I stay where I am, trying to get a sense of whether I’m hurt. My right fist pulsates with pain and my head aches, but that’s all. I stand up on shaky legs, all sour with blood and coughing. I give the corpse a decent kick with the side of my foot. It jumps, rattling the fallen saucepans around it.
I kneel over the dead man. The German is smooth-shaven, with close-cropped hair like a con from Långholmen. The yellow, grinning teeth between his pale lips are undamaged, but the left side of his scalp is scarred in patches, as if he was hit once by a hail of shotgun pellets. For a moment I consider closing his blue eye.
I search him. I find some sort of badge in silver and gold in the shape of a flower, a key ring with about ten keys on it, an automatic lighter, a wallet with thirty kronor in banknotes, and a photograph with a group of smiling soldiers. I do not recognise their uniforms.
I take the money and replace his wallet in the inside pocket of his overcoat, then close the coat at the front and give the corpse a little pat. I am so glad that I kept my leather gloves on through the entire fight – there’s less to tidy up, and now I’m in a bit of a hurry. I check the meat thermometer. It’s fallen to thirty-two degrees. I get out my comb from my inside pocket and pull it through my hair.
‘Kvisten doesn’t bare his head for anyone,’ I mutter as I pick up the hat from the floor and press it down on my head. Time to make my way home. I have to get rid of all my clothes and I should fix myself up with a water-tight alibi; it’s only a question of time before the police find both bodies. If I’m lucky, Alcazar will be closed tomorrow, but presumably the door to Sonja’s flat is still open, unless they’re already there. Luckily it’s not far to get home to Sibirien, and the streets are almost deserted even though it’s only seven o’clock.
‘Doris. Kvisten’s high-society alibi.’
It doesn’t get much tighter than that. If I can convince her to be there for me and put her reputation on the line, I’m home and dry. Anyway she doesn’t have much of a reputation to worry about. She’ll do it. She has to do it.
Before I leave the place, I wash the blood off my face under one of the taps, and do up all the buttons of my coat. On my way out I accidentally step on the bowler hat of the German.
After sneaking out the same way as I came in, I find that the blustering wind that comes hounding up Birger Jarlsgatan finds its way under my coat at once, and starts tearing at my bloodied rags. I pick up a handful of snow, pressing it against my right hand, and then quietly jog past the timber yard on the left and go down the stairs towards Engelbrektsplan.
I pass the mouth of the Brunkeberg Tunnel, lying there like the snout of a huge boar in the snow, and then hurry past the tobacconist’s. I’m dying for a damned smoke. The row of bare trees on Birger Jarlsgatan can already be glimpsed through the falling snow. From there it’s more or less straight on all the way to Sibirien. I hardly meet a soul. The snow consumes all the sounds of the city, and everything is absolutely still.
Doris is waiting for me at home in the bed. All the lights in the flat have been left on. She’s wearing a white slip that clings to her bony body. The ashtray perched on her stomach is full of cigarette butts, gooey with lipstick. She has twiddled her way to a radio station playing jazz.
‘Evening.’
‘Where have you been?’ She looks at me with an uninterested expression. She’s been at her medicine again, and now has the same, soulless eyes that one sometimes sees in resigned, impoverished folk once their anger has brewed for too long, and is now transforming itself into an acidic bile that’s slowly corroding them from the inside. The only difference is that she has plenty of dough.
‘Just having a look around. What are you doing?’
I go into the wardrobe and root out an old sailor’s sack. I can hear Doris mumbling something as I come out and start undressing. The pain is burning in my right hand. A trumpet wails from the radio.
‘Did you say something?’
‘Listening to music.’
I empty the pockets of my clothes, stuff them into the sailor’s sack, change into a clean shirt and trousers and jump into a pair of old clogs. I pick up a cigar and bite off the end.
‘Are you finding anything good?’
She shrugs. The ashtray is in danger of overturning in the bed. ‘Why don’t you use the cigar cutter I gave you today?’ ‘Cigar cutter’ is difficult for her, and she slurs as she attempts it.
‘I forget that I have it.’
On the wall next to the sleeping-alcove one can see the splashes of blood from the time she whacked me on the nose. I put on my things, go up to her as she lies there with her breasts almost popping out of her shift, and pick up the box of matches that’s on her stomach.
‘Can you fill the big saucepan with water and put it on the boil? I’ll be back in a moment.’
She nods torpidly.
With the sailor’s sack, a bottle of paraffin, and a scrap of sausage for the cats in the yard, I head down the stairs and go out the back door. The night is cold and clear. A big rat from the latrine scurries across the snow and disappears behind the sheds. Someone has left the potato cellar door open. There’s no sign of the cats, and the snow-covered water pump looks like a snowman made by a mentally impaired child.
I kick up an elongated hole in the snow, lay the sack in it and drench it in paraffin. While the clothes are absorbing it, I go over to the potato cellar and stick my head in. It stinks of rancid humidity and rat droppings. The smells remind me of the isolation cells at Långholmen. I shiver and close the door.
When about a minute has gone by, I strike a match and watch as my clothes go up in flames. The sharp smell of paraffin fills the courtyard. As I stand there watching the sailor’s sack burning, I eat the sausage. In the window I see Lundin briefly passing, shaking his head. Pity about the new overcoat and boots, but there’s nothing else for it. The goons’ technicians are too smart.
By the time I come back up into the flat, the water is boiling. Doris has perked up a bit. She’s sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and the newspaper, and she’s even put on a dark dress with a long line of big white buttons.
My clothes fall in a heap on the rag rug. I pour cold water into the bathing tub, shift it to the middle of the floor and top it up with boiling water. Doris stares at me without any reserve.
I get into the water and hang my head, an enormous fatigue emanating through my limbs. I hear her getting to her feet. She lowers a tea towel into the water, then scrubs my back with it.
‘I’ve killed a bloke.’
I’m still hanging my head. The hand that’s washing my back stops rubbing for a few moments.
‘I’m sure he deserved it.’
She goes back to her scrubbing. I exhale.
‘He’s killed at least three people, maybe four, and he tried to finish me off as well.’
‘Well, then,’ she says. ‘Are you in trouble?’
I nod. ‘It’s probably just a question of time before they’re at the door.’ I hesitate, then go on: ‘Would you lie for me?’
Doris drops the towel into the water, stands up, goes around the bathing tub and turns her back on me. She picks up my clothes, starts folding them, and piles them on the kitchen table. When she turns the trousers upside down, the loose change and gold lighter clatter onto the floor. She picks up the lighter and fidgets with a pack of Camels from the table. The lighter clicks a few times without result.
‘That’s a lovely lighter.’ She holds it up before her. Her mouth turns to a bloodless streak. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘It’s broken. Doris? Would you?’
‘Why are you going around with a broken lighter?’
‘Don’t change the subject now.’ I’m cold, sitting there naked in the tub. ‘Would you?’
She puts the lighter back in the trousers and pats them down. Then, in the midst of the deep silence that follows, there’s a hard knock on the door. Someone tugs at the handle before knocking again. Doris looks
up with a harried expression.
‘For God’s sake,’ I whisper, rising from the bathing tub with water dripping everywhere. ‘Would you?’
The goons that have come to put me in irons aren’t the same as the last time. Both are in uniform. One of them is an elderly, red-nosed bloke with spectacles and large, droopy ears. The other is a severe type with a clipped moustache and a hand on the hilt of his sabre. Wearing the towel wrapped around my hips, I reverse into the gloomy hall.
‘Kvist?’ The older of the two men sniffs.
I nod.
‘Turn to the wall!’ The younger of them speaks with an irritable, shrill voice.
‘Can’t one even have a Christmas soak these days?’
I smile and turn around, and as I do so I notice some cobwebs in the corner between the ceiling and the wall. The pain cuts through my right hand when they handcuff me. Someone presses the base of his hand against my shoulder blades.
