I prepared the moose meatballs in the middle of the afternoon. I ate nine; Edmund ate one. We split the peaches between us more evenly, four–two. All in all, I was satisfied with my meal.
Even though I had to cook and do the dishes.
Just as I’d finished with the latter, we received our first caller of the afternoon. Gladys Lundin walked across the property clearing her throat and coughing, asking if we had any schnapps to spare.
Normal people, like Benny’s mom or Mrs. Lundmark, who lived two floors up on Idrottsgatan, would knock and ask for a cup of sugar or flour for pancakes or rhubarb pie, but the Lundins were not normal people. Far from it. As far as I knew, Gladys was the matriarch of the tribe; she was at least seventy and probably weighed well over one hundred kilos. She propelled herself forward with two sturdy oak canes and always had a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. None of this prevented her from stopping by to beg for schnapps.
I explained that the house was dry for the time being, and so she asked for a kilo of potatoes instead.
I could hardly deny her that, after all we had half a crate. With the canes and the cigarettes, the carrying became complicated, but in the end I hung a bowl on a cord around her neck. She hobbled away without saying thank you and I wondered if she was going to sit right down and brew some schnapps with the potatoes as soon as she got home. I only had a vague idea of how that would go, but with some luck she might distill a glass by the evening.
From that day onward, I thought it was strange that one person showed up right after the other—Gladys Lundin and the next visitor—however, whichever way I looked at it, I couldn’t make a logical connection.
But never mind; after getting rid of Gladys I hadn’t been in the chair for more than twenty minutes before I heard another cough behind me. Much stronger and much more ominous.
I stood up and found myself eye-to-eye with Bertil Albertsson. Super-Berra. The man who had an arm so strong that if a ball he threw hit a goalie, it could be fatal. The man who had hung his striped blazer nonchalantly on one finger and handed it to Atle Eriksson before he let rip on red-faced Mulle in Lacka Park.
The man whose fiancée was called Ewa Kaludis.
I’d dropped Colonel Darkin on the lawn, but I didn’t think to pick it up. I had a hard time swallowing and wondered if Edmund had given me his strep throat. Berra was standing before me with the same wide stance that he’d had at Lacka Park. He was wearing a white, short-sleeved shirt and his tanned, hairy arms were rippled with muscles and veins. His rough-hewn face was inscrutable; he had one eyebrow cocked, and looked at me like something he happened to have stepped on in the gutter.
“Hi,” I said.
He didn’t reply. His one eyebrow stayed raised, almost up to his hairline, and his jaw was moving slightly. Grinding. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I tried to stare right back at him. No use.
“Where’s your brother?” he said. Without moving his lips.
“Who?” I asked.
How did I come up with such an utterly stupid question? I was probably trying to buy some time. Time to faint, or time for some merciful god or goddess to come to my rescue. To arrive at Gennesaret and carry me off to a desert island in the South Seas for all eternity.
No god appeared and I didn’t faint.
“Your brother,” Berra Albertsson repeated. “Henry. I’ve got a thing or two to say to him.”
“Oh, him,” I said.
“How many brothers do you have?” asked Berra.
“Just one,” I said.
“So where is he?”
“He’s not here,” I said.
“When will he be back?”
“I don’t know. Late.”
“Late?”
“Tonight. Twelve. Or even later. He left a note.”
“Tonight.”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.” He lowered his eyebrow, coughed twice, and spat on the lawn. The loogie landed twenty centimeters from my left foot. Five centimeters from Colonel Darkin.
“You tell him,” he said. “Tell him I’ll be back at one tonight. I’ve got a thing or two to say to him.”
“He might not be here then, either,” I said. “He might be even later.”
“So I’ll wait.”
And with that he left. I watched him go. When he’d disappeared behind the lilac bushes, I looked down at the spit shimmering in the grass.
It’s never going to go away, I thought. That damned loogie is going to be on Gennesaret’s lawn a century from now. It is what it is.
“Who were you talking to?” Edmund asked, sticking his head out of the window. “I was sleeping and heard voices. Who was here?”
Edmund went as pale as a corpse when I told him about my conversation with Berra Albertsson.
He took his glasses off and put them back on again at least ten times and gnashed his teeth, but mostly he looked frightened. Dogged and focused in spite of the fever, but also despairing. This must have been what it was like when he was waiting for his real dad to belt him. He barely said a word as I recounted my conversation with Berra. He wrung his hands every now and then and struggled to swallow, but that was all. He had no idea what we should do.
Not a single one.
“The storm,” he finally said. “I told you. We’ve been waiting for the storm and now it’s here.”
“Goddammit,” I said, because I didn’t know what to say and I felt the need to buck myself up with a few swear words. “Damn it all to hell.”
“Exactly,” said Edmund.
The rain started to fall around 8 p.m. and I kept Edmund company by going to bed just after nine. It was a proper storm with streaks of lightning and thunder claps too close for comfort. It seemed like it would never end.
