‘The days go by, and with every day it gets harder.’
‘Poverty and disgrace.’
‘A nice combination.’
For a while I follow her gaze out into the night, then I take out Bruntell’s photograph from my breast pocket and slide it across the table. Elin tears her gaze away from the window and looks down at it, her eyes all shiny with tears.
‘Who are those two?’
‘I’ve asked around. Nothing.’
‘And?’
‘It seems it was taken precisely when your mother was being carried out of the laundry. You see how that woman’s pointing?’
‘Christ Almighty. We have to—’
‘We’ll never be able to find them.’
Elin’s cheeks are flaming red.
‘You must have taken a punch too many.’
‘The hell’s that supposed to mean?’
‘God damn it, Harry. Sometimes you can’t even see it when you’re looking right at it. Like today, for example.’
A tear is running down Elin’s cheek. Angrily she wipes it off with the back of her hand, then stands up so violently that the back of the chair is thrown into the wall behind her. She snatches up the photograph and storms out into the hall.
‘Elin?’ I slap the table so hard that the plate jumps into the air. ‘What the bleeding hell is going on?’
I hear the door opening and then slamming behind her. I push back my chair and shuffle into the hall. She remembered to take her shoes and coat but her hat is still hanging on a hook.
‘Well, she’s quick off the mark, anyway.’
I go back into the kitchen and half-fill the bathtub with cold water from the tap, then put it down on the floor and top it off with the contents of the saucepan.
I have to rip the blood-blackened undershirt off my skin. A couple of the stitches have opened up; the wound across my ribs yawns like the gills of a freshly caught perch. Nothing that a new plaster and a tub of Sister Ella’s Ointment can’t fix. I remove the rest of my clothes and open another pilsner, then throw a bar of soap into the water and step into it myself. The wound stings even when I keep it above the water but the warmth soothes my sore muscles. I’ll be having an early night tonight.
I put the beer bottle on the floor and soap my body. When Doughboy comes out, I’ll take him to the Central Baths. I go there myself for a thorough clean now and then. Of course, there are other reasons to go there too, and I’m not talking about their twenty-five-öre cups of hot soup: ‘Shapely youths, well-off gentlemen. And then Harry Kvist, of course, the cigar shop owner and boxing trainer.’
I rinse myself off as well as I can and have another few pulls at the beer. The water is murky with soap, prison dirt and blood. I take the scrubbing brush and run it across my nine remaining fingernails. The stub of my little finger tingles.
Suddenly I hear the front door open and close. I flinch, sending water sloshing over the edge of the tub. A pair of heels click on the floor and Elin comes back into the kitchen. Her eyes open wide when she sees me sitting there in the tub like a humiliated dog. I bend forward and wrap my arms around myself to hide my knife wound. Elin slaps the photograph down on the draining board. She glares out through the window over my head.
‘I may be a cast-off from a sodding orphanage who didn’t get very many years of schooling, but that doesn’t mean I’m a fucking moron.’
‘Pardon me?’
One hell of a woman for cursing, is Elin. I snatch up a towel and drape it over the tub. Elin turns her fat posterior towards me, picks up the poker and gives the fire in the grate a good raking. Her suspender belt is showing through the fabric of her green dress. There’s a clanking of metal against metal. A couple of jaded trumpet blasts can be heard from next door. She continues in a calmer voice: ‘I’ve always had my head screwed on. If you have a jug of some kind, I can help you rinse out that half-kilo of pomade you’ve got in your hair.’
‘There on the wall.’
‘This one?’
I nod and adjust the towel.
‘What do you mean? Head screwed on?’
The pipes sigh as Elin fills the jug with water.
‘Didn’t you notice the way they were dressed?’
‘In the photograph?’
Elin circles me and stands behind the tub.
‘Look up.’
‘What do you mean by—’
The cold water hits me right in the face, running through my beard stubble, down my neck and over the wound. I clench my jaw until I can hear a crunching sound in my head.
Its iciness nips at my skin.
‘Did you show Lundin the photograph?’
‘What would that half-blind twit have to say about it?’
