The Viper

by Hakan Ostlundh

  “I thought you did all your number inquiries online,” smiled Göran.

  “Don’t joke around with me,” said Lennart.

  He drew himself up slowly and gingerly and Göran could almost hear his vertebrae cracking.

  “You do a lot of good here in the station,” said Göran.

  Lennart looked at him gravely without answering.

  “There are a lot of us old hands who are a bit behind when it comes to working with computers.”

  “You can be proud of what you do,” said Göran.

  Lennart waved dismissively.

  33.

  Ricky woke up suddenly. He was looking up at an unfamiliar ceiling. Above him hung the extinguished red glass oval that had bathed yesterday evening in a warm and enchantingly unreal glow. Now the room was far more jarringly real. The sun shone in harshly behind the drawn curtains and the man sleeping beside him exuded a strong and unfamiliar scent. Ricky couldn’t make out what it was. It wasn’t perfume, it wasn’t sweat, it wasn’t sex, it was just unfamiliar. He knew that this smell would follow him around all day.

  The body next to him was suntanned and hirsute unlike his own fair, hairless skin. Yesterday it had excited him to slide his fingers through the stiff, rustling body hair. Today it only seemed animal-like, in the basest sense.

  It wasn’t the first time he had woken up in this bed, but each time it ended the same way.

  He cautiously slid one leg out over the edge of the bed, put his foot on the floor, and sat up. From experience he knew that the man next to him wouldn’t wake up, or at least would pretend not to wake up, whichever it was.

  Ricky gathered his clothes and got dressed in the living room. His body felt at once light and heavy and his skin almost hurt as he pulled on his rough jeans, as if every nerve ending was suffering from extreme oversensitivity. His head felt like it had pins and needles, as if his brain had actually fallen asleep, and his mouth felt so dry, like it had been glued shut. He filled a glass of water in the kitchen, also cautiously, no spattering stream against the metal sides of the sink, and raised it to his dry lips. He drank, slowly at first, but then with increasing thirst.

  Then he was out on the street, bare feet against the leather of his shoes, the daylight cut straight through him like red-hot knives. Only now did he realize that it was still early in the morning. He headed down toward the sea. He was hit by a cold wind when he emerged from the sheltered back alleys, but the sun warmed his neck. Way out at sea, lined up in the shipping lane, the big cargo ships gleamed in the sunshine.

  His feet were cold, so he bent down and tied his shoes. Everything was back the way it was. Cast out into reality. For a few hours the night before he had been released from everything, absorbed in the present and his own body. He had forged beautiful plans, but they had nothing to do with the future. It was only when time ceased that his thoughts about tomorrow could become so bright. Now he felt disheveled, burned out, and real. Real and completely repulsive.

  He kicked away a rock that disappeared silently and imperceptibly into the choppy water. He had to think for a moment to remember where he had parked the car. Over by Söderport, he realized finally. Why all the way over there? Totally the wrong end of town. He sighed and started to walk along the seafront, turned up next to the big conference building, and passed between a deserted and yellowing Almedalen Park and the library’s high glass facade. He glanced at a group of students, caught a few words in a foreign language. Polish, Russian?

  I’m still young, he thought. It wasn’t too late. He was still young.

  * * *

  LOW CLOUDS HUNG over the Karlsö Islands, but they seemed like they were about to dissolve, blown apart by the strengthening wind. The trees, still green in patches, jerked and shook in the gusts.

  Fredrik drove south along the coast road and was just south of Västergarn when the phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number on the display.

  “Fredrik Broman,” he answered.

  It was from the repair shop. They had found a problem. Some kind of a grease seal on the right front axel was cracked. It wasn’t very expensive to repair, but they wouldn’t get any spares in until tomorrow morning.

  “I see,” he sighed, “well, I guess I don’t have much choice. But are you sure you’ll be getting one in tomorrow?”

  The mechanic said that it was a sure thing and rambled on at length about their spare parts delivery routine, the night ferry, and other details Fredrik hadn’t asked for. When he was finally done, Fredrik hung up and tried to call Gustav, but got no answer.

  “A grease seal,” he said out loud and at that same moment was overtaken by a black Opel Astra.

  It was a bit of a reckless maneuver done well above the speed limit. The car hummed onward toward Klintehamn and was soon out of sight.

  When Fredrik reached Levide only Elin Traneus was home.

  “You can come in and wait if you want, but I’ve got no idea when he’ll be back,” she said.

  She looked tired from lack of sleep, pale and with a murky gaze.

  “Do you know where he is?” asked Fredrik.

  “No. In Visby, I think, but other than that…”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “I’ll have to come back later,” he said and took a step down from the porch steps.

  He nodded good-bye to her and was already on his way toward the car when she stopped him.

  “Anything new on that Karl-Johan?”

  Fredrik stopped and turned around.

  “I spoke to him this morning together with another officer. If he comes here again he gets hit with a restraining order. He knows that. I doubt he’ll be showing up here again.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “About the restraining order you mean?”

  “No, that he won’t be coming around here again,” she said.

