After a dozen miles he stopped at an intersection. He read the signs and searched the map again. Nothing. He made a sudden decision. He would have to find someone to ask. He turned off towards the town the road signs claimed to be closest.
The town was larger than he had expected. But its streets were deserted. Wallander stopped outside a restaurant that seemed to be open. He locked his car and realized that he was hungry.
He stepped into the dusk.
The restaurant was a breath of a Europe that hardly existed any more. Frozen in time, a strong smell of stale cigar smoke. Deer heads and coats of arms shared the brown walls with beer posters. A bar, also brown, empty of patrons; shaded booths, similar to the pens in a barn. At the tables shadows leaned over glasses of beer. In the background, loudspeakers. Christmas songs. Holy night.
Wallander looked around without finding an empty booth. A glass of beer, he thought. Then a good description of how to drive on. Then a phone call to Linda. To tell her whether he’d make it tonight or not.
One of the booths was occupied by a single man. Wallander hesitated. Then made up his mind. He walked up and pointed. The man nodded. It was okay for Wallander to sit down. The man sitting opposite him was eating. An old, sad-faced waiter appeared. Goulash? Wallander pointed to the other man’s plate and beer glass. Then he waited. The man opposite went on eating with slow movements.
Wallander thought that he might start a conversation. Ask about the way, ask where he was. He took the opportunity when the man pushed his plate away.
“I don’t mean to disturb you,” Wallander said. “But do you speak English?”
The man nodded noncommittally.
“I’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere,” Wallander said. “I’m Swedish, I’m a policeman, I’m on my way to spend Christmas with my daughter. But I’m lost. I don’t even know where I am.”
“Maardam,” the man said.
Wallander recalled the road sign. But he had no memory of having seen the place on his map. He told the man his destination.
The man shook his head.
“You won’t get there tonight,” he said. “It’s far. You’re off course.”
Then he smiled. His smile was unexpected. As if his face had cracked.
“I’m a policeman, too,” the man said.
Wallander gave him a thoughtful look. Then he held out his hand.
“Wallander,” he said. “I’m a detective. In a Swedish town called Ystad.”
“Van Veeteren,” the man said. “I’m a policeman here in Maardam.”
“Two lonely policeman,” Wallander said. “One of them lost. Not the most amusing of situations.”
Van Veeteren smiled again, nodding.
“You’re right,” he said. “Two policemen meeting only because one of them has made a wrong turn.”
“Things are as they are,” Wallander said.
The waiter put his food on the table in front of him.
Van Veeteren lifted his glass, toasting him.
“Eat slowly,” he said. “You’re in no hurry.”
Wallander thought of Linda. Of his having to call her. But he realized that the man who also was a policeman and who had a weird name was right.
He would spend his Christmas Eve in this strange place called Maardam and which he suspected wasn’t even marked on his map.
Things were as they were.
Nobody could change that.
Just as so many other things in life.
Wallander placed his call to Linda, who of course was disappointed. But she understood.
After the call, Wallander stayed on outside the phone booth.
The Christmas songs made him sad.
He disliked sadness. Particularly on Christmas Eve.
Outside, the snow had begun falling again.
Van Veeteren remained sitting in their pen, his eyes fixed on two crossed toothpicks. How strange, he thought. I almost could have sworn that I wouldn’t need to exchange even two words with anyone until the Christmas dawn’s early gleaming . . . and then this guy suddenly turns up.
A Swedish policeman? Taking the wrong road in a snowstorm?
Just as unlikely as life itself. And that he himself was sitting here certainly wasn’t the result of any planning. Quite the contrary. After the obligatory Christmas lunch with Renate and the afternoon best wishes telephone call to Erich, Jess and the grandchildren, he had crawled into a bubble bath with a stout beer and Handel turned up full. While waiting for the evening to come.
Christmas Eve chess with Mahler at the society.
Just like last year. And the year before that.
