Room No. 10

by Ake Edwardson

  He moved around the room. Paula Ney hadn’t checked out. She had been murdered. She had died here. She had died because someone hated. Was that the case? Naturally. How could anyone hate so much? She had written about love and then she’d died. The nature of the violence was such that it must have been personal. It wasn’t apparent in this room; there were no traces on the walls and floor. You murder the one you love. Or: The violence had increased to such a degree of impersonality that it had become . . . personal. Did they know each other, the murderer and Paula? No. Yes. No. Yes. He saw the shadows moving again, becoming longer. The afternoon traffic seemed to increase in density down on the street. He could hear it suddenly, as though the blockade had been broken. He heard a shout, honking from a car, a sudden ambulance over to the west, and, in the background, a dull buzzing from the whole city. A seabird started up when the sound of the ambulance cut off. And now: the sound of steps in a new pocket of silence. A woman’s steps. Paula must have heard all of those sounds; heard life outside, the city’s . . . normalcy. What had she thought of? Did she know that she would never again get to move around among all of those wonderful sounds? Yes. No. Yes.

  • • •

  “No,” said the man behind the desk, “I don’t remember there being anyone with her. I don’t remember her.”

  He had an indeterminate appearance, which had been shaped during several decades. Maybe he was the same man as when young Winter stood here asking about Ellen Börge. No. It wasn’t him. Winter would have known. But he looked as though he had been here then, as though he had always been here. Some people had that sort of appearance; they appeared to be part of their surroundings.

  Winter asked an impossible question. He wanted to ask it. Maybe it wasn’t impossible, maybe it was the best thing he could ask right now.

  “Do you remember a young woman who checked in here in 1987? Her name was Ellen Börge.”

  “Sorry?”

  “She disappeared the next day.”

  The man looked at Winter as though he were looking at someone who’d drunk his way through lunch.

  “We were here asking about her. I was here.”

  “I don’t remember,” said the desk clerk.

  “She stayed in the same room,” Winter continued.

  “The same as who?”

  “Ney. Paula Ney.”

  “In 1987?” The man looked around, as though there were a witness standing somewhere who could confirm that the inspector in front of him was drunk, or crazy. They got all sorts here. “Eighty-seven? At the moment I don’t remember anything from the eighties at all.”

  “You don’t seem to remember any of last week at all.”

  The man didn’t answer. He had already answered. He didn’t remember the woman checking in, and that was that. People came and went through the lobby all the time, and as far as he knew, they were all guests of the hotel. Someone had had a key to room ten, but he didn’t remember giving it to her.

  “Do you have many regular customers?” Winter asked.

  The man looked even more perplexed, behind his attitude. Winter realized why. He had phrased the question wrong.

  “Regular male customers.”

  “Some businessmen,” the man said, and smiled.

  “Any you recognize?”

  “I don’t usually recognize people.”

  The man yawned. It was a big yawn. It was very demonstrative.

  “Is there something wrong with your eyes?”

  Winter had raised his voice.

  “What? No . . .”

  The man’s jaw had become stuck, half-open in the middle of another yawn.

  “I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?!” he said after a few seconds. “You don’t need to get angry.”

  “There’s been a murder here and you pretend that you’re a blind, deaf idiot. Get it together, for God’s sake!”

  The man looked around again. There were still no witnesses in the lobby; no one behind the sooty cretonne that drooped at the base of the stairs, no one halfway up or down the stairs, no one behind a half-open door that led to God knows where, no one behind the palm in the pot over by the entrance. Winter suddenly thought of the tropics again; it was the palm and the fan that was rotating on the ceiling above them, and the humid warmth in there. The late summer had become tropical in the last few days. He felt the sweat through his shirt. And the lobby of Hotel Revy reminded him of a colonial hotel, or the set of one. It was the movie version of the tropics. But this movie was for real.

  “So,” said Winter, taking out his notebook.

  • • •

  Detective Inspector Fredrik Halders declined coffee. No one in this apartment wanted any damn coffee anyway. He understood how they felt. The couple in front of him was trying to get through one day at a time, and coffee and buns were of no help with that. Nor was liquor. Halders had tried liquor when his ex-wife, the mother of his children, was killed by a drunk driver. He hadn’t started drinking right away. It began months after Margareta was murdered. Halders had felt the shock slowly letting go and the hate streaming into him, and he had drunk to keep the hate at bay, to make himself immobile, so that he wouldn’t carry out an execution of the murderer or slash his murder weapon to bits. Halders knew where the fucking car was, in front of the house that was waiting to be set aflame.

  He had drunk his way out of the depression, and afterward he was ashamed. Not because he hadn’t carried out his plans for the drunk driver, but because he had used liquor as an anesthetic. Liquor had been an active accomplice in the murder. He ought to become a teetotaler, and he practically was one now. There was still time to be flexible; it was still too soon for AA, he wasn’t there yet. He drank coffee, liter after liter. But not at this particular moment.

  Perhaps Mario and Elisabeth Ney were thinking of hate, or maybe they couldn’t think at all. But Halders had asked about enemies of theirs, of Paula’s. Who could have so much hate?

