by Kepler, Lars
A woman’s screams cut through the walls.
The lift doors close behind Saga. The light shrinks to a narrow strip, then vanishes altogether.
Suddenly the darkened ward is visible through the door.
An old man is standing looking at her with his nose pressed against the glass. When she meets his gaze, he turns and hurries away.
She cautiously opens the door, and makes sure that it shuts behind her.
The old man is dragging a tube along the floor behind him.
The subdued lighting reflects off the grey linoleum. A black handrail runs along one wall.
One of the doors on the left is open.
Saga moves forward slowly, trying to see if there’s anyone hiding behind the door.
The row of sprinklers in the ceiling cast shadows that look like spiked flowers.
She’s getting closer to the open door, but just before she gets there it slams shut with a bang.
A man is talking with a put-on voice, and it sounds like he’s rearranging the furniture.
The next door is also open.
She approaches it warily, each step revealing more of the small lobby, bathroom door, and part of the flowery wallpaper.
A thin woman is sitting asleep in a wheelchair in the middle of the room. She has a blue-black mark on the back of one hand from a cannula.
Someone’s giggling further along the corridor.
Saga moves on slowly, glancing at the emergency exit, and noting that the door opens outwards.
She knows that Jurek is much stronger than her.
She’s spent countless hours in the gym and on shooting ranges.
Jurek’s fitness comes solely from combat situations, where he was forced to kill to survive.
She steps over a crutch lying on the floor and carries on along the corridor.
There are splashes of red-brown liquid on the scratched skirting board and textured wallpaper.
The lift whirrs into motion behind her.
With silent steps she reaches the unlit staff room. She can hear a bleeping sound, some sort of alarm.
‘Hello?’ Saga says tentatively, and walks through the doorway.
Faint light is coming from one side, illuminating a dining table with a Christmas cloth and a bowl of oranges.
She feels a chill rush of adrenalin when she catches sight of the blood that has been trodden across the floor in the L-shaped kitchen.
The fridge is open, that’s where the alarm is coming from.
A pool of blood leads off to the side.
Saga looks at her own reflection in the dark window, and the empty doorway out into the corridor.
She turns the corner and sees a middle-aged woman lying on the floor behind an overturned chair.
The glow from the fridge doesn’t reach the woman’s face, but Saga can see her dark blue trousers and T-shirt.
Her laminated name-badge glints on her chest.
Saga moves closer and sees that one of the woman’s trouser legs has ridden up. Her shin has been snapped in two, the jagged bone is sticking through the blood-stained nylon of her socks.
Her head is in darkness, but as Saga moves closer she discovers that her nose and the entire middle of her face have been smashed in.
The linoleum floor beneath her is covered in blood.
The woman’s upper jaw and nose cavity have been pushed back into her skull, leaving her lower teeth bare.
Saga turns and feels her legs shaking as she walks back out into the corridor.
She opens the cabinet on the wall and takes out the heavy fire-extinguisher so that she has some sort of weapon.
From behind one door comes a sound like a child crying, but it must be one of the patients, a senile woman with a high voice.
Saga reaches the dayroom, with an electric Advent candelabra in the window. A large man is sitting on the sofa with his face turned towards the switched-off television.
‘You can stop right there and put your hands up towards the ceiling,’ he says in a low voice.
She puts the fire-extinguisher down on the floor as he stands up and turns towards her. There’s no doubt that he’s the man known as the Beaver.
He’s big, bigger than she’d expected. He’s holding a saw in one hand, an ordinary handsaw with a rusty blade.
The Beaver is wearing a crumpled black raincoat, and the pearl earrings are swaying from his earlobes.
‘Saga Bauer?’ the Beaver says.
He blows his cheeks out, drops the saw on the floor and starts to walk towards her. The look in his narrow eyes is sad and serious.
‘I’m going to check you for weapons, and I want you to stand completely still,’ he says in a dark voice.
‘I assumed I should come unarmed,’ Saga says.
He stops behind her and starts to run his big hands over her neck, under her arms, down her chest, stomach and back.
‘This is an intimate situation, and I’m not particularly comfortable with it either,’ he explains as he starts to feel between her legs and buttocks.
‘Perhaps that’ll do now,’ she says.
Without answering he carries on down her thighs and shins, then stands up and checks her hair, before finally asking her to open her mouth and checking inside with the light on his phone.
‘Jurek told me not to bother with the other bodily orifices,’ he says.
‘I’m not armed,’ she repeats.
‘And you won’t be needing this,’ he says, picking the fire-extinguisher up with one hand.
He starts to walk and she follows him along the corridor. When he leans forwards to put the fire-extinguisher down Saga sees that he has a fat wallet in his back pocket.
Further down the corridor an old woman is walking along with a rollator. She stops at every door, tugs at the handle, crying that she’s going to beat all the children.
The Beaver shows Saga into a dark room that smells of pipe tobacco and disinfectant hand-gel.
‘Jurek will be here shortly,’ he says, switching the light on.
‘Is he your boss?’ Saga asks.
‘He’s more like a strict older brother, I do whatever he tells me to.’
Saga walks past the small kitchen area and discovers that there’s an old man lying in the bed crying. He has grey hair, thin arms, and a washed-out nightshirt. A large plaster is hanging loosely from his cheek.
‘Where is everyone?’ he sobs. ‘I’ve been waiting and waiting, but where are Louise and the boys, I’m so alone …’
‘Stop whining, Einar,’ the Beaver says.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ the old man says, and presses his lips together.
The Beaver takes his black raincoat off, crumples it up and pushes it behind the radiator.
She thinks about the recording of him shooting a man in Belarus, and the trail of frenzied destruction in the bar on Regeringsgatan.
‘I know how I look, but I’m more intelligent than most – 170 on the Wechsler scale.’
‘Everyone’s different,’ Saga says warily.
The Beaver squints at her, then smiles, revealing his crooked front teeth.
‘But I’m unique,’ he says.
‘Would you care to elaborate?’
‘If you think you’d understand.’
‘Try me.’
‘I have an allele, a variant gene that means I can incorporate specific mutations, like IVF, only naturally … I was born with a sort of sixth sense.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The simple version is that it’s on the precognition spectrum … Most people don’t believe me when I mention it – not that that matters. The truth is that I have an ability, I know who’s going to die first almost every time I enter a room.’
‘You know who’s going to die first?’
‘Yes,’ he replies seriously.
57
The Beaver purses his lips and closes his eyes, as if he’s trying to see into the future to see which person in the room is going to die first. A few seconds
later he opens his eyes and nods sadly.
‘Einar,’ he replies, then leans his head back in a silent laugh.
When the old man hears his name his upper body starts to rock catatonically as he begins to whimper again.
‘Where are you? Louise? I’m waiting and waiting …’
The Beaver sighs, walks over and presses the old man’s mouth so hard that blood starts to run down his chin, then he punches him, making his head bounce against the wall.
‘He’s just senile,’ Saga says.
The Beaver wipes his hand on his trousers and walks back to Saga. Einar is sobbing quietly in his bed, asking in a bewildered voice after Louise and the boys.
‘Can you guess why I wear my pearls?’ he asks.
‘As a tribute to an important person in your life,’ she replies.
‘Who?’
‘Will you tell me where my dad is if I guess right?’
The door opens and Jurek Walter walks in, wearing the usual check shirt, labourer’s trousers and heavy shoes.
Without so much as looking at them he goes over to the kitchen area and pours a glass of water. His prosthetic hits the counter with a dull clang as he turns the tap off.
‘Isn’t this place unnecessarily risky?’ Saga asks. ‘Why don’t you live in your own place?’
Jurek drinks the water, then rinses the glass.
‘I haven’t got a home,’ he says.
‘I think you’ve got a house,’ Saga goes on. ‘It’s probably not completely isolated, seeing as you seem to think it would be a risk taking the Beaver there.’
‘A house?’ Jurek repeats in a low voice, turning his pale eyes on her.
‘Your early childhood was spent in Leninsk,’ she says. ‘Near the cosmodrome. Your name was Roman, and you lived in a house with your brother Igor and your father.’
‘Yes, well done,’ Jurek says drily. ‘I guessed it was by tracking my father’s movements that Joona Linna found the gravel pit.’
He looks down at the floor and tries to adjust the straps of the prosthesis.
‘But here in Sweden … why didn’t your brother live with you?’ Saga goes on.
‘He wanted to live at the quarry. He needed to be near Father’s things, the furniture he recognised – I suppose some places have a sort of magnetic attraction that keeps you there.’
The Beaver goes over behind Jurek and tries to adjust the straps under his shirt. The prosthesis seems have twisted slightly and he’s trying to loosen it.
‘Just take it off,’ Jurek says curtly.
With a calm smile the Beaver starts to undo the straps across Jurek’s back.
‘A prosthesis never obeys the way you want it to,’ the Beaver explains to Saga. ‘It’s almost as if the power relationship is reversed when you start to adapt to the limitations of the prosthesis.’
He rolls Jurek’s flannel shirt up, gently releases the arm’s fixture, and pulls it out from the sleeve along with the straps.
Saga catches a glimpse of the end of the stump before the shirt falls back into place. It’s very high up the arm, not far below the shoulder. Cornelia has stretched the skin over the stump and made sure the stitches and sutures were on the inside of the arm.
The Beaver puts the prosthesis in the sink and ties a knot in the loose sleeve of Jurek’s shirt.
‘You know there are more modern prostheses?’ Saga says.
‘I don’t really miss the arm anyway,’ Jurek replies. ‘It’s just a cosmetic issue, an attempt not to attract attention.’
Saga looks at the blood-stained plastic hand sticking out of the sink, and the sand trickling from the cup.
‘Why did you put Cornelia’s brother in a grave?’ she asks.
‘Cornelia was threatening to commit suicide, so I took her to the island and made her watch while I buried him.’
‘But it didn’t work,’ Saga says.
Jurek makes a resigned gesture with his hand, then takes hold of the knot in the other sleeve.
‘I’d like to have kept her,’ he says. ‘But when she realised I’d tracked her daughter down in Fort Lauderdale she hanged herself … she thought that would save her daughter, but obviously it hasn’t.’
‘You’re really not interested in the killings though,’ she says hoarsely.
Those pale eyes focus on her once more, and she holds his gaze without blinking.
‘That’s a good observation,’ Jurek says.
The Beaver takes out a frying pan and puts it on the hotplate, then gets eggs, cheese, and bacon from Einar’s fridge.
‘I don’t even think you wanted to kill me before, like you mentioned the last time we met,’ Saga says, with a feeling of taking a leap in the dark.
‘Perhaps not,’ he replies. ‘Perhaps that’s the way it is with sirens. You don’t want them to die – and that’s what makes them so dangerous. You know they’re going to ruin everything, but the thought that they might disappear is simultaneously unbearable.’
The Beaver turns on the extractor fan above the stove, then starts to melt some butter in the pan.
‘Let’s go to the dayroom,’ Jurek says.
They leave the Beaver cooking and go out into the corridor. Jurek pushes a wheelchair out of the way with no trace of urgency.
‘I remember what you said about the first times you killed anyone,’ Saga says as they walk.
‘Is that so?’
‘You said it was strange … like eating something you didn’t think was edible.’
‘Yes.’
‘So how is it now?’
‘Like physical labour.’
‘And it never felt good?’ Saga says tentatively.
‘Oh, yes.’
A woman is screaming so hard behind one of the doors that her voice breaks.
‘That’s hard to imagine,’ Saga says.
‘“Good” might not be the right word, but the first time I killed anyone after Father’s suicide … it felt calming, like when you’ve solved a complicated riddle … I hung him up on a spike and told him why it was happening.’
‘So that was when you explained the way you saw things to him … about how you were going to restore order or however you want to put it,’ Saga says as they pass the fire-extinguisher on the floor.
Jurek doesn’t answer.
They reach the dayroom where the Beaver was waiting for her when she first arrived.
An old woman is standing on the other side of the sofa, poking her stick at the floor in front of her, muttering something, then starting the process all over again.
Jurek gestures to a table where there’s a small portable laptop. They walk round the dark aquarium and sit down opposite each other. Jurek’s empty shirtsleeve ends up on the table and he brushes it off with his right hand.
Saga looks over at the old woman behind the sofa and swallows hard. From this angle she can see that she’s poking at a severed head with her stick. The woman doesn’t seem to understand what’s on the floor in front of her but is still anxious, as if she can’t quite put her finger on what’s wrong, and somehow imagines she can put it right with her stick.
The slowly rolling head belongs to a man in his thirties with a neat black beard. His glasses have fallen off and are lying in the pool of blood.
58
Saga looks away from the senile old woman and can hear the sound of her own breathing. She looks at the dark aquarium and thinks that she can handle this meeting, provided she remains calm.
‘Hasn’t it ever felt good for you?’ Jurek asks.
‘Only once – when I shot you,’ she replies, looking him straight in the eye.
‘I like that,’ Jurek says.
‘Because you tricked me into thinking I’d killed my own mother,’ she goes on, but regrets it immediately.
She doesn’t want to talk about her mother.
She never wants to talk about her, it doesn’t do her any good.
The old woman catches hold of the glasses with her stick and backs away, leaving a t
rail of blood after them. She stops and looks over towards the door, mutters something to herself, seems to forget about the glasses and starts to walk towards the corridor.
‘I assumed you did that intentionally,’ Jurek says, leaning back in his chair. ‘It would have been perfectly natural, but I was wrong.’
‘Yes.’
‘I know you were only eight years old,’ he goes on. ‘And, in purely legal terms, you had no responsibility for her, but obviously you could have saved her, that’s always an option.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Saga says, feeling the weight of each breath.
‘I don’t know anything about you, I’m not claiming that, but I assume you went to school like all Swedish children.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you saying that no one noticed anything? That no one noticed that you sometimes hadn’t slept for days, that you came to school with bruises on your face and—’
‘Mum never hit me,’ she interrupts, then purses her lips.
‘She was fairly heavy-handed, though? You said you never wanted to take your jacket off because you were ashamed of all the bruises.’
Saga tries to smile wearily, in an attempt to hide how agitated she feels. Jurek takes nourishment from other people’s darkness.
He thinks he can shock her, get her off balance with his cruelty, but she’s already thought all these things, that’s why she keeps that door firmly closed.
‘Mum never hit me,’ she says in a calmer voice.
‘I didn’t say she did. You survived, it was OK, but that gave you a chance to save her,’ he goes on, wiping his hand on the front of his check shirt.
‘I understand what you’re doing,’ Saga says.
‘All you had to do to save her was tell someone about your situation,’ Jurek says slowly. ‘But for some reason you thought that would be disloyal. And that was what killed your mother.’
‘You don’t know anything,’ Saga says.
Her lips are dry, and when she moistens them she can feel her mouth trembling.
He can’t know anything, but she remembers the morning when she had been awake for three days and her mum felt better and made pancakes for breakfast. Before Saga went to school, her mum made her promise not to say anything about what had happened that night.
