Kennedy's Brain

by Mankell Henning

  The wind had eased off. She took her coffee into the courtyard and balanced it on her knee when she sat down on a bench. Her mobile rang. She was sure it would be Henrik, but the call came from Greece and was from Vassilis. She hesitated, and decided not to answer. Soon enough she would return to Argolis and go to see him then.

  She put her mobile back in her handbag, drank her coffee, then decided that she had had enough. The speakers scheduled for the rest of the day would no doubt have very interesting things to say, but she did not want to hang around any longer. She returned her coffee cup and went to see the man with the hare lip. She told him that a friend had unexpectedly fallen ill – it wasn't life-threatening, but serious enough for her to feel that she ought to return home immediately.

  She would regret those words. They would return to haunt her. She had cried wolf, and the wolf had come.

  But just then Visby was bathed in autumn sunshine. She went back to her hotel, was helped by the receptionist to change her air ticket and was lucky enough to find a seat on a flight leaving at three o'clock. That gave her time to take a walk round the city walls, and she called in at two shops to try on knitted jumpers made from local wool but failed to find one that fitted her. She had lunch at a Chinese restaurant and decided not to phone Henrik, but to surprise him. She had a key to his flat, and he had told her that she could go in at any time – he had no secrets from her.

  She arrived at the airport in good time, and saw the photograph taken the previous day in a local newspaper. She tore the page out and put it in her handbag. Then came an announcement that the aircraft she was due to fly on had developed a technical fault, and she would have to wait for a replacement plane that was already on its way from Stockholm.

  She was not annoyed, but could feel her impatience growing. As there was no alternative flight, she sat in the sun outside the terminal building and smoked a cigarette. She was sorry now that she hadn't spoken to Vassilis: it would have been as well to get it over with and weather the furious outburst of a man whose vanity had been wounded and who could not accept a no for what it was.

  But she did not phone him. Her flight eventually left after a two-hour delay, and it was nearly six by the time she was back in Stockholm. She took a taxi to Henrik's flat on Söder. They were caught in a traffic jam caused by a road accident – it was as if invisible forces were combining to hold her back, to spare her what was in store. But she knew nothing of that, of course, and merely felt her impatience increasing. It seemed that in many ways Sweden had started to become more like Greece, with gridlocked traffic and constant delays.

  Henrik lived in Tavastgatan, a quiet street set back from the busiest roads on Söder. She tried the entry code, hoping it had not been changed. It was easy to remember: the Battle of Hastings, 1066. The door opened. Henrik lived on the top floor, with a view over rooftops and church towers. He had also told her, to her horror, that if he stood on the narrow railing outside one of his windows, he could just glimpse the water at Strömmen.

  She rang the bell twice, then unlocked the door. She noticed immediately that the air in the flat smelled stale.

  She suddenly felt scared. Something was wrong. She held her breath and listened. She could see into the kitchen from the entrance hall. There's nobody here, she thought. She shouted that she had arrived, but there was no reply. She felt better. She hung up her coat and kicked off her shoes. There was no post or junk mail on the doormat. So Henrik was not away, at least. She went into the kitchen. No dirty crockery in the sink. The living room was unusually tidy, the desk empty. She opened the bedroom door.

  Henrik was under the covers. His head lay heavily on the pillow. He was lying on his back, one hand hanging down towards the floor, the other open over his chest.

  She realised immediately that he was dead. In a desperate attempt to banish the thought, she screamed out loud, but he did not move, he just lay in his bed but was no longer there.

  It was Friday, 17 September. Louise Cantor fell into an abyss.

  Then she ran out of the flat, still screaming. Those who heard her said afterwards that she sounded like an animal howling in pain.

  CHAPTER 3

  A single tangible thought emerged from the chaos. Aron. Where was he? Did he still exist? Why was he not here by her side? Henrik was their joint creation, and that was not something he could run away from. But needless to say, Aron did not appear, he was absent just as he had always been absent, like a thin column of smoke that she could neither grasp hold of nor lean on for support.

  Afterwards, she had no clear memory of the next few hours: all she knew was what others had told her. A neighbour had opened his door and found her lying on the stairs. In due course a constant stream of people turned up, police officers and ambulance men. She had been taken back to the flat, despite her resistance. She had no desire to go back in there, she had not seen what she had seen, Henrik had just slipped out, he would soon be home again. A woman police officer with a childlike face had patted her arm, like a friendly old aunt trying to console a little girl who had fallen and grazed her knee.

