Yngve unscrewed the cap with tears in his eyes. Annika looked down at the floor and wriggled her toes to stop them from going stiff.
What were they going to do with her?
It’s not like the tunnel, it’s not like the tunnel.
Karina Björnlund put her bag down on the floor again.
‘I don’t understand what we’re doing here,’ she said.
‘Your power has made you impatient,’ Göran Nilsson said, looking at the minister with his dragon’s eyes, pausing until he had everyone’s full attention. Then he tilted his head back and looked up at the ceiling.
‘I am very aware that some of you were surprised to get my call,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time since I gathered you together like this, and I appreciate that it aroused mixed feelings. But there’s no need for you to be scared.’
He looked straight at the Minister of Culture.
‘I’m not here to harm you,’ he said. ‘I’m here to thank you. You became the only family I had, and I say that without any sentimentality.’
‘So why did you kill Margit, then?’ Karina Björnlund said, her voice tight with fear.
Göran Nilsson shook his head, his stinking yellow dragon head, his divine, revolting ruler’s head.
‘You’re not listening,’ he said. ‘You’re just talking. You weren’t like this before. Power really has changed you.’
Hans Blomberg took a step forward, apparently tired of the lack of focus. ‘Tell me what I should do,’ he said to his leader. ‘I’m ready for armed struggle.’
Göran Nilsson turned to him, sorrow in his eyes. ‘Panther,’ he said, ‘there won’t be any armed struggle. I’ve come home to die.’
The archivist’s eyes opened wide, an imbecilic expression spreading across his face.
‘But you’re back now,’ he said. ‘You’re here again, our leader, we’ve been waiting years. The revolution is near.’
‘The revolution is dead,’ the Dragon said harshly. ‘Capitalist society that treats human beings like cattle has won, and with it all the false ideologies: democracy, freedom of expression, justice before the law, women’s rights.’
Hans Blomberg listened devoutly, Karina Björnlund seemed to shrink with every word, and the alcoholic was completely absorbed in his newfound bottle of bliss.
‘The working class has been reduced to a brain-washed horde of cretinous consumers,’ he said. ‘There’s no desire to improve things any more. The false authorities herd people into the meat-grinder without a word of protest.’
He fixed his eyes on Karina Björnlund.
‘The authorities use people up, now as then,’ he said, his voice clear and steady. ‘They wring us out like dishcloths and then they throw us away. This is how it has always been, but today it is governments elected by the people that permit the buyers of labour to exploit us until we break. I have accepted that this is the case, and I have fought against it in my own way. Revolution?’ He shook his head. ‘There’ll never be any revolution. Humanity has bartered it for Coca-Cola and cable television.’
Hans Blomberg stared at him, his eyes blank and bewildered. ‘But that’s not true. You’re back, and I’ve been waiting so long. I’ve trained all these years, just as you said, and I’m ready. It isn’t too late.’
Göran Nilsson raised his hand.
‘I have very little of my life left,’ he said. ‘I have accepted my personal condition, and the condition that we are all in together. Fundamentally, there is no difference between me and the lies of the bourgeoisie. I shall live on through my children, and in return I give them their inheritance.’
He staggered, clutching his stomach.
‘No one will be able to exploit you any more,’ he said. ‘Your days on the treadmill are over.’
‘What do you mean?’ Karina Björnlund seemed less scared now.
‘He’s going to give us presents,’ Hans Blomberg said, his voice echoing with astonished disbelief. ‘It’s Christmas for all of us! Or perhaps some post-funeral coffee? The revolution is dead, didn’t you hear?’
‘Stop it, Hans,’ Karina Björnlund said, taking hold of his arm. ‘Mao’s dead, too, and even China is capitalist now.’
‘You believed as well,’ Hans said. ‘You were a revolutionary too.’
‘But, good God,’ she said, ‘we were nothing but children. Everyone believed in the revolution. That was just the way things were back then, but that all vanished long ago.’
‘Not for me!’ Hans Blomberg shouted, and Göran Nilsson took an unsteady step towards him.
