Kennedy's Brain

by Mankell Henning

  Aron leaned back in his chair.

  'At first he talks about a single lantern. Then there are suddenly several. What does that mean? Is there a group of people trying to dig under the skin of these pharmaceutical companies?'

  'This could well be Henrik. Even if I thought I had made him immune to any thought of digging down into the earth to discover secrets.'

  'Did he never want to follow in your footsteps?'

  'Become an archaeologist, you mean? Never. He even hated digging in sandpits when he was a child.'

  Aron pointed at the screen.

  'He must have been pretty well up in IT. There again, the programs he uses are not the very latest ones. That also gives food for thought. Given the amount of money he had, why didn't he acquire the very latest, state-of-the-art technology? I can only think of one explanation.'

  'That he wanted to use the money for something else?'

  'Every penny was important. For something else. The question is: what?'

  Aron opened a new seam in the computer's underworld, and called up another of Henrik's secrets. It was a series of newspaper articles that had been scanned directly into the computer.

  'He didn't do this here,' said Aron. 'There is no scanner in this flat. Was there one in his Stockholm flat?'

  'I didn't see one.'

  'Do you know what a scanner is?'

  'We're hardly likely to dig them up out of the ground as ancient relics, but we do use them occasionally.'

  They read the articles. Two were from the English newspaper the Guardian, two from the New York Times and two from the Washington Post. The articles were about health-care workers who had been bribed to leak case notes on two different people, one man who wanted to remain anonymous, and another, Steve Nichols, who allowed a photograph of his face to be used. Both men had been blackmailed and forced to pay huge amounts of money because they were HIV-positive.

  Henrik had made no notes or comments. The articles were silent signposts in a room where Henrik was not present. Could Henrik's large income come from blackmail? Could he be a blackmailer? Louise was sure Aron was thinking the same thing. The thought was so repulsive and impossible that she banished it. But Aron said nothing, simply sat in front of the computer, stroking a finger over the keyboard. Could it be that Henrik found himself in a dark tunnel leading into an even darker room?

  They did not know. And that is where they left matters. They locked up and left the building without Blanca having put in an appearance. They went for a walk through the town, and when they finally got back to their hotel Aron asked if he could sleep in her room.

  'I can't face up to being on my own.'

  'Bring your own pillow,' she said. 'And don't wake me up if I'm asleep when you arrive.'

  After a few hours of sleep Louise was woken up by Aron moving around the room. He was wearing trousers, but no shirt. She watched him through half-closed eyes and noticed a scar running across his left shoulder blade. It looked as if it had been caused by a knife. In the days, now long ago, when she had often rested her head on his back, there had been no such scar. When had he acquired it? Possibly in one of all those drunken brawls he had always been keen to take part in, disregarding the danger – most of them started by himself. He put on a shirt and sat down on her bed.

  'I see you're awake.'

  'Where are you going?'

  'Nowhere. Out. Coffee. I can't sleep. I might go to a church.'

  'Since when did you start going to church?'

  'I still haven't lit a candle for Henrik. That's something it's best to do on one's own.'

  Aron picked up his jacket, gave her a nod and disappeared through the door.

  She got up and hung the 'Do Not Disturb' notice on the door handle. On the way back to bed she paused by the wall mirror and examined her face. Which face is it that Aron sees? I've always been told that my face keeps changing. My colleagues, the ones who are close to me and dare to say what they think, maintain that I wear a different face every morning. I'm not like Janus with only two faces: I have ten or fifteen masks that are always changing. Unseen hands place a mask over my face as dawn breaks, and I have no idea what expression I'm wearing on that particular day.

  That is an image that frequently crops up in her dreams.

  Louise Cantor, archaeologist, bent over an excavation with a classic Hellenic mask covering her face.

  She went back to bed, but was unable to go back to sleep. The nagging feeling of despair refused to go away. She phoned Artur. There was no reply. On the spur of the moment, she looked up Nazrin's telephone number, but there was no reply there either. She left a message on the answering machine and said that she would be in touch later, although it was rather difficult as she was on a journey.

  When she was about to leave the room and find somewhere serving coffee, she noticed that Aron had left his room key on the table.

  During the time of suspicion, when I thought he was being unfaithful, the years before our marriage collapsed, I used to search through his bags and pockets in secret. I would read his diary, and always try to be first to collect the post as it dropped through the letter box. If now had been then, I would have taken the key and unlocked his door.

