Black Lies, Red Blood

by Kjell Eriksson

  Anders Brant only shook his head and pretended not to understand, but realized that as a gringo he stood out, all the more so as he did not seem to be on his way anywhere, but hung around like a homeless person trying to pass the time.

  He went up to the wastebasket, threw away his plastic mug, and decided it could not wait. Going back with unfinished business would be both silly and irresponsible.

  He had prepared what he would say. In his money belt was an envelope with cash. When he left the bus station it was with a feeling of fateful distress, as if he could not have done this any other way, at least that’s what he told himself. There had really been no choice, everything had worked toward this ignominious end.

  Obviously there had been a choice at one time, he could have left the place, even after they established contact and started exchanging small talk in that way Brazilian women are so good at, demure and flirtatious at the same time. But he wanted to hear the music group that would appear an hour or so later and decided to wait. In the interim he could just as well pass the time with a little company. She introduced herself as Vanessa. He ordered a beer, which they shared, and then another.

  If he had left the concert and instead taken the last ferry back to the island, then he would not need to go back to Itaberaba like a scoundrel, with words and money ready, but without honor. You got horny, it was that simple, admit it, you idiot, he thought, heading for the first available taxi. I should have gone home, given myself a hand job and woken up at sunrise, sober and free.

  The taxi ride was short, maybe fifteen blocks or so. It cost 8 reais. Brant gave him ten, got out of the car with sweat running down his forehead, and headed for the blue-painted house with the light red wall she had described.

  A few children were playing on the street. A gas peddler pulled his cart as he called out that he was in the neighborhood. Anders Brant looked around in hope of finding something, a sign that would give him a chance to leave the field. Maybe Vanessa might come walking with a guy at her side? Then he could sneak away behind the ice cream seller’s hut, observe them, let him give her a passionate kiss, which could not be misunderstood, before he continued up the street. He would wave at the man and then disappear through the gate to the blue house.

  Fantasies! But could he simply, untruthfully make up a man? A rival. Go back to Salvador and then from Sweden write a letter, filled with anguish and injured fury.

  Give up! Vanessa is a good woman and you’re a childish prick. Go up to the gate now and ring the bell, don’t tell her everything, but enough. Offer her support, money, whatever, to make things easier and smooth. Give her everything except your faithfulness and love. Give her betrayal. Then flee. Fight back the disgust and bad conscience, keep building on the myth of Anders Brant, the unreliable Swede, who for twenty years never paid for sex or even started a relationship on all his travels in Third World countries. On the contrary, he had maintained, with a type of moral superiority, that it would be cruel and unjust.

  The men, Scandinavians, Germans, Americans, or wherever they came from, who with the power of the dollar bought sex and temporary intimacy, for a day, a week, a vacation, to feel like kings, with their cocks as a scepter, left devastated women and a sick system behind them, a prostitution economy.

  Vanessa was no whore, and he was no traditional john. They had not met with a business transaction as starting point, there had been genuine attraction and sincere joy, perhaps love. He did not know whether he was in love or if he was only a victim of the Western middle-aged man’s need to feel potent and desirable.

  He could not see a life together with Vanessa, it was that simple. She had many good qualities, she was beautiful as a dream and easy to be around, in short, an amazing woman, but still there was no future for the two of them. She could see a future, but he could not.

  Of course he had asked himself why, but could not formulate an explanation that was entirely convincing. So how could he convince her?

  It was more a feeling of inequality. He would always be the stronger one, the one with money, and above all the one who had a possibility to leave. Then, when he did leave, and he would sooner or later, he would leave a Vanessa with considerably worse opportunities than she had today. She was twenty-nine, talked about children, inconceivable for him. He was fifteen years older and could not imagine becoming a father at that age. Besides, it was doubtful whether he had the purely physical prerequisites. During the last two years of a five-year relationship with a woman they had tried to have a child, but failed. Two years later she was pregnant by another man and now had four children, no fertility problems there.

  Were those only excuses to be able to flee with honor intact, albeit somewhat tarnished? No, he answered himself.

  He did not want to give up his independence and he did not want to tie Vanessa down in a relationship, it was that simple. There was nothing chauvinistic about this, he maintained, on the contrary it was an expression of concern for her.

  He still felt like a traitor.

  * * *

  The bell rang. If only she weren’t at home, he thought before the door opened. First surprise on her face, which quickly changed into a broad smile. He tried to smile.

  She ran up to the gate. He adjusted the money belt.

  Sixteen

  Lindell met Fredrik Johansson in town. When she got hold of him—once again it was Elina who helped locate a current cell phone number—he was on his way to a workout session at the old Centralbadet, and they agreed to meet first at the Cathedral Bridge.

  “I have to get going,” he said. “I’m going to meet some buddies and work out, I told you that.”

  “Okay,” said Lindell. “Let’s meet here in an hour, then we’ll go up to the police station.”

  He turned on his heels and disappeared without a word. Lindell started to follow him but stopped at the square and sat down on a bench. She watched as he slipped into the health club.

