by Lars Kepler
“You know both of them well, so—”
“No, I don’t. It would be a big risk,” she said. “Perhaps, though … I’d need a few hours, maybe three hours, and then I might risk the Tartini tomorrow.”
“You shouldn’t do it just because your father thinks—”
“But he’s right.”
“No, he’s not,” Axel said. He began to roll a joint.
“I know the easy piece well,” she said. “But it might not be on a high enough level. It all depends on what you and Shiro Sasaki pick.”
“You shouldn’t think like that.”
“How am I supposed to think? You’ve never let me see you practise even once. What are you planning to play—have you even picked out a piece?”
“The Ravel,” he answered.
“The Ravel? Without even practising?”
She laughed out loud.
“No, seriously, which piece?” she asked.
“Ravel’s Tzigane—and that’s the truth.”
“I’m sorry, Axel, but that’s a crazy choice. You know that yourself. It’s too complicated, too quick, too reckless, and—”
“I’m going to play like Perlman, but without being in a hurry … because the piece shouldn’t be rushed.”
“Axel, it’s supposed to be allegro,” she said with a smile.
“Yes, for the hare that’s being chased … but for the wolf, it should go a bit more slowly.”
She gave him an exhausted look.
“Where did you read that?”
“Attribution”—he waved the joint—“Paganini.”
“Well, then, I only have to worry about our Japanese competitor,” she said as she tucked the violin back underneath her chin. “Since you never practise, you’ll never be able to play the Tzigane.”
“It’s not as hard as people say,” he replied as he lit the joint.
“No, indeed.” She smiled as she started to play again.
After a while, she stopped and looked levelly at Axel.
“You’re really going to play the Ravel?”
“Yep.”
She was serious. “Have you lied to me and been practising all this time? Maybe for four years? And not even telling me? Or what?”
“I decided this minute—the minute you asked.”
She laughed. “How can you be such an idiot?”
“I don’t care if I come in last,” he said as he stretched out on the sofa.
“I care,” she said simply.
“I know, but there’ll be other chances.”
“Not for me.”
She started to play the Tartini. It was better, but she stopped. She repeated the complicated passage again and then once more.
Axel clapped his hands and then he put David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars on the record player. He put the needle over the LP and as the music started, he lay down, closed his eyes, and began to sing along:
Ziggy really sang, screwed up eyes and screwed down hairdo.
Like some cat from Japan, he could lick ’em by smiling.
He could leave ’em to hang.
Greta hesitated, put down her violin, walked over to him, and took the joint from his hand. She took a toke, another one, coughed, and handed it back.
“How can anyone be as dumb as you?” she asked as she touched his lips.
She bent over and wanted to kiss him on the lips, but her aim was off and she touched his cheek instead. She whispered “Sorry” and then kissed him again. They kept their lips together, searching and seeking. He drew off her cardigan and her hair sparked from static electricity. He received a little charge when he touched her cheek and snatched his hand back. They smiled nervously at each other and then they kissed again. He unbuttoned her white, stiffly ironed blouse and felt her tiny breasts through her simple bra. She helped him take off his T-shirt. Her long, lustrous hair smelled like the fresh air of snow and winter, but her body was as warm as newly baked bread.
They moved into his bedroom and sank deeply onto his bed. Her hands trembled as she unzipped and pulled off her skirt, and for a moment it seemed she would pull off her panties at the same time, but that’s not what she had intended, and her hands kept them on as Axel pulled down her kneesocks.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered. “Do you want to stop?”
“I don’t know—do you?”
“No,” he said.
“I’m just a little nervous,” she said honestly.
“You’re older than I am.”
“Yes, you’re still just seventeen—I’m robbing the cradle,” she said, smiling.
Axel’s heart pounded as he pulled down her panties. She lay still as he kissed her stomach, her small breasts, her throat, her chin, her lips. She opened her legs and he lay on her and felt how she slowly pressed her thighs against his hips. Her cheeks flushed bright red as he slid inside her. She pulled him close and stroked his back and neck and sighed every time he sank into her.
Once they finished, panting, there was a thin layer of sweat between their nude bodies. They lay wrapped in each other’s arms, eyes closed, as they fell into a sweet sleep.
63
the johan fredrik berwald competition
It was light outside when Axel woke up on the day he would lose everything. He and Greta had not shut the curtains. They’d fallen asleep together in the bed and slept the entire night.
Axel slowly got up and looked down at Greta, who slept with a completely calm face and the thick blanket crumpled about her. He walked to the door and stopped next to the mirror and looked at his naked seventeen-year-old body for a while. Then he continued into the music room. He closed the door to the bedroom softly and walked over to the grand piano. He took his violin out of its case and tuned it. He put it to his chin, went to stand by the window, and looking out at the winter morning and the snow being blown from the roofs in long veils, he began to play Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane from memory.
The piece begins with a sorrowful Romany melody, slow and measured, but then the tempo begins to increase. The melody echoes faster and faster in upon itself as a blistering, split-second memory of a summer night.
It’s an extremely fast piece.