  She was embarrassed by the thought. When she was in Australia, in the house with the red parrots, she had never had the feeling that there was a woman in Aron's life, somebody he was hiding away because Louise had turned up. Even if there had been another woman, it was nothing to do with her. The love she had once felt for him was not something that could be dug up out of the ground and restored once more.

  She had coffee and then went for a walk. It occurred to her that she ought to phone Greece and talk to her colleagues. But what could she say?

  She paused in the middle of the pavement and realised that she may never return to Greece to work, just for a few days to fetch her belongings and shut up the house. The future was a blank page. She turned round and went back to the hotel. A chambermaid was busy in her room. Louise went down to reception to wait. A beautiful woman was stroking a dog, a man was reading a newspaper with a magnifying glass. She returned to her room. The key was still on the table, Aron still hadn't come back. She pictured him inside a church, with a candle in his hand.

  She knew nothing about his pain. One of these days he would be transformed into a volcanic eruption. The hot lava compressed inside him would force its way out through cracks in his body. He would die like a dragon spitting fire.

  She rang Artur again. This time he answered. It had snowed during the night. Artur loved snow, it made him feel secure, she knew that. She told him that she was in Barcelona with Aron, and that they had discovered a flat belonging to Henrik that nobody knew about. But she did not say that Henrik was HIV-positive. She was unsure how Artur would react. It was a brief call, Artur never liked talking on the telephone. He always held the receiver some way from his ear, forcing her to shout.

  She hung up, then made a call to Greece. She was lucky and spoke to the person who had replaced her in charge of the dig, a colleague from Uppsala. Louise asked how the work was going, and heard that the autumn excavations were coming to an end before everything closed down for the winter. Everything was going according to plan. She had decided to be very clear about her own role. She simply did not know when she would be in a position to take up her duties again. It was not all that important just now, winter was approaching and fieldwork would be suspended. Nobody knew what would happen next year, if the necessary grants to continue the work would be approved.

  She was cut off. When she tried the number again, she heard a female voice speaking Greek. Louise understood that fate had ordained that she should try again later.

  She lay down on the bed and went to sleep. It was half past twelve when she woke up. Aron had still not returned.

  For the first time she started to feel uneasy. Four hours in which to have coffee and light a candle in church? Had he run away again? Could he not face any more? Would she have to wait six
months yet again before he rang her, drunk and maudlin, from some far distant haven? She took the key and went to his room. His case was lying open on the bench provided: clothes in a mess, and an electric razor in a shabby case. She felt among the clothes, and found a plastic pouch containing a very large sum of money. She transferred the notes into her own purse, to ensure that they wouldn't be stolen. At the very bottom of the case she discovered a book by Bill Gates, meditating on computers and the future. She thumbed through it and found a few pages where Aron had highlighted certain extracts and made notes in the margin. Just like Henrik, she thought. They were two of a kind. She never made marginal notes in books. She replaced it, and picked up another one. It was a study of unresolved mathematical problems. The corner of one page was folded over, to mark where Aron had got to. The next chapter would deal with Fermat's riddle.

  Louise replaced the book, and looked round the room. She investigated the waste-paper basket: an empty vodka bottle. He had not smelled of strong drink in the morning since they had met on the pier in Australia. Nevertheless, since they arrived in Barcelona he had evidently emptied a whole bottle. There was no sign of any glasses, and so he had drunk straight from the bottle. But when? He and Louise had been together almost all the time.

  Louise returned to her room, and it occurred to her that all she was doing now was waiting for Aron. I come to a stop when the pathfinder stops, she thought, and felt annoyed. Why don't I do my own thing?

  She left a message on the table. She had lunch in a little restaurant not far from the hotel. When she paid her bill she noticed that it was three o'clock: surely Aron would be back at the hotel by now. She checked her mobile, but he had not rung and left a message.

  It started to rain. She hurried back with her jacket over her head. The man in reception shook his head. Mr Cantor hasn't come back. Has he phoned? We don't have a message for Mrs Cantor.

  Now she was seriously worried. But it was a different kind of worry – she was not afraid that Aron might have run away from her again. Something had happened. She rang his mobile, but there was no reply.

  She stayed in her room until evening. Still no Aron. She had tried his mobile number several times, but it was switched off. At about seven she went down to reception. She sat down in an armchair and watched the people circulating between the exit, reception, the bar and the newspaper stand. There was a man on a chair, studying a map in a corner next to the bar entrance. She looked at him surreptitiously. Something had attracted her attention. Did she recognise him? Had she seen him before? She went to the bar and drank a glass of wine. And another. When she returned to the lobby the man with the map had gone. There was a woman sitting there now. On the phone. The woman was so far away that Louise could not even hear what language was being spoken, never mind what was being said.

