Steiner tries to lift his head. His eyelids tremble with exertion but at long last he manages it, and man and wife look each other in the eye.
‘You ruined me. And you ruined him.’ Steiner coughs blood. ‘You treated him as if he were a trophy, just another of your toys. You made him sick.’ Doris takes a step towards him. ‘You made him mad.’ An intense cannonade of New Year rockets ring out, with hardly a pause between the explosions.
I hold my breath. She grabs his pulpy chin and forces his face up. His spectacles are smashed when she hammers the butt of the pistol twice against his forehead. The blood is spattering around them. Steiner screams piercingly and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, she pushes the pistol into his stomach and squeezes the trigger.
She’s pressing the revolver so hard into her husband that the report of the weapon is dampened. I hunch up behind my arms.
When I look up again, Steiner is dead. He lies slumped in the armchair with his chin against his chest. There’s a regular mess from his stomach down. Doris’s eyes are shaded with smudged mascara, and the lower part of her dress is speckled red. The hand holding the revolver is smeared with blood. She pulls her husband’s hand off the armrest and leans over it, supporting herself on her right arm. Her breathing is tremulous and strained, and a few little muscles around her mouth are moving spasmodically.
Anders de Wahl’s languorous voice sings ‘New Year’s Bells’ from the radio. I have almost made my way over to her when she straightens up and lifts her revolver. The muzzle is hot against my forehead. When she cocks it, the sound is louder than the bursts of fireworks in the sky. For a few seconds we stand in silence, staring into one another’s eyes. Two has-beens.
A drop of blood falls from her hand, hitting the floor with a splashing sound.
‘Take your pistol with you. And your cigar butt.’
I step back. She doesn’t put down her revolver. She doesn’t even seem to see me. I bend down and put the butt in my trouser pocket. I make the Husqvarna safe and put it in my home-made holster, before turning round and walking out of the door. On my way, I hit the light switch and the hall lights up.
Just as I’m heaving open the heavy door, the Skansen fireworks on the Djurgården side are setting fire to the whole sky, with plumes of red, green, yellow and blue arcing over the dark expanse. The detonations come rolling across the ice like thunder.
I reach the big gate and push it open, then lift my hat to wipe the sweat from my brow with my sleeve. Behind me I hear an engine starting, and I turn around. To my right, Leonard’s sports car shoots out of an underground garage, skidding onto Nobelgatan in a cloud of exhaust and snow crystals, and coming to a stop in front of me. Doris winds down the window. She has wiped her face clean of mascara and had time to apply some fresh lipstick. On the passenger seat, the revolver reflects the lights of the fireworks.
‘You won’t get away,’ I say. ‘They’ll keep hunting you until you’re dead.’
She picks up an object from her lap and tosses it to me. I catch it. Steiner’s wine-red cigar case.
‘Happy New Year, Harry.’
I lift my hat, nod, and put it back. Doris smiles forlornly, releases the clutch and, before I know it, the car has disappeared around the corner.
I extract one of Steiner’s Havana cigars from the case and bite off the end. The strong taste fills my mouth and I blow a heavy cloud of smoke into the night.
Just as I’m about to step into the street, someone whimpers behind me. I turn around. Dixie is standing there, pacing about in the snow halfway between the main door and the gate. The lights in the hall form a half-circle around her. Shivering with fear, she retreats a few steps, and then stops again. I get out the Husqvarna and, with a soft click, cock it and then squat down to wait for her to come running across the gravelled drive.
When Dixie is a metre away, I lift the weapon. She skids to a halt in a little cloud of powder snow, slides towards me and collides with my leg. I point the Husqvarna at her and she rolls onto her back, legs in the air and even remembers to droop her tongue from her mouth. Little flakes of snow have got caught in her long eyebrows. I put the gun against her chest. I have a sense of her pathetic heartbeats passing through the gun’s metal. I squeeze the hilt hard.
‘Anyway, it would be bloody stupid leaving a bullet behind.’
Dixie, reacting to the sound of my voice, looks at me with eyes as black as Durham coal. I make the Husqvarna safe, put it back in my holster, scratch the dog’s stomach with my undamaged hand and try to quieten her down. She spins round and rears up on shaking legs; I scoop up the little thing and put her under my jacket, with a little scratch behind her ear.
‘I don’t have a lot to offer you. No silk cushions for your dumb little head, and no paté for breakfast, just the odd bit of sausage at most. And there’ll be a hell of a lot of running about after bicycles.’
I stick the Havana into my mouth and button up my jacket so that only her head sticks out, next to my collar. Her warm body vibrates against mine.
‘But if we keep working hard and if we manage to stay out of the way of a touchy bloke called Olsson, old Kvisten should be able to make sure we have a decent time of it.’
I walk onto Nobelgatan. There are no people around. The New Year fireworks on the other side of the ice are starting to die down. My body feels as if I just went fifteen rounds. It’s going to be a long walk back to Sibirien.
I’m cold already.
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Copyright
Pushkin Vertigo
71–75 Shelton Street
London, WC2H 9JQ
Original text © Martin Holmén 2015
Translation © Henning Koch 2016
First published as Clinch by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, Sweden
Published in the English language by arrangement with Bonnier Rights, Stockholm, Sweden
First published in English by Echo Publishing in 2015
First published by Pushkin Vertigo in 2016
ISBN 978 1 782272 05 2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
Cover image © Todd Keith/Getty Images
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