Mahler had called shortly before six. From the hospital up in Aarlack, where the old poet was stuck with his even older father and a broken thighbone.
A pity for such a vital ninety-year-old man. A pity considering the gambit he had thought of while taking his bath. A pity all things considered.
When despite all he had finally arrived at the society in the whirling snow he had also realized that it was no use to him without Mahler. He had driven on a few blocks towards Zwille and finally walked into the restaurant without any expectations. Regardless of everything else he had to eat. And perhaps drink.
The Swedish policeman returned with a sad smile.
“Did you reach her? What did you say your name was, by the way?”
“Wallander. Yes, it’s fine. We just postponed everything until tomorrow.”
There was a sudden soft warmth in his glance and there could hardly be any doubt about its origin.
“Daughters aren’t such a bad thing to have sometimes,” Van Veeteren said. “Even if you can’t find them. How many do you have?”
“Only one,” Wallander said. “But she’s all right.”
“Me too,” Van Veeteren said. “And a son too but that’s something else.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Wallander said.
The sad waiter appeared, asking about what was to follow.
“Personally I prefer beer when alone,” Van Veeteren said. “And wine with company.”
“Ought to think about where to spend the night,” Wallander said.
“I’ve already done that,” Van Veeteren stated. “Red or white?”
“Thanks,” Wallander said. “Red it is, then.”
The waiter again disappeared into the shadows. A brief silence fell at the table while an Ave Maria of unknown origin began playing from the speakers.
“Why did you become a policeman?” Wallander asked.
Van Veeteren studied his colleague before answering.
“I’ve asked myself that question so many times by now that I can’t remember the answer any longer,” he said. “But I’d guess you to be ten years younger, so maybe you know?”
Wallander gave a half smile and leaned back.
“Yes,” he said. “Though I’d have to admit that there are times when I have to stop to remind myself. It’s all this evil; I’m planning to exterminate it. The only problem is that it seems we have built an entire civilization on it.”
“Or at least some major supports,” Van Veeteren said, nodding. “Though I would have thought Sweden to be spared at least the worst aberrations . . . your Swedish model, your spirit of consensus . . . well, it’s what you read about, anyway.”
“I used to believe in all that, too,” Wallander said. “But that was a few years ago.”
The waiter returned with a bottle of red wine and a few pieces of cheese, courtesy of the house. Ave Maria ended and muted strings began playing.
Wallander raised his glass but stopped in the middle of moving, listening hard.
“Do you recognize that?” he asked.
Van Veeteren nodded. “Villa-Lobos,” he said. “What’s the name of it?”
“I don’t know,” Wallander said. “But it’s a piece for eight cellos and one soprano. It’s damned lovely. Listen.”
They sat without speaking.
“We seem to have some things in common,” Wallande
r said.
Van Veeteren nodded contentedly.
“So it seems,” he said. “If you play chess as well I’ll be damned if I believe you’re not just something someone’s made up.”
Wallander drank. Then he shook his head.
“Damned badly,” he admitted. “I’m better at bridge, but hardly a champion at that either.”
“Bridge?” Van Veeteren said and cut off a third of the Camembert. “Haven’t played that in thirty years. Back in those days we used to be four.”
Wallander smiled and gave a slight nod towards another table.
“Back there are a couple of guys with a deck of cards.”
Van Veeteren leaned out of the booth to check.
Wallander was right. In a booth a few yards away two other men were flipping cards back and forth, looking bored. One of them was tall, thin and slightly stooped. The other one was almost his opposite: short, heavy and with a dogged expression. Judging from wrinkles and hair they were both close to fifty years old.
Van Veeteren stood.
“All right,” he said. “It’s only Christmas once a year. Let’s make our move.”
Less than ten minutes later the bidding was under way and after a further twenty-five minutes Wallander and Van Veeteren had won a doubled bid of four spades.
“Vagaries of chance,” the shorter of the two men muttered.
