The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  He keeps to the side of the road as he makes his way up toward the estate, running silently on the grass. If only his own breathing didn’t sound like a pair of bellows, he might be able to hear something. He’s so scared he feels sick. But what bloody choice does he have? Where is she?

  Ester can see someone in the mirror. Someone who looks like her. Science has come a long way, but there is nothing durable in us. A human being is a collection of vibrating chords. And the air around is also a collection of vibrating chords. It’s remarkable that we don’t walk straight through walls on a daily basis, melting into each other’s being.

  She has surrendered herself. To what, she cannot say. She simply knows it at a deeper level than her intellect. At every stage, the contract has been signed. She moved into Mauri’s attic. She has trained her body. She has loaded her body with carbs. And now her head must follow her feet, and not the reverse.

  Her head can rest as her feet run down the cellar stairs.

  At that same moment, five men are advancing toward Regla. They are all dressed in black. The group leader is the one Ester called The Wolf in her mind. He and three of the others are armed with small machine guns. The last man is a marksman.

  The marksman lies down in the grass with Mikael Wiik in his sights. He shouldn’t need to lie down, his target isn’t moving at all.

  Mikael Wiik is standing on the steps outside the house listening for sounds from the road. Diddi and his wife took the car and drove away from Regla. Presumably Diddi’s had some kind of quarrel with Mauri. Bloody inconvenient, but Diddi’s completely unpredictable these days.

  He heard the car stop down by the outer gate, then they turned the engine off. He wonders why they didn’t keep going. Presumably they’re sitting in the car having the row of the century.

  I’m doing my job, thinks Mikael Wiik. And that isn’t my job.

  I’m not getting involved, he thinks. And I’m not involved. Not in the business with Inna, either. I gave Mauri that phone number. But whatever happened after that, I’m definitely not involved.

  He’d looked at Inna’s body up in the morgue in Kiruna. There had been a terrible entry wound.

  It can’t have been a professional, he convinces himself. She died for some other reason altogether. It had nothing to do with Mauri Kallis.

  He takes a deep breath. The spring is woven through the night air. The wind is warm, carrying a scent of green. He’s going to buy a boat in the summer. Take his partner out to the archipelago.

  Then he doesn’t think anything anymore. As he falls forward and hits the stone steps, he’s already dead.

  The marksman alters his position. Moves round to the other side of the house. Big dining room windows. Reads the room. Only one guard, standing by the wall in the dining room. The other guests are sitting ducks. He reports “All clear” through his headset.

  Ester Kallis switches the electricity off at the fusebox. With a few rapid movements she unscrews the fuses for the outgoing lines. She throws the fuses under a nearby shelf. She hears them roll across the floor and stop. The darkness is solid.

  She takes a deep breath. Her feet know their way up the stairs. She doesn’t need to see. They’re running along a black path.

  And while her feet are following the black path, she herself is living in another world. You could call it a memory, but it’s happening now. Again. It’s happening just as much now as then.

  She’s standing on a mountainside with eatnan. It’s late spring. Only odd patches of snow left. Flocks of birds calling in the air all the time. The sun warms their backs. They’ve unbuttoned their cardigans.

  They’re looking down at a mountain stream. The melting snow has made it several meters wide. And it’s a torrent. An elk cow makes her way into the water and swims across to the other side. Once she’s on the bank, she stands there calling to her calf. She calls and calls, and eventually the calf finds the courage to get into the water. But the current is too strong. The calf doesn’t have the strength to swim to the other side. Ester and her mother watch as the current takes it. Then the cow jumps back into the water and swims alongside her drifting calf. She swims around it, pushes it up against the current with her body, and they swim side by side. The current is strong, the cow’s neck is stretched up above the surface of the water. She looks like a cry for help. When they reach the other side, she treads water, pushing against her calf so that it can scrabble its way ashore. At last they’re both standing on the other side.

