The Princess of Burundi

Nineteen

The man had certainly been friendly, he thought, offering to follow him into the emergency room. Maybe he thought I had a concussion and couldn’t manage on my own.

He put his hand on his head and waited until he saw the car drive away. The dizziness came and went. He didn’t think it was a result of the blood loss, but rather of the exertion. The wound had stopped bleeding and a sticky scab had formed over it, plastering his hair onto his forehead. He felt gently along the edges of the wound.

After a few minutes he was on Dag Hammarskjöld Way, unsure of what to do next. A light snow was falling. A few cars drove by. He retreated into a park, where a young couple came walking toward him, laughing. They were probably dressed up under their thick down coats. The woman was holding a plastic bag with something Vincent assumed were shoes.

He stepped behind a tree and let them pass before he snuck up behind them. The snow muffled his steps and he took them by complete surprise. He grabbed the man’s wool cap and ran into the park. After fifteen meters or so he turned to see if they had followed, but they were still standing in the same spot, staring at him. He knew they wouldn’t come after him, but he still ran as he made his way toward Uppsala castle.

He pulled on the cap as he ran, veering down to Lower Slottsgatan and coming out slightly north of the swan pond. There he stopped to rest, rubbing his face clean with a handful of snow and pulling the cap back down over his eyebrows.

A taxi was leaving the restaurant, Flustret. He stopped it in the middle of the street and climbed into the backseat. The driver looked at him in the rearview mirror.

“I’m going to Årsta,” Vincent said and was surprised at how collected he sounded. “Årsta center.”

The driver punched in some information on his meter before he gathered speed and crossed the Iceland bridge.

Vincent said nothing during the trip, while the thoughts churned in his head. He was a hunted man now, and it was with a certain measure of delight that he thought about how he would elude his would-be captors. So far everything had gone well. The man who had picked him up would no doubt contact the police after he read about this in the morning paper. But all traces would end at the emergency room. The couple with the cap would probably do nothing. The important thing now was that Vincent not do anything stupid. His wound had to be taken care of, that was the priority.

He paid the driver generously, climbed out, and watched until the taxi was gone before he started walking in the direction of Salabackar. Now everything depended on Vivan’s being home.

Vivan was his former sister-in-law, who had been divorced from his brother, Wolfgang, for almost fifteen years. She lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Johannesbäcksgatan. She had room enough, but the question was if she would be willing to let him in. They weren’t close but sometimes ran into each other in town. A few times they had had coffee together and she had on one or two occasions visited him in Sävja. His brother almost never got in touch with him, and this contact with Vivan was a way of keeping tabs on Wolfgang, who had settled in Tel Aviv.

He threw a snowball at her window and was pleased to see it hit the mark on his first attempt. Vivan’s face appeared between the curtains almost immediately, as if she had been waiting for the snowball to strike.

She looked scared. Vincent could see that, even though her window was on the third floor. Maybe she thought it was his brother, her former husband. That first year after their divorce he had harassed her, called her, banged on her door, and waited for her outside the front door when she came out to go to work.

Was that why she smiled when she saw that it was her brother-in-law? Her face left the window and a few seconds later the stairwell light came on. Vincent felt gratitude, a feeling he almost never experienced. Finally, someone who’s there for me, he thought and walked close to the front door.

Vivan was still smiling, but her expression changed to one of fear when she saw his face.

“What have you done?” she asked.

“Someone attacked me,” he said, which seemed to make her even more frightened.

“Attacked you?” she repeated automatically.

He nodded and stepped inside.