* * *
Some guys wake up in other people’s stairwells and decide to take a piss right there. It’s not their stairwell and they do need to pee. Then there’s the larger group of guys that could go pee behind a bush at Vita Hill Park, at least if things are really pressing. Kouplan wishes he belonged to at least one of those groups, but he doesn’t. He presses his thighs together in an especially ridiculous way, while he also tries to concentrate on discovering important clues through a window twenty meters away. Finally, he has to capitulate and he runs down the wooden stairs and into a café. “PleaseletmeusethebathroombeforeIpeealloverthefloor,” he says, and it’s the threat and perhaps the desperation in his voice, but the guy behind the counter waves him toward the door for the bathroom, and behind it is thirty seconds of absolute heaven.
Once he’s run back up the stairs at Vita Hill, Chavez’s silhouette in the window is gone. The other man is standing in yellow light, turned toward what might be a kitchen counter. Perhaps he’s weighing substances. Or making mac and cheese. Kouplan glances down toward Skånegatan, penetrating the window across the street. If Chavez is still in the apartment, he’d appear in one or the other window eventually. If a man is making mac and cheese for a little girl, you’d eventually see a small shadow move. Neither thing happens.
* * *
It’s only two days before November starts and the wooden stairs are dry but cold. As Kouplan sits, it doesn’t take long before a winter chill starts moving up through his jeans and onto his thin limbs. He’s now spent twenty-four hours on stairs and his stomach is screaming about the lone hardtack sandwich. He leans against the railing as he observes the man in the yellow kitchen. He’s not ready to leave yet.
There’s a connection, he feels after a half an hour of observation, between himself and the man in the kitchen. The connection is that the man is walking around his apartment and Kouplan is watching him walk around his apartment. It’s the same kind of attachment a stalker has to his victims. The simile swirls in a meaningless way through his mind and is broken by an absolutely true picture of his father. Kouplan is little and his father is twice as big. “Sabr talx ast, valikan bar-e širin dārad,” his father is saying. “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” Perhaps he means that waiting for the man in the apartment to do something is leading somewhere or he means Kouplan’s entire existence. But now all Kouplan can think of is sweet fruit. Apricots, plums, grapes, melons. The feeling of soft fruit skin breaking between his teeth, the juice running down his chin if you don’t slurp it in immediately. Then kebab, the first bite of one with everything on it. Then ghejme badenjan stew with extra lamb. Once his dreams have gone to fish sticks and mashed potatoes, he realizes he’s gone too far. Chavez is not appearing in the apartment, in the entrance, or on the street. Through the window, there’s not one single strand of a little girl’s hair. Before Kouplan leaves, he goes to the entrance of the building and finds the name of the man: F. Karlsson.
On the subway back, he summarizes his day in his notebook. First he’s writing in Persian and then in Swedish: Nineteen hours observation and hungry like hell.
* * *
There’s something special about hunger. Along with the need for peeing and the need for sleep, it overrides all the other needs one can have. That’s what people call the Maslow stages of need. As he shovels oatmeal into his mouth, he can hear his mother telling him about Maslow in his mind. “Bodily needs come first,” she explains. “Next comes the need for security.” Kouplan makes another portion of oatmeal and he can hear his father repeat the proverb. It’s as if his hunger is calling them back. He thinks one thought halfway through, wondering how they are. If he completes the thought, he will have to think that his mother must be thinking the same about him and his brother, and he can’t face that. His mother would say that it’s not healthy.
Once his stomach is full of oatmeal, he opens his notebook. He rereads his observations and realizes that nineteen hours of work have not brought him any closer to Julia. It’s been two weeks since she disappeared, and a six-year-old is somewhere right now, at this very moment when Kouplan has finished scraping the last of his oatmeal from his bowl, right now, frightened because of where she’s ended up.
Either that, or a six-year-old body is somewhere.
Either that, or Pernilla is lying.
CHAPTER 23
It sounds crazy, but it’s true: Someone has erased every trace of Julia. There hadn’t been many, and the ones that had existed had not been easy to find, but someone had found every last one of them and destroyed them. After Pernilla had not been able to find any traces of photos in her old computer, she’d gone through her entire apartment filled with fear. A chill spread in her body as she realized that there was not a single piece of evidence to show that Julia was hers—her precautions had backfired and someone had committed the perfect crime.
Who would have known that she had some pictures of Julia in an old, bulky computer in the basement storage space? Who knew that she had a lock of hair in an old, red box? She was the only one, right? And—her thoughts bother her and then scare her—and Julia. Julia, who giggled when she cut off a lock of hair. Julia, who went with her to the basement when she brought down her old computer.
She can’t explain why she started to think about Thor. He would never kidnap a child, but perhaps, if he thought he was helping, he would ask Julia some questions. Julia is shy, but kind and, above all, just six. Six-year-olds trust people—it’s part and parcel of their age. But he would never kidnap a child, she repeats to herself.
* * *
“I’m paying you to find Julia,” Pernilla says testily to Kouplan.
They’re walking from Gullmarsplan to Globen. Again. She hates the walkway beneath the bridge; she hates the Subway and the Greek restaurant.