‘Only that the couple are known as the Rymans.’
‘The Rymans. I’ll be damned.’
‘You have dirt behind your ears. They live on Vattugatan.’
‘How do you know all this?’
Elin rubs a finger against the ridge behind my ear. She slides her hand down and starts to knead my neck. Something releases there, with a cracking sound. Elin lets go and before long another spout of cold water comes down over the top of my head. I splutter and cough. Elin grabs my scalp and starts massaging it.
‘They’re in mourning: in other words, they’re clients of Lundin’s. A couple of months ago he buried Mrs Ryman’s old father. Mister Ryman is a postman, and his wife works in Klarahallen. We can find them.’
‘I’ll be damned.’
MONDAY 25 NOVEMBER
Two days to go. The kitchen window is wide open, I’m shaking with cold as I crawl about with a bucket of soapy water, scouring the floorboards with a brush. My damp knees are aching but I only have a little bit left to do. I straighten my back and bend down again, keeping one of my eyes clamped shut against the smoke, and grunting when ash from my cigar tumbles over the clean floor. The eleven chimes from St Stefan’s Church break through the sound of my scrubbing and, before long, the bells of Johannes join them from the south. On the eighth chime I put one foot on the floor and on the ninth I stand up, taking the cigar out of my mouth: ‘Harry Kvist in a magnificent comeback.’
I mop up the remaining water with a rag and wring it out over the bucket. My cracked cuticles sting. I have to get myself down to the Toad, and make arrangements for my bare-knuckle fights. Only a few more weeks till the first dust-up. I should invite Hasse, the shoeshine boy, to show him how it’s done. No one has ever knocked me down.
‘Never taken a count.’
Maybe I should start going for runs, work on my fitness a bit. Until I knew better I thought it would be enough to take Dixie out for long walks, but she limps along so slowly that it’s impossible to keep up a decent pace without strangling her.
I shake the rug out of the window. Dust, dog hair and crumbs rain down into the courtyard. I whip it up and down a couple of times, making a cracking sound. A black alley cat darts off, her belly dragging against the ground. A smell of fried herring wafts on the wind from some neighbour’s kitchen.
I lay out the rug on the floor and admire my handiwork. Doughboy shouldn’t lack for anything. It’s been six months since he was allowed to move into the cell next to mine. I kept my eye on him from the moment I first saw him, and I couldn’t have done otherwise – a beautiful lad like that.
It was less than a week before the kid started running errands from the kitchen staff to a gang of bootleggers on the East Wing. After a few days of running back and forth with corn gruel – which can be fermented with yeast – he started trying to sneak a share of the goods for himself. If I hadn’t stepped in at that point and taken him under my wing, he would have found himself in trouble.
When love entered the picture it felt as natural as putting my left foot forward in the boxing ring. We spent the nights in an ecstasy of desire, moulding one another according to our passions, but after two weeks there was no longer any need for this: each of us knew exactly what we wanted. The last six months
, which are usually so slow and tedious, flew by.
Every morning I woke with joy in my breast, my blood warm, a silky smooth feeling in my heart. Soon after the debacle of the mashing operation, he started making rat traps using shoe soles from the cobbler’s workshop and steel springs, which he sold to the other prisoners. There’s no doubt about it, the lad knows what he’s about, and I’m sure he’ll be handy around the cigar shop.
I walk out of the kitchen, lift the mattress and pick up a pair of trousers which have been in the press to sharpen up the creases. I make the bed with clean linen. There’s a growing mountain of dirty laundry. Christ knows what I’ll do with my dirty laundry now that Beda’s gone west. I’ll have to find a new washerwoman. The main thing is that it’s clean and tidy here for Doughboy when he’s released in two days’ time. That is, if I dare trust him and his promises.
Unfortunately you can’t always trust smooth-cheeked cabin boys. The same old story repeated itself to damnation during my years at sea: first I’d sit with one of them, wasting time and money for a half-eternity in some dingy drinking hole in a port somewhere; then we’d set up a meeting for later on in some dark corner or alleyway, but they’d rarely show up as agreed; and when they did some of them would make the mistake of trying to rob me. The first few times I set to worrying, imagining they’d been shanghaied or thrown in jail. I’d spend hours looking for them in bars and whorehouses, but it wasn’t long before I started wising up and would slope off back to my ship instead, cursing under my breath.