  Her stomach was growling but she could not bring herself to go to the Kurdish hot dog vendor on the pedestrian street, much less fight the crowds for a nondescript daily lunch special at a restaurant.

  She decided to wait on the bench. There was a lot to think about with the investigation of Klara Lovisa’s fate, but she immediately started speculating about Anders Brant—who he really was, what he had to do with Bosse Gränsberg, and where and why he had gone away. Somewhere warm, she decided. He was strikingly tan all over his body, obviously he had sunbathed naked. “I go away sometimes,” he said casually when she asked whether he’d been on vacation, but did not explain where, or whether it was for pleasure or business.

  What hurt was just his casual attitude. For him perhaps it was just a short-term love affair, one of many. There was no doubt that he appreciated her company and their sex together, he had both said and shown that openly. But there was something, and it was only now that she could put it in words, something tacitly apathetic in his attitude, as if he did not really take their developing relationship seriously.

  Then, and that was only a few days ago, she had not thought about it that much, fully occupied as she was with simply experiencing this rebirth in the area of love. The intoxication of passion made her inattentive. Now she had a serious hangover, with the demon of loneliness perched on her shoulder. He jeered at the futile castles in the air. He would remain sitting there a long time, she realized that.

  Treachery, she thought. It is treachery if he leaves me now. It is treachery if he is mixed up in something illegal. I am never going to forgive him! Or myself either!

  Those were her thoughts on the bench. It was summer, people were strolling slowly along, enjoying the heat. A few tourists photographed the milldam. A young couple lifted up their children so they could peek over the railing of the Cathedral Bridge and look down at the current. Lindell could sense their delight and the parents’ quiet joy, which even at a distance could be seen on their youthful, innocent faces. There was a playfulness in the woman’s manner when she set her ki
d down on the sidewalk again. The man said something and she smiled at him. That’s what being a couple looks like, thought Lindell, bitterly envious.

  The onset of her period did not make things any better, the plague that had started hitting her again with full force and made her body slack and her mood low. It was as if nothing mattered when the periodic torment approached.

  And she had dreamed of a vacation together! A vacation full of laughter and intimacy, Ann, Erik, and Anders on an expedition somewhere, it didn’t matter where and how, just the idea of a joint project made her laugh to herself and move with a different lightness.

  Was it over? Unconsciously she was becoming convinced that this was the case. She would be sad, but not let herself be totally crushed. She would put up walls inside, hate her way out of the pain, convince herself that it was good for her and Erik when Brant definitively disappeared from their life.

  Beside her on the bench an older man was sitting straddle-legged, with his hands resting on a cane. He was dressed in heavy shoes, gabardine pants and a worn jacket, with a soiled hat on his head. His face was weather-beaten. Wind and sun had hollowed out furrows in his cheeks and made his skin leathery. Lindell imagined that he was a Greek shepherd, sitting on a mountain slope watching his herd.

  Tell me something, she wanted to encourage the old man, tell me about your life.

  Suddenly he turned his head very slowly, as if the movement required the greatest effort, and observed her. The whites of his eyes were streaked with red.

  “A beautiful day,” he said.

  Lindell nodded and smiled.

  “I usually sit here, or there,” he said, pointing toward a bench on the opposite side of the square. “It depends on the sun.”

  His accent reinforced her impression that he came from the Mediterranean. Why not Greece, she thought?

  “Are you from Greece?”

  He nodded, but showed no surprise at her correct guess.

  “People come and go, I watch them. In the summer it’s mainly the women I’m interested in. I like fluttering skirts.”

  He laughed, a boyish, giggling laugh.

  “Unfortunately I don’t have a skirt on,” said Lindell.

  “You don’t look like you’re in a skirt-wearing mood.”

  “‘Skirt-wearing mood’?”

  “Yes, I think about laughter when I see a beautiful woman in a beautiful skirt. But today a skirt would not suit you so well.”

  Lindell looked down at her black jeans. They didn’t look too happy either.

  “He’s coming back,” said the Greek.

  “Who?”

  “And when he does, you should put on a skirt with beautiful, happy colors.”

  Lindell stared at him, both moved and agitated by his words. He raised one hand from his cane and placed it on her knee. It felt as if his hand weighed a ton.

  “Now Grandpa’s going home,” he said.

  He removed his hand, got up laboriously, and took a deep breath.

  “Are you a shepherd?”

  “No, land surveyor, but now I don’t have any land to survey. Trust me,” he continued after a short pause, without looking at her, and went his way. A few seconds later he had disappeared.

  What did he mean? Lindell stared at the building where the man had gone around the corner. Had he seen her and Freddy on the bridge, how he left her and how she followed him a little indecisively but then sank down on the bench? That he improbably enough thought they were a couple? She could be Freddy’s mother!

  Or was her quandary about the disappeared journalist so clearly legible on her face? Perhaps the old land surveyor was psychic?

  And this talk about skirts! She could not see him however as a peeper who sat drooling over skirts blowing up and exposing women’s legs. His whole way of expressing himself was too singular and his eyes too wise for that.

  She smiled to herself and decided to consider him a bearer of a favorable message that everything would work out. Brant would come back, everything would have a natural explanation, and she would wear a skirt in happy colors. Did she even have such a skirt?