“I will find Julia,” he says. “But I need you for this.”
“That’s not it. I’m just paying you to find her, okay?”
“What’s wrong?”
He stops to look at her, his fine brown eyes questioning. His entire body is ready, Pernilla thinks. He seems to be calm, but inside he is ready for anything. Even for what she’s going to say.
“I only had three pictures of Julia,” she says. “And one lock of hair in a box. I had them in the apartment and in my storage unit, but they’ve disappeared.”
He’s silent; his forehead wrinkles slightly.
“So she’s completely gone now?” he asks.
She exhales, because he believes her.
* * *
He could disappear like that, Kouplan thinks. If something happened to him now, he’d cease to exist completely. Just like Julia, there’s nothing of him but a body. It’s a risky way to live.
“Didn’t you ever think of it?”
The question had been on his tongue for so long that it had to come out.
“All the time,” Pernilla replies. “But they were threatening to take her when she was still inside me. I couldn’t let them. And if I showed up, say, two years later with an unregistered child … guess who would have been an incompetent mother.”
“Yes, well … that is … would she … would you have homeschooled her, or what? And what if she’d gotten seriously ill?”
Pernilla’s eyes fill with tears.
“Don’t you believe I’d been thinking about all that? Don’t you believe that’s exactly what I’d been worrying about all along?”
She’s practically spitting it out and he lays an arm on her shoulder, not thinking about it for the first time, and she doesn’t push him away. He wants to ask: Why were you so afraid that someone would take her? What made you think this way? Every detail is important. He wants to say this, but her shoulders are shaking.
“Now we keep going,” he says. “We’ll find her.”
* * *
Today, Globen is the right place to be if you’re looking for a girl. An entire archipelago of them fills the square and there are festival tents, sleeping bags, and t
eddy bears. The girls inhabiting the space ought to be in school, but by their T-shirts, it’s easy to tell that Justin Bieber is a greater need on their Maslow scale. There are hundreds of them.
“Don’t think about them,” Kouplan says to Pernilla. “Close your eyes.”
Pernilla obeys. She’s standing beside him like a normal Swedish mother, but just moments away from pure panic. He watches her push it away; he sees the vibrating abyss behind her eyelids.
“First take a deep breath.”
About ten girls are screaming from excitement—apparently for no reason—not too far from them. Pernilla inhales. Kouplan observes the thin lines around her mouth.
“And out again. And then think about that day, but earlier. Did you talk to anyone?”
“On the subway?”
“Or before then. At home. Did you speak to someone on the phone or did you meet someone? How about the day before?”
The girls behind Pernilla are practicing some invented choreography to their phones and writing Belieber on each other’s foreheads. Pernilla breathes in, breathes out.
“I don’t remember anything on that day. But on Sunday, we went for a walk.”
“You and Julia?”
“No, Janus. Julia stayed at home.”
He made a mental note. Julia stayed at home. Why?
“And you were talking to someone?”
“There was a guy with another mutt.”
She suddenly opens her eyes.
“Is any of this important?”
“Shut your eyes. A guy who also had a mutt. Had you seen him before?”
“A few times. We often walk the same route. We say hi.”
He sees that the panic leaves her eyes and gives way to something else. Perhaps she’s focusing.
“Had he ever met Julia?”
She leaves time to think and then replies:
“No, I don’t think so. No, I only saw him when I was alone with the dog. I think she was outside with me once, but she was on the playground. They never met.”
Kouplan imagines he’s a man with a dog.
“Perhaps he’s afraid of children,” he says. “Perhaps he only says hi when he sees you’re alone.”
When Pernilla closes her eyes, he can see everything in her face. She’s not able to control it as much; he can see her doubt before she even says the words.
“I was thinking along the same lines.”
* * *
I’m getting paid to believe her, he thinks as they walk toward Skärmarbrink. They’re walking along the same route that a man with a large nose had walked with a young girl two weeks ago, and he’s no longer sure that he’s part of that situation. He has something else going on—that Pernilla isn’t telling him everything. But he’s getting paid to believe her.
“Did she often stay home when you went out with Janus?” he asks.
“More and more often. I think maybe because she was older or maybe she was getting tired of walking the dog, even though she loved him so much at first. But I don’t know … do you think children can get depressed?”
Kouplan had been crowded on refugee buses and lived in residences for asylum seekers; he’d been rejected along with entire families and he’d seen five people sharing one bed. If children can get depressed?
“You could say … you could say that Julia was a hidden child, couldn’t you?”
Pernilla’s face was that of a parent’s conscience.
“But I tried to give her everything. Stimulating activities … and … I mean, we went to the library, did some bead mosaics…”
Kouplan asks, “Do you still have them?”
“Yeah, why?”
Kouplan doesn’t say anything, but he’s thinking: Someone has taken photos and a lock of hair but left bead mosaic pictures. Someone was strategic, or perhaps just cruel. They’d come to the bridge over the train tracks. He stops and lowers his voice.
“Is there anyone who does not like you?”
She gives a dry laugh.
“Besides Patrick?”