  At eight thirty Louise drank another glass of wine. Then she left the hotel. Aron had taken the keys to Henrik's flat with him. That was where he had been all day, of course, at Henrik's computer. She walked quickly and turned into Christ's Cul-de-sac. When she came to the entrance door she checked her back. Was that a shadowy figure lurking in the darkness just outside where the street lamp reached? Once again she was enveloped by a mysterious fear emanating from somewhere she was unable to pin down.

  Was this the fear Henrik had referred to in his conversations with Nazrin, and in his notes?

  Louise rang Blanca's bell. There was a pause before she answered.

  'Sorry, I was on the phone, my father's ill.'

  'Have you seen my husband here today?'

  Blanca shook her head.

  'Are you absolutely sure?'

  'He's not been, and he's not left.'

  'He's got the keys. We must have misunderstood each other.'

  'I can open up for you. You just need to slam the door when you leave.'

  It occurred to Louise that she ought to ask Blanca why she was not telling the truth. But something got in the way. Her main task for the moment was to find out where Aron was.

  Blanca opened the door to Henrik's flat, then vanished down the stairs. Louise stood still in the semi-darkness, listening. Then she switched on the lights, one after the other, and walked round the flat.

  All of a sudden, it seemed to her that several of the wayward pieces had just found their places in the puzzle, and that an unexpected pattern was emerging.

  Somebody wanted Aron out of the way. It was something to do with Henrik, something to do with Kennedy's brain, with Henrik's journeys, his illness and his death. Aron was the pathfinder. He was the most dangerous person, the one who had to be disposed of first, so that the path would not be discovered.

  Louise turned cold with fear. She edged cautiously closer to the window, and looked down at the street.

  Though there was nobody there, she had the impression that somebody had just left.

  CHAPTER 11

  Louise Cantor was plagued by insomnia when she returned to the hotel. She reminded herself of what it had been like when things were at their worst. When Aron had left her. When he started sending his tearful, drunken letters from various drinking dens all over the world. Now he had vanished again. And she was waiting, on guard. In an attempt to appeal to whatever forces were keeping him away, she went to his room and snuggled down in the bed he had never used. But still she was unable to sleep. Her thoughts went into free fall: she had to catch them before they crashed into the ground. What had happened? Could she have misread the situation after all? Had he run away, abandoned her and Henrik yet again? Simply sneaked off, for the second time? Could he really have been so brutal that he had pretended to be in mourning and going to a church to light a candle for his dead son when in fact he had already made up his mind to disappear?

  She got up and took some miniatures from the minibar. She paid no attention to what she was drinking. She poured into herself a mixture of vodka, Tia Maria and cognac. The spirits induced in her a sort of calm, but needless to say, it was deceptive. She went back to bed, and could hear Aron's voice:

  No human being can paint a wave. A person's movements, a smile, a wink can be captured on canvas by a skilful artist. So can pain, Angst, as in the case of Goya, his man stretching out his arms in desperation to the firing squad. All these things can be depicted, I've seen all of them reproduced in a convincing way. But never a wave. The sea is always elusive, waves will elude anybody who tries to capture them.

  She remembered the trip to Normandy. It was the first one they had made together. Aron was due to lecture on his view of future developments in telephony and computers. She had taken study leave from her lecturing post at Uppsala University, and accompanied him. They had spent a night in a Paris hotel where the sound of oriental music penetrated the walls of their room.

  Early the next morning they had taken a train to Caen. Their passion had been intense. They had made love in the cramped toilet: never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined anything so blissful.

  They had spent several hours in the beautiful cathedral in Caen. She had observed Aron from a distance and thought: there stands the man with whom I shall spend the rest of my life.

  That same evening, after he had delivered his lecture and received a standing ovation, she told him about her thoughts in the cathedral. He had looked at her, embraced her and said that he had thought exactly the same thing. Their destiny was to live together for the rest of time.

  The next day, very early, in pouring rain, they had hired a car and driven to the beaches where the invasion took place in June 1944. A relative of Aron's, from a branch of the family now in the USA, one Private Lucas Cantor, had died on Omaha Beach, before he had reached dry land. They found a parking place, then braved the wind and the rain and wandered along the deserted sands. Aron had been very introverted and silent, and Louise thought it best not to disturb him. She thought he was moved emotionally, but a long time afterwards he told her he had just felt freezing cold in the damp, driving wind. What did he care about Lucas Cantor? When
you're dead, you're dead, especially after thirtyfive years.