  She fiddled with the bolt on the door while she waited for his answer. Locked it, opened it again.

  “Are you okay here?” he asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders again.

  “I guess so.”

  “Have you tried calling your brother?”

  “Yes, but he’s not answering.”

  Fredrik thought for a moment, then he took out a business card.

  “There’s something I have to take care of, but I’ll be back in an hour, so we’ll just have to see if Rickard has come back by then.”

  He handed her the card.

  “Maybe you could give me a call when he shows up, or ask him to call me, so I know. I’d be very grateful.”

  Elin nodded.

  Fredrik sat in the car and drove off, somehow relieved at having gotten away from there.

  * * *

  ALREADY ON THE way into Visby he had decided to swing past the crime scene to take a look around. It was only when he was pulling up in front of the farm that it struck him that Eva would be there.

  He was about to turn the car around and drive away when she suddenly stepped out of the kitchen door. Eva immediately recognized him.

  “Fuck!” he swore under his breath.

  He had no choice but to stop and climb out of the car.

  They said hi to each other. She with a certain tightness around the corners of her mouth, he thought. Couldn’t she ever just relax? Only once had he called her up and been difficult, and that was a long time ago now. One single drunken pleading phone call a little too late at night. It ought to be stricken from the record by now.

  “I didn’t get hold of Rickard Traneus, so I decided to swing by here.”

  Why did that sound like a bad excuse?

  “Okay,” said Eva.

  The kitchen door opened again and Granholm came out. He glared at Fredrik through his round glasses. Granholm to the rescue, thought Fredrik.

  “Is there anything I can do?” he asked Eva. “I’ve got an hour to kill, give or take.”

  Eva looked a little at a loss, but then seemed to think of something.

  “You can sta
rt in the basement if you like.”

  Relegated to the basement, he thought, when a minute later he walked down the basement steps and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Oh, well, nothing to do but grin and bear it. No coldness or dank earthy smell hit him when he descended into the whitewashed corridor with no less than five doors on either side of it. It was warm and clean.

  To the right there was a sauna and something that he at first took to be a jacuzzi made of stone and sunken into the floor. Then he saw that it was some kind of a Japanese bath, given the small wooden stools that were piled up by the wall. The next was a laundry room, opposite that was the boiler room, and then adjacent to that, closest to the stairs, there was a big storage room for clothes, shoes, skis, and other sports equipment. At the far end of the corridor there was a food cellar, or a big larder more like. It was cooler in there and there were cans, jars of jam, pickled vegetables, and all sorts of different bottles of liquor stacked on unpainted storage shelves. At the very back of the larder, there was a narrow door and on the wall next to it some kind of device with a little glimmering red light on it. It looked like an AC unit, only smaller.

  Fredrik opened the door and felt how the damp and cold swept over him. There was a completely different climate in there, than in the room outside. He switched on the light. Two dim bulbs cast a warm glow over a room that was about double the size of the larder. It was a wine cellar. The right wall was completely covered with cemented clay pipes. Sticking out of virtually each one of them were foils in red, green, and gold. His curiosity piqued, he moved closer and pulled out a bottle at random, wiped off a little dust and peered at the label.

  The bottle he was holding was a Château Pétrus from 1990. He wasn’t altogether sure whether wines like that were drunk at all, or if they were just sold and bought at auctions. In any case, actually tasting one was a pleasure afforded very few. A sixteen-year-old Pétrus from a good year was worth quite a few thousand.

  He stuck the bottle back into its clay pipe and realized that he ought to have a flashlight to do a proper job down here. He was just about to go upstairs and fetch one from the car when he caught sight of something sticking out from among the wine catalogues and loose sheets of paper on a little stained oak shelf to the left of the door. He pulled out the shiny metal baton, which, just as he had guessed, turned out to be a flashlight. With working batteries no less, he could confirm after having tested it.

  He began the monotonous task of removing the bottles one by one and shining the flashlight into each of the clay pipes. Over half the cellar contained expensive Bordeauxs, although not all were of the same breathtaking price class as the first one he had taken out. He also found Bourgognes, Chablis, Meursaults, a few red Beaune wines, and then Champagne of course, but nothing other than bottles stuck inside the pipes.

  He examined the shelf where he had found the flashlight, quickly flipped through the pile of catalogues and loose sheets of paper. In among them he found a bound black A4 notebook, a cellar book. All purchases were carefully entered in black ink on light-blue lines, as well as when bottles had been taken upstairs to be drunk. He flipped through it from the back. The last time something had been brought into the cellar was two years ago.

  Fredrik flipped forward, wanted to see if Arvid Traneus may have taken out a bottle of Champagne or something else to celebrate coming home. He couldn’t find any such entry, at least not after skimming it so quickly. But another entry caught his eye. On the tenth of April, 2001, he had taken up two Winston Churchill 1985s. “Rickard 20” was written next to it.

  He heard footsteps in the corridor outside and stopped flipping the pages. The door to the larder opened.

  “Hello?” someone called out. “Fredrik, are you there?”

  It was Eva.