  Ester and her mother stand there watching them. They’re overwhelmed by the elk cow’s courage. By her powerful feelings for her calf. And by the calf’s trust; it was so afraid of the current, but jumped into the water anyway. They don’t say anything to each other as they stroll back to the reindeer herder’s cottage.

  Ester walks behind her mother. Tries to take long strides, so that her feet will land on exactly the same spot as her mother’s feet.

  Mauri Kallis is asking his guests what they would like with their coffee. Gerhart Sneyers would like a large cognac, Heinrich Koch and Paul Lasker will have the same. Viktor Innitzer opts for Calvados, and General Helmuth Stieff asks for a single malt.

  Mauri tells his wife to stay where she is, and takes on the task of pouring drinks for his guests himself.

  “I’ll get some fresh candles,” says Ebba, taking the candelabra up to the kitchen, slightly annoyed that the hired help haven’t noticed that they’ve almost burned down.

  There’s a security guard in the dining room. He works for Gerhart Sneyers. When Mauri Kallis gets up and walks past him, he notices how discreetly the man has done his job. Mauri hasn’t actually given a thought to the fact that he’s been standing there all the way through dinner.

  For that reason it’s almost comical when the security guard goes down, taking a sixteenth-century wall hanging with him. Mauri has time to remember a boy who fainted during the school’s Lucia procession when he was in the third grade. And at that same moment he becomes aware of the sound of breaking glass. Then there are two men in the doorway and the ridiculous popping sound of a hail of bullets.

  And then all the lights go out. In the darkness he can hear Paul Lasker screaming with pain. And somebody else screaming hysterically, then suddenly falling silent. The hail of bullets stops, and after a second there’s the beam of a flashlight, searching the room for the crawling, yelling, wriggling creatures trying to crouch down and make their escape.

  General Helmuth Stieff has got hold of the dead security guard’s gun; he fires into the light, somebody falls to the floor and the flashlight goes out.

  It’s pitch black. Mauri discovers that he’s lying down. And when he tries to get up, he can’t. His hand is wet, his shirt is wet.

  I’ve been shot in the stomach, he thinks. But then he realizes he’s got whisky all over him. Because he can’t see anything, sounds seem louder. There are women in the kitchen screaming with fear and then that popping noise and it goes quiet and Mauri thinks “Ebba” and he has to get out of there and that’s the only thought in his head. He has to get out of there.

  He can hear the flipping of the light switches on and off in the hallway, but nothing happens. The whole of Regla is in darkness.

  And Paul Lasker goes on screaming. Some of the men bump into each other underneath the table. It’s a matter of seconds before the others are back in the dining room.

  Mauri has been shot in the hip. But he can drag himself along using his hands. The dining room leads into the drawing room, and as the drinks cupboard is a wooden extension of the tiled stove in the drawing room, he knows he’s close to the drawing room doorway. He drags himself across the threshold; this is where everybody would have had their coffee and after-dinner drinks. Two more meters, and his strength runs out.

  That’s when someone gently places a hand on his back. He hears Ester whisper in his ear:

  “Keep quiet if you want to live.”

  The general is still fighting back in the dining room, a random
barrage of shots comes from the doorway to the hall. One of the intruders stands in the hall holding the flashlight while the other fires. Paul Lasker stops screaming. The general is firing, but not too often. Not much ammunition left, soon they’ll be able to go in and finish off the lot of them.

  Ester gets Mauri into a sitting position on a hard eighteenth-century sofa. Details about the bloodstains he leaves behind will appear in the preliminary investigation report, and there will be speculation about a probable scenario. Ester squats in front of him and picks him up in a fireman’s lift.

  Lift, she thinks. One, two, and three.

  He’s not very heavy. The drawing room leads into the library, which in turn leads into a room that hasn’t been decorated yet, and is full of all kinds of things. It has a door leading out into the garden. She opens it and takes long strides out into the darkness.

  She knows the way. She’s run through the little wood down to the old jetty several times with her eyes covered. She’s scratched her face to pieces on the trees, but she knows her black path. If she can just get across the yard and the grassy slope to where the trees begin.

