“The Bermuda Triangle. People go from the Spin Dryer to Systembolaget and the beer joint over there and back again, and they just vanish.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“That there’s a whole lot of shady stuff going on around here. Some fucking weird creatures come along, pushing dodgy booze and funky pills. But those of us who run a serious business, who stand here in the wind and rain, night after night, we can’t afford to pull stunts like that. Unless we deliver quality goods so we can look people in the eye, the next day, we’re fucked.”
“I don’t believe a word of that,” Modig said. “I’m pretty sure you’re not all that fussy. And I’d say you’re in deep shit right now. Do you see the guys in police uniforms over there?”
Charlie had had his eyes on them all along and could feel them glaring at him.
“If you don’t tell us all you know, we’re pulling you in here and now. You said you’d sold to the man,” Modig said.
“I sold to him alright. But I thought he was scary, so I kept as far away as I could.”
“Scary in what way?”
“He had scary eyes, and he had stumps instead of fingers and bloody patches on his face. He was rabbiting on about the moon. ‘Luna, luna,’ he kept saying. That’s moon, right?”
“As far as I know.”
“At least he did once. He appeared from Krukmakargatan, limping, and was beating his chest and saying that Luna was alone and calling for him, she and someone whose name was Mam Sabib or whatever the fuck it was, and it frightened me. He was a complete psycho, and I gave him the stuff even though he didn’t have the right money. It didn’t surprise me at all that he turned violent later.”
“In what way violent?”
Shit shit shit, Nilsson thought. He had promised not to say anything. But it was too late now, he would have to go with it.
“Not with me.”
“With whom?”
“Heikki Järvinen.”
“And who’s that?”
“A customer, one of my customers who actually has a bit of style. Heikki met the bloke in Norra Bantorget in the middle of the night. At least it must have been him. Heikki described a little Chinaman with fingers missing wearing a huge fucking down jacket. He was going on about having been up in the clouds, and when Heikki wouldn’t believe him he got himself a punch which made his head swim. The Chinaman was as strong as an ox, he said.”
“Where can we find this Heikki Järvinen?”
“Järvinen comes and goes, so you never really know.”
The policewoman made notes and nodded, and asked a few more questions. Then she left him, along with the uniforms, and Nilsson gave a sigh of relief. He had been sure that there was something very odd about the Chinaman, and he took himself off to call Heikki Järvinen before the police got hold of him.
Blomkvist heard at once that Carson’s voice had changed, as if he had been up all night or had come down with a cold.
“It’s a civilised time of day at your end, isn’t it?” he said.
“Very much so.”
“Not here. My head feels as if it’s about to blow apart. You remember I told you I had a relative who was on the mountain in 2008? And you remember I said he was dead?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, he was. Or at least presumed dead. But I should take it from the top. I called my uncle in Khumbu. He functions as a sort of local information exchange, and we went through the whole list you sent. The only relative we found there was this one person, and I was about to give up. If he was dead then he was dead and couldn’t very well show up in Stockholm and die all over again. But my uncle told me that no body had ever been found. I looked into it all more closely, and I saw that the age was right, and so was the height.
“What’s his name?”
“Nima Rita.”
“He was one of the leaders, wasn’t he?”
“He was the Sirdar, the head of the group of Sherpas, and the one who worked hardest on the mountain that day.”
“I know, I know, I read about him … He saved Mads Larsen, and Charlotte somebody.”
“That’s right, and if it hadn’t been for him, there would have been an even worse catastrophe. But he paid a high price. He chased up and down like a galley slave, and afterwards he had bad frost damage to his face and chest. He had to have some of his fingers and toes amputated.”
“So you really do think it’s him?”
“It has to be. He had a tattoo of a Buddhist wheel on his wrist.”
“My God,” Blomkvist said.
“Exactly, it’s all falling into place. Nima Rita is my third cousin, as they call it, so it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that he and I shared that special mutation in the Y chromosome that your researcher colleague pointed out.”
“Can you see any explanation for his having ended up in Sweden?”
“No, I can’t. But there’s a follow-up which is interesting.”
“Tell me. I haven’t had time to acquaint myself with all the details yet.”
“At first the assistant guides, Robin Hamill and Martin Norris, were praised for their rescue efforts, to the extent there was any praise going since Engelman and Grankin were dead,” Carson said. “But with the issuing of the more comprehensive reports, it was clear that the decisive role in the drama had been played by Nima Rita and his Sherpas. But I don’t know if that did Nima much good.”
“Why not?”
“Because by then he was going through hell already. He had fourth-degree frostbite, which is indescribably painful, and the doctors waited as long as they could before amputating. They knew that his livelihood depended on his being able to climb. For a native of the Khumbu valley, Nima Rita had earned a lot – although still not much by European standards – but money just ran through his fingers. He drank heavily and had no savings at all. But, worse still, his name was being dragged through the mud. He was harried by his own demons.”
“In what way?”