Axel was playing because he was happy. He wasn’t thinking. His fingers ran and danced like eddies and ripples in a stream.
Axel started to smile. He was thinking of a painting his grandfather had in the drawing room. His grandfather had said it was the most apt and glowing version of Näcken by Ernst Josephson. As a child, Axel had loved the legends surrounding this mystical being whose violin music was so beautiful it lured people to their deaths, beautiful deaths drowning in the pool.
At that moment, Axel felt that he was just like the Näcke, a young man surrounded by water as he played. Except Axel was happy. That was the greatest difference between Axel and the Josephson painting.
His bow leaped over the strings at amazing speed. He didn’t care that some of the bow’s taut hair broke and danced in the air with the music.
This is how Ravel should be played, he thought. Not exotically but happily. Ravel is a young composer, a happy composer.
Axel let the final notes resonate in the body of the violin and then seem to whirl away like the light snow on the roof outside. He lowered his bow and was about to bow towards the snow outside when he realised that someone was behind him.
He turned and saw Greta in the doorway. She held the blanket around her body and her eyes were dark and strange as she looked at him.
Axel frowned at her stricken expression.
“What’s wrong?”
She didn’t answer. She swallowed loudly. A pair of large tears began to run down her cheeks.
“Greta, what’s the matter?” he asked, insistently.
“You told me that you hadn’t practised,” she said in a monotone.
“No, I … I …” he stammered. “I told you that I learned new pieces easily.”
“Congratulations.”
>
“What are you thinking?” he said, aghast. “It’s not what you think!”
She shook her head.
“I can’t believe I could have been so stupid,” she said.
He set down the violin and bow, but she was already closing the bedroom door behind her. Axel snatched up a pair of jeans he’d left hanging on the back of a chair and pulled them on. Then he knocked on the door.
“Greta? May I come in?”
There was no answer, and with that, a black clump of worry settled in his stomach. In a little while, she came out of the bedroom fully dressed. She didn’t even look at him as she put her violin in its case and gathered up her belongings to leave him alone.
The concert hall was full. Greta was the first to play. When she saw him, she looked away. She wore a blue velvet dress and a necklace with a heart pendant.
Axel sat alone in the dressing room and waited with half-closed eyes. It was absolutely silent. Only a small sound could be heard behind a dusty plastic fan guard. His little brother came into the room.
“Aren’t you going to sit with Mamma?” Axel asked.
“No, I’m too nervous. I can’t watch you perform. I’ll just sit here and wait.”
“Has Greta started yet?”
“Yes, it sounds good.”
“Which piece did she choose? Was it Tartini’s violin sonata?”
“No, something by Beethoven.”
“That’s good,” Axel muttered.
They sat together silently and said nothing more. After a while, there was a knock at the door. Axel stood up and opened it. A woman told him that he would be next.
“Good luck,” said Robert.
“Thanks,” Axel said. He picked up his violin with its bow and followed the woman through the hallway.
Great applause sounded from the audience. Axel caught a brief glimpse of Greta and her father as they hurried into Greta’s dressing room.
Axel walked close to the wings and had to wait through an introduction. When he heard his name, he walked into the centre of the spotlight and smiled at the audience. A murmur arose when he announced his selection, the Tzigane by Maurice Ravel.
He put his violin to his chin and lifted his bow. He began to play the sorrowful introduction and then sped up the tempo to the impossible speed. The audience seemed to hold its breath. He could hear that he was playing brilliantly, but this time the melody didn’t sparkle. His playing was no longer happy. It was as if he had become the Näcke, with a hectic, feverish sorrow. Three minutes into the piece, the notes were falling like rain in the night, and then he began to purposefully skip a few. He slowed, played off-key, and finally broke off the piece completely.
The concert hall was silent.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and then he walked off the stage.
The audience clapped politely. His mother got up from her seat in the audience and followed him. She stopped him in the walkway.
“Come here, my boy,” she said as she put her hands on his shoulders.
Then she stroked his cheek and her voice was warm as she said, “That was remarkable, the best interpretation I’ve ever heard.”
“Forgive me, Mamma.”
Her face stiffened, seemed to pull in on itself. “Never,” she replied, and she turned away from Axel and walked out of the concert hall.
Axel went to the dressing room for his coat, but he was met by Herbert Blomstedt outside the dressing-room door.
“That was remarkable, my boy,” he said in a very sad voice. “Until you began to pretend you could no longer play.”
The house reverberated with silence when Axel returned home. It was already late at night. He trudged up to the top-floor apartment, in through his music room, and then to his bedroom. He shut the door behind him. He still heard the music in his head, how it had sounded until he began to drop notes, slow the tempo unexpectedly, break off the piece in the middle.
He had stopped. Over and over he had stopped.
Axel let himself down on the bed and fell asleep with his violin case beside him.
The next morning, he woke to the sound of the telephone.
Someone walked across the dining-room floor. It always creaked.
A moment later, there were steps on the stairs. His mother walked right into his bedroom without knocking.
“Sit up,” Alice commanded.