  “In here!” he shouted and tried to hide his surprise.

  He thought she had sent him down to the basement so she wouldn’t have to see him.

  Eva entered the wine cellar and pulled the door closed behind her.

  “Hi, how’s it going?” she asked and swept her eyes quickly across the bottle necks projecting from the clay pipes.

  “Not bad … very nice wine collection, but nothing of interest, if that’s what you mean?”

  She took a few short steps toward him. Fredrik closed the cellar book and held it in his left hand.

  “I see … well, I just wanted to see if you’d found anything.”

  What he had at first perceived as a capacious wine cellar, had suddenly turned into a very small room where two people ended up very close to each other, whether they liked it or not. He got the feeling that Eva had been struck by a similar thought. She seemed to have become distracted from whatever her original reason for coming down had been.

  “I was just thinking…”

  She fell silent, lowered her gaze, and sighed heavily.

  “What?” he asked, just to puncture the silence.

  “I don’t really know what I was thinking,” she said.

  It looked like she was going to back out of the room any second, but now he didn’t want to let her go.

  “No, go ahead, say it.”

  When she still hesitated, he took a cautious step forward.

  “Haven’t we been silent long enough?”

  That made her smile.

  “I know that I’ve been a little … that I keep my distance. But I think it’s better that way. Right?”

  He suddenly became uncertain. Was that a right that demanded his agreement, or was it really asking him what he thought? There wasn’t a lot of distance between them right now.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  Eva looked at him, her gaze dark and solemn in the gloom of the cellar.

  “It doesn’t mean that there’s nothing else there,” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “But that’s just how it is.”

  Fredrik walked slowly up to her. It wasn’t more than two short steps.

  She continued looking at him. What did she want with that look? Unyielding, insistent, and yet expressing some kind of desire? Or not?

  He wasn’t sure which of them touched the other first, but … No, that was a lie. It was he who touched her. He couldn’t help it. But it was a completely innocent, virtually imperceptible touch. He raised his free hand and gently stroked the sleeve of her overall. She couldn’t even have felt it through the fabric, but she continued to work him with that gaze, silent and unflinching.

  Then suddenly they kissed, passionately and full of desire. Her smell was exactly as he had remembered it, her lips like coming home.

  This is wrong. This is so fucking wrong, echoed in his head. But he couldn’t help himself.

  He let go of the black notebook, tore off the latex glove from his right hand, and dug his fingers into her cool, thick hair.

  Then she broke away. Abruptly.

  “Damn it,” she whispered. “That was not good, that was not good at all. A bad idea, that’s what it was.”

  Eva looked around furtively.

  “Take it easy,” he said. “I don’t want to cause any trouble. If it was a bad idea then … well, then it was a bad idea.”

  He sought eye contact with her, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze. Her chest was heaving in sync with her rapid breathing.

  “Just take it easy,” he said again.

  She gave him a quick look, then she turned around and disappeared out through the door.

  Fredrik looked after her stupidly, then bent down and picked up the cellar book from the floor while he tried to still the hurricane that was raging inside him.

  “No, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea,” he whispered to himself.

  34.

  Elin felt how everything became easier once Ricky came back. Her fear disappeared from one moment to the next. It even became easier to breathe.

  But she was angry at him, angry because he had accused her, angry because he had just run off without saying anything. But she didn’t know how she was
going to say that to him, if she even had any right to say it. And she was far too grateful to have him back in the house to risk starting another argument.

  He had said, “Hi,” looked at her with a glazed-over look, and then disappeared into his room.

  Elin sank down into the sofa in the living room. She should go home. What was the point in her being there anymore? It would take weeks, maybe more, before they could bury mother. School was waiting, or rather wasn’t waiting. The courses continued relentlessly without her and it would be hard for her to catch up once she had fallen behind.

  It was like a nightmare. Had her father really killed her mother? That’s what she thought, but she didn’t want to believe it. Ricky couldn’t understand it, couldn’t understand the difference.

  She leaned her head back and thought about dying. It was distant and incomprehensible and wasn’t connected with any emotions. She couldn’t picture the life that lay ahead of her or it coming to an end. But then all at once something sunk through her chest and everything around her became black and ice cold. She was completely alone and the world was neither good nor evil, and there was no point to anything. She jumped up from the couch to stave off the panic, walked over to the window, pressed her forehead and nose against the glass. A beautiful autumn sun shone above the lambs out in the pasture. She had to smile at the sight.

  Once a long time ago, her father had spoken to her about the meaning of life. She didn’t remember why, whether it had come out of nowhere or if she had asked him some naïve existential question. “There is no meaning to life,” he had said, “no meaning other than the one you give it yourself.” If that was true, her life right now was meaningless.

  Then the doorbell rang. It was the police who had come back.

  * * *

  THERE WAS A large bouquet of white and red roses in a red glass vase on the black tabletop. There was a card attached to one of the stalks. Condolences from a relative, Fredrik guessed.

  “What was it he was doing in Japan?” he asked Rickard, who was sitting opposite him at the big table.