  But Louise had not grazed her knee, she had been shattered by the realisation that her son was dead. The woman police officer kept repeating her name – Emma. Emma was an old-fashioned name that had recently become popular again, she thought confusedly. Everything came back eventually, even her own name which in the old days had been used mainly by the rich and high-born: now it had slipped down through the joists of the class system and become available to all. Her father, Artur, had been responsible for choosing the name, and she had been teased at school. At the time there was a Queen Louise in Sweden, an ancient old crone looking like a withered tree trunk. She had hated the name all the time she was growing up, until the end of her relationship with Emil when she had wriggled free of his bear hug and been able to move away. Then the name of Louise suddenly became a significant advantage.

  Such thoughts whirled around inside her head as Emma sat patting her arm, as if beating time to the tragedy, or as if it were time itself ticking by.

  One thing she could remember, one of the few things she did not need to be reminded of or to have explained to her: time was like a ship sailing into the distance. She was standing on the quay and the clocks of life were ticking away more and more slowly. She had been left behind, she was no longer involved in the course of events. It was not Henrik who was dead, it was her.

  She occasionally tried to run away, to drag herself away from the policewoman sympathetically patting her arm. They said later that Louise's screams had been heartrending; eventually somebody had forced a tablet down her throat, making her even more confused and sleepy. She recalled how all the people crammed into the little flat had started to move at snail's pace, as if in a slow-motion film.

  As she fell into the abyss she had also had confused thoughts about God. She had never conducted a real conversation with God before, or at least not since her teens when she had gone through a phase of persistent religious brooding. One snowy morning in early December, shortly before the traditional processions to celebrate St Lucia, one of her classmates had been run over and killed by a snow-plough on her way to school. It was the first time death had affected her personally. It was a death smelling of wet wool, a death enveloped by wintry cold and heavy snow. Her teacher had wept – that in itself had been a ghastly attack on her childhood idyll, seeing her strict class teacher burst into tears like a terrified and abandoned child. A candle was burning on the desk where the dead child used to sit. It happened to be the desk next to her own, and now her friend had gone away: that is what death meant, going away, no more than that. What was so frightening, and eventually horrific, was the realisation that death struck at random. She started to wonder how that could be, and it suddenly dawned on her that the question may well have been addressed to what was known as God.

  But He did not reply. She tried every trick she could think of to attract His attention, she made a little altar in a corner of the woo
dshed, but no inner voice answered her questions. God was an absent adult who only spoke to a child when it suited Him. She eventually discovered that she did not really believe in God: perhaps at most she had fallen in love with Him, a secret passion, rather like one for an inaccessible boy several years older than herself.

  From then on there had never been a God in her life, not until now; but He did not speak to her on this occasion either. She was alone. There was only herself plus the policewoman patting her arm and all the other people speaking in low voices, moving slowly and apparently looking for something that had been lost.

  There was a sudden stillness, like when a recorded tape snaps. The voices all around her were no longer there. Instead she could hear whispers inside her head, saying over and over again that it wasn't true. Henrik was merely asleep, he was not dead. He could not possibly be dead. After all, she had come to visit him.

  A police officer, in plain clothes, with tired eyes, asked her gently to go to the kitchen with him. She realised afterwards it was so that she did not have to watch Henrik being taken away. They sat down at the kitchen table, and she could feel the breadcrumbs against the palm of her hand.

  Henrik couldn't possibly be dead, the breadcrumbs were still there!

  The policeman had to repeat his name before she caught on. Göran Wrath. I shall feel boundless anger if what I refuse to believe eventually turns out to be true, she thought.

  She answered his questions with questions of her own, which he replied to in turn. It was as if they were circling round each other.

  The only certainty was that Henrik had died. Göran Wrath said there was nothing to suggest foul play. Had he been ill? She said he had never been seriously ill, the usual childhood ailments had come and gone without leaving any trace, and he had never been prone to infections. Wrath wrote down her replies in a little notebook. She looked at his chubby fingers and wondered if they were sensitive enough to seek out the truth.

  'Somebody must have killed him,' she said.

  'There are no signs of his having been assaulted.'

  She wanted to protest, but lacked the strength. They were still sitting in the kitchen. Wrath asked if there was anybody she would like to phone. He gave her a mobile, and she rang her father. If Aron no longer existed and was unable to accept his responsibilities, her father would have to step in. She could hear the phone ringing, but there was no reply. Perhaps he was out in the forest, making his wood sculptures? Somewhere where there was no signal. But if she shouted loudly enough, would he hear her then? At that moment, he answered.

  She started crying the moment she heard his voice. It was as if she had flown backwards through time and returned to the helpless creature she had once been.

  'Henrik is dead.'

  She could hear him breathing. To fill his enormous lungs required vast amounts of oxygen.