Axel was frightened the moment he saw her. Her face was still wet from her tears.
“Mamma, please—”
“Be quiet!” she says in a low voice. “I’ve just got a call from your principal—”
“He’s unhappy with me because—”
“Can you be quiet!” Alice yelled.
He stopped talking. She held a trembling hand to her mouth. New tears began to stream down her cheeks.
“It’s about Greta,” she finally was able to say. “She committed suicide last night.”
Axel stared at her and tried to understand what she’d said.
“No! … Because I—”
“She was ashamed,” Alice says. “They said she felt she let everyone down, that she should have practised more. You promised to help. I knew it, though, I knew. She never should have come here, she … I’m not saying it’s your fault, Axel, because it isn’t. She was disappointed in herself because when everything was riding on her playing, she couldn’t deal with it, and she couldn’t bear that—”
“But, Mamma, I—”
“Be quiet,” she said. “All of this is over.”
Alice left. Axel got out of bed in a gathering fog. He swayed, but steadied himself. He took his beautiful violin out of its case and banged it violently against the floor. The neck broke and the bridge flopped over under the loose strings. Axel stamped on it and pieces of wood flew in all directions.
“Axel! What are you doing?”
Robert rushed into the room and tried to stop him. Axel pushed him away. Robert fell on his back against the wardrobe behind him, but he started back again.
“Axel, so you messed up, so what?” Robert said. “Greta did, too. I met her in the hallway and she’d also … everyone—”
“Shut up!” Axel screamed. “Don’t ever say her name to me again!”
Robert stared while Axel continued to stamp on the wooden pieces until there was nothing left that resembled a violin. Robert then left the room.
Shiro Sasaki won the Johan Fredrik Berwald Competition. Greta had chosen the easier Beethoven piece, but she’d been unable to play it perfectly, a demand she had made upon herself. As soon as she’d got home, she’d locked herself in her bedroom and must have taken a huge amount of sleeping pills. She’d been found in bed the next morning when she’d been missed at breakfast.
Axel’s memory sinks away as if it were a forgotten life down in the depths of the sea. He looks at Beverly. It’s like Greta’s big eyes looking back at him. He looks at the cloth in his own hand and the liquid on the table and the shining intarsia with the woman playing the erhu.
Light slides across the curve of Beverly’s head as she turns to look at the violins hanging on the wall.
“I wish I knew how to play one,” she says.
“Let’s take a class together,” he says, gently smiling.
“I’d like that,” she answers in all seriousness.
He sets the cloth down on the table and feels the terrible exhaustion inside his body. The recording of the piano’s echoing music fills the room. It’s being played without a damper and the notes flow dreamily into one another.
“Poor Axel, you want to sleep,” she says.
“I have to work.”
“This evening, then,” she says, and gets up.
64
the lift down
Detective Inspector Joona Linna is at his desk at CID. He’s reading Carl Palmcrona’s memoir. Five years ago, Palmcrona recorded how he’d traveled to Västerås to watch his son graduate from primary school. He’d stood at a distance as everyone gathered in the school yard and sang “Den b
lomstertid nu kommer” while standing in the rain holding umbrellas. Palmcrona described his son’s white jeans and jacket, his long blond hair, and wrote that ‘the boy had a family resemblance in his nose and eyes, which made me want to cry.’ He’d driven back to Stockholm and wrote that his son was worth everything he’d done up to now and everything that he would ever do.
The phone rings. Joona picks it up immediately. It’s Petter Näslund calling from the police bus on Dalarö.
“They’ve got Penelope Fernandez. I’ve just been in contact with the helicopter group, and they’re flying back over Erstavik Bay right now,” he tells Joona. His voice still sounds hunted.
“She’s alive?” Joona asks, and is overwhelmed by a feeling of relief.
“She was swimming in the open ocean when they found her,” Petter explains.
“How’s she doing? Is she all right?”
“It appears so. They’re heading towards Söder Hospital.”
“Too dangerous,” Joona says abruptly. “Fly her to the police station instead. We’ll bring a team of doctors from Karolinska Hospital.”
Petter says he’ll contact the helicopters.
“What about the others?” Joona asks.
“It’s complete chaos. We’ve lost people, Joona. It’s crazy over here.”
“What about Björn Almskog?”
“We haven’t found him, but … right now we really know nothing, and it’s hard to find out what went on.”
“What about the killer?”
“We’ll catch him. This is a small island. We’ve got men all over it along with help from the Coast Guard and the naval police.”
“Good,” Joona says.
“You don’t think we’ll get him?” Petter asks grimly.
“If you didn’t catch him right away, he’s probably slipped through.”
“You’re saying it’s my fault?”
“Petter,” Joona says quietly and softly. “If you hadn’t been so fast on the uptake, Penelope would be dead, and without her, we’d have no leads at all.”
An hour later, two doctors from Karolinska converge in a protected room deep underneath the National Police Board headquarters. Penelope lies unmoving in their care. They’re bandaging her wounds, setting up an IV for rehydration and nutrition, and giving her tranquilisers.