  The group leader shines his flashlight on the men in the dining room. The beam moves from face to face. General Helmuth Stieff is dead, so is Paul Lasker.

  Heinrich Koch is slumped against the wall. His hand is a lifeless claw above a spreading red stain on the front of his white shirt. He stares in terror at the man with the blackened face who is holding the flashlight in his left hand. His breath comes in short, rapid pants.

  The group leader draws his Glock and shoots him between the eyes. This will make the two survivors more talkative. He notes that Viktor Innitzer shouted out in horror.

  It seems that Innitzer is completely unharmed, physically. He’s sitting up against the wall with his arms pressed to his chest.

  Gerhart Sneyers is lying on his side underneath the table.

  The group leader makes a movement with his head, and one of the men grabs hold of Sneyers’s feet and drags him over to the group leader. He lies there on his side, his knees slightly drawn up and his hands between his thighs. The sweat is breaking through the skin of his forehead. Gathering in beads and pouring down his face. His whole body is shaking, as if he were shivering.

  “Your name?” the group leader asks in English. Then he changes to German.

  “Ihr Name? And who were the others?”

  “Rot op,” replies Sneyers, and when he opens his mouth to speak, blood pours out of his mouth.

  The group leader bends down and shoots him too. Then he turns to Viktor Innitzer.

  “Please don’t kill me,” begs Innitzer.

  “Who are you? And who were the others?”

  And Innitzer tells him who he is, and says the names of the others as the beam of the flashlight falls on their dead faces. The group leader holds out a little tape recorder, and Innitzer speaks into it as clearly as he can, casting terrified looks up at the group leader the whole time.

  “Is there anyone missing?” asks the group leader.

  “I don’t know…I don’t know, if you could stop shining the light in my face…I…Kallis! Mauri Kallis!”

  “Nobody else?”

  “No.”

  “So where’s Kallis?”

  “He was standing just there!”

  Viktor Innitzer points in the darkness toward the drinks cupboard.

  The group leader shines his flashlight at the cupboard, and then at the doorway beside it. He aims his pistol at Innitzer’s head, he’s of no further use now, and fires. Then he signals to one of the others to go with him, and runs into the drawing room.

  They search the room methodically with their flashlights. It looks like a well-rehearsed dance as they move back to back, round and round, forward and backward, the beams of the flashlights shining in different directions.

  They’re going to need better light, especially if Kallis has managed to get outside. They can only hope he’s injured.

  “Fetch the Hummer,” says the group leader into his headset. “It can cope with this terrain.”

  Anna-Maria Mella has just seen Diddi Wattrang’s dead son in the family Hummer. She’s running up to Regla. Although she’s not really running, because it’s completely dark out there. She’s trotting along, lifting her feet up so that she won’t fall over anything, she has no desire to fall over while she’s carrying a gun without the safety catch on.

  What’s happened here? she thinks.

  There are no outside lights on. The house itself is in complete darkness.

  A little farther on, she sees the beam of a flashlight. Somebody is shining it on the track in front of them and running toward her at high speed. She immediately turns aside and throws herself down into the ditch. Pulls off her jacket, which is covered in reflective tags, and throws it on the ground inside out. She doesn’t have time to run any farther away, or the person up there will hear her. She crouches down in the ditch; last year’s grass is flattened and offers no protection, but there’s a little bit of undergrowth, a few branches. If only the person doesn’t shine the light in her direction, she’ll be okay.

  The water in the ditch is a hand’s-breadth deep. She can feel it penetrating her shoes and jeans immediately. She digs in the mud with her free hand and smears as much dirt on her face as she can, so that it won’t show up as white in the beam of the flashlight. She has to look up, be ready to fire if the person catches sight of her and aims a gun at her. She holds the pistol in both hands. Then she keeps absolutely still and silent. Her heart is pounding like a jackhammer.

