Now the man caressing the Browning was himself Schlageter! He turned to the others. “Iväg!” he commanded curtly. Fly. His three berserkers peeled away and vanished into darkness. He would not see them again.
He stood alone. He was a dark lord, consumed with dreams of blood and fire. The sense of impending victory was palpable. His mouth had gone dry. He wondered if the same affliction affected other great warriors.
Seventeen minutes later by his watch, a soft pinpoint glow emerged from the town’s darkness. Here is the real light of the North, he thought. The flames below opened like the petals of a yellow rose. Soon the fire lit the whole wooden building, even as it ate the structure alive. He could hear the alarm bells. A curious quality of frigid air: while up close sounds could seem muffled, far off they carried eerily well. Human cries came to him, shouts, pleadings. Or perhaps those occurred only in the man’s imagination.
The volunteer brigade arrived too late. Against the fire’s beautiful radiance the man could pick out teams of rescuers rushing forward. The tiny figures threw their ladders against the side of the building. But the ladders were made of wood, and they burned, too.
31.
Leaving Sveg and the giant wooden bear sculpture behind, Brand and Hammar drove on, farther into the mountains, toward Västvall. She wondered if he was leading her straight back into trouble. The deserted, winter-bitten countryside seemed to afford no place for her. I’m lost, she thought, gazing out at the stunted pine woods.
Hammar directed her off the highway onto a smaller road, then off that onto a smaller one still. He had her pull up in front of a structure that appeared half buried in snow.
“What is this place?”
“A family summer house,” Hammar said.
“Whose family?”
“Mine,” he said. “Come along.”
From the outside the cottage appeared to be lovely, with a deep air of the rustic and picturesque. Brand felt a stab of awe at the beauty of the Swedish countryside. The building of dark wood posted itself in the throat of a small vale. Spread out below was a frozen lake, its empty surface surrounded by snow-flattened fields and dense forests of pine, birch and aspen.
Brand now realized that Hammar had to know the Västvall area very well indeed, since his family were practically neighbors of the Vosses. Not exactly close enough to borrow a cup of sugar, say, but in the same general vicinity. Why hadn’t he revealed the existence of the cottage to Brand?
“A härbre,” Hammar called the place. Formerly a barn to store grain, now repurposed and remodeled.
The aspens in the lakeside meadows bent in the cold wind, their bark silvery in the late afternoon light. Beyond the lake, the landscape seemed to roll out in an endless succession of hills and valleys.
Hammar had accomplished a minor miracle in rehabilitating the ancient wooden structure. Brand had not expected anything like it from Krister Hammar, the urbane attorney at law. The man was an onion. There were more layers to him than Brand had yet managed to peel away.
“We brought the old structure here from its original site, my dad and I, pulling it over the ice in winter with a horse-drawn sledge,” Hammar explained. “I was fourteen, it was…just before my father died. Inside the place smelled like dust, centuries of it. Back then I was contemptuous. I didn’t believe such a decrepit pile of logs was worth saving. I didn’t know why my father would bother. Now I feel differently.”
The härbre dated back to the 1700s. But the interior modifications came straight out of the 21st century. Here was the Sweden of today, encapsulated: a three-hundred year old structure that represented an ancient agricultural tradition, with an ultra-modern design sensibility grafted onto it.
“This may be my new favorite place in the world,” Brand said, looking around. “I never thought I’d say that about anywhere that wasn’t New York City.”
“Let’s go in.” Hammar extended his arm like a real estate agent.
Brand noticed that someone had plowed the driveway and that the heat was on inside. “I called ahead to our neighbor,” Hammar explained.
The original, barn-like härbre represented the heart of the home, serving as the main living space. On one expanse of whitewashed wall, Hammar had hung some of the primitive-looking farm tools that had originally been stored in the building, a matching pair of wooden-toothed rakes, a lethal-looking scythe and a collection of flails. The handles on all the implements were worn from use. Brand could not help but think of the hands that had polished them smooth, calloused hands and strong arms now decades gone.