  * * *

  Freddy Johansson approached on foot exactly one hour after they had gone their separate ways. Lindell gave him a smile from a distance that she hoped would express her appreciation that he was so punctual. They walked in silence to Lindell’s car and drove to the police station.

  In contrast to Andreas Davidsson, Freddy Johansson looked her in the eyes when he spoke. He also adopted a considerably tougher attitude.

  “You sent a text message to Klara Lovisa last New Year’s Eve,” Lindell stated, taking a chance.

  “I don’t remember that,” he answered. “Maybe I did.”

  “Where did you send the text from?”

  “I was in town.”

  “With friends?”

  “The party broke up right before twelve o’clock. There was a little trouble. Then I went home.”

  Lindell asked for the names of his friends and Freddy listed off a handful of names and some cell phone numbers, which she wrote down.

  “You went home alone?”

  “I already said that.”

  Lindell squinted at her notepad, browsed back a few pages, pretended to read something, and then fixed her eyes on the young man before her. She understood why he irritated some people. His full lips were drawn up, making him look like he was sneering superciliously all the time.

  “Okay, then,” she sighed. “What did you write?”

  “I didn’t say I sent her a message. You know how it is, you text here and there.”

  “You liked Klara Lovisa, I’ve understood.”

  “She was cute,” said Freddy.

  “Did you have a relationship?”

  Freddy laughed. The superior sneer disappeared, and he suddenly looked more human, with a boyish, almost cute expression.

  “She was jailbait, sort of, you know, a little flirty.”

  “And you’re a grown man?”

  He did not comment on that.

  “She was fifteen. You know she turned sixteen the day she disappeared?”

  “It was in the newspaper.”

  “Did you text her and wish her happy birthday?”

  “No,” said Freddy, shaking his head.

  He drew his hand through his mop of hair.

  “What do you really want? Am I suspected in some way?”

  “We’re just checking up on a few things,” said Lindell curtly. “Do you have a driver’s license?”

  “Yes, what about it?”

  “A car too perhaps?”

  “No.”

  “Do you ever borrow a car? From your parents perhaps?”

  She suddenly got the feeling that she was completely on the wrong track. Why should this twenty-two year old have anything to do with Klara Lovisa’s disappearance?

  “It has happened. Damn, you’re really inquisitive!”

  Lindell waved her hand to interrupt him.

  “We would like a photo of you.”

  He immediately took out his wallet and removed a minimal photo, no larger than a passport picture, and handed it over.

  “That’s nice,” she said. “But we want a proper photo.”

  “Why? Fan picture, or what?”

  Now it was Lindell’s turn to shake her head.

  “Come along with me now, and we’ll get this taken care of right away. Then you can go home.”

  Seventeen

  She hugged him hard and long, and when she released her hold she nudged the money belt, laughed, and said something jokingly about the rich gringo with the artificial stomach.

  He freed himself from her embrace.

  “Shall we go in?”

  She stepped to one side and as he passed through the doorway she caught him again, pressed herself against him, put her head against his shoulder. Her hair smelled of lemon.

  She was wearing a white dress, with several clasps depicting birds tucked into her hair.

  �
��I’m so happy,” she whispered. “I’ve been longing for you.”

  He nodded and looked into her amazing eyes.

  “We have an hour before Mama comes home. She’s nervous, you should know.”

  He nodded again.

  “But she won’t be home for an hour.”

  She caressed his cheek.

  “You’re warm,” she said, pulling on his T-shirt and fanning a little air in toward his upper body.

  “Take a shower,” she suggested, leading him into the house, toward the bathroom.

  He sensed what that hour might involve. Vanessa was extremely physical, as she herself put it. She loved bodily contact, was often ready for touch, took the initiative. The modesty she had shown at first had completely disappeared and was replaced by an openness that was a match for his.

  “I think I’ll shower later,” he said, and his voice sounded considerably rougher than he intended.

  “Are you tired? Do you want to rest before Mama gets here?”

  He noticed a moment of disappointment in her eyes. He shook his head.

  “Just a little thirsty.”

  “I’ll get a beer, then we’ll sit in the shade behind the house.”

  She went toward the kitchen. He watched her. I want her, he thought, suddenly aroused.

  They sat down on the patio. A bird, whose call Anders Brant recognized very well, called out its encouraging song: come-on-along, come-on-along, come-on-along.

  She poured the beer, carefully as usual, and set a glass in front of him.

  “Skål,” she said.

  The first word in Swedish that she learned.

  “Skål,” he said, and reciprocated her smile.

  His dehydrated, exhausted body greedily soaked up the cold beer. He immediately felt the effect of the alcohol. Maybe it will make this easier, he thought, and emptied the glass.

  She observed him, but her smile had faded somewhat. She poured more beer. Her eyes rested steadily on his face.

  He leaned his head forward, wiping his sweaty forehead. The belt pressed against his stomach.

  “What’s that bird called?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered immediately, as if she didn’t care to listen, as if birds were the last thing that interested her right now.