“It turned out that he had been paid by Engelman to take special care of Klara – he had of course failed to do that – and afterwards was accused of having worked against her interests. I don’t believe that. Nima Rita was by all accounts an incredibly loyal person. But like many other Sherpas, he was extremely superstitious, and thought of Everest as a living being which punishes climbers for their sins, and Klara Engelman … well, I guess you’ve read about her?”
“I saw the reports at the time.”
“Many of the Sherpas were upset by her. At Base Camp they were complaining that she could jinx the expedition and she must have irritated Nima too. He certainly went through the tortures of hell afterwards. Apparently he suffered from hallucinations, and that may have been partly neurological. He had sustained brain damage from all the time he’d spent above eight thousand metres, and he became increasingly bitter and behaved strangely. He had lost a number of his friends. No-one wanted anything to do with him. No-one except his wife, Luna.”
“Luna Rita, I presume. And where is she now?”
“That’s just the point. Luna took care of Nima after his operations. She baked bread and grew potatoes, and sometimes went over to Tibet to buy wool and salt which she sold in Nepal. But in the end it wasn’t enough, so she started working on climbing expeditions. She was much younger than Nima, and she was strong. She quickly rose from kitchen help to become a climbing Sherpani. But in 2013 she was part of the Dutch attempt on Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth highest mountain, and she fell into a crevasse at high altitude. The expedition turned into total chaos. There was an avalanche, a blizzard was blowing, and the climbers had to get off the mountain in a hurry. They left Luna to die in the crevasse. Nima was driven mad with grief, and he took it for an act of racism. He shouted that if it had happened to a Sahib, they would have got him out straight away.”
“But she was just a poor local woman.”
“I have no idea if that made any difference. I doubt it did. Generally, I have a high opin
ion of people in the climbing world. But Nima was determined, and he tried to get an expedition going to recover her body from up there and give her a decent burial. There was not one single volunteer so in the end he set off on his own, far too old and apparently not sober either.”
“Jesus.”
“If you speak to my relatives in Khumbu, that was his greatest achievement, more so than all his ascents of Everest. He got up there and saw Luna down in the crevasse, preserved for ever in the ice, and he decided to climb down and lie next to her so they could be reborn together. But then … the mountain goddess whispered to him that he should go out into the world instead and tell her story.”
“Sounds …”
“… totally crazy, oh yes,” Carson said. “And although he really did go out into the world, or at least to Kathmandu, and told the tale, nobody could make out what he was talking about. He became more and more incoherent, and was sometimes seen crying beneath the flags at the Boudhanath Stupa. Every so often he would go to the shopping districts in Thamel to nail up wall newspapers in poor English and even worse handwriting. He was still going on about Klara Engelman.”
“What did he say?”
“By this point he was suffering from severe mental disorder, don’t forget, and it was probably all one big muddle in his head, Luna and Klara and everything else. He was completely shot, and after he launched a diatribe against a British tourist and was locked up for a day, his relatives got him into the Jeetjung Marg mental health centre in Kathmandu. He stayed there on and off until the end of September 2017, and then one day he goes off to get himself some beer and vodka. He was apparently suspicious about the drugs the doctors were giving him and said that the only thing that silenced the voices in his head was alcohol. I think the staff reluctantly let it happen. They allowed him to abscond because they knew he would always come back. But this time he didn’t come back, and they grew concerned at the hospital. They knew he was expecting a visit that he was very excited about.”
“What kind of visit?”
“I don’t know. But it might have been from a journalist. To mark the tenth anniversary of Klara Engelman and Viktor Grankin’s deaths, a number of articles and documentaries were being prepared. Nima was apparently very happy that at last somebody wanted to listen to him.”
“But you don’t know anything more about what he wanted to get off his chest?”
“Only that it was all but impenetrable, full of ghosts and spirits.”
“And nothing about Forsell, our Minister of Defence?”
“I don’t know, all I have is hearsay and I don’t think the centre is going to release its records any time soon.”
“What happened when he didn’t return?”
“They searched for him, of course, in all the places he would usually hang out. But they found no trace at all, except for various reports that his corpse had been seen not far from the Bagmati river, where the dead are cremated. But no body was ever identified as his, and after a year the investigation was wound up. They abandoned hope, and in the end his family held a little memorial ceremony in Namche Bazaar, or maybe more of a … how shall I put it? … a moment of prayer for him. It was very beautiful, apparently. He hadn’t been so well regarded those last years. But that restored his reputation. Nima Rita had been on the summit of Everest eleven times without oxygen. Eleven times! And his climb up Cho Oyu, that was …”
Carson went on animatedly, but Blomkvist was no longer listening quite so intently. He was looking up Nima Rita, and even though quite a lot had been written – there were Wikipedia entries in both English and German – he found only two photographs. In one, Nima Rita was standing with the Austrian star climber Hans Mosel, after their ascent of the North Face of Everest in 2001. In the other, more recent, he was shown in profile in front of a stone house in the village of Pangboche in Khumbu. Like the first picture, it had been taken from a bit too far away – certainly too far for any face-recognition software to be effective. But Blomkvist was in no doubt. He recognised the eyes and the hair, and the patches on the cheeks.