“We get water from the lake here,” Hammar said. “And I’m afraid the bathroom is an outhouse, if you follow the path out back.”
He knelt to start a log fire in the hearth. Moving back and forth from fireside to the kitchen area, he served a late lunch of sausage, bread and cheese. Or was it dinner? The early winter dusk suspended time. Brand felt light-headed and disoriented. She had to refer to her watch to get anchored. It had all been just one long day. A short six hours earlier, she had been facing off with Detective Hult and his juvenile sidekick Larsson.
Hammar poured them glasses of red wine, a nice cabernet sauvignon. Brand was too weary to be impressed. Her tiredness became an unstoppable force. She fell into a doze in front of the fire, thinking as she did so that now Hammar could watch her sleep, just as she had watched him on the drive up from Stockholm.
◆◆◆
Brand woke to the sound of a dull, rhythmic pounding, coming from outside the cottage. The fire still burned. Someone—it could only have been Hammar—had covered her with a blanket of soft, patterned lambswool. The man himself was not around. A pair of felt-lined rubber boots stood on the floor near the couch where she had fallen asleep. A white hooded parka that looked as if it was thermally rated for a polar expedition lay on the empty sofa chair. She donned both the boots and the parka and stepped outside.
Once again, as on that night at the Dalgren homestead, the mad sweep of stars made her stop and stare. And there was something else, too, something Brand had never set eyes on before, outside of photographs and videos.
Teasing the horizon were the green flares of the aurora, like a minor preview of the main show to come. Tongues of lime-white flame unfurled, pulsed, and then folded back in on themselves. Mormor, her dear grandmother Klara, had told Brand tales of the northern lights. She created in a young girl’s mind visions of a polar wonderland. Knowledge gained by experience always surpasses knowledge gained second-hand, by mere description. The reality of seeing the aurora now easily vanquished her childhood imagination. Perhaps, finally, this was the hidden reason, unknown even to herself, that Brand had come to Sweden.
Thud, thud, thud.
The sound that had awakened her might have been Hammar, down by the frozen lake, beating a dead horse. Brand headed out along the short driveway from the cottage. She discovered a path through the snow. Following the sound, she approached Hammar on the shore of the lake. He was oblivious to her presence.
Indeed he was in the midst of beating something, if not a horse. Wielding an ax with great pummeling swings, he attacked the surface ice. He had already managed to chop through a sizable rectangle near the shoreline. This was an isvak, a section of open water for ice bathing. The hole looked black and forbidding.
Hammar had also built a bonfire directly on the ice, a short distance from the cut-out. He had pulled up some logs near the flames to sit upon. Next to the logs, warming by the fire, were a pile of sheepskins.
The thudding sound of his effort covered the noise of Brand’s approach. She stood watching him, intently engaged in physical labor. The sight formed a picture of the man far different from the one asleep in the passenger seat of the Saab.
He looked up and hailed her. Then, smiling crookedly, he slammed the ax into the ice one last time, leaving it embedded. He immediately began to remove his clothes.
Brand didn’t catch on right away. She had all sorts of outlandish thoughts. But after Hamma
r disrobed completely, he stepped toward a small, hutch-like building at the lake’s edge. Brand realized what was up.
A sauna, of course. Outside of a health club, Brand had never encountered one. At the quick glimpse of Hammar’s body before he stepped into the sauna, she experienced a mild erotic charge. While he wasn’t exactly ripped, and didn’t have the body builder tone like a lot of her fellow New York cops, Hammar had obviously kept himself fit.
“What about boots?” she called to Hammar through the closed door of the sauna. “Can I leave my boots on?”
“Don’t be a baby,” came his answer from within.
Brand kicked off the felt-lined boots Hammar had provided her in the cottage. She hesitated only a moment, before throwing off her American modesty together with her clothes. She slipped into the darkened, sweltering interior of the sauna.
