guess I better start walking.”

Svetlana picks up her bag, but then stops. She wants to say something else but has trouble letting it out. “Saga… hey, I’m sorry about what my guy said,” she finally says. “I don’t know if you heard… but he’s not coming to any more of my matches.”

Svetlana clears her throat and then starts walking again.

“Wait a minute,” Saga says. “If you’d like, I can give you a ride to the station.”