“Are you still there?” Carson said.
“I’m just a bit shocked.”
“I’m not surprised. That’s some mystery you’ve got on your hands now.”
“You can say that again. But honestly, Bob … I can tell that you’ve got supergenes. You’ve been fantastic.”
“My supergenes are for high-altitude climbing, not detective work.”
“I think you should check out your detective genes too.”
Carson gave a tired laugh.
“Can I ask you to be discreet about this for the time being?” Blomkvist said. “It would be bad if anything got out before we know more.”
“I’ve already told my wife.”
“Please keep it in the family, then.”
“I promise.”
Afterwards, Blomkvist wrote to Nyman and Bublanski to tell them what he had learned. Then he went on reading the Forsell material, and later in the morning he rang him to see if he could set up an interview.
Forsell had a fire going in the stove. Rebecka could smell it from downstairs in the kitchen, and she heard him pacing back and forth. She did not like the sound of his footsteps and she could not bear his silence and his glassy look. She would have done anything to see him smile again.
Something is wrong, she thought again, just wrong. She was on the point of going upstairs to demand to speak to him when he came down the winding staircase. She was happy at first. He was wearing his training gear and his Nike running shoes, and that should have been a sign that he was getting his spirits back. But there was something about his posture that frightened her. She met him halfway up the stairs and stroked his cheek.
“I love you,” she said.
He gave her such a disconsolate look that she flinched, and there was nothing soothing in his reply:
“I love you.”
It sounded like a farewell and she kissed him. But he shook himself free and asked where the bodyguards were. She took a moment before answering. They had two terraces, and the guards were sitting out on the western one, facing the water. They would have to change and accompany him if he was going on a run, and as usual they would struggle to keep up. Sometimes he would run back and forth a bit so as not to exhaust them.
“On the west terrace,” she said, and he hesitated.
He seemed to want to say something. His chest heaved. His shoulders were unnaturally tense, and there were red patches on his throat which she had never seen before.
“What is it?” she said.
“I tried to write you a letter. But I couldn’t.”
“Why on earth would you write me a letter? I’m standing right here.”
“But I …”
“But you?”
She was about to break down, but vowed not to give in before he had told her exactly what was going on. She took hold of his hands and looked into his eyes. But then the worst thing imaginable happened.
He tore himself loose, said “I’m sorry,” and then ran off, not towards the bodyguards but instead across the terrace which faced the forest. In no time at all he was out of sight, so she screamed for her life. When the guards rushed in she was distraught.
“He’s run away from me, he’s run away from me.”
CHAPTER 16
26.viii
Forsell ran so fast that his temples were pounding and his mind was filled with the clamour of an entire life. But there was nothing remotely uplifting about it – not even the happiest moments. He tried to think about Becka and their sons. All he could picture was the disappointment and shame in their eyes, and when he heard birdsong in the far distance, as if from another world, he could make no sense of it. How could anyone be singing? How could they want to live?
His whole existence was black and hopeless. Yet he had no idea what he wanted to do. In town, he would have thrown himself in front of a long-distance lorry or a Tunnelbana train. Here there was only the sea and, alt
hough he felt it beckoning, he knew that he was far too good a swimmer, and that amidst his despair there was an untameable will to live which he was not certain he could suppress.
So he kept on running, not in his usual way but as if he were trying to run from life itself. It was incomprehensible that it had come to this. He had thought he could cope with anything. He had thought he was as strong as a bear. But he had made a mistake and been drawn into something he knew he could not live with. At first, he had really wanted to hit back, to fight. But they had him. They knew they had him, and here he now was. Birds flew up all around, and further on a startled roe deer leaped into the trees. Nima, Nima. That it should be him of all people. There was no logic in it.
He had loved Nima, although that was of course the wrong word, but still … there had been a bond between them, an alliance. Nima had been the first to pick up on the fact that Johannes was stealing into Rebecka’s tent at night at Base Camp, and it had upset him. His Everest goddess was offended by sex on her sacred slopes.
“Makes mountain very angry,” he said, and in the end Johannes could not help pulling his leg. Even though everybody warned him – That man can’t handle a joke! – Nima had taken it well and laughed, and the fact that Rebecka and Johannes were both single no doubt helped.
Grankin and Engelman’s case was more problematic because both were married to other people. It was difficult in all sorts of ways, and he remembered Luna, wonderful brave Luna, who sometimes came up with fresh bread, goat’s cheese and yak butter in the mornings, and he recalled his decision to help them, yes, that was probably where it all began. Johannes gave them money – as if paying off a debt that he did not yet know he had.
He kept on running and was drawn inexorably towards the water. Once on the beach he pulled off his shoes and socks and his running vest and waded into the sea. He began to swim, just as he had been running, wildly and furiously. He noticed that there were white crests on the waves and that the water out here was colder than he had expected. The current was strong, but instead of slowing down, he ploughed on.
He was going to swim and forget.
The Girl Who Lived Twice Page 14