  'Henrik is dead,' she said again.

  She heard him spit something out, perhaps he said 'Good God', or maybe he swore.

  'What's happened?'

  'I'm sitting in his kitchen. I came here. He was asleep in bed. But he was dead.'

  She was lost for words and handed the mobile to Wrath, who stood up, as if to demonstrate his sympathy. It was when she heard him tell her father that it hit her: Henrik really was dead. It was not just words and imagination, a macabre game involving visual impressions and her own horror. He really was dead.

  Wrath hung up.

  'He said he'd been drinking and was unable to drive. But he would take a taxi. Where does he live?'

  'In Härjedalen.'

  'What? A taxi from Härjedalen?! That's three hundred miles!'

  'He'll take a taxi. He loved Henrik.'

  She was driven to a hotel where somebody had booked a room for her. While she waited for Artur to arrive, she was never left alone. Most of her companions were in uniform. She was given some more tranquillisers, she may have slept – she was not sure about that afterwards. Henrik's death was shrouded in mist for those first few hours.

  The only thought she could recall from that evening when she was waiting for Artur's taxi to arrive was that Henrik had once constructed a mechanical hell. Why she recalled that very thing, she had no idea. It was as if all the shelves containing memories inside her brain had collapsed, and all the contents had ended up in the wrong place. No matter what thought or memory she tried to summon up, what actually came to mind was something unexpected.

  Henrik had been fifteen or sixteen at the time. She had just been putting the finishing touches to her doctoral thesis on the difference between Attic Bronze Age graves and burial customs in northern Greece. It had been a time of worry – would her dissertation stand up to intense scrutiny? – and sleepless nights. Henrik had been restless and irritable, the rebellious feelings he would normally have directed at his father had been channelled towards her instead, and she was afraid that he was drifting into company where drugs and antisocial feelings were the norm. But everything had blown over, and one day he had shown her a picture of a mechanical hell that was displayed in a Copenhagen museum. He said he would like to see it, and it was obvious that he could not be put off. So she suggested they should go there together. It was early spring, and she was due to be examined for her doctorate in May – she needed a few days of relaxation.

  The trip brought them closer together. For the first time they outgrew the mummy-child relationship. He was on the verge of manhood, and wanted her to treat him like an adult. He started asking questions about Aron, and she had finally told him in all seriousness about their intense mutual passion, the only positive outcome of which was Henrik's conception. She tried to avoid talking ill of Aron, she did not want to reveal her husband's lies and his constant efforts to avoid responsibility for the child she was expecting. Henrik listened attentively, and it was clear from his questions that they had been prepared well in advance.

  They spent two windy days in Copenhagen, sliding around on the slushy pavements, but they duly found the mechanical hell, and it seemed to be the triumphal climax of their expedition. The hell had been created by an unknown master (or perhaps rather a lunatic) in the early eighteenth century, and was no bigger than a puppet theatre. You could wind up springs and then watch devils made out of tinplate gobbling up desperate human beings who fell down from a rod at the top level of hell. Flames had been cut out of yellow-coloured metal, and there was a chief devil with a long tail who moved rhythmically until the power generated by the clockwork mechanisms wore out. They managed to persuade one of the museum staff to wind up the springs again even though it was not officially permitted: the mechanical hell was very fragile and extremely valuable. There was nothing else like it in the world.

  It was then that Henrik made up his mind to create a hell of his own. She did not believe he was serious. And in addition, she doubted if he had sufficient technical skill to construct the necessary mechanisms. But three months later he invited her into his room and showed her an almost exact copy of the hell in Copenhagen. She had been most surprised, and felt very bitter towards Aron who was not interested in what his son was capable of achieving.

  Why did she think of that now, as she sat with her police companions, waiting for Artur? Perhaps because on that occasion she had felt great satisfaction deep down for the fact that Henrik gave her life a meaning far beyond any satisfaction she could derive from doctoral dissertations or archaeological digs. If there is a meaning in life it must be centred upon a person, she thought, nothing else. It had to be a person.

  Now he was dead. And she was dead as well. She cried in waves; tears came like showers that squeezed out their contents then vanished again. Time had ceased to be of any significance at all. She had no idea how long she waited. Shortly before Artur arrived the thought struck her that Henrik would never deliberately expose her to the slightest pain, no matter how much difficulty life was causing him. She was the guarantee that he would never take his own life.

  What was the alternative? Somebody must h
ave killed him. She tried to tell that to the policewoman guarding her. Soon afterwards Göran Wrath came into her hotel room. He flopped down onto a chair in front of her and asked her why. Why what?