  He passes by two meters from her. Doesn’t see her. It’s definitely a man. Once he’s run past she takes a look and can make out a silhouette with broad shoulders. The sound of boots thumping on the gravel is gradually fading.

  Friend or foe? She has no idea. Is he one of Kallis’s security guys? Is he the one who just shot Diddi Wattrang and his family?

  She doesn’t know. And he’s running down toward the gate, down toward the car with a dead child in the front seat. Down toward Sven-Erik?

  She gets to her feet, leaving her jacket in the ditch, up onto the road. Her knees and feet are soaked.

  She runs after the man who’s on his way toward the Hummer, keeping to the grass verge. If he draws his gun on Sven-Erik…Well, there’s only one thing she can do. She’ll put a bullet in his back.

  The man reaches the Hummer. He gets into the car and starts it up. The headlights come on, and suddenly the whole area seems to be bathed in a cold light. God, do two headlights really give that much light?

  There’s no sign of Sven-Erik.

  The man is reversing. She realizes he has no intention of wasting time turning the car around; he’s going to reverse all the way up to the house.

  Anna-Maria throws herself down into the ditch again. Lies flat on her stomach as the car passes by. Gets into a crouching position, watching him. He’s too busy looking where he’s going to glance in her direction. He’s reversing at top speed up the avenue to the house. Bloody hell, he’s moving fast. Keeping dead center on the road.

  Then she realizes he’s sitting next to the seat containing the child that has been shot through the head. It’s a repulsive, disgusting thought. What kind of people are they?

  “Sven-Erik,” she calls quietly. “Sven-Erik!”

  But there’s no reply.

  Sven-Erik has just called for backup.

  Now he’s making his way along the grass verge. True, it’s difficult when you can’t see anything, but his body remembers all those years in the forest. He’s found his way many times when it’s been pitch black. And he doesn’t even have a birch bark basket on his back tonight.

  His body has adopted a rapid loping gait, legs quite wide apart, knees bent. He can feel rather than see the road on one side and the lime trees on the other.

  When the man with the flashlight comes running toward him, he doesn’t splash down into the ditch, but hides behind a tree until he’s gone by.<
br />
  Without realizing it, Anna-Maria and Sven-Erik meet. But they’re on opposite sides of the road. Anna-Maria is running after the man with the flashlight. Sven-Erik is going in the other direction, up toward the house. There’s no more than four meters between them, but they don’t see one another. And they hear only their own footsteps, their own breathing.

  She’s out in the garden. Ester is holding Mauri’s arms and legs firmly; he’s lying across her shoulders like a yoke. As she goes around the corner of the north wing of the house, she sees the flashlights’ beams through the drawing room window. They’re not far behind. But she’s protected by the darkness now. She has to move silently. She cuts across the yard, avoiding the gravel.

  She’s going to go through the orchard and down to the dense wood. Through the dense wood down to the old jetty. Seven hundred meters of difficult terrain, carrying the weight of another person; as soon as she reaches the trees she can slow down.

  She has almost reached the orchard when the Hummer drives into the yard. She sees it approaching like a red-eyed animal, it takes a second for her to realize they’re the rear lights. It’s reversing up the avenue.

  And the headlights catch her. Suddenly she sees the gnarled trunks of the apple trees in the light, and takes a few rapid, heavy steps to get away. Keep going. Back to her dark path. Toward the woods.

  The driver of the Hummer informs his colleagues via his headset that he has two escapees in his sights. He drives the car straight across the flower beds, out onto the grass and toward the orchard.

  He has to stop before he reaches the orchard. The downward slope is too steep, he can’t drive down the steps of the stone terrace, he’ll get stuck.

  He reverses a meter, changes gear, drives forward a little bit. Uses the car like a searchlight, checking the area methodically, telling his colleagues to get a move on. Two of them inform him they’re on their way. The other two have gone to check out the other buildings. They’ve shot the nanny, who had just lit some candles in her living room and was aimlessly looking on the bookshelf for something to read, since the TV wasn’t working.