Julia was still holding her arm. Less in encouragement, more to comfort her.
“My mom always says I should never apologize for myself. Never say sorry for being good at something.”
Anna-Lena took a dubious bite of her pizza, then said with her mouth full: “Wise mom.”
* * *
They stood there in silence.
* * *
And then there was a loud bang.
* * *
Once. Twice. A few seconds later came the whistling and explosions, so many and so close together that you couldn’t count them. Lennart was standing closest to the window, so he was the one who exclaimed: “Look! Fireworks!”
Jim had sent a young officer from the station to buy them. He was setting them off from down by the bridge. Lennart, Zara, Julia, Ro, Anna-Lena, Roger, and the real estate agent went out onto the balcony. They stood there watching in amazement. They weren’t pathetic little bangers, either, they were the real thing, different colors, the sort that look like rain, the whole deal. Because, as luck would have it, Jim liked fireworks, too.
The bank robber and Estelle watched them from the kitchen window, arm in arm.
“Knut would have liked this,” Estelle nodded.
“I hope you like it, too,” the bank robber managed to say.
“Very much, you sweet child, very much indeed. Thank you!”
“I’m so sorry for everything I’ve done to you all,” the bank robber sniffed.
Estelle pouted her lips unhappily.
“Perhaps we could explain everything to the police? Tell them it was all a mistake?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Perhaps you could escape somehow? Hide somewhere?”
Estelle smelled of wine. Her pupils were ever so slightly unfocused. The bank robber was about to reply, then realized that the less Estelle knew, the better. Then the old woman wouldn’t have to lie for the bank robber’s sake when she was questioned by the police. So she said: “No, I don’t think that would work.”
Estelle held her hand. There wasn’t much else she could do. The fireworks were beautiful, Knut would have loved them.
* * *
When they were finished the bank robber went into the living room, and the others all came back in from the balcony. The bank robber tried to signal discreetly that she wanted to talk to the real estate agent, but sadly that was impossible given that the real estate agent was busy arguing with Roger about the price Julia and Ro ought to pay for the apartment if they bought it.
“Okay, then! Okay!” the real estate agent finally snapped. “I can go a bit lower, but only because I have to put the other apartment up for sale in two weeks’ time, and I don’t want that competing with this one!”
Roger, Julia, and Ro all tilted their heads in such a way that they bumped into one another.
“Which… other apartment?” Roger asked.
The real estate agent harrumphed, annoyed with herself for having let that slip out.
“The apartment opposite, on the other side of the elevator. I haven’t even put it up on my website yet, because if you sell two apartments at the same time, you get less for both, all good real estate agents know that. The other apartment looks just the same as this one, only with a slightly smaller closet, but for some reason it has excellent mobile reception and that seems to be ridiculously important for people these days. The couple who own it are splitting up, they had a terrible row in my office, they’ve removed all the furniture from the apartment, the only thing left in there is a juicer. And I can quite see why neither of them would want it, because it’s a truly terrible color…”
The real estate agent went on babbling for a long time, but no one was really listening anymore. Roger and Julia looked at each other, then at the bank robber, then at the real estate agent.
“Hang on, you’re saying you’re going to be selling the neighboring apartment as well? The one on the other side of the elevator? And… there’s no one living there at the moment?” Julia asked, just to be sure.
The real estate agent stopped babbling and started to nod instead. Julia looked at the bank robber, and of course they were both thinking exactly the same thing, a possible solution to all this.
“Have you got the keys to the other apartment?” Julia asked with a hopeful smile, convinced that this would be a perfect end to the whole thing.
Unfortunately the real estate agent looked back at Julia as if that were a ridiculous question. “Why would I? I’m not even going to start trying to sell it for another two weeks, and do you think I carry people’s keys around just for the fun of it? What sort of real estate agent do you take me for?”
* * *
Roger sighed. Julia sighed, more deeply. The bank robber wasn’t even breathing, just tumbling headlong into the hopelessness inside her.
* * *
“I had an affair once!” Estelle said cheerfully from the other end of the apartment, because she’d found another bottle of wine in the kitchen.
“Not now, Estelle,” Julia said, but the old woman was insistent. She was slightly drunk, that can’t be denied, because the closet had already provided quite a lot of wine for an elderly lady.
“I had an affair once!” she repeated, with her eyes fixed on the bank robber’s, and the bank robber suddenly felt nervous about the possible details that might slip out in a story that started like that. Estelle waved the wine bottle and went on: “He loved books, and so did I, but my husband didn’t. Knut liked music. I suppose music’s all right, but it’s not the same, is it?”
The bank robber shook her head politely.
“No. I like books, too.”