I can feel them tensing up when they hear the sound of Doris’s heels. With a swishing sound, one of them draws his sabre halfway out of its scabbard. I look around.
She comes into the living room and sits on top of the desk. Without shaking, she puts a Camel into her cigarette holder. We watch her in silence. In the gloom, her bright buttons shine like the whites of a chimney-sweep’s eyes. She fluffs up her hair.
‘So? Would one of these gentlemen be kind enough to offer me a light?’
I hear at least one of the goons start patting his uniform, to look for a box of matches. I nail Doris with my eyes, but she doesn’t return my gaze, and then she sighs.
‘Excuse us, my lady, we didn’t know you were here.’
Doris finds a box of matches on the desk. The flame briefly lights up her narrow face, her brown eyes and the beauty spot high up on her cheek. She’s touched up her lipstick.
‘What’s going on?’
The match goes out in a cloud of grey cigarette smoke.
‘You’ll have to excuse us, Miss, we have our orders.’
‘We’ve been here all evening.’ My voice seems nervy. ‘We had Christmas luncheon at Metropol and then we came back here.’
‘Shut up!’ The goon shoves the palm of his hand even harder into my back. My head thumps into the wall. Doris is still refusing to look at me.
‘Let’s take him onto the landing and dress him there,’ decides the younger one. ‘You’ll have to drive him to the station. I’ll have a word with the lady in the meantime. Where are his clothes?’
Doris nods towards the kitchen. The younger one stamps off, while the older one takes me by the crook of my arm and tries to drag me out of the door. I resist. Doris looks at me, nods briefly and puts her hand on her heart. I smile, I can breathe again. The goon pulls me out into the stairwell.
The car is cold. I sit in the back seat, and the older constable drives at a snail’s pace, hunched over the steering wheel. The powder snow whirls all about us as we move along. One of the headlights is broken. I’m shivering. We travel through a ghost city, the restaurants and shops all closed, and no sign of any trams and hardly even cars.
‘You remember when they buried those Ådalen blokes?’ The goon in the front gets out a handkerchief and blows his nose loudly, with one hand.
‘Certainly I do.’
‘Everything stopped. People put down their tools, there was no traffic for five minutes.’
‘Until the factory whistles sounded again.’
‘This is a bit like that, isn’t it? Like the grave.’
In Vasaparken the ice rink lies deserted. A tramp leans against a tree like an abandoned snowman. I have the idea he could be dead. As we pass, a stray dog cocks its hind leg against a tobacco kiosk by St Eriksplan. We turn off towards Gloomholmen.
I wonder what the goon is talking to Doris about. There’s really not so very much he could ask the director’s wife. The subject is too delicate. I’m in her hands. There’s not a lot to be done about it. My head hurts, and my right hand is pulsating with pain.
DCI Alvar Berglund is properly dressed in a jacket, waistcoat and a white shirt, also a tiepin with a swastika. He smiles welcomingly as I walk into the little interrogation room, then he puts down his spectacles, which he is in the process of polishing, and stands up to shake hands. I’ve been let out of the handcuffs, probably on Berglund’s order. We shake hands, his grip cutting into my fist like a punch at an already broken rib. I break into a sweat but force myself to smile.
‘Kvist! How nice! How’s your Christmas been?’
‘I’ve had worse.’
We make ourselves comfortable opposite one another.
‘Have you solved the Christmas crossword yet?’
‘Haven’t had time.’
‘You’ve been busy?’ Berglund smiles again, twists the tip of his grey moustache, and taps his pen at the table as if to mark out the time that passes between each reply.
‘You know how it is.’
‘Yes.’ Berglund nods. ‘We’ve had our hands quite full here as well. Never seen a Christmas day quite like it.’ He stops drumming for a few seconds before he goes back to it.
‘I thought I’d be seeing Olsson.’ I regret the words as soon as they have flown out of my mouth.
‘The head of the Criminal Division? Why on earth would you think that?’
