The Truth Behind the Lie

by Sara Lövestam

  The first photographs are of herself and Jörgen. Jörgen was very much like Patrick, actually, just with hair dyed black and less strength. How in love she’d been and how awful that he had died. She also had black hair in the pictures—they’d shared home dye every month in order to save money. Jörgen appears most often on the screen—sometimes he’d set up the camera toward both of them for silly self-portraits. She looks into his blue eyes that no longer exist. She can feel his warm hand on her back; no, that’s her dog Janus.

  “Look here,” she says. “If that hadn’t happened … fourteen years ago. This guy would be your master.”

  Janus doesn’t bother to look at the picture. He just lays his chin on Pernilla’s lap and looks up at her, and his dog body moves with his breathing. Pernilla scratches his shaggy head with one hand while she clicks through with the other.

  “And here’s some from my former job. That guy wearing a tie, that’s Perra, he wanted to sleep with me. That’s only because I dyed my hair blond; that was after Jörgen. That woman with the low-cut dress, she was a real bitch; sorry, but she was.”

  There’s a knot inside her, which, although it’s not dissolving, hurts less the more she talks to Janus about old times. She tells him about the cherry blossoms in May 2004 and about the vacation in Gotland in 2006, shows him a crooked sunset and several more pictures of Patrick than of herself. There are fifty-seven pictures in the entire folder, less than five a year, and hardly any after Julia was born. There’s not a single one of Julia.

  Her heart sinks as she realizes this. She knows she’s been careful, but at least three times she’d pressed the shutter to immortalize her beautiful child. She’s absolutely sure she’s done so—she can close her eyes and see a picture of her newborn Julia wrapped in a red-striped blanket. Another photograph should have shown Julia in a sun hat standing on a stone path and a third should have had her in her yellow pajamas. But they’re not in the folder. Someone has deleted them.

  * * *

  Errand boy. Both in Persian and in Swedish, the word sounds like it describes a nimble youth, as thin as Kouplan or even thinner, but the man Rashid has indicated as M.B.’s errand boy is anything but. The seriousness of what’s happening grabs Kouplan the second he nears the entrance and sees the enormous back through the glass door of the grill—the seriousness that appears when something, like a train at full-speed or a mountain impossible to climb, is right before you, greater than yourself.

  Kouplan walks inside, head down, two broken ear buds in his ears. When the errand boy with his bulging muscles glances in his direction, Kouplan nods as if he’s keeping time with a hip-hop beat. The errand boy soon loses interest in him and takes the double portion of kebab that Azad hands him and starts eating, open-mouthed. He sits down in the corner, so close that his right shoulder almost touches Kouplan’s left one. Across the table, there’s a white guy, perhaps Swedish, perhaps Polish, or maybe from the Balkans. The men who own Rashid’s apartment also got him the dishwashing job, and perhaps this white guy is one of them. The two men are talking, but Kouplan can’t hear what they’re saying, although he can feel the vibrations of the errand boy’s voice. In another life, he could have been a baritone.

  If Kouplan’s understanding of human beings has anything to tell him, it’s that the mumbling white guy isn’t M.B. M.B. has contacts and subordinates; M.B. is the one who makes money on women, and he would never sit leaning forward like that. After eating half his kebab, the white guy grabs a fistful of salt packets from the table, and the errand boy does the exact same thing shortly afterward—it’s the most obvious transaction Kouplan has ever seen. He concludes that neither of them is all that intelligent.

  The tempting French fries are still on the thinner guy’s plate when the two of them get up to leave. Soon the food will be scraped away into the fast food place’s large garbage cans and there’s nothing Kouplan can do to grab them for himself in a normal, not obvious manner. He slinks out a few seconds after the errand boy and sees that the white guy has already disappeared. The huge back is moving toward Medborgarplatsen and Kouplan prays for two things over and over again: Don’t turn around. Don’t take a taxi.

  He’s the child of a professor and a psychologist, he thinks, as he shadows the errand boy past the cafés of Södermalm. It’s unreal how he, born in a hot country to parents with double degrees, is now following a mountain of muscle while avoiding the police like a criminal in this October chill of Stockholm. All it would take is the errand boy being followed by yet someone else so that he, himself, would turn into a target for unimagined criminals. He won’t be able to ask the police for help—he’d be nothing more than a pimple between two implacable thumbnails. Mâmân, he thinks, Allah, Bâbâ, brother. But all he has is himself and his own body. He follows the errand boy down into the subway and the earth closes above them.

  They return to the surface in Akalla. Three stations earlier, they’d passed Kouplan’s home and he felt a sting of longing for a shower. Now he has neither the time to think about his own bathroom, or Pernilla’s, which he should have taken advantage of, because the massive errand boy takes the escalator up two steps at a time and heads for the light of Akalla. Kouplan runs up as fast as he dares; he can’t do the same thing as the errand boy without drawing attention to himself. At the entrance, he stands there at a loss until he catches sight of a spot of shining black and realizes it’s the errand boy’s jacket. He’s swaggering along, greeting the boys in front of the newsstand with a nod. Here the errand boy is a king; he strides across the street and shoves a door open with his shoulder. Kouplan glances up at the sign: a gym.

  The errand boy is in the gym for an hour and a half. After the first twenty-five minutes have gone by, Kouplan heads somewhere to grab a hamburger to keep from fainting, and then spends the next sixty minutes worrying that the errand boy is still in the gym. Still, who can look like that if you’re only at the gym fifteen minutes a day? When the man comes out again, he’s carrying a gym bag over his shoulder. This means he must have been there that morning and left it there and that means he works out twice a day. Kouplan shudders—his sixty push-ups every morning are nothing in comparison.

  If Kouplan had been working out, then taken the subway to slip secrets via salt packets at a grill, eaten kebab, and then worked out a second time, he’d finish the day by going home. Therefore, he’s fairly sure that the building the errand boy walks into is, as Thor the priest would put it, his own humble abode. The errand boy’s humble abode is a thirteen-story apartment building with brown walls and hundreds of anonymous windows. Kouplan is too far behind to have any chance of sticking his foot in the door, which closes behind the errand boy to leave Kouplan outside. He says a quick prayer to Allah, who reasonably should not even listen to him since his faith is fairly selective, but he receives assistance this time: The lock is broken. He hurries to the elevator and watches the numbers on the digital screen shift slowly to nine, ten, eleven, and then stop at twelve. Five minutes later, Kouplan takes the same ride up.

  All the doors have peepholes, so Kouplan just looks at all the nameplates, puts them into his memory, and goes back to the elevator. He rides to the thirteenth floor, tests the door to the fire escape and slinks into the stairwell. The thirteenth floor seems dusty and unused; on the twelfth floor, he sees dirty footprints on the landing. In the groove by the stairs, there are butts from hand-rolled cigarettes and one unopened condom. He sits on the edge of the first step and exhales. The stairwell could use some air. He takes out his notebook and writes down everything he knows about the errand boy. Or whatever he should call him. Most of the names on the twelfth floor were Chinese; the others were Nilsson, Chavez, and Papadakis. The errand boy could be one of these three, but Kouplan makes an educated guess that his name is Chavez. Then he carefully opens the metal door that leads to the twelfth floor.

  The rectangular length of nothing that binds Nilsson, Chavez, and Papadakis with the Chinese is empty and just as quiet as wooden door
s with peepholes would allow. Kouplan looks down at the condom lying in the gap beneath the door. Ultimate protection it says on the wrapper and Kouplan prays this is true. He withdraws back into the stairwell, leaving a gap of sallow light. From the first step, with his head against the stone-colored wall, he has an inch-wide perfect view of the elevators.

  CHAPTER 21

  Adults thunder like moose on the stairs. Before they’d even start running, they’re on the next flight of stairs, and a child doesn’t have a chance to be quicker. A child, for instance, a girl, won’t be able to get more than half a flight away, even if she rushes out the moment the man unlocks the door. She’s been counting, felt in her body how fast she can run, and did her best to be truthful. She knows that men can run faster if they really want to.

  She has figured out that she is on the fourth floor. She’s figured this out because there is a building on the other side of the street and the window across from her is the fourth from the ground. She’s just a child, but she’s not stupid and she knows how to count. And she can open windows.

  In order to get to the latch, she has to climb on the dresser and pull with all her might. Finally, the clasp loosens along with two layers of paint, and she pushes at the window, first carefully and then as hard as she can. At first, it seems like the window is stuck, but all of a sudden, the paint gives and the window opens with such speed that she loses her balance. For one frightful second, she’s staring right down four floors and sees the street below. She’s holding to the window latch and pulls herself back inside with her feet, and she doesn’t breathe until she’s back inside. Her lungs pump out her fear and she feels her blood humming like bumblebees in her hands and feet. In one way, she feels more alive than she has during the past few days.

  Once she catches her breath, she sticks her head out the window. It’s just as far to the ground as before, but her feet are now anchored on the floor. On the sidewalk below, people are walking past as small as beetles. Between them cars stop and go, stop and go. Behind the cars, there are signs that shine all through the night. She’s seen them before, but they are clearer now that the window is open.

  “A-P-O-T-E-K,” she spells aloud. “G-A-L-L-E-R-I.”

  She thinks the first place must be one where people buy medicine. She has no idea what the other sign means. But perhaps the people who sell medicine would care about little girls.

  She waits until a person in a white coat comes out of the apothecary. That person, a white beetle, brings her hand to her mouth and soon smoke comes out. Now or never.

  She stares right at that beetle person, opens her mouth and screams as loud as she can. Since she first saw that man who called himself her real father, she’s screaming for help so loudly that it echoes from the building wall across the street, and the people react, but not with alarms or with police cars with sirens on. Instead, they seem hesitant or appear irritated. She yells that she’s here, up here, UP HERE and that they’ve taken her, but nobody is glancing upward at the fourth floor and all of a sudden the locked door flies open.

  It’s not the man who calls himself her real father, but the other one. He doesn’t yell, but he growls and mutters angrily as he slams the window closed. Then he grabs her by the hair, her hair that hurts even when her mother tries to comb it, especially the thin strands by her neck. He grabs it and lifts her straight up and it hurts so much, tears come to her eyes. She can feel the strands of hair pulling off her scalp, but most of them hold as he carries her across the room. He screams at her the entire time and she doesn’t understand much besides that she was not allowed to yell to the people on the street below. He could have dropped her on the bed, but instead he drops her on the floor. From below, he appears as large and mighty as a monster truck, and his face is the ugliest she has ever seen. Before he leaves, he spits on her. He’s aiming for her face but it lands on her neck. She wipes it off once he’s gone and it smells rank and pungent and she smears it on the door.

  * * *

  Then she lies on the bed for a while. Her scalp throbs and aches. She feels it to see if she’s lost much hair, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. She looks up at the ceiling and presses on her scalp, which starts to feel swollen after a time. She sighs and thinks about her mother. In the evenings, she can remember how her mother would hug her and make their supper, how they’d laugh at TV shows or do a puzzle. But during the days, the guilt takes over. Her mother had told her clearly what she should do if someone tried to kidnap her. Yell and run, her mother had said, and her voice echoes over and over: Yell and run. But she didn’t yell and she hadn’t run, so she let her own mother down. If she thinks about it too much, she starts to cry.

  CHAPTER 22

  Kouplan’s bony rump chafes on the stone stairs that, in case of fire, would save the inhabitants of the Sibelius building. His neck has stiffened at a three-quarters angle, and, although he’s waking up, he feels like he hasn’t slept. He’s been sitting all night in the same position, dozing and half-dreaming of falling down twelve flights of stairs and landing in ice-cold jail cells, waking from his cell phone reminder that his battery is low and from the rumbling in his stomach. It hasn’t been a whole night, actually, as it’s just four thirty in the morning when the first rattle of a door lock starts. It’s a Chinese woman of about forty, who yawns mightily while the elevator heads up through its shaft. Kouplan checks the time.

  By six a.m., he’s wondering what he’s doing here. If Julia’s kidnapper had headed to Hökarängen, why is he sitting in a really cold staircase in Akalla and staring at the elevator door? If Patrick acts like he’s not Julia’s father and Thor reacts with such unconcern when hearing about her disappearance, why isn’t he shadowing them instead? His only answer is unsatisfactory: gut feeling.

  By seven, the rest of the building is waking up. The elevator is working several times every hour, even though it is a Sunday. Two more Chinese women head down from the twelfth floor, and once the elevator heads up to the thirteenth floor. Three hours later, Chavez appears.

  It’s a shock when Chavez is actually standing there, taking up the entire gap that Kouplan has been staring through. First Kouplan’s legs don’t obey him, but he forces them to move. He jogs down two flights of stairs as he counts the seconds. On the tenth floor, he pushes the door open and throws himself at the elevator button. He didn’t need to be in such a hurry. The elevator is still heading up from the seventh floor and he has time to catch his breath. Before the elevator has time to reach the twelfth floor and turn around, a family with children all dressed up to go to church has joined him. He lets them enter the elevator before him as a buffer between him and the errand boy Chavez.

  * * *

  The sun pokes him in the eyes. It’s a sunny day, especially bright for someone who has been sitting for sixteen hours in a drab stairwell. Kouplan blinks until he can see properly; he breathes in the fresh air as if it were a good but insufficient breakfast and follows Chavez, who does not seem to be in much of a hurry. The sign in the subway shows eight minutes until the next train, so Kouplan has enough time to buy a hardtack sandwich from the machine. He looks away as he drops the coins in—for that amount of money he could buy half a box of hardtack at the supermarket. But there’s value in not fainting.

  At the Central Station, he keeps behind Chavez, as far back as he can, so that he’s actually following the top of a haircut. He should have changed his clothes, he thinks, because how long can a person be shadowed without realizing that the skinny guy in the brown jacket is starting to seem familiar?

  At Slussen, Chavez changes to Bus Number 3. Chavez sits all the way in the back, so Kouplan sits up front. Each time the bus stops, he can glance in the rearview mirror, and at Renstierna street, it’s Chavez’s massive body that exits the rear bus door. When he gets up to leave at the same stop, he notices that Chavez is looking both ways, just like Kouplan does when he wants to avoid the police. Therefore, he stays on the bus, now sitting far in the back and watching Chavez through
the dirtiest back window he’s ever seen. At the next stop, he hops off, crosses the street and saunters toward the building that has just swallowed Chavez. The door is locked and Chavez has disappeared.

  He needs to get a pair of binoculars, he thinks, once he’s sat down at the restaurant across the street. A waitress asks him what he wants and he asks for the menu. He really could use a pair of binoculars that could see into each room and reveal who Chavez has come to meet. Instead, he only has his own set of peering eyes, and, behind them, the beginnings of a headache.

  “Have you decided?” the persistent waitress asks and he forces himself to smile as he shakes his head.

  At least the sun is in the right direction, and behind one of the windows, there’s movement. Third floor, the side next to Vita Hill. Perhaps he’s imagining things, but it appears to be Chavez’s silhouette he sees inside. It’s been in front of his eyes for two days, so he’s pretty sure he recognizes it.

  “My boss says you have to order something if you want to stay,” the waitress declares. Her voice is hostile.

  Kouplan can imagine how he appears. It’s been two days since he’s taken a shower and if he were the waitress’s boss, he’d also have his concerns.

  “I’m sorry,” he says as he hands her the unopened menu. “There’s nothing here that I’m not allergic to.”

  He gets up and leaves, the waitress behind him exclaiming: “You can’t be allergic to everything!” and walks out to go around the corner to Vita Hill. From the stairs up the hill, he can see many windows of the same apartment and it seems to him that there’s a tall, male figure next to the man who must be Chavez. Then he realizes how badly he needs to pee.