“I thought as much from looking at you! As if you understand that people need fairy tales as well, not just narrative. I’ve liked you from the moment you came in here, you know. You messed things up a bit, with the pistol and all that, but who hasn’t messed things up at one time or another? All interesting people have done something really stupid at least once! For instance, I had an affair, behind Knut’s back, with a man who loved books, just like me. Whenever I read anything now I think of the pair of them, because he gave me a key, and I never told Knut that I kept it.”
“Please, Estelle, we’re trying to…,” Julia said, but Estelle ignored her. She ran one hand along the bookcase. One of the last times she met her neighbor in the elevator he gave her a very thick book, written by a man. He had underlined one sentence, several hundred pages in: We are asleep until we fall in love. Estelle gave him a book in exchange, one written by a woman, so it didn’t need hundreds of pages to say things. Close to the start Estelle had underlined: Love is wanting you to exist.
Her fingers traced the spines of the books on the shelf, as if she were dreaming, not as if she were looking. A book fell out from the middle of a row, not as if it had done so on purpose, but simply because her fingernails happened to touch its spine. It landed on the floor and fell open a few pages in. The key that fell out bounced off the pages, then landed on the parquet floor with a tinkling sound.
Estelle’s chest was rising and falling breathlessly and her voice may have been slurred but her eyes were crystal clear when she said: “When Knut fell ill we signed the apartment over to our daughter. I thought she might want to move in here with her children, but that was obviously a silly idea. They didn’t want to live here. They’ve got their own lives, in a place of their own. Since then there’s only been me here, and… well, you can see… it’s too big for me. This isn’t a sensible apartment for a single person. So in the end my daughter said we ought to sell it and buy something smaller for me, something easier to look after, she said. So I called several different real estate agents and obviously they all said that it wasn’t usual to hold a viewing so close to New Year, but I wanted… well, I thought it would be nice to have a bit of company at this time of year. So I went out before the real estate agent arrived, then I came back up once the viewing had started and pretended to be a prospective buyer. Becaus
e I didn’t want to sell the apartment without knowing who was going to be buying it. This isn’t just an apartment, it’s my home, I don’t want to hand it over to someone who’s just going to be passing through, to make money from it. I want someone who’s going to love living here, like I have. Maybe that’s hard for a young person to understand.”
That wasn’t true. There wasn’t a single person in the apartment who didn’t understand perfectly. But the real estate agent cleared her throat.
“So… when your daughter commissioned me, I wasn’t the first person she’d called?”
“Oh, no, she called all the other real estate agents before she felt obliged to ring you. But just look how it’s all turned out!” Estelle smiled.
The real estate agent brushed the dust off her jacket and her ego.
“So this is the key to…,” the bank robber began, staring at it but still not quite able to believe it.
Estelle nodded.
“My affair. He lived in the neighboring apartment, on the other side of the elevator. That’s where he died. I was standing in front of the bookcase when the apartment was put up for sale, and I wondered what would have happened if I’d met him first, before Knut. You can let yourself do that when you get old, go for a little stroll in your imagination. A young couple bought the apartment. They never changed the lock.”
Julia cleared her throat, rather taken aback.
“How… sorry, Estelle, but how do you know that?”
Estelle gave her an embarrassed little smile.
“Every so often I… well, I’ve never actually opened the door, of course, I’m not a criminal, but I… sometimes I check to see if the key still fits. It does. It doesn’t surprise me that they’re splitting up, that young couple, it really doesn’t, because I often used to hear them arguing when I was smoking in the closet. The walls are rather thin in there. You get to hear all sorts of things. Some of it would shock even Stockholmers, I can tell you.”
The bank robber put the book back on the shelf. Clutched the key tightly. Then she turned to the others and whispered: “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything at all. Go and hide in the other apartment until this is all over. Then you can go home to your daughters,” Estelle said.
The key was dancing in the bank robber’s palm when she unclenched her fist, she couldn’t hold it still.
“I haven’t got a home to go back to. I can’t pay the rent. And I can’t ask any of you to lie for my sake when you talk to the police. They’re going to ask who I am and if you know where I’m hiding, and I don’t want you to lie for me!”
“Of course we’re going to lie for you,” Ro exclaimed.
“Don’t worry about us,” Julia cajoled.
“We don’t actually have to lie, any of us,” Roger said. “We just need to play dumb.”
“Yes, well, there’s no problem, then, is there? Because that’s hardly going to be a challenge for any of you!” Zara declared. For once, it wasn’t actually meant as an insult, it just sounded like it.
Anna-Lena nodded thoughtfully at the bank robber.
“Roger’s right. We just have to play dumb. We can say you never took the mask off, so we can’t give a description.”
* * *
The bank robber tried to protest. They didn’t give her a chance. Then there was a knock at the door, and Roger went into the hall and peered through the spyhole, and saw Jim standing outside. That was when Roger realized what the real problem was.