“Even a blind hen sometimes finds a grain of corn,” the taller one explained.
“Two,” Van Veeteren said. “Two blind hens.”
Wallander shuffled the cards with slightly unpracticed hands.
“And what do you two do for a living?” Van Veeteren asked, accepting an offered cigarette.
“Writers,” the tall one said.
“Crime novels,” added the shorter one. “We are fairly well-known. At least back home. Or at least I. We lost our way—that’s why we happen to be here.”
“Many have lost their way tonight,” Van Veeteren said.
“Crime writers often lose their way,” Wallander noted and began dealing the cards. “I suppose that’s another pretty rotten line of work.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Van Veeteren said.
They were about halfway through the next hand—an undoubled three no trump contract with the fairly well-known author as declarer—when the waiter appeared unasked from the shadows. He looked pained.
“Might I just inform you,” he said subserviently, “that we’ll be closing in ten minutes. It’s Christmas Eve.”
“What the heck . . . ?” Wallander said.
“What the hell?” Van Veeteren said.
The tall crime writer coughed and waved a dismissing index finger. But it was the short, well-known one who spoke.
“In that case, might I just in turn inform you,” he said without the slightest tone of subservience, “that there is at least one advantage to being a writer . . .”
“. . . even one who has lost his way,” the tall one interjected.
“. . . and that is that we are the ones writing your lines,” the short one continued. “So I’ll ask you to damned well repeat that entrance!”
The waiter bowed. Disappeared and after only a few seconds reappeared, armed with a bunch of keys. Bowed again and cleared his throat.
“On behalf of the host I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas. Please feel free to serve yourselves from the bar, and should you feel hungry, there are cold cuts in the refrigerator. Lock up whenever you leave, but please don’t forget to put the keys in the mail slot.”
“Excellent,” Van Veeteren stated. “Perhaps there is some common sense and good in the world after all.”
The waiter retired for the last time. When he disappeared through the entrance they briefly heard the whistling of the snowstorm, but then the winter night again enfolded the little restaurant in the town that was missing from the map.
Common sense? Kurt Wallander thought, sliding a trey towards the king and jack already on the table. Good?
Well, if there was, perhaps on Christmas Eve.
And in the company of fictitious poets.
Poets, my ass! he thought after a second. Eight novels and not even a fucking line of blank verse!
Tomorrow, he would see Linda.
Henning Mankell was born in Stockholm in 1948. He began writing at an early age, but was also interested in the theater and initially worked as a stage director; from 1984 through 1990, he was in charge of the Växjö theater. During the 1960s, he was politically active on the far left, largely in sympathy with the Maoist groups in Sweden as well as Norway, where he lived during most of the 1970s. Currently, Mankell and his fourth wife, Eva, daughter of movie and stage director Ingmar Bergman, have homes in the southern Swedish town Ystad, on the Swedish island Färö, and in Maputo, Mozambique. Mankell published his first novel, Bergsprängaren, in 1973, and has since written more than thirty novels as well as plays, short stories, juveniles, and an autobiography. His first crime novel, introducing Detective Inspector Kurt Wallander in Ystad, was Mördare utan ansikte (Faceless Killers), published in 1991; it won both the Best Novel of the Year Award from the Swedish Crime Fiction Academy and the first Glass Key for best crime novel of the year in any of the Scandinavian countries. In 1995, the fifth Wallander novel, Villospår (Sidetracked), received another Best Novel of the Year award. In Sweden, a total of thirty-five Wallander films have been released, covering all Mankell’s novels as well as more than twenty based on original stories by the script writers. In Britain, the BBC has produced twelve adaptions of the Wallander novels starring Kenneth Branagh. Mankell’s work is published throughout the world.