“Välkommen till den tionde helveteskretsen,” Hammar said. She understood him without translation. Welcome to the tenth circle of hell.
Hell, in this incarnation, was cozy, fragrant, and hot enough to sear the skin. She sat on the small raised wooden platform next to Hammar. He ladled a scoop of water onto the pile of hot stones in one corner. A wave of steam heat came at her that the souls of Dante’s inferno would have recognized.
She gasped. “Oh. My. God.”
“You see?” Hammar said brightly. “I hear you call to your maker. No atheists in foxholes, and none in saunas, either.”
Then he began to beat her flesh lightly, using a switch made of bundled birch twigs.
Snick, snick, snick, sounded the stroke of the bath whisk.
Brand started to lose her mind. She seemed incapable of any thought beyond heat, heat, heat. Time stretched out in an elastic way that made a minute seem like an hour. She was not aware of sitting knee-to-knee with a naked man. She didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want to scream. She wanted only to survive.
They had been through hell three times together now, she thought, herself and Hammar. Once at the bloody manor house, once during the blizzard at Västvall, and now here, in a more pleasurable way, in the sauna. The first two times they had survived. She couldn’t predict what was going to happen this third time around.
“You know,” she gasped, “a sauna is not that bad as a seduction technique. It’s just a little obvious.”
“You misunderstand the tradition,” Hammar said carefully. “There is no seduction here. For you Americans, maybe, all nudity is sexual. In the eyes of many in the rest of the world, that viewpoint is puritanical.”
“It must be my overheated blood,” Brand said, aiming for irony and missing the mark.
“Let me tell you how it is here. I have been involved in a legal proceeding, held in an out of the way location. The officers of the court wound up in a sauna together after a hard day at each other’s throats. Men and women both, lawyers and clerks. There was even a judge. Believe me, nothing could be further from the erotic.”
He gave a derisive snort. “Then we all put our clothes back on. If the same collection of people suddenly thought to strip down in any other circumstances, it would be considered a funny social misstep. So do you understand?”
“Okay,” Brand said. “I think you’re all kidding yourselves, but okay.”
Hammar reached out and traced a longitudinal scar that ran down the outside of Brand’s right thigh. She brushed his hand away. What was it with men and their fascination with scars?
“Now what?” she asked.
“Now we…”
“Oh, no, no way.”
“Of course I don’t mean sex. I mean now we jump through the hole I chopped in the ice, the isvak. We leap into zero degree lake water.”
“No way. I mean, I knew what you meant and I mean no way.”
“You will be pleasantly surprised,” Hammar said. “When you plunge into an isvak after being in the sauna, your skin feels—well, it’s hard to describe. Your body feels silky, as though you’ve turned into a seal. Radiant. Totally alive.”
“I don’t want to be a radiant seal.”
“It’ll be good, I promise.”
Hammar took her hand. He thrust open the door of the sauna hut and stepped outside.
He led Brand toward the gaping hole in the lake ice. Their bodies sent off plumes of steam. Hammar’s eyes glistened with the blue-green reflection of the aurora. The haunting array of the northern lights, growing more pronounced every second, uncoiled above them.
“Don’t think,” he said. “Just do.”
Brand didn’t think. Instead, she balked. At the sight of the black water, a pool of freezing ice that just happened to be masquerading as liquid, she turned abruptly away from Hammar. Grabbing a bonfire-warmed sheepskin to wrap around herself, Brand headed back to the cottage, barefoot in the snow.
32.
A few years previously, all traces of the erotic had vanished from Brand’s life. She had been drinking too much, and made an attempt to dry out. Sex disappeared when alcohol did.
After a stretch of sobriety, she had to question her new reality. How had the human species managed to procreate before the discovery of fermentation made getting drunk possible? Participating in partnered sex while undrunk struck her as more and more awkward, mawkish, and unlikely. She eased off the throttle with men. She threw herself into her work.