“Some storms go round and round,” Edmund said. “In Ånger once the thunder and lightning went on for over twelve damn hours in a row. Talk about something that can make you feel real small.”
“How’s the strep?” I asked, because I didn’t want to talk about storms. It was bad enough as it was.
“On the mend, I’m sure,” Edmund concluded after swallowing a few times to see. “I’ll probably be all better by tomorrow.”
Ten minutes later he was sleeping like a log. I turned off the light and lay awake listening to the rain on the roof and the rumbling. The lightning was striking fifteen or thirty seconds before the bangs, so maybe it was like Edmund said: the storm was circling us.
And it did make you feel real small.
I must have fallen asleep, because soon after twelve I woke up. The rain had stopped but there was a spirited wind.
I heard Henry turn on the tape deck downstairs. I think he was talking to someone.
Edmund’s bed was empty.
-
II
-
14
It was Lasse Side-Smile who found the body, and it was Lasse Side-Smile who landed on the front page of Kurren two days in a row. His parents had a cottage in Sjölycke and that’s where Side-Smile spent most of the summer. It was a well-known fact that he was realizing his dream of becoming a competitive cyclist. Like Harry Snell. Or Ove Adamsson. His face ruled out any chance of him becoming a film star or a trumpet player, but nothing was keeping him from being a speed-demon.
He had been in the town’s junior league for a few seasons and was expected to move up to the seniors in a year or so. A up-and-comer, as they say in sports. Side-Smile had all the prerequisites—everyone who knew anything about cycling agreed—and his face was no obstacle.
Given his ambition, Side-Smile took advantage of the summer days for training, and in the small hours of the morning he would take his racing bike out of the shed in Sjölycke and hit the road for a fifty- to sixty-kilometer ride. Or eighty to one hundred if he was on top form—and this was one of tho
se days. Riding the uneven gravel roads wasn’t usually part of his routine because there was a clear and present risk of skidding and flat tires.
But that morning he did. For variety’s sake, I suppose, and there was still the odd race track on gravel at this time, the dawn of the sixties.
He took the road that led east through the woods, toward the Levis’ place, and it turned out to be an especially short spin.
Short and one hell of a shocker, as he later told the reporter from Kurren. Only a few kilometers into the ride, he comes charging down the winding road that led past the parking area we shared with the Lundins. At full speed. Hunched over the handlebars. Sees two parked vehicles. A black VW and a red Volvo PV 1800.
The Volvo makes him hit the brakes so hard he almost lands on his nose in the gravel.
Or rather, what’s next to the Volvo does.
The passenger’s door is open and just below it on the ground is a person lying on their stomach. A man wearing narrow black shoes, thin polyester slacks, and a white short-sleeved shirt. This is what Side-Smile sees when he turns his bike around and backtracks up the hill. He glimpses a striped blazer on the driver’s seat. The man is on his front, but slightly contorted, arms alongside his body. As Side-Smile keeps repeating to the reporters and the photographers: The arms were what made it click.
Something wasn’t right.
A person who’s alive doesn’t lie like that. You can tell at a glance, at least if you have a pair of eyes in your head, and Side-Smile certainly does. It’s about quarter past six and he’s guiding his racer toward this unbelievable sight with great caution.
He sees what he already knows.
The man has a gaping hole in his head, and everything is covered in blood: his hair, his shirt, and the ground on which he lies.
He can’t tell who it is, because of course he doesn’t dare touch the body and turn it over. You’re not supposed to do that, anyway. It’s the police’s job to turn dead bodies over, not Lasse Side-Smile’s.
No, Side-Smile doesn’t identify the man in the clearing; we do. Henry and Edmund and I, because we’re the ones he comes running to, shouting at the top of his lungs.
And it’s we who run with him up the path, and we who stand in a semi-circle around Bertil “Berra” Albertsson, and not one of us says a word.
Not a single one of us. All three of us know it’s Super-Berra, but none of us lets anything slip. Not one sound.
Neither does Lasse Side-Smile. For a full thirty seconds, four people just stand there, staring at a fifth who is no longer a person, and these are the longest thirty seconds of our lives.
Then I check my watch. It’s six twenty-five the morning of July tenth and the Incident is a fact.
When Lasse Side-Smile left to go call the police from the Lundins’, I knew there was something I had to find out, even though my head felt scrambled. I managed to make eye contact with my brother Henry and to mouth the question “Ewa?,” looking in the direction of Gennesaret. I don’t know why I felt like keeping Edmund out of it, but I did. This was between me and my brother. This, whatever it was.
I think Henry understood me, but he didn’t answer. He gave his head a slight shake and lit a Lucky Strike.
I sighed and put my arm around Edmund. He was shivering in the cold morning air, but otherwise, it was just as he’d predicted.
The strep throat had eased during the night.
-
15
The first police car arrived while we were still by the parking spot. Side-Smile had returned—along with Gladys Lundin and a lady about thirty years her junior who was a carbon copy of her. Smaller and paler, she didn’t have a cane yet, but she was valiantly chain-smoking and her breasts were already drooping down toward her belly button.
“That’s how that cookie crumbled,” was Gladys’s first comment. “Lucky none of the men are home, or the cops would march right over and pick them up.”
Otherwise, there weren’t many comments floating around. Super-Berra was where he was on the gravel, but no one seemed to want to take a closer look. We spread out in a protective semi-circle of sorts, with our backs turned to the Incident, and when the black-and-white Amazon turned up with one plain-clothes and three uniformed policemen, we had to give them our names and then trudge home and sit tight.
“Goddamn,” said Edmund when we were back in our room. “That’s all I can say. Goddamn.”
I realized I was feeling properly sick and considered going into the woods and sticking a finger down my throat, but the waves of nausea retreated. I shut my eyes and hoped for a couple hours’ sleep, but that was wishful thinking. From the ground floor, I heard Henry on the Facit; it was strange that he’d be writing at a time like this, and indeed the clatter stopped after a few minutes.
“Hey, Erik,” said Edmund.
“Yes?” I said.
“Let’s not talk about it now. I can’t hack it.”
“All right,” I said. “Best we get some shut-eye first.”
“He’s dead,” Edmund said anyway. “Can you believe the bastard is dead?”
“Yes,” I said. “Berra Albertsson is dead.”
The detective arrived around nine and was called Lindström. He was wearing a pale suit and a bow tie, and, if it wasn’t for his black, slicked-back hair, he might have looked like Tam Sventon, Private Detective.
One by one, he greeted us, by shaking our hands and telling each of us his name, Detective Superintendent Verner Lindström. He smelled faintly of cologne and spoke slowly and thoughtfully, as if he were making an effort to discard any unnecessary and frivolous words before saying what he wanted to say. He exuded a certain confidence, and I could tell he wasn’t to be toyed with.
Naturally, he started with Henry. They locked themselves away in the kitchen and as Edmund and I wandered around the house we could see them sitting in there at the table covered with the checked wax cloth, almost like two chess players.
Because we didn’t really know what to do with ourselves, we went up to the clearing to have a look.
Four other cars had arrived at the scene; it had been roped off and the black-and-yellow signs announced that a crime scene investigation was under way and it was forbidden for unauthorized persons to cross the police line. Edmund explained to a cocky constable that we were the ones who’d found the body—well, not counting Lasse Side-Smile—but that didn’t help. We had no business being there. Berra Albertsson’s body had been removed and thick chalk lines had been traced around where it had lain.
Several men in green overalls were crawling in and around the red Volvo. They wore thin gloves, had brushes and magnifying glasses. Suddenly, the scene felt so unreal I had to pinch myself in the arm to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Edmund noticed what I was doing and shook his head gravely.
“It won’t help,” he stated. “Just accept you’re awake, pal.”
People were milling around outside the barrier, but not a lot. I saw Side-Smile and his dad, the old Levi couple and a few folks from the Sjölycke area. As well as a couple of journalists and a photographer.
But not a lot, as I said. The world probably didn’t yet know that the handball legend Berra Albertsson was dead. You could almost still tell yourself nothing had happened.
This feeling didn’t last long. The next thing I noticed was that Killer was inside the police line and that for some reason it gave me the shivers.
Yes, I must’ve been awake this whole time.
When we arrived back at Gennesaret, Henry’s interrogation was finished. It was Edmund’s and my turn to sit at the kitchen table with Detective Lindström. Before we went inside I thought about when Berra and I had talked out on the lawn not twenty-four hours ago.
“I’m just going to check on something,” I said to Edmund and left him for a few seconds.
Of course. There wasn’t even a trace
of the loogie left.
“As you know, there has been a serious incident,” the detective began. “It’s important that everyone’s statement is as accurate as possible so that we can sort this out. No guessing. No lies. Is that clear?”
Edmund and I nodded.
“Your names, please.”
We gave them.
“And you’re living here this summer?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Together with Henry Wassman, who is also your brother?”
“Yes.”
“What time did you go to bed last night?”
Edmund explained that he had gone to bed at eight thirty on account of his strep throat. I said I was in bed about half an hour later.
Detective Lindström didn’t have a tape recorder, but using a blue ballpoint pen he wrote down every word we said in a notepad that was in front of him on the table. He kept one arm bent around the pad, so it was impossible to read his writing. You could tell it wasn’t his first time questioning someone, and my respect for him grew.
“And what time did you fall asleep, approximately?”
“At once,” explained Edmund.
I hesitated. “Ten, I think.”
“Was either of you awake later in the night?”
Edmund wrinkled his forehead and I let him answer first.
“I went out for a pee,” he said.
“At what time?”
“No idea,” said Edmund. “Not a clue.”
“And you didn’t notice anything unusual at that time?”
“No,” said Edmund. “Nothing.”
“Was it raining?”
Edmund thought about it.
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t raining.”
Detective Lindström made a note.
“And you?” he said, turning to me. “Were you awake at any point during the night?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“Not at all?”
The Summer of Kim Novak Page 11