‘Panther,’ he said, ‘you’ve misunderstood me.’
‘No!’ the archivist yelled, his eyes red and moist. ‘You can’t do this to me. The revolution is the only thing that matters.’
‘Pull yourself together,’ Karina Björnlund said, shaking the archivist’s arm in irritation.
With an angry tug the man pulled himself free from the Minister of Culture and the next moment he raised his clenched right fist and punched her hard in the face.
46
Someone screamed. It could have been the minister or the alcoholic or Annika herself; and then the furious archivist turned to face Göran Nilsson and shoved him with all his strength against the wall with the poster of Mao. The Yellow Dragon fell to the concrete floor with the audible crack of breaking bone, and a hissing sound as the air went out of his lungs.
‘You bloody traitors!’
Hans Blomberg’s voice was breaking. He gathered himself and leaped for the door, throwing it open with a crash and slamming it behind him with the same force.
The candle flame flickered but did not go out; the shadows slowly stopped dancing about.
‘I’m bleeding,’ the minister shouted from the floor behind the compressor. ‘Help me!’
Then silence settled heavily and the cold grew even harsher. Annika could hear the archivist cursing through the brick wall as he disappeared towards the railway line. She went over to Göran Nilsson. He was unconscious by the wall, his right foot twisted at an unnatural angle. His right leg looked a bit shorter than the left. Yngve the alcoholic stared drunkenly and unsteadily at his leader lying there on the floor, his face almost completely colourless and his teeth chattering. Karina Björnlund struggled to her feet, holding a hand to her face, blood was trickling between her fingers and down onto her fur-coat.
‘My nose is broken,’ she howled. ‘I have to get to hospital.’ She started to cry, then stopped because it was too painful.
Annika went over to the minister, put a hand gently on her arm. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, inspecting the woman’s face behind her hand. ‘It’ll heal okay.’
‘But what if it’s crooked?’
Annika turned away and went back to the man slumped on the floor. He really did smell unbelievably bad, the stench of something severely diseased.
‘Göran,’ she said loudly. ‘Göran Nilsson, can you hear me?’
Without waiting for a response she leaned over, taking off her gloves, and pulled the man’s gun from his pocket, it was heavy and ice-cold. With her back to the others she slipped it quietly into one of the outer pockets of her polar jacket, she knew nothing about revolvers and tried to convince herself that the safety catch must be on.
The Yellow Dragon groaned, his pale eyelids flickering. She put her hand on the frozen cement floor to see how cold it was, sweat making her fingers stick to it at once. Shocked, she pulled them away.
‘You can’t lie here,’ she told the man, ‘you have to get up. Can you stand up?’
She looked up at Karina Björnlund.
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ she said. ‘This place is worse than a freezer. Can you help me carry him?’
‘But I’m wounded,’ the Minister of Culture said. ‘And why should I help him? After all he’s done to me. Can’t Yngve carry him?’
The alcoholic had sat down on the floor clutching the half-empty bottle in his arms.
‘You can’t fall asleep here,’
Annika said to Yngve, feeling reality letting go of her, the ice-cold room threatening to strangle her.
‘If you knew how much I’ve suffered over the years,’ Karina Björnlund said from over by the compressor. ‘Always afraid that someone would let on that I knew these fools. But that’s what happens when you’re young, isn’t it? You think a load of crazy things, get in with the wrong crowd?’
Göran Nilsson tried to sit up but let out a little cry and slumped back on the concrete floor.
‘Something’s broken in my hip,’ he whispered, and Annika remembered her grandmother’s broken hip that winter when there was so much snow.
‘I’ll go and get help,’ Annika said, but a second later the man was holding her wrist in a vice-like grip.
‘Where’s Karina?’ he muttered, his eyes unfocused.
‘She’s here,’ Annika said quietly and wriggled loose in horror, standing up and turning to the minister. ‘He wants to talk to you.’
‘About what? We’ve got nothing to say to each other.’