  “Everyone liked Paula,” said Elisabeth.

  It was one of the great clichés of language, but not for her. Elisabeth looked as though it was true for her. Halders found himself on the other end. Not everyone liked him. It was better now; he could actually count his friends on the fingers of one hand, but before, for many years, all it took was one extended middle finger. His own.

  “How was her job?”

  “What do you mean, Chief Inspector?” She spoke in a monotonous voice. Her husband, Mario, didn’t speak at all.

  “Detective. But please, don’t worry about titles.” Halders had thought of himself as chief for several years, but that was also behind him now. He was not boss material. He couldn’t even compromise with himself.

  “Her coworkers,” he continued.

  “I . . . never heard anything.”

  “Heard what?”

  “That she had any enemies at work.”

  “Did she like it there?”

  “I never heard otherwise,” Elisabeth said.

  “Did she like the work itself?”

  “She never said otherwise.”

  No enemies, no conflicts, no concern about her work. That was unique, he thought. Or else it was quite simply the case that she never said anything about anything at all.

  He looked at the portrait of Paula. It was standing in the middle of the kitchen table. Elisabeth had placed it there when they sat down. Paula would be there during the conversation. It was about her.

  The photographer had captured her in a black-and-white picture for eternity in the middle of the start of a smile, or maybe at the end. Halders had never understood portrait photographers’ obsession with smiles. Children who were scared into smiling by toys. Adults who were supposed to think of something pleasant. Say “cheese.” For Halders, it might as well be “shiiit.” Smiles. Did people become more beautiful clad in a demanded smile? Did the future become more beautiful?

  Paula Ney was beautiful, in a conservative way. She didn’t take any risks with her hairstyle. Her gaze was somew
here else, maybe on the wall above the photographer’s head, maybe far beyond the wall. Paula Ney had beautiful, regular features in that photograph; it was a face that wasn’t transformed by the unfinished smile, and Halders thought, as he sat on the hard kitchen chair, that perhaps Paula Ney hadn’t been so happy.

  “How many years did she work at Telia?”

  Halders had turned to Mario Ney, but Elisabeth answered:

  “Nine years. But of course it wasn’t called Telia before.”

  “One year after secondary school . . .” said Halders. “What did she do that year?”

  “Nothing . . . in particular,” Elisabeth said.

  “School? Job?”

  “She traveled.”

  “Traveled? Where did she travel?”

  “Nowhere . . . in particular.”

  Everywhere is particular, Halders thought. Especially if you choose to travel there.

  “In Sweden? Abroad?” He leaned forward over the kitchen table. The tablecloth was yellow and blue. “It’s important that you remember. Everything can be important in a preliminary investigation. A trip can be—”

  “We don’t really know,” Mario interrupted. This was the first thing he had said; he hadn’t even said anything when they greeted each other in the hall. He didn’t look directly at Halders; his gaze was directed upward, toward the kitchen wall, maybe far beyond it. “She didn’t say very much.”

  “She was nineteen years old and she traveled away for a year and she didn’t say where she was?” Halders asked. “Weren’t you worried?”

  For his part, he would have called the police if Magda did that. Some other police.

  “It . . . wasn’t a whole year,” Elisabeth said in her hesitant way. “And she sent us a few postcards. We knew that she was out traveling, of course.” Elisabeth looked at Mario. “We waved good-bye to her at the station.”

  “Where was she on her way to then?”

  “She had a ticket to Copenhagen.”

  “Is that where she went?”

  Mario shrugged slightly.

  “Where did she send the first postcard from?”

  “Milan.”

  Halders tried to catch Mario’s eyes, but they slid away, up again. The man had been born in Italy. He looked like someone who came from a different part of Europe, or the world. A darker appearance, eyes, chin. His hair was nearly gone, a grayish-black crown around his ears. Halders’s hair was completely gone; what hadn’t fallen out on its own he had shaved off.

  “Did she want to search for her roots?”

  “Her roots are here,” said Mario. His tone was unexpectedly hard.

  No Bella Italia for him, Halders thought.

  “But she went to Italy,” he said.

  “She went to other countries,” said Elisabeth.

  “Do you still have her postcards?”

  “Does it really matter?” said Mario.

  “As I said before,” said Halders. “Everything can matter.”

  Mario got up. “I’ll see if I can find them.”

  He wanted to get away. Halders could see that his hands were trembling; maybe the rest of his body was, too. He kept his face turned away.

  “Your husband doesn’t seem to be homesick for the old country,” Halders said when Mario had left the kitchen.

  “Maybe he left for a reason,” Elisabeth said.

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged slightly, exactly the same way as her husband had. She had learned it from him, or he had from her. But it looked like a movement from a country far to the south.

  “Was he forced to leave?” Halders asked.

  “He hasn’t mentioned anything about that.”

  Good God. Did anyone say anything about anything in this family?

  “Did he come to Sweden alone?”

  She nodded.

  “From where?”

  “From Sicily.”

  “Sicily? That’s a big island. What part?”

  “I don’t actually know.” She looked Halders in the eye. “I realize that it sounds strange, but it’s actually true. Mario has never wanted to talk about it.” She turned her gaze away. “And I . . . don’t understand what this has to do . . . with this.”

  “Has Mario seen his family? Since he left?” Halders continued. “His family from Sicily?”

  “No.”

  “He’s never gone back?”

  “No.”

  “None of you?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s not where Paula was headed?”

  “Wouldn’t she have said so if she were?” said Elisabeth.

  I’m not so sure of that, Halders thought. But what did she know about Sicily? All she had to bring to her father’s island was her name, and perhaps Ney was a common name.

  “Did Paula speak Italian?”

  “Not then,” Elisabeth answered.

  “Now I don’t understand,” said Halders.

  “She learned it . . . a little later. A little of the language.”

  “After that trip?”

  Elisabeth nodded.

  “After Milan?”

  Elisabeth nodded again.

  “Did she travel back?” Halders asked.

  “I don’t actually know,” Elisabeth said, looking straight at Halders again, and he believed her. Or he thought that he believed her.

  “She didn’t have a traveling companion?”

  “No.”

  “Never during that time?”

  “If she did, she didn’t say anything about it.”

  “What was she like when she came home? Had she changed?”

  Elisabeth didn’t answer. When Halders had come here, he hadn’t been thinking of travel. Now his questions were leading him around the Mediterranean. Maybe it was completely wrong, a meaningless field trip.

  “Was she happy? Sad? Exhilarated?”

  “She was the same as usual,” the mother said.

  She turned her head abruptly, as though toward a sound out in the courtyard. Suddenly Halders saw the similarity. There was something about the light. He hadn’t seen it before. There was something about her profile. Halders moved his eyes back and forth between the woman in the photograph and the woman who was sitting in front of him. At that angle she was a dead ringer for her daughter; he hadn’t seen it right away. Dead ringer. What a hell of a phrase.

  “What does that mean?” he asked. “That she was the same as usual?”

  Maybe Elisabeth had planned to answer. She had turned her head back. But Mario had come back into the kitchen and walked up to them quickly and placed several postcards on the table.

  “This was all I could find. I think she took some home with her, too.”

  Home. Halders had been in Paula’s apartment. The renovations were nearly finished, one and a half rooms wallpapered and painted. It had been a strange experience. Walking around in an apartment that was in the process of getting a new face, and a different smell, while at the same time the person who had lived there no longer existed. He couldn’t remember having been in the same situation before. There was something repulsive about it. An affront to life.

  Halders had seen cupboards and shelves and a freestanding chest of drawers, all half-covered with transparent plastic; it looked like mist, as though someone were breathing under the plastic cover. In one corner, Öberg’s technicians had lifted the plastic and begun to move her belongings. That, too, felt like some kind of affront.

  Maybe they would find a ten-year-old postcard. Would that help them? Yes. No. No.

  3

  The group gathered in the conference room. It had been renovated twice during Winter’s time in the unit, but now that was over. There would be no more polishing in these corridors that were clad in a kind of brick that suggested another time. There would be no more renovation. The money for such things was gone. The bricks outside his office would fall to the floor in time.

  He could see the remains of the sunrise over Ullevi, the soccer stad
ium. The sun rose reluctantly over his part of the world. A pointless job. Winter cold would come no matter what. The sun was on its way to the equator, where it belonged. This time of year was dominated by one big sunset, and then darkness. Arctic night, only a few months away. The long johns would itch at first, but you always got used to it.

  “Damn, it’s warm,” said Ringmar, who had just come into the room and sat down, and he wiped the layer of sweat from his forehead.

  “Stop that,” Halders said.

  “Sorry?” Ringmar said, his hand still on his forehead.

  “I hate it when northerners start whining about the sun as soon as it comes out.”

  “I just said it was warm,” Ringmar said.

  “You said damn, it’s warm,” Halders pointed out against the haze of heat. “Isn’t that a negative comment?”

  “Says the great optimist in the police force,” Ringmar said, and wiped his forehead again.

  “Carpe diem,” Halders said, smiling.

  “Mea culpa,” said Ringmar, “mea maxima culpa.”

  “Can someone translate?” said Lars Bergenhem, still the youngest detective in the group.

  “Didn’t you do the classics option?” Ringmar asked.

  “Classics what?”

  “The classics option at the police academy,” Halders said. “Think first, act later. It’s gone now. Swept away.”

  “Carpe diem I understand,” said Bergenhem, “but the other part?”

  “My fault, I’m to blame,” said Ringmar.

  Winter drank the last of the coffee in his mug. At least the coffee was cold in the warm room. He cleared his throat. The warm-up talk between Halders and Ringmar and Bergenhem grew quiet.

  “The floor is open for debate,” he said, “but unfortunately the police can no longer afford translators.”

  Aneta Djanali laughed very abruptly. It was the first sound from her in the conference room this morning. She had spoken with Halders earlier in the morning, and with Fredrik’s children, Hannes and Magda, but she was happy to stay out of the warm-up. She was already warm. This evening they would go out to the cliffs of Saltholmen and take the last dip of the summer. They had been saying this for a whole week already. But the sun went down behind Asperö like a blood orange every evening, and that meant it would come back the next morning.