Her attempt at sobriety was triggered by a suicide attempt, her second, at age thirty-two. Her first try was not really a serious one. She OD’d on pills and red wine when she was still a teenager, just about to turn twenty.
It was over a decade before she tried again. Her dark life had gotten a lot darker by then. She thought the NYPD might save her. But cops turned out to be as squirrely as asylum inmates.
“You know the only profession with a suicide rate higher than cops?” her partner Willie Urrico asked her. “Psychiatrists.”
Everyone on the force drank. At that period in her life, the passing of her thirtieth birthday frightened Brand. The milestone had become a millstone around her neck. The idea of her own mortality suddenly occurred to her. In response, she tried to outdo everyone on the force. Out-drink, out-fuck, out-not-care them all.
Nothing helped. Urrico started offering her mouthwash and aspirin before they headed into the precinct house for roll call.
During a late-night vodkathon, a hard-drinking assistant district attorney named Jeffra Sanger gave her counsel. “If I ever want to end it, I know exactly how I’d do it.”
“Yeah?” Brand’s words came out slurred. But she experienced a flicker of interest.
“This place is an island, remember?” Sanger was talking about Manhattan. The Hudson River bounded the borough of Manhattan on the west. The Harlem and East Rivers cut off the eastern side.
“Really, we’re on an island?” Brand responded sarcastically. “Coming down a little hard on the obvious, aren’t you, Jeffra?”
The two of them were both rebounding off rancid sexual encounters with vile men. As the night wore on, commiseration descended into misery.
“Here’s how you do the deed, Veronika. You take a cross-town walk, west to east.” Sanger looked solemnly into Brand’s eyes. With a sudden spasm of almost-sobriety, the woman bit off an additional four words. “You. Just. Keep. Going.”
“Just keep going,” Brand echoed.
“Uh-huh,” Sanger said. “West to east.”
“West to east, right.”
Sanger leaned in close. “The Hudson River might not do it. But the East River, baby, nobody comes out of that alive. It’s not really a river, actually. It’s a tidal strait. The currents run back and forth like freight trains.”
“Growing up, I was on the swim team at the Queens Aquatic Club,” Brand noted.
“Don’t matter, sweetheart,” Sanger said. Citing an infamous confluence of the East and Harlem Rivers, she added, “You ain’t doing the breaststroke in the currents of Hellgate.”
A few rounds of drinks later—more than a few—Brand became separated from her fel
low drunks. In search of her misplaced vehicle, she staggered alone down a sidewalk on East Twenty-Third Street. She decided to try out Jeffra Sanger’s suggestion.
West to east. Just keep going.
She passed beneath an overpass of FDR Drive, crossed the frontage road, the bike path, and the thin strip of weed-choked land along the East River. No fences stopped her. No “life is worth living” anti-suicide sign turned her away.
The black water appeared half congealed, like oil or gelatin. On the opposite shore, the lights of the Queens waterfront shimmered. Queens, her home borough, just across the water. In Brand’s bottle-blurred vision, the surface of the river read like an invitation. I feel like going home, she told herself. She just kept going, over the top of the rusted retaining wall, standing poised for a single instant, then, falling forward.
On the way down, a jagged piece of bulkhead metal tore a foot-long gash in her right leg. The concussive slap of the water knocked the breath out of her. The current sucked her away in the general direction of the big landmarked Pepsi-Cola sign on the far shore.
It’s hard to believe that death enjoys irony, but life certainly embraces it with a vengeance. A police boat had recently been summoned to the area. The rescue squad was in search of another suicidal jumper, this one a fifteen year old male last seen in the river off nearby Corlears Hook.
The police patrol fished Brand out. One of the cops, Stan Medelino, recognized her.
“Brand? My God, you went in after that kid jumper?”
She couldn’t speak. Officer Medelino took her silence for a yes. Brand passed out. Six hours later she woke in Bellevue Hospital.
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