Karina Björnlund’s voice sounded thin and nasal. She took a few cautious steps towards the man and Annika could see that her nostrils were bleeding badly. Her face was bruised and swollen, from her lips right up to her eyes. Annika met her gaze, reading in it all the bewilderment that she herself was feeling, and inside her a small light went on: she wasn’t alone, she wasn’t alone.
‘Keep him company,’ Annika said, and the minister went hesitantly over to the terrorist, but as she leaned over him he screamed.
‘Not blood,’ he panted. ‘Take the blood away.’
Something short-circuited in Annika’s head. There he was, the mass-murderer, the professional hitman, the full-time terrorist, and he was whining like a cry-baby. She flew over to him and grabbed him by the coat.
‘So you don’t like the sight of blood, you bastard? But killing all those people, that was all right, was it?’
His head fell back and he closed his eyes.
‘I’m a soldier,’ he said flatly. ‘I am nowhere near as guilty as the leaders of the free world.’
She felt tears welling up.
‘Why Margit?’ she said. ‘Why the boy?’
He shook his head.
‘Not me,’ he whispered.
Annika looked up at Karina Björnlund, who was standing in the middle of the floor, a look of shock on her face.
‘He’s lying,’ she said. ‘Of course it was him.’
‘I only strike at the enemy,’ Göran Nilsson said flatly. ‘Not against friends or the innocent.’
Annika stared at the man’s pain-racked face, his apathy, disinterest, and she suddenly knew that he was telling the truth.
It wasn’t him who murdered them. There was no reason for him to kill Benny Ekland, Linus Gustafsson, Kurt Sandström or Margit Axelsson.
So who had done it?
She was shaking. She stood up on numb legs and walked unsteadily towards the door.
It was shut. Stuck fast, immovable.
She remembered the lock on the outside, and realization hit her like a physical blow. Hans Blomberg had shut them in.
She was locked inside an ice-box with three other people, it was thirty degrees below zero, two of them were wounded and the third was blind drunk.
Hans Blomberg, she thought. Is that remotely possible?
And the next moment the tunnel was over her again, the pipes stretching along the ceiling, she could feel the weight of the dynamite on her back, and somewhere in the distance a woman was crying, snorting and howling with pain and despair and she realized that it was the Minister of Culture, Karina Björnlund. And she wasn’t alone, she wasn’t alone.
She let go of the tunnel and grabbed hold of reality. She mustn’t fall apart, if she fell apart she would die.
It’s so cold, she thought, how long can you survive in this sort of cold?
Her breathing slowed down. She was in no immediate danger herself. In her polar outfit she could last the night if need be. The minister had her fur-coat, but the men were worse off. The drunk’s eyelids were already drooping, he wouldn’t last another hour. The terrorist had better clothes, but was lying directly on the cement floor, which was like a block of ice.
We have to get out of here. Now. How?
Her mobile!
She let out a small noise of triumph as she fumbled in her pocket and pulled out her phone.
No reception.
She held it up in the light of the candle, trying it in every corner of the room. Not a trace of a signal. She tried to make a call anyway. Nothing happened.
Don’t panic.
Think.
The minister had a phone. Annika had called her on it just a couple of hours before.
‘See if you can get reception,’ she said to the minister.
‘What?’
‘Your phone! You’ve got a mobile on you; I called you, didn’t I?’
‘Oh, right.’
The minister carefully searched in her black leather bag, pulled out her mobile and switched it on with pin-codes and a lot of loud puffing, then held it up in the air.
‘I haven’t got a signal,’ she said in surprise.
Annika put her hands over her face, feeling the cold bite at her skin.
It’s all right, she thought. I’ve already called the police. They should be here any minute.
And she studied the minister. The woman was bruised and shaken. She looked towards the alcoholic, in the flickering candlelight his lips looked dark blue. He was shaking with cold in his thin jacket.
‘Okay,’ Annika said, forcing her head to think rationally. ‘We are where we are. Is there any sort of blanket here? A tarpaulin, any insulating material?’
‘Where did Hans go?’ Yngve said.
‘Did he lock the door?’ Karina Björnlund asked.
Shaking, Annika did a circuit of the dusty little building: a few rusty tins, a lot of dirt, and a rat’s skeleton.
‘He can’t have locked the door,’ the Minister of Culture said, going over to try it for herself. ‘Göran has the key.’
‘You can just click a padlock shut,’ Annika said. ‘So what is this place, anyway?’
She felt the walls, saw that the windows were sealed shut with coarse wooden planks nailed from the inside, and remembered the metal shutters outside.
‘It’s been derelict for forty years,’ Karina Björnlund said. ‘My father was on the railway, he brought me here as a child.’
‘What’s it for?’
‘It was a compression room. They built a new one when they rerouted the railway. How are we going to get out?’
‘Are there any tools anywhere?’ Annika asked.
‘We’re stuck,’ Karina Björnlund said, her eyes now so swollen that they were almost completely closed. ‘God, how are we going to get out?’
She wouldn’t find any forgotten tools, Annika realized, they would have been removed years ago. The walls were of solid concrete, and the door couldn’t be forced.
‘We have to keep moving,’ she said. ‘We have to keep each other warm.’
She gulped, feeling panic creeping up on her. What if the police didn’t come? What if Karlsson in central control had forgotten her?
She shook off the thought and went over to the rancid-smelling man below the Mao poster. His breathing was shallow and rattling, a string of saliva hanging from his mouth.
‘Göran,’ Annika said, crouching down next to him and struggling against the stench. ‘Göran Nilsson, can you hear me?’
She shook his shoulder and the man looked up at her with vacant eyes, his bottom lip shivering with cold.
‘J’ai très froid,’ he whispered.
47
‘Je comprends,’ Annika said quietly, and turned to the minister. ‘Karina, come and sit next to Göran, put your arms round him and wrap him in your fur.’
The Minister of Culture backed away until she reached the corner behind the compressor.
‘Never,’ she said
. ‘Never in a million years. He’s done me so much harm.’
Annika looked at the man beside her, his waxy, pale skin, his shaking hands. Maybe she should let him die? Wasn’t that what he deserved?
She left Göran Nilsson and went over to the man leaning against the wall.
‘Yngve?’ she said. ‘Is your name Yngve?’
The man nodded, had pushed his hands up into his armpits to keep them warm.
‘Come here,’ she said, opening her polar jacket. ‘Come and stand next to me. We’re going for a walk.’
He shook his head firmly and clutched the almost empty bottle.
‘Okay, don’t then,’ Annika said, closing the jacket and looking over to the minister.
‘He’s got a gun,’ Karina Björnlund said. ‘We can shoot our way out.’
Annika shook her head. ‘The door’s made of steel. The bullets would ricochet round the room and kill the lot of us. Besides, we’d have to hit the padlock on the outside to get out.’
‘What about the windows, then?’
‘Same thing.’
Should she say she’d told the police? How would they react?
‘I knew it would turn out like this,’ Karina Björnlund said with a sniff. ‘This whole Beasts thing has been a nightmare right from the start. I should never have gone with them when they left the Communist Party.’
The Minister of Culture dug in her bag and pulled out a black garment, it might have been a T-shirt, which she held up to her nose.
‘Why not?’ Annika said, watching the minister’s shadow dance across the wall as she moved around behind the candle.
‘I don’t suppose you’d even been born in the sixties,’ Karina Björnlund said, glancing at Annika. ‘It can’t be easy for your generation to understand what it was like, but it was actually fantastic.’
Annika nodded slowly. ‘I can imagine,’ she said. ‘You were young, Göran was the leader.’
The minister nodded eagerly. ‘He was so strong and clever. He could get anyone to go along with him. All the girls wanted to be with him, all the boys looked up to him. But I should have walked away when he was thrown out. It was stupid to go along with his idea for the Beasts.’
Karina Björnlund lost herself in memories for a moment, Annika watched her with increasingly clear eyes.
Red Wolf Page 33