Kouplan leans against the fence and looks down onto the tracks. The train to Farsta, with its striped roof and glowing signs, thunders below them. He thinks about directions, about clues.
“Someone who wants to hurt you,” he says. “Someone who would go so far as to take your child.”
Pernilla stands beside him. The train to Farsta disappears around the corner, leaving nothing but vibrating rails.
“Apparently.”
* * *
Kouplan has two feelings that don’t match. The first feeling tells him that someone who needed a child saw an opportunity and kidnapped Julia. The other one tells him that Julia’s disappearance is connected to Pernilla somehow. Or with Julia herself. How long can a child remain hidden? What does a child hide within itself when it is hidden? What does the child long for? What is it receptive to? And he thinks about points of intersection.
A point of intersection happens when one graph meets another graph. It can illustrate the ultimate investment sum or the most profitable size of a pizza carton. And you could also say that it happens when a lost fish meets a hungry crocodile. And so if a child is frustrated enough at being hidden and tied to its mother and there’s an adult in great need of a child …
If you have two equations with two unknown factors, there are three methods of finding out how they intersect. Although this is true for mathematics, these former words of his old math teacher make Kouplan feel that the answer is much closer. His two feelings can both be true, once he figures out how they intersect.
He can also be completely wrong.
* * *
A real policeman would never bring a distraught mother on an aimless walk through a suburb on the south side of the city. Right now he can only choose between M.B. and Pernilla, and he can’t get Pernilla to talk if she’s not with him. The train tracks are now silent and empty except for two ragged pigeons pecking at invisible food. Pernilla replies to a question he hasn’t asked.
“Some things are murky. I don’t remember them so clearly.”
Kouplan thinks she’s working her way to something important, so he focuses on the birds as he quietly says:
“What kind of things?”
“When you ask me questions, it’s like I can’t remember. I try to, but it’s like my brain doesn’t want to bring me the answers.”
“So you can’t remember details, like what color or what time and the like?”
She shakes her head.
“No, it’s like I can’t remember how everything fits together. I think about a day, such as Sunday two weeks ago. I know Julia wasn’t with me at the park, but I can’t remember when I got home. And it’s the same thing for longer stretches of time, like when you asked me about the year before Julia was born.”
A man walks past them. His nose is distressingly small. Kouplan thinks that memory works like that for everybody. You don’t remember when you get home. You don’t remember every person you’ve ever met.
“Only witnesses on TV remember everything.”
“But I don’t think other people are like me.”
Her voice transitions—truth is seeping into the air around them. If this is true—if Pernilla has memory blackouts she can’t explain …
“A memory loss like after taking drugs?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “No, I don’t take drugs.”
Kouplan reflects on the two bottles of wine they drank last Friday. On the other hand, the bottles were dusty. He thinks about people who drug other people.
“I don’t know if it’s shock,” Pernilla says.
Kouplan thinks about people who take control over other people’s lives.
“Does anyone else have keys to your apartment?”
Pernilla shakes her head.
“Only my landlord. Kouplan, I can’t take much more of this. I’m starting to see Julia behind every single bush.”
Kouplan shivers and realizes Pernilla is right. She should not be ou
t here with him.
“I’m going to keep going on my own,” he says. “I’m going to get in touch with my contacts and see if they’ve found out anything more. Then there’s another place I want to check out.”
“I wish I could help. I’m going crazy.”
“Have you written down things like I asked you to? Anything you remember might be useful.”
“At least five pages.”
“Keep writing. If I don’t find Julia by tomorrow, I’ll drop by and pick it up.”
“Nothing I write is going to help.”
Probably not help me, Kouplan thinks. But it might help you in the long run. He’d told her about finding Julia by tomorrow just to give her hope. A child who has been missing for longer than two weeks is probably not alive.
“Trust me,” he says.
CHAPTER 24
Her mother had forgotten to tell her one thing when she warned her about getting kidnapped. She forgot to tell her what to do if she had been kidnapped.
Now all she has is her own mind and the only way out is through the window. She walks over to it and unlatches the latch the growling man had shut. She thinks about Rapunzel who let down her golden hair. Her own hair only reaches the windowsill. There’s no rope in the room, and if there were, it probably wouldn’t reach down all four floors. She thinks about a TV show, how the characters tied sheets together. The bed in this room doesn’t have any.
She’s tried to count the days. She could think of five, but she’s not sure if she’s mixing them up. She doesn’t know if yesterday was day number five or if it was the day before yesterday. She can’t count how many times she’s cried, or the nights where she lay awake staring at the black stripes on the curtains. She can count the men, however.
There are three of them.
The second man has an accent, which means he has a different language and can’t speak hers so well. He takes care of “the girls” and brings them food from fast food places. “The girls”: That’s her and the two grown-ups from Poland. They speak Polish with each other and live in the room next door. At first, she wished she could stay with them, because they were nice to her even if they didn’t understand her. They combed her hair and kissed her on the cheeks. But then she noticed that there were strange noises coming from their rooms: banging and moaning. The second man said that’s when they had “visitors.” In a few days, he told her, she’d also get “visits” and the most important thing for her to do was to keep quiet.
The Truth Behind the Lie Page 11