‘I thought it was about Zetterberg?’
‘Olsson is on Gotland for Christmas but you’ll see him. In good time.’
‘So why am I here?’
Berglund smiles again, broader than ever, and stops his tapping before offering a surprise: ‘There’s a witness on Kungsgatan, a widow who sits in the window all day.’
‘I’ll be damned!’ This whole charade is starting to bore me.
‘Yes. And she freed you.’
I meet Berglund’s eyes. Like all goons, he takes a little detour before he gets to the point. I decide to take things into my own hands, to be rid of it.
‘And Sonja. I think Sonja saw the murderer leaving Zetterberg’s place.’
‘Yes. And as far as I’ve heard you’ve been looking for her? And I think you found her in the end, didn’t you?’
‘Unfortunately not. I was looking for her, half of Klara could back that up, but it was like she’d been swallowed up by the ground.’
‘I thought you were a bit of a bloodhound when it comes to women who are on the game?’
‘This one slipped through.’
‘Well, we did find her in the end, this evening in Regeringsgatan.’ Berglund runs his finger across his moustache. ‘Sadly, she was fairly quiet.’
‘Oh?’
‘She had holes in her. Lots of holes.’
I flinch, even though I already knew this, of course. I think of her in the rain on Kungsgatan and I think of her father in his little workshop on Bondegatan. Now he really doesn’t have anyone to follow him. Now it’s only him and his weeping wife.
‘Well that’s very bad news.’
‘For her. And for you. Where were you this afternoon?’
‘I spent the afternoon with a lady friend. You’ve probably heard of Doris Steiner?’ Now it’s my turn to smile.
‘She said you had luncheon at the Metropol?’ Berglund taps his notebook with his pen again.
‘Their Christmas table. I can recommend the pig’s trotters.’
‘And then?’
‘Then we went back to my home and spent the rest of the evening there… You know how it is.’ I raise my eyebrows pointedly, man to man, so to speak.
‘I didn’t think you bothered with the ladies?’ Berglund smiles again, but now even that feigned civility of his is missing, the one he likes to present to the outside. I feel anger rumbling inside of me like a heavy breaker at sea. I have a good mind to lean across the table and deck the bloke.
‘Well,’ Berglund goes on. ‘We have spoken to Mrs Steiner and indeed she does confirm that you lunched at the Metropol.’
‘There you are, then!’
‘And then, according t
o her version of events, you disappeared for several hours before coming back and burning your clothes down in the yard.’
They keep me rotting in the cell for a few days, to soften me up. The only human contact I get is the latrine cleaner and the screw who brings the porridge or opens the viewing slit and tells me to shut my gob if I start whistling some Ernst Rolf. One night the prisoner in the cell next door tries to communicate with me by means of the same old knocking. That, if anything, drives me half crazy. The wall lice don’t make things much better.
I pace back and forth to work up some warmth, my left hand on the waistband of my trousers to keep them from falling down, my clogs clattering with a hollow sound between the walls. The ash-grey light of dawn enters through the little barred window. I cough and spit in the galvanised shit bucket.
I’ve been here for four days. They can keep me locked up for three months if they want to. One of my co-prisoners during my first Långholmen stint claimed he was once detained here for sixteen days. I wipe my snot on my shirt sleeve. At least at Långholmen, if one needed to, one could tear out a page from the Bible or the catechism.
I sit down and very carefully squeeze my right hand. The worst of the swelling has gone down, but my little finger and its knuckle are somewhere between dark blue and purple, also far more crooked than usual. Something in there has broken.
‘Soon when old Kvisten shakes his fist, it’ll be like a rattle.’
My voice echoes hoarsely between the graffiti-strewn walls. I try to laugh but nothing comes out. I get up and start pacing again. I smell like a tramp and my body itches from the lice. How the hell do they manage to survive in this cold, in these stone walls?
I’m startled when the prisoner in the cell on the right starts howling. He does it at regular intervals. It’s impossible to make out what he’s yelling, he just yells.
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