“Damn. That policeman’s out in the stairwell, how are you going to get past him into the other apartment without him seeing you? We didn’t think of that!” he exclaimed.
“Perhaps we could distract him?” Julia suggested.
“I could squirt lime juice in his eyes!” Ro nodded.
“Perhaps we could just try reasoning with him?” Estelle said hopefully.
“Unless we all run out at once so he gets confused!” Anna-Lena said, thinking out loud.
“Naked! People always get more confused when you’re naked!” Lennart informed them, in his capacity as an expert.
Zara was standing next to him, and he was probably expecting her to tell him he was a damn idiot, but instead she said: “Perhaps we could bribe him. The policeman. Most men can be bought.”
Lennart of course noticed that she could have said “most people,” she didn’t have to say “most men,” but he couldn’t help thinking it was a nice gesture on her part to try to be part of the group.
* * *
The bank robber stood in front of them for a long while with the key in her hand, on the brink of telling them about Jim, but instead she said thoughtfully: “No. If I tell you how I’m going to escape, you’d have to lie when the police question you. But if you just walk out of here now and go downstairs, you can tell the truth: when you closed the door behind you, I was still in here. You don’t know what happened to me after that.”
They looked like they wanted to protest (all except Zara), but eventually nodded in response (even Zara). Estelle put some clingwrap over the remains of the pizza and put it in the fridge. She wrote her phone number on a scrap of paper, put it in the bank robber’s pocket, and whispered: “Send me a text when you’re safe, otherwise I’ll worry.” The bank robber promised. Then all the hostages walked out of the apartment. Roger went last, and carefully closed the door behind him until he heard the latch click. Jim directed them to walk down the stairs, where Jack was waiting to escort them into the police cars that would drive them to the station to be questioned.
* * *
Jim was left alone in the stairwell for a while, and waited until Jack came up the stairs.
“Is the bank robber still in there now? Are you sure, Dad?” Jack asked.
“One hundred percent,” Jim said.
“Good! The negotiator’s going to call the phone in there shortly and try to get him to come out voluntarily. Otherwise we’ll have to break the door in.”
Jim nodded. Jack looked around, then crouched down by the elevator and picked up a piece of paper.
“What’s this?”
“Looks like a drawing?” Jim said.
Jack put it in his pocket. Looked at the time. The negotiator made the call.
* * *
It had been tucked inside one of the pizza boxes, the special telephone thingy. It was Ro who had found it. She was very hungry, so she just thought it was odd to find a phone in a pizza box, put it down, and decided to eat first before bothering to think about it. And by the time she’d finished eating she’d forgotten all about it. There was so much else going on, the fireworks and all the rest of it, and perhaps you had to know Ro to understand just how absentminded she could be. But perhaps it’s enough to know that once she’d finished her own pizza, she opened all the other boxes and ate the crusts the others had left. At that point Roger turned to her and said she needn’t worry, he was sure she was going to be a good parent now, because good parents eat other people’s crusts out of other people’s boxes just like that. Hearing that meant so much to Ro that she burst into tears.
So the phone was left on the little three-legged table beside the sofa, as unsteady as a spider on an ice cube. When all the hostages had gone, the bank robber put her pistol down next to the phone, after wiping it carefully first, of course, because Roger had seen a documentary about how the police find fingerprints at crime scenes. She also threw her ski mask on the fire, because Roger had said the cops might be able to get DNA and all sorts of other stuff off it otherwise.
* * *
Then the bank robber went out through the door. Jim was standing alone on the landing. They glanced at each other quickly, she gratefully, he full of stress. She showed him the key. He breathed out.
“Hurry up,” he said.
“I just want to say… I haven’t told anyone you’re doing this for me. I didn’t want anyone to have to lie for me when they were questioned,” she said.
“Good,” he nodded.
&nbs
p; She tried in vain to blink away the dampness in her eyes, because of course she knew she was actually asking someone to lie for her, more than he had ever lied for anyone. But Jim wouldn’t let her apologize, just pushed her past the elevator door and whispered: “Good luck!”
She went inside the neighboring apartment and locked the door behind her. Jim was left standing on his own in the stairwell for a minute, which gave him time to think of his wife and hope she was proud of him. Or at least not really angry. With all the hostages safely on their way to the station, Jack came running up the stairs. Then the negotiator made the call. And the pistol hit the floor.
67
Back in the police station, Jim has told Jack the truth, the whole truth. His son wants to be angry, he wishes he had the time, but because he’s a good son he’s busy trying to come up with a plan instead. Once they’ve let the witnesses leave through the back door of the police station, he sets off toward the main entrance at the front.
“You don’t have to do this, son, I can go,” Jim says disconsolately. He stops himself from saying: Sorry I lied to you, but deep down you know I did the right thing.
Anxious People: A Novel Page 28