But there ought to be a difference between a couple of hours propping up a bar and several months in the slammer. We were able to talk when the screws weren’t listening; we told each other all there was to tell. I know everything about Doughboy: I know about his drunken father and his dead sister looking down on him from heaven. In a way he reminds me of myself when I was young, although in my case it was my twin brother that died, and I never saw hide nor hair of my father, drunk or sober.
‘He’ll probably keep his promises. Where else would he go?’
I speak these words to myself to soothe my uncertainty. I take the hanger with Doughboy’s serge suit from the kitchen door handle. It’s black with wide lapels and it smells spanking new. I remove a couple of hairs from the shiny cloth, then hang it up again and run my hand over it.
The soot-speckled windows could do with a going-over but that will have to be done in the spring, after I’ve removed the inside windows so they can be opened. Maybe we can give each other a hand with it. I put on my hat and go downstairs to give Lundin a lift to the bank.
The stairwell smells of lunchtime. I grip hold of the old banister, polished smooth by trouser seats and coarse working hands. On the way down I caress the glistening wood with my scarred hand.
‘With this twelve hundred today, you’ll owe me three thousand, one hundred and thirty-six kronor and fifty öre.’
‘It’s been worse.’
I steer the hearse down Birger Jarlsgatan. Outside the pawnbrokers on Norrlandsgatan, the Monday queue stretches a good way along the street, exposed to the cutting wind. The sky hangs like a lead roof over the city. Most of the women have tied shawls tightly around their heads. Someone has already opened an umbrella, even though it hasn’t started raining yet. Next Friday, when it’s time to get their rags out of hock with the old man’s pay packet, they’ll all see each other again. They stand about nattering, most of them seem to be acquainted. I take my eyes off them and change down a gear.
Lundin gets out his nickel-plated snuff tin and taps it with his finger.
‘If your figures add up, my brother, you’ll have to pay off the debt in weekly instalments of around two hundred and eighty kronor. And after that you’ll be paying me about sixteen kronor a day.’
‘For all eternity?’
‘Amen.’
I take a left into Stureplan. We pass the Hotel Anglais, and the wheels thump against the double tram tracks. A newly made coffin, required for the following day, thumps around in the back.
In the middle of the triangular plaza, a customer is sitting in a hut, having his shoes polished. That would be a good spot for my boxing talent from outside the City Library. A hut of his own to lock up at night. I glance at Lundin, who’s kneading himself a decent wad of tobacco with a shaky left hand. He shoves it under his lip.
‘Maybe we should get it all down on paper?’
‘By God, yes, of course we should. You pick up the funds this evening and I’ll arrange it. Have you spoken with the widow again?’
‘Haven’t had time.’
‘But it’s yours if you want it? The shop?’
‘Got till Wednesday morning.’
Lundin rearranges the snuff in his mouth with his tongue: ‘So the Devil got you in order at long last. Who would have thought it?’
I brake to let two elegant youths in brushed top hats cross the road in front of the Royal Dramatic Theatre. They’ve carefully done up all the buttons of their overcoats; I can’t tell if they’re wearing waistcoats.
Birger Jarlsgatan merges into Nybroplan. Crates, kegs and piles of birch wood fill the quays. Some of it’s being loaded onto ships, some of it’s coming off. Stevedores are running up and down the gangplanks. A sack of potatoes or brown beans has split and scattered its contents over the muddy paving stones of the quay. A couple of lads with pale noses are crawling about on all fours, trying to salvage what they can. Lundin seems to have dozed off.
I turn right and then left where a faded metal sign nailed into a façade announces the beginning of Kungsträdgårdsgatan. In the summer months, Kungsträdgården with its trees and wooden benches is the cauldron in which much of the city’s gossip is both boiled and salted; I often sit there in the sun, feasting my eyes on bare-breasted sailors walking under the trees with a swing in their step. Now it is almost deserted here apart from a couple of loud-mouthed lasses, who perhaps haven’t understood that the weekend is over yet, stumbling about in the slight shadows of the lime trees.