Håkan Nesser was born in 1950 in the small town of Kumla, which also houses one of Sweden’s high-security prisons. He studied at Uppsala University and from 1974 until he became a full-time writer in 1998 was a gymnasium (approximately equivalent to high school) teacher of Swedish and English. His first novel was Koreografen (The Choreographer, 1988); with his second, Det grovmaskiga nätet (The Mind’s Eye, 1993), he published his first crime novel and the first of ten featuring Inspector Van Veeteren in the fictitious city of Maardam; the novel received the Best First Novel Award from the Swedish Crime Fiction Academy. The second and fourth in the series Borkmann’s punkt and Kvinna med fodelsemärke, (Borkmann’s Point, 1994, and Woman with a Birthmark, 1996) received the Best Novel of the Year Award; the seventh, Carambole (Hour of the Wolf), won the Glass Key for best crime novel published in Scandinavia during the year 2000. In 2006, Nesser introduced a new protagonist, Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti, a Swedish policeman of Italian descent; for the second Barbarotti novel in 2007, En helt annan historia (An Entirely Different Story), Nesser for the third time won the Best Novel of the Year Award. A further three Barbarotti novels have followed. Nesser has also written stand-alone crime novels, set in Sweden as well as in London and New York, and is an internationally acclaimed author.
AN ALIBI FOR SEÑOR BANEGAS
MAGNUS MONTELIUS
Magnus Montelius is an environmental consultant who spent many years in Africa, Latin America, and in the Eastern European countries that were part of the Soviet Union before 1991. He now lives with his family on Stockholm’s south side. His first novel was published in 2011 but is set in 1990 and is concerned with the political history of the previous decades. Montelius grew up in a family where many members had been active on the radical left, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, and he wanted to portray both that intellectual environment and its relationship to the surrounding world and its realities. Mannen från Albanien (The Man from Albania) was a very strong first novel: a political thriller of the last period of the Cold War, based on meticulous research and personal insights.
Both before and after that book, Montelius has written occasional short stories. As in his novel, he uses the personalities of his characters as the starting point for the events that follow. His story here displays both his careful sense of story, his humor, and his skill in portraying characters.
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THEY WERE ALONE IN THE SMALL INTERROGATION ROOM. THE DEFENSE lawyer regarded him under heavy eyelids. His face was red and bloated and his hair a bit unruly. It had probably been a tiring holiday. Welcome to the club, Adam thought.
“So you mean,” the lawyer sighed, “that you are absolutely innocent of these charges.”
Adam nodded.
“But you did make a complete confession to the police?”
“It’s complicated.”
The lawyer looked even more tired. He obviously didn’t believe Adam, nor was he in the mood for any complicated stories. But even so, Adam thought, he had to tell him what really had happened. And start at the beginning.
Señor Banegas carefully sipped his wine toddy and glanced around appreciatively. He and Adam were the only guests in the Hotel Reisen bar, not particularly strange since, after all, this was the night before Christmas Eve.
“It’s not a bad plan, is it?”
Adam couldn’t get a word out. Actually, it was the most idiotic idea he had ever heard.
Banegas smiled crookedly. “Of course it entails a certain amount of inconvenience. And to me, personally, considerable cost. But love, my dear friend, is worth any sacrifice.”
Señor Banegas was the Honduran secretary of state for infrastructure, a successful retailer of favors and favors in return. He had arrived with a delegation a little over a week ago. The absurd time of year had been chosen to coincide with Christmas shopping, and the delegates had all brought their wives.
Banegas twisted his grizzled mustache. “Adam, I tell you this most seriously. We never know where and when a great love will overwhelm us.”
But Banegas was strangely reticent about the object of his passion.
Adam felt as if the minister read his thoughts. “We are gentlemen, you and I. So I know that there is no need for me to name the young lady. That is well. As I have told you, my wife is the problem.” He sighed. “She is crazy, and I use the word in a strictly clinical sense.”
Adam was prepared to agree. During his trips to Honduras he had met Mrs. Banegas at receptions. A round woman with staring eyes who seemed to watch every movement her husband made.
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