The Viper
Page 33
Fredrik rushed after him.
“Rickard!” he screamed pointlessly into the wind.
Rickard had gotten a head start, but with his hands cuffed behind his back he couldn’t run all that fast without running the risk of losing his balance. Fredrik quickly gained on him and heard how Sara in turn was following close behind him. Rickard Traneus stumbled and sort of lurched forward a little. Fredrik thought that he would fall headlong onto the rocks and clumps of grass, but with a quick, skipping maneuver he managed to stay on his feet and ran on toward the edge of the cliff.
Fredrik pushed himself closer and closer. He caught up with Rickard just as they approached the brink and threw out an arm to catch and tackle him. His arm got wedged underneath Rickard’s arm just as he threw himself off, and as he twisted in the air Fredrick had no chance of freeing himself. Rickard disappeared over the edge and pulled him inexorably with him in his fall.
They plummeted. Fredrik grabbed hold of Rickard with his left hand, too, and they fell face-to-face. He fell from the cliff down toward a bluish-gray flat rock that rose out from the shingled shoreline below with Rickard Traneus’s empty gaze staring into his.
He fell and saw himself in a bed, saw a woman in a long skirt come toward him from a pair of doors that opened out onto a brightly lit corridor. At first the image was unfamiliar, then he suddenly realized that it was from a British TV series that he had long since forgotten the name of. It was set in the 1800s and the man lying there in the bed was dying, the man whose gaze was now his. The woman in the doorway went double, the image went out of focus, the dying man went out of focus. Was that the last image that would flicker before his mind’s eye? A scene from a TV series that wasn’t even worth remembering?
Then nothing more.
66.
Göran Eide was standing outside the ER entrance at Karolinska University Hospital smoking a cigarette. It tasted like shit and was completely irresistible.
When he had been informed about what had happened out on Östergarnsholm he had done three things. One: made sure that the ambulance helicopter was on its way out to the island. Two: made sure that Gustav drove down to inform Fredrik’s wife about the accident and then drove her back to Visby. Three: politely asked a uniformed officer to run over to the supermarket to buy a pack of Camel Lights. That was over seven hours ago. Once the decision had been made to take Fredrik to Karolinska, Göran had flown up to Stockholm on the same plane as Ninni.
He didn’t like to stand outside a hospital’s emergency room and wait. He didn’t actually like smoking, either. But right now he was doing both.
Two years earlier he had stood outside the entrance to Visby hospital after having visited an injured officer. Then he had stood there trying to work out what had gone wrong and what he could do to make sure that he would never have to stand there again.
Fredrik Broman had somehow been pulled over the edge of a cliff when he had tried to stop Rickard Traneus from throwing himself off it. Both of them had plunged down the precipice on Östergarnsholm and landed right on top of a slab of exposed bedrock below. Rickard Traneus on the bottom, had died instantly, with Fredrik on top of him. “They lay there as if they’d been sacrificed at some kind of altar,” Sara had said in a quavering whisper when she returned to Visby deathly pale and frozen stiff.
Fredrik was badly injured. They had made a quick assessment in Visby, stabilized him and sent him on to Karolinska. It wasn’t clear whether he would make it. This was considerably more serious than the incident two years ago. Göran shut his eyes. How the hell could things have gone so terribly wrong? Had Fredrik made a mistake, been careless or tried to play the hero? Or was it Sara? Or was it he himself? Or was it just one of those things?
To hell with it. The most important thing right now was that Fredrik pulled through.
Göran took a deep drag from his cigarette and noticed how the door to the ER opened. It was Ninni. She came up to him, walking with short, slow steps.
Without thinking about it he held out the pack of cigarettes to her. She took it without saying anything, shook out a cigarette, and let him light it. He made sure that it had really taken before he blew out the match.
They both smoked their cigarettes almost all the way down to the filter without saying a word to each other.
67.
Sara had added a few days of vacation to extend her three days of sick leave. Now that the investigation was over, it didn’t really make any difference if she took a few extra days off. Her own procedure had been overshadowed by what had happened in the storm out on the island. It had just become something that had to be dealt with quickly. And nobody had asked any questions.
She had thought that she was well prepared for the meeting with Fredrik, had spoken to both Göran and Ninni, but she had still stopped short just inside the doorway, dumbstruck. The body lying on the bed was heavy and unresponsive, its gaze had no focus. He wasn’t unconscious, and yet he wasn’t there, either. Where was he in that case? Was he in there at all? Had the fall from the cliff expunged the person she knew as Fredrik Broman and just left behind a few remaining bodily functions such as breathing and a beating heart? The hospital had little useful to say about it.
They were told they just had to wait and see. It sounded vague, but the very vagueness itself inspired a kind of hope. Surely they wouldn’t raise people’s hopes for no reason?
Ninni was with him when Sara entered. She saw how her gaze clung to her oblivious husband’s face, filled with despair but also something else, an involuntary loathing toward everything. The hospital room, the seemingly lifeless body, the bandages, and the IV. Well, maybe not toward everything, but above all toward that inert, limp, silent, helpless body. She saw it and understood her, didn’t judge her.
She offered to sit with him for a while. Ninni could go down to the cafeteria for a bit, or go out for a walk, or whatever she needed to do. For a moment Sara was afraid that she had been too forward, crossed some line, but Ninni accepted her invitation with a grateful smile.
Ninni went off leaving her alone in the room with Fredrik. Sara regarded her colleague. Or that mute shell that bore a physical resemblance to him. What would she say to him? What would she do?
