After the Fire

by Henning Mankell

  A woman wearing a colourful turban was standing next to me at the bar. I asked if she would like to dance; I was astonished at my own courage. She said yes. We shuffled onto the floor. I learned the basics of dancing when I was at school, but on the few occasions when I danced with Harriet I was embarrassed by my ineptitude. Now, even though the floor was so crowded, I felt at more of a loss than ever. My partner noticed at once; I was moving as if I had hooves. Her disappointment was obvious; she looked at me as if I had deceived her, then walked away and left me there. Total humiliation.

  I went up the stairs, followed by the sound of reggae music, and out onto the street.

  I had almost reached my hotel when I took out my phone for some reason. It hadn’t rung, but I discovered that there was a text message from Louise: Where are you?

  I tried to call her, but I still couldn’t get through.

  ‘I’m here,’ I said out loud to myself. ‘I’m actually here.’

  CHAPTER 16

  I hated the woman who had left me on the dance floor. With every step I took towards my hotel, I subjected her to increasingly vicious attacks in my head.

  On a dark street just before I reached the Gare Montparnasse a drunken man came up to me and asked for cigarettes. I told him I hadn’t smoked for thirty years.

  I was afraid he might attack me, but the tone of my voice clearly made him think again, and he staggered away.

  I had difficulty sleeping that night. The incident in the club hurt; I was still embarrassed. I lay awake for a long time. I thought I could hear the guests in neighbouring rooms starting to make preparations to leave, and a cleaning trolley trundled past. I wondered if it was Rachel, starting work at this early hour.

  It was five o’clock by the time I managed to doze off in my brown room. At eight my mobile rang; it was the embassy, a man who introduced himself as Olof Rutgersson. I wasn’t sure I understood his title.

  ‘We still haven’t managed to locate your daughter,’ he said.

  He had a nasal voice; I’m sure it wasn’t his fault that it gave his tone an air of arrogance.

  ‘What happens now?’

  ‘We will definitely find her. After all, Paris is a city not a continent. She’s probably under local arrest, but that does mean the search will take time. I’ll be in touch as soon as I have something further to communicate on this matter.’

  I wanted to protest at the way he expressed himself: ‘something further to communicate on this matter’?! But I said nothing; I needed him.

  There were hardly any guests in the breakfast room, where the gigantic head of a kudu with large curly horns hung on the wall next to etchings of bridges over the Seine. Monsieur Pierre had once again been replaced by Madame Rosini, while a short Vietnamese girl took my order for coffee.

  There was a bottle of sparkling wine in an ice bucket, and I couldn’t resist the temptation. My anger towards the woman who had abandoned me on the dance floor dissipated.

  After breakfast I took a short walk to the railway station and bought a Swedish newspaper. When I got back to the hotel I sank down in a worn leather armchair in reception.

  I liked the hotel. Lisa Modin had made a good choice. Before I started reading the paper, I asked Madame Rosini if they had received a booking for a Swedish lady. They hadn’t. She must have decided to stay somewhere else.

  I leafed through the paper; it was half past ten. Rachel came down the stairs carrying a basket of cloths and cleaning products. She smiled before making a start on the glass door.

  My phone rang; it was the man from the embassy.

  ‘Good news,’ he said. ‘We’ve found your daughter. She’s at a police station in Belleville.’

  ‘What on earth is she doing in that part of the city?’

  ‘I can’t answer that, but I’ll come and pick you up.’

  Exactly one hour later a chauffeur-driven car with diplomatic plates pulled up outside the hotel. I got in beside Olof Rutgersson. He was aged about fifty and rather thin. His face was grey, colourless.

  As we drove off I asked him to tell me what he knew.

  ‘I haven’t got much to report,’ he said. ‘We found her through our usual channels and the extraordinarily poor computer system used by the French police. That’s all I know. The important thing now is to assess her position so that we can work out how to proceed.’

  ‘You’re talking about my daughter as if she were a ship,’ I said.

  ‘It’s just words,’ Olof Rutgersson replied. ‘By the way, I suggest you let me do the talking when we arrive. I have diplomatic status. You don’t.’

  He made a few calls; I noticed he had a small tattoo just above his wrist. It said MUM.

  We were in a traffic jam, and Rutgersson was talking on his phone when I recognised the street, one of Haussmann’s wide boulevards.

  I knew where I was. One day almost fifty years ago I had come up from the Metro exactly where our car was currently stuck in a queue of impatient drivers. It was during the period when I was working illegally, sitting in a little workshop in Jourdain repairing clarinets under the quiet guidance of Monsieur Simon. I don’t remember how I got the job, but it didn’t pay well. The workshop was in a backyard, and it was cramped and dirty. Apart from Monsieur Simon, who was a kind man, there was another young man working there who was fat, short-sighted and downright unpleasant. As soon as Monsieur Simon was out on some errand, he would start having a go at me, telling me that I was a burden because I had clumsy fingers and always arrived late in the mornings. I never argued with him, I simply despised his cowardice and wished he would drop dead among his saxophone valves.

  Sometimes Monsieur Simon would send me out to various music shops to deliