The Truth Behind the Lie

by Sara Lövestam

  If he didn’t already know her. Line of Inquiry 2.

  If Kouplan had money on his cell phone, he’d text Pernilla. Instead, he writes in his notebook: Do you usually go to the Globe Arena Center every Monday? Probably not, he thinks. The girl is six. She probably goes to daycare. This means that any person who wanted to kidnap Julia in particular must have followed mother and daughter, perhaps the entire way from their home. Or perhaps knew that they were going to the Globe Arena that very morning.

  He notes down both possibilities. Then he checks out the area around him. Road, stairway, square, center, and, of course, the Globe Arena area itself. Time to widen the search.

  * * *

  He hardly believes a kidnapper would take his victim into a shopping mall. More likely, he would head straight to the subway. The entrance by the arena is the closest.

  The kiosk owner down by the platform looks at him the same way as the girl at the Subway. As if he were a complete idiot.

  “A week ago? Look, I have three hundred customers a day! And five hundred are kids, if you get my drift.”

  Kouplan gets his drift.

  “But if there’s something unusual going on, perhaps you’d remember it? Tkaya?”

  The last word is a guess, because the man appears Kurdish to him. The kiosk owner breaks into a grin.

  “Kurdî qise dekeyt?”

  Kouplan grins back. “Just a little.”

  The kiosk owner likes when people speak a little Kurdish to him. He tells Kouplan of two instances of men carrying a child during the week, three with baby carriages, one mother with short hair and one that was extremely attractive. One child was screaming and kicking, but this was a boy, unfortunately. He doesn’t remember any child in a pink raincoat.

  Kouplan writes his cell phone number on a receipt someone left behind. One of these days, he’ll have shiny business cards with his name embossed.

  “Sipas dekem.”

  The man nods and holds his hand out over the counter. He shakes Kouplan’s energetically.

  “Good luck!”

  * * *

  Kouplan has nothing when he gets onto the bus to Pernilla’s house. No witnesses, no clues, no leads, nothing. Can he really be paid for nothing? All he has is four questions he’s written in pencil. He steps off the bus and looks around the neighborhood. A little reconnaissance. How does a woman live whose child has gone missing?

  CHAPTER 8

  A woman whose child has gone missing can live in a rental apartment building with green balconies. This one has the code 1111. He enters it and takes the elevator up. It smells clean. If he ever had a child, he hopes he or she would be able to ride in an elevator this clean every day.

  Pernilla looks smaller than the first time they met. In his memory, she was about the same height as he was, but she’s almost five feet, six inches. She’s put her blond hair into a ponytail. She smiles, her face is pale. She asks him to come in. A sandy-colored and very happy dog pushes past her calves. Kouplan keeps his reflexes under control and lets the dog sniff his crotch.

  Pernilla has painted her hallway white, except for one wall, which is blue. Beneath the clothes hangers, there are two hooks at the right height for a child. A child’s jacket hangs on one. It has a shiny surface. He wants to ask if it’s new, but decides to be considerate and lets the question rest. On the shoe rack, there are rubber boots in kids’ size eight and a half. He glances around the properly cleaned apartment as Pernilla clears her throat.

  “It’s a little messy,” she apologizes.

  “It looks great.”

  “Coffee?”

  * * *

  Kouplan sits on her sofa, which is a light mocha color and has a lighter stain on one of the arms. He’s looking at the stain; certainly she’s noticed it.

  “It was a ketchup stain,” she says.

  Her stomach knots as she thinks about it. Everything, absolutely everything here, reminds her of Julia. Kouplan looks at her in confusion.

  “What?”

  “Ketchup made that stain. I thought you were looking at it.”

  His eyes follow her gesture and he studies the arm of the sofa, as if he has just noticed the stain that moment.

  “I had no idea that ketchup makes light stains,” he says.

  “Neither did I. It’s because it’s acidic, I think. Julia spilled a whole bowl of macaroni right there, but it was a while ago.”

  He concentrates on her, this boy who is actually a man. Not suspiciously, but with attention. She realizes that he’s going to start asking her questions.

  * * *

  Kouplan sees immediately that he is invading a space now empty due to a missing child and that Pernilla is desperately trying to fill it with normal gestures and words.

  Only the dog seems unaffected by what’s going on. He trots through the apartment with his own agenda.

  “So, I wrote down everything,” he says as he opens his notebook. “Here you go. Interview with a waitress, a kiosk owner, a Greek restaurant owner, reconnaissance of the area…”

  He doesn’t know if she will pay now or later and what kinds of rules apply to this situation, but since he’s living outside the rules anyway, it will have to depend on the situation.

  “Okay, that’s good,” she says and leans over to see what he’s written down. “What have you found out? Can we ask for any recordings from security cameras or something like that?”

  “Only the police are allowed to view those,” he says, and he believes that to be the case. “One thing we do know is that nobody in the area noticed anything unusual. I know it sounds like … there’s not much information. But it’s good that at least we know this. I’m going to keep interviewing people until we find which direction he went. If she didn’t…”

  He hesitates; he was about to say if she didn’t go willingly.

  “I have two main theories,” he says instead. “The first is she was picked at random. The other is that it was Julia, herself, they were after.”

  Pernilla swallows and takes a deep breath. He can see her focus.

  “All right.”

  “So I thought we could make a list of why anyone would want to take Julia.”

  “All right.”

  The thought of a list of why someone would want to take Julia feels like the kind of dream you have right before you fall asleep. A dream where you can’t stop falling, where your heart thinks you are going to die and your hands grab for the mattress. Pernilla holds onto the edge of the sofa and the knuckles of her fingers turn white.

  “No detail is too small,” Kouplan says.

  “She’s very well-behaved.”

  Kouplan writes.

  “So you think she might not resist a kidnapper?”

  She tries to imagine Julia in front of her, fighting a stranger with her tiny arms.

  “No, but she’s easily frightened, she’s easily frightened and a little unusual.”

  Unusual, Kouplan writes.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “She has an odd sense of humor. She’s kind of subtle, if you can say that about a six-year-old.”

  He nods.

  “Have you noticed any adult show more interest in her than seems normal? At her daycare … or a playground?”

  She has to think. Where would Julia meet adults?

  “I don’t send her to daycare,” she says. “I work from home, in telephone support, so she’s never needed to be in daycare or preschool. Perhaps if she’d been a more active child, but she’s fairly calm. Perhaps … the library. We go to the library sometimes.”

  “All right, let’s start with the library. Is there anyone in particular who would talk to Julia? Start a conversation with her?”

  Pernilla pictures in her mind the people working at the library. The one with short hair and glasses. The white-haired one with the corduroy jacket. They always greet them in a friendly way when she and Julia come in to ask whether a certain Alfons book has been checked out or not. They like Julia. They
like all the kids who read. But start a conversation with her …

  “No, nothing beyond normal.”

  They go through all the places she and Julia used to go. The shops, the playgrounds, the toyshop. Then it hits her.

  “Could this be why they’d take her? As opposed to someone else?”

  “Because?”

  “Because she’s so quiet and careful … because she doesn’t make a lot of noise. If they wanted someone like…”

  She takes a deep breath to be able to say out loud what has come to her mind.

  “A girl like Natascha Kampusch, the girl they kept in a basement. They wanted a nice … a nice…”

  She can’t keep control over her body any longer. She lets go of the edge of the sofa. She falls.

  * * *

  When Pernilla faints, he thinks for a moment that she’s dying, but realizes in a split second that she’s fainted; the air is shimmering as if an electric current has gone through it. Then the dog jumps onto her lap, barking, and Kouplan gets up and goes to the kitchen and gets some water. The cup is a plastic one with Mickey Mouse on it. The water sloshes as he walks back, and the dog is licking Pernilla’s face and when her eyes begin to move behind her lids, both he and the dog can release their breath. He gives her the water.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  Her shoulders are so lonely, he thinks. Her back, her neck, her longing. She needs a hug, but probably not from her detective; he has no idea how she’d take that. He sends a silent thank-you to the sandy-colored, warm body of a dog, who is now lying across her legs.

  “How are you feeling?” he asks.

  “I’m fine,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  She shakes her head and her jaw tenses, two times.

  “Time to take a break,” she says.

  Her eyes see the plastic cup and maybe she wants to say something else, but she keeps it to herself. Her blue eyes get caught in Kouplan’s.

  “I want my normal life back.”

  * * *

  To give her five more minutes, just to make sure he says that he has to go to the bathroom.

  The bathroom is in white and gray and in front of the tub, there’s a light-blue shower curtain. He silently opens the bathroom cupboard, and thinks this is part of his legitimate rights as a detective.

  Inside, there’s a pacifier, a full tube of Idomine salve, three packs of tampons, disinfectant, and panty liners. A prescription of penicillin with her social security number on it. He memorizes it. On the sink, there’s a tube of children’s toothpaste and in the mug, there’s a large and a small toothbrush. He looks at the small one for a minute. It has a dinosaur on the handle. Thinks: I’d faint, too, if I were her.

  When he comes back into the living room, she’s gone.

  He stands next to the sofa with its light-colored stain and looks around dumbfounded before he hears banging in the kitchen.

  Pernilla doesn’t even look up when he walks into the kitchen. She’s melting butter in a frying pan.

  “Do you like fish sticks?”

  Kouplan is fairly sure he likes fish sticks. At any rate, they smell wonderful and start a minor revolution in his stomach and they certainly wouldn’t contain any pork. Still, he asks just to be sure. Pernilla stares at him.

  “Are you Muslim?”

  He shrugs. When is anyone a Muslim?

  “So why don’t you eat pork?”

  Her question might be antagonistic, or might be just a question. He can’t tell.

  “Why don’t you eat dog?” he asks back.

  Pernilla makes a face and raises her eyebrows as she flips the fish sticks in a well-practiced way.

  “You must really like pigs, then,” she says.

  “Not all pigs,” he replies.

  He doesn’t like his own joke; it is not right to call people names, not even the police, though they hunt for him all over the city. You have to be above it all.

  At any rate, Pernilla smiles.

  “Some pigs are easier to love than others, I imagine.”

  She whisks some powder into water and heats the pot.

  “It’s mashed potato powder,” she says as she glances at him. “I can’t make real food right now. I’m making a double portion for you, but you don’t have to eat all of it.”

  He eats all of it. A double portion of powdered mashed potatoes and eight fish sticks. The fish sticks taste vaguely like fish, the potatoes like nothing at all. Still, it fills his stomach until it hurts.

  “I can make some dolma for you the next time,” he tells her, and smiles as energy spreads through his arms and legs.

  “Did you like it?” she asks.

  “Yes, it was good,” he says and smiles so that she’ll believe him.

  As she clears off the table, he takes up the questions again. Perhaps it will work better if he asks them in passing.

  “A photo of Julia. Did you find one?”

  She says nothing, wiping a glass in silence.

  Finally she says, “I wish I had more. I wish I were like those crazy moms putting their kids’ pictures up on Facebook all the time.”

  “I only need a few.”

  “I’ll have to look.”

  He understands by her voice that there might not be any photos. He can tell it’s something she regrets. He changes the subject and moves her frying pan to create the illusion he’s helping her with the dishes.

  “Do you look alike?” he asks.

  She smiles at the dishwater.

  “We look very much alike. We could stand in front of a mirror together and compare our … our noses and our eyes and…”

  She sniffles, perhaps close to crying.

  “We look very much alike,” she concludes.

  * * *

  He’s ready to leave and she doesn’t want to let go of those deep brown eyes. They’ve kept her thoughts from racing. This boy-man has even got Janus to fall asleep. When he gave her water, he’d put a hand on her shoulder, just for a second or two … when he walks out the door, she is going to be all by herself again, with the emptiness that had been filled with Julia. But she doesn’t keep him.

  “What are you going to do tomorrow?” she asks.

  “I’m going back to the Globe Arena,” he says. “It’s still possible that someone saw something. I just need to find the right person.”

  His face looks unchanged from when he was sitting on her sofa, but his eyes begin to flicker and stare and narrow almost imperceptibly as he puts on his jacket. She wouldn’t have noticed it if she hadn’t recognized it.

  “Are you all right?”

  He swallows, nods, smiles widely.

  “Yeah, I’m great,” he says.

  * * *

  But he was not all right. She’s thinking about it as she changes into her nightgown. Kouplan is afraid. She didn’t notice the first time she met him, just as you don’t notice the exact minute your child has gone missing. But after he’s sat on her sofa and eaten her fish sticks and showed her in detail how you go about finding a missing child … she realizes she’s become aware of him as a human being.

  She checks the door before she goes to bed. Shudders as she checks the door handle. What if the door flies open and somebody’s out there?

  “Janus!” she calls in a voice pitched too loud in order to frighten away her own thoughts. “Janus, come sleep in the bed!”

  Julia was the one who would creep into her bed whenever Julia had nightmares.

  “Nightmare,” she’d say as she wedged her scrawny body beneath the blanket.

  Pernilla would stroke Julia’s hair then and sing to her. Finally, Julia would fall asleep and then Pernilla would fall asleep, too. They’d fall asleep to the sound of each other’s breathing.

  Janus’s breathing is completely different. It’s filled with slobber and quick breaths and sometimes he whimpers in his sleep. At least he’s breathing.

  CHAPTER 9

  There’s a police car in front of the apartment building where Kouplan li
ves. It appeared around six in the morning and was still there a little after eight. And still there at nine. At nine-thirty, Kouplan has done one hundred fifty push-ups and sent an e-mail to Karin telling her he now has his transit card. He asks her about an ID card, even if he’s fairly sure she can’t help with that. She probably doesn’t even know that there’s someone online named Fletch, who charges two thousand crowns to make a driver’s license. She certainly doesn’t know that to get a really good driver’s license, you have to pay ten times as much. As that thought enters his mind, it swirls like a disturbed nest of wasps so he has to do ten more push-ups. Looks out the window. The police car is still there.

  You can’t go crazy, his brother said seven years ago. His brother had strong eyes, brave even when he was afraid. Kouplan can still hear the unique sound of his voice and it’s saying you can’t let the fear eat you alive. What are we doing here? his brother says. Are we shrinking or growing? Focus! What are we doing here?

  Kouplan exclaims the answer he learned seven years ago: We’re working.

  By five past ten he’s completed a map of all possible leads, undeveloped lines of inquiry, people who might be interested in Julia. Time is flying, he writes in the corner as a reminder. He has to figure out the most important clues and concentrate on them.

  When the phone rings, he jumps, not from fear but because his mind had been so focused on his work.

  It’s Rashid.

  “My name is Kouplan now,” Kouplan says. “Forget that other name when you call. You should always ask for Kouplan.”

  “Okay, Kouplan.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve asked the guys I’m sharing a place with if they know people involved in human smuggling and they want to know why I asked.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I said I was worried about my wife’s safety. I needed to know who to keep an eye on.”