68.
Elin Traneus looked out from her balcony on the sixth floor of the Hotel Okura. The hotel lay in Tokyo’s Minato district, not many blocks from the building where her father had spent a large part of the last three years of his life.
It was the beginning of March. Tokyo was chilly and it was often raining. The rain came suddenly, was strangely silent and seldom lasted very long. When Elin had arrived in the city, she had gotten off the bus at the wrong stop. She had pulled her wheeled suitcase three blocks through one of those rain showers. Suddenly a man in uniform had appeared from out of the arcade beneath one of the hotels along the way. He had hurried up to her and given her a simple umbrella of see-through plastic. It had been such a beautiful gesture. She still felt moved every time she thought about it.
The Hotel Okura was built in the sixties and had appeared in one of the James Bond movies. She had read that in a brochure she had found in the lobby that was as cavernous as an aircraft hangar. The hotel also had a bar that served excellent dry martinis. She was going to try not to spend too much time in those gloomy rooms, among all the middle-aged, Japanese salarymen.
She didn’t sleep much. The first three days she had mostly spent on her balcony looking out at the city. She had also wandered around in the immediate neighborhood that was ugly and drab. Despite the peculiar Japanese address system, she had eventually managed to find the building where her father had lived. The building was a graphite gray, anonymous high-rise of forty or so stories. Of course, she had no way of confirming that this was actually where he had lived.
Molly had gone with her to Gotland for the funeral. Elin was eternally grateful to her for that. She couldn’t have handled it otherwise.
The funeral had taken place at Levide church one w
eek before Christmas, in the unfamiliar church on the wrong side of the road. Or rather the funerals. No doubt there were those who felt that it was inappropriate, or downright offensive, to hold one joint funeral service. But for Elin it would have been unthinkable to do it any other way, no matter what had happened.
All three of them were buried together. Of the three people lying in the oak caskets with brass handles, two of them had each murdered one of the others. Her family. Now they were resting in peace with Stefania. That might not have been an altogether uncomplicated choice, either, but that was how it turned out.
Who was actually guilty of what? She couldn’t bear to think about it like that. They were gone now, all of them, so what difference did it make?
The lights on the skyscrapers came on as the sky darkened. In the building opposite the hotel, men and women were still working away in an open office landscape beneath the fluorescent lighting. She stood out on the balcony looking at them while she thought about whether to order room service or head down to the gloomy bar.
Hotel Okura was an expensive hotel, but that wasn’t a problem. It had turned out that she was the heir to a small fortune. The sole heir. In addition to the farm in Levide, which was worth at least 4 million, her father had left behind 320,000 in cash, plus stocks and funds worth about 2 million. There was also a company on the island of Jersey that owned shares and options with a combined value of 112 million crowns. In a yield account, the same company had over 3 million crowns worth of Eurodollars.
When she had spontaneously said that she would really prefer to just give it all away, the lawyer had looked shaken. She got the feeling that he was considering if there was any way to have her declared temporarily of unsound mind. Think it over, he had urged her. The money in Sweden couldn’t be touched in any case until the estate was settled, and that couldn’t be done until any wrongful death claims had been paid. The lawyer had been quick to reassure her on that point. Swedish courts never granted any large sums in cases like that. Regardless of the extent of the assets of the defendant. A few hundred thousand at most.
Think it over, he had asked her once again. She could start a foundation and put the assets in a fund if she was determined to give them away. Then the assets could grow and she could devote herself to donating the proceeds and if she were to change her mind one day, the money would still be there.
He didn’t understand. She didn’t want to devote herself to charity. She just wanted to get rid of the assets. But above all, she had other things to think about. And now she went traveling with the money. Father’s money.
A soft, silent rain began to fall. Elin went inside from the balcony, but let the door stand open. It would soon stop.
She was unsure why, but the trip to Tokyo had been necessary. She had needed to stand outside father’s anonymous skyscraper and feel that it meant nothing. She couldn’t explain what it did to her exactly, but she felt that it did her good. He was far away now. There was a sea between them. Another kind of sea.
A loud, piercing shriek echoed outside. She looked out and just caught a glimpse of a black shadow in front of the lit-up facade. She had heard them the first time the night before, when she had lain awake on her bed and long since given up any hope of falling asleep. The awful shriek had given her a start and made her sit up. She had looked out through the window and wondered what it was. She had stared single-mindedly out into the night. Until she finally caught sight of them and understood that they were ravens. It was ravens that flew shrieking among Tokyo’s skyscrapers after dark.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Håkan Östlundh grew up in Stockholm, Sweden, where he still lives today. He has worked as a journalist for Sweden’s bestselling morning paper and spends summers on Gotland with his wife and three sons.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
THE VIPER. Copyright © Håkan Östlundh 2008 by agreement with Grand Agency. Translation copyright © 2012 by Per Carlsson. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Cover design and digital imaging by James Iacobelli
Original photograph of landscape © Nikki Smith/Arcangel Images
Original photograph of windmill © Carl Hanninen/Alamy
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.minotaurbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Östlundh, Håkan, 1962–
[Blot. English]
The viper / Håkan Östlundh.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-64232-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-01127-5 (e-book)
I. Title.
PT9877.25.S85B5613 2012
839.73'8—dc23
2012010101
eISBN 9781250011275
First Edition: August 2012
*Translator’s note: The late Swedish financier, Jan Stenbeck, who died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine, is said to have enjoyed gorging himself on this eccentric concoction from time to time.