Sail of Stone

by Ake Edwardson

  “Who would do that?” said Halders.

  “Me.”

  “Come off it. You’d be the last one.”

  “Someone else, then. This isn’t personal, if that’s what you think.”

  “Really?”

  “Not personal in that way.”

  “You know just as well as I do that Winter would never put people on something like this,” said Halders.

  “It’s preventative. Erik is all for prevention.”

  “He’s also for realism.”

  “What is more realistic than a battered woman?”

  “What do you want me to say to that, Aneta?”

  “I don’t know, Fredrik.”

  “And even if Winter gave the okay, Birgersson would say no.”

  “Birgersson? Is he still around? I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “That’s how he wants it,” said Halders.

  Aneta got up and walked across the room.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” she said.

  Halders had made grilled sandwiches. She was still warm from the hot shower, relaxed, a bit comfortably numb after all of her thoughts earlier today. “I couldn’t find pineapple,” he said, “there was cheese and ham and mustard, but no pineapple.”

  “You aren’t required to have pineapple on a warm sandwich, Fredrik.”

  “Oh, really? Great. I was feeling like a failure there for a minute.”

  “You’ve done well, Fredrik.”

  “A cup of tea?” He held out the pot like the servant of a countess.

  “You changed the disc,” she said, meaning the music.

  “I will never cease to be amazed at all the guitars you collect,” he said, and she listened and understood what he meant when the guitar solo in “Comfortably Numb” arrived.

  “I think he knows the people who stole that whole apartment,” she said.

  “Oh, Aneta, please.”

  “Who else would get the idea to do it? How did they get in?”

  “Now drink your tea and relax for a minute.”

  “Answer me. They just went in.”

  “And then out.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t think he wants that crap,” said Halders.

  “I think the exact opposite,” said Aneta. “If he can’t own her, he can at least own everything that is hers.”

  Halders didn’t answer.

  “You’re not answering.”

  “I didn’t realize it was a question.”

  “Come on, Fredrik!”

  “That analysis seems, well, a little too homemade, if you want an honest opinion. And there’s another snag.”

  “What?”

  “Well, even if that crazy Forsblad guy is batshit insane, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the rest of the world is, does it? He had to convince those two characters you met that the apartment had to be emptied.”

  “Like they needed a reason? Are you kidding? Do you mean that today, in this country, it’s difficult to get two criminal henchmen to empty an apartment? There are always people for sale who will do anything you need.”

  “Can people really be so awful?” said Halders.

  “Don’t joke away your naïveté, Fredrik.”

  “Do you know what, Aneta,” said Halders, reaching for the teapot again. “There is no man born of a woman who can beat you in a debate.”

  “Debate? Are we having a debate?”

  Bergenhem walked across Sveaplan with a strong wind at his back. A sheet of newspaper flew in front of the neighborhood store.

  The houses around the square looked black in the twilight. A streetcar passed to the right, a cold yellow light. Two magpies flapped up in front of him when he pushed the button next to the nameplate. He heard a distant answer.

  It was just like last time.

  But this time he wasn’t here on duty.

  He didn’t know why he was standing here.

  “I’m looking for Krister Peters. It’s Lars Bergenhem.”

  “Who?”

  “Lars Bergenhem. I was here last year, from the county CID.”

  He didn’t get an answer, but the door buzzed and he opened it.

  He went up the stairs. He rang the bell. The door was opened after the second ring. The man was Bergenhem’s age.

  His dark hair hung down on his forehead just as it had last time. It looked as deliberate now as it had then. His face was unshaven now, as it had been then. Peters was wearing a white undershirt now, as he had then; it shone against his tanned and muscular body.

  “Hi,” said Peters. “You came back.”

  “I can have that whisky now,” said Bergenhem.

  Bergenhem had worked on the investigation of a series of assaults. A friend of Krister Peters’s, Jens Book, had been attacked and seriously injured near Peters’s home.

  Bergenhem had visited Peters and questioned him. Peters was innocent. Peters had offered him malt whisky. Bergenhem had declined.

  “I’ll pass this time,” Bergenhem had said. “I have the car and I have to go right home when I’m done.”

  “You’re missing a good Springbank,” Peters had said.

  “Maybe there will be another time,” Bergenhem had said.

  “Maybe,” Peters had said.

  Peters turned his back to Bergenhem and went into the apartment. Bergenhem followed Peters, who sat down on his dark gray sofa. Magazines lay on a low glass table. Three glasses and a bottle stood to the right of the magazines. Bergenhem sat in an easy chair that had the same covering as the sofa.

  “How are things?” said Peters.

  “Not so good,” said Bergenhem.

  “Do you feel like you need someone to talk to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ve come to the right place,” said Peters.

  “Everything is so confusing,” said Bergenhem.

  16

  It was still daylight on Donsö. Winter stood on the Magdalena’s quarterdeck. The sun was starting to burn low over the sea. It would soon disappear. Does the sun go out when it goes down in the water? Elsa had asked last summer, when they had been swimming down in Vallda Sandö and lingered there for a long time. It was a good question.

  “There must be a lot of sunsets like that out at sea,” Winter said to Erik Osvald, standing beside him.

  “Well, we don’t exactly sit there applauding a sunset,” answered Osvald.

  “But you must see the beauty in it.”

  “Yes …,” answered Osvald, and Winter understood that the weather and sun and rain and hours of the day and nature’s beauty were something different for Osvald than they were for him, for everyone who lived on land.

  Osvald watched the sun, which was in the process of sinking.

  “Soon it will be a season when you can miss the light,” he said in the twilight. “Soon we’ll have to have lights on from three in the afternoon to ten in the morning.” He looked at Winter. “And in the summer we complain that the sun stings our eyes at four in the morning.”

  Winter nodded. Everything must be so much sharper out there.

  “But there’s really no day at sea, and no night.”

  Winter waited for him to continue. The sun was gone.

  “There’s no day, there’s no night,” repeated Osvald.

  It sounded like poetry. Maybe it was poetry. Work and everyday life make up poetry because everything unessential has been scrubbed away.

  Osvald looked at him again, back in the reality of his job.

  “We never really have any morning or any night like this out there, you know. Days and nights go on; every five or six hours the trawl has to come up.”

  “No matter the weather?” asked Winter.

  Osvald squinted at him. He had fine lines all over his face; none were longer or wider than the others. He had a tan that would never disappear when it was dark between three and ten. The slits of his eyes were blue. At that moment, Winter wondered what Osvald thought about when he was out on the lonely s
ea. What did he think in a storm?

  “The weather isn’t a big problem for us these days,” said Osvald, nodding as though to emphasize his words. “Before, boats went under in storms.” He looked out across the sea again. “Or were blown up by mines …,” he said, as though to himself. He gave Winter a quick glance again. “Last fall we had very bad weather, but there were only two nights we didn’t fish because of a storm. If the wind is over forty-five miles per hour we don’t put out the trawl.” He gave Winter a smile. “At least not if the bottom is bad. It’s not so good if it gets caught when it’s forty-five miles an hour.”

  He turned around to see if his sister was standing there. But Johanna had excused herself for a second and climbed down the ladder off the boat and gone in among the houses, which came almost up to the quay.

  “We’re a little split on the weather, of course,” said Osvald. “If it’s bad weather it’s good pay. There might not be any others who will risk going out. And there’s no fisherman yet who lost by betting on a storm! Prices go up after a storm. And the storm stirs up the stew on the bottom, too. Storms are good for the sea.”

  The storm stirs up the stew, thought Winter. That’s true. Everything is moved around, comes up, is turned over, stones are turned over, everything old is new, everything new is old, round, round, up and down.

  That’s how it was with his work. That’s how he wanted it to be. The past didn’t exist as a past; it was no more than an abstraction. It was always there in reality, present in the same manner as the present, a parallel state that no one could sail away from.

  He looked at Osvald. This man was at home here, in his own harbor, or rather he was at home out at sea, but the sea was nearby.

  “What’s the best part out there?” asked Winter. “Out at sea?”

  Osvald seemed not to hear. Winter repeated his question. Osvald kept looking out across the water, as though he were waiting for company, as though a ship would become visible on the horizon, like a replacement for the sun that had gone down there. A pillar of smoke. A distant ship’s smoke on the horizon.

  “Man is king,” said Osvald suddenly. He let out a laugh. “If you stand up on the bridge and look around you’re higher than everything. As far as you can see, you’re higher. In a lot of ways, spiritually, too.”

  Winter understood what he meant. Osvald was a man of faith.

  But he also wanted to be king, a worldly king. To keep being a king at sea. Winter wondered to himself what Osvald was prepared to do to be able to keep his kingdom, and the big trawler that was his throne. Winter considered the risks again. How far would Osvald go? Was there anything that could stop him?

  “Think of the contrast with the forest,” continued Osvald. “My brother-in-law has a clearing way down in the forest, inland, and when you’re there, far under the trees, you’re the smallest of everything there.”

  “Yes,” said Winter, “it makes one humble somehow, I suppose.”

  “Humble … mmhmm … yes, humble. Don’t get me wrong, twenty-five years on the North Sea make you humble, it leaves its mark. All year round, all day long … you are cocky about some things, but you’re not cocky about everything. You are very humble about some things.”

  Winter nodded. Osvald was serious. It was suddenly as though Winter weren’t standing there in front of him. Osvald was speaking to the sea. Winter understood that this was a man who seldom spoke this much, but who sometimes longed to be able to do so, like now. But Osvald spoke in his own way and followed his own logic.

  If I keep going with this, the disappearance is a logic that I will also have to follow. Winter felt the wind pick up in his face. This logic, these thoughts, they come from a different world than the one on land. Life in this world is what means something here. And things that are larger than life. That’s what Osvald is talking about.

  “There’s a higher power,” said Osvald, as though he had read Winter’s thoughts. “Besides the coast guard,” he said with a laugh, but he was immediately serious again. “If there isn’t a higher power, everything is meaningless.”

  Winter turned around and saw the community, the big houses, the smaller ones, the narrow roads, the flatbed mopeds, which were the vehicles of the southern archipelago. He saw the crosses. The mission hall. He remembered now that the Osvald family were members of the Mission Covenant Church.

  “You said that you were higher than everything out there,” said Winter. “Is that like saying that you live near the heavens?”

  “Well, which heaven are you talking about?”

  “The one you were just talking about.”

  “The higher one?” Osvald seemed to smile at his words, as though he were joking. The high heaven, the higher one above. “No. Religion has nothing to do with fishing.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  Osvald shook his head.

  “But don’t they have to go together?” said Winter.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the church is so important here. It’s everywhere.”

  “Mmhmm.”

  Winter didn’t know if Osvald would say anything more. But he knew that this was important. Religion was an important subject here.

  “No one from here thinks that it’s strange to go to church if you go into a foreign harbor in a storm, for instance,” said Osvald after a bit. “No fisherman from the west coast would hesitate to.”

  Winter nodded.

  “All fishermen from the west coast believe in God,” said Osvald.

  “Does that mean there’s a God-fearing atmosphere on board?” asked Winter.

  “All of us fear God,” said Osvald.

  “And no one does anything evil on board?” said Winter.

  Osvald didn’t answer.

  “No one swears on board a fishing boat,” said Johanna Osvald as they sat in her house. Her brother nodded. It had grown dark. Winter was going to take the Skarven back to Saltholmen at 7:02.

  “Not even when they slam their fingers in something?” said Winter.

  “Not even then,” said Erik Osvald. “I have to say that you really react if you hear someone swear on the radio or something. If it happens, it must be fishermen from the east coast or Denmark.”

  “Do you have a lot to do with Denmark?”

  “We bring our fish on land in Denmark,” said Osvald. “In Hanstholm in Jutland. It’s on the west side of Jammer Bay. Across from Hirtshals.”

  “West of Blokhus?” asked Winter.

  “Exactly. Blokhus is farther into the bay.”

  Blokhus was familiar to Winter. Several years ago he’d found some of the answers in a case he’d worked on there. A murdered woman couldn’t be identified, and the old clues had led him to Denmark and Jammer Bay. There the past had cast its long shadows into the future, which was the present.

  “The Magdalena is never here in the Donsö harbor,” said Osvald.

  “No?”

  “No, no, she’s just here for an overhaul now. Usually we change off in Hanstholm.”

  Osvald explained. The routine went like this: The Magdalena was out for six days fishing for cod and haddock and went into Hanstholm on the seventh day at five in the morning with the fish cleaned, “gutted,” as he said, weighed and sorted and packaged in six different sizes for the cod and four for the haddock. Fifteen to twenty tons of fish. The fish auction took place at seven, the same time all along the North Sea and North Atlantic. During the morning, the four of them worked on maintenance and taking supplies on board. The four relief shift workers came at noon and went right out with the Magdalena. The four who had been relieved got into the relief shift’s car and drove across Jutland to the ferry in Frederikshavn.

  “What happens to the fish?” asked Winter.

  “Fish and chips in Scotland,” said Osvald.

  “Really?”

  “The haddock should be just over minimum size, as it’s called. So the meat isn’t tough. And small cod can also become fish and chips. And it goes by truck on a ferry to
Scotland. It’s a little strange, isn’t it? We sit off Scotland and catch fish that eventually go by truck to Scotland. There’s a ferry that goes directly from Hanstholm to Thurso, by the way.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Winter.

  “It’s not much to know,” said Osvald.

  Winter wasn’t sure he was right. There was something in what Osvald had said that Winter listened for. Something Winter didn’t understand then.

  Later, when the wind started to become audible out there against the mess, Winter asked, “What’s the worst part about being out?”

  “Well …,” said Osvald, looking at his sister. She hadn’t said much for the last half hour. But Winter knew that he would speak with her more.

  “Well, the storms have never been able to break us, of course,” continued Osvald. “And not wrecks, injuries … nothing like that, ever. You just have to grit your teeth and you’ll get past it.”

  “The silence,” said Johanna suddenly.

  Her brother gave a start. Then he nodded.

  “What silence?” asked Winter.

  “The silence among the crew,” said Johanna. “Or what do you think, Erik?”

  He nodded again but didn’t say anything. Suddenly it was as though he had become a part of the silence Johanna was talking about. As though he had suddenly become an example. He looked up.

  “That can break you,” he said now. “Or, it does break you. Discord on board, a bad atmosphere. It breaks you fast.”

  Winter nodded.

  “Then you can easily end up alone as a skipper.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Then you can easily end up alone,” repeated Osvald.

  “As a skipper?”

  “As a skipper, yes.”

  Winter thought about that. Erik Osvald was a skipper.

  His young grandfather, John Osvald—had he also been a skipper?

  “Was John Osvald the skipper on the Marino?” he asked.

  Osvald looked again at his sister, who didn’t look back.

  “Not at first,” he said.

  “Not at first? What do you mean by that?”

  “Something happened one time … it was right before … I don’t know … but Grandpa was skipper when they sailed for Scotland.”