A tall lad, hanging about outside the bank, lets his tongue whip across a cigarette paper. I glance at him as I brake. He’s wearing plus fours, with a big beret on his head. Possibly a waiter with the Monday off. He leans nonchalantly against the wall, one of his boot soles also resting against it. I hold my breath; there’s a tickling sensation in my crotch immediately followed by a mouldering guilt.
Doughboy just cannot get out of prison quick enough. I need the angular outline of a bloke in my bed as soon as possible.
Lundin wakes up with a start, coughing. He nods at the fuel gauge, I nod back at him, acknowledging that I will have to fill up.
‘Don’t you bloody forget now, the automobile has to be back for the funeral tomorrow morning, nine o’clock at the latest.’
He peers up at the flint-grey sky, steps out into the traffic and hurries towards the bank. I release the clutch and continue on my way, to pick up Elin. We’re on the trail of the Rymans. The steering wheel shudders as the engine splutters and chokes, but I press the accelerator and pick up speed, passing the statue of Charles XII at the southernmost end of the park. He’s pointing stoically towards the Russians, but the pigeons have gone for the warrior king in a big way and covered him in shit.
I stifle a yawn. The shoulder holster with the Husqvarna chafes against my ribs. I adjust it. On the corner of the Norr Bridge stands a lone angler with his line in the water, and a faded leather cap on his head. The skin of his creased face hangs loosely like the folds of a turkey’s throat. I don’t know if I’ve seen him before or if I am having some sort of dark premonition. I shudder in my seat and turn right by Gustav Adolf’s Square to make my way back to Sibirien and Standards.
I’ve turned up Sveavägen and I’m just nearing the columns of the Handels High School when I catch sight of a back that I feel I recognise. I step on the brakes, move to the kerb and crawl along behind the kid. Damn, surely that’s him? The worn jacket, the stained beret and the shiniest boots in town. He’s limping
, but he’s running all the same, even if the pace leaves something to be desired.
I smile to myself, thinking of my future as a boxing trainer. It’s been almost fifteen years since I last set foot in a boxing club. Maybe they’ve forgotten all about me by now. I pull up alongside the shoeshiner. He’s sweating, his head hanging low between his shoulders, but he keeps pushing himself on.
I’m just about to wind down the window and encourage him to keep it up for the last hundred metres, when Hasse looks up at his finish line. He sucks in his lower lip and picks up speed, his cheap boots clattering against the pavement. I remember my glory days, pull away and leave him behind. If I had strength enough to knock out one well-prepared opponent after another back in those days, then surely I can also squeeze a bit of information out of a postman like Ryman?
The great windows of Saluhallen Market let in the washed-out late-autumn sunlight, illuminating the lunchtime rush. Business is brisk after the morning’s wholesaling, and everywhere you can see women bargaining for flowers and root vegetables. From time to time the whistles of the steam trains can be heard through chattering voices, pulling into and leaving Central Station. The massive siding is only a stone’s throw to the north.
Mrs Ryman brushes off discarded leaves and stalks from her stall with her slim hand. Her greyish apron is stained with soil. She’s thrown a man’s jacket with a frayed collar over her shoulders. Her features are unmoving, frozen on her face. Maybe it’s the loss of her father that’s turned her to stone.
Elin and I are inside the market’s own Restaurant NORMA, watching her through the window. We sit next to each other, so we have a clear view. The café is half-full of people eating their lunch. Elin slurps her coffee without taking her eyes off the florist. Mrs Ryman sits behind the table, her hands clasped in her lap.
‘Stina works in the fish market next door.’
Elin’s cup clinks as she puts it back on the saucer. I tear my eyes away from Mrs Ryman. Elin is wearing a navy-blue casual dress. A fashionable colour, she claims. Her shoes are brown, like the leather gloves lying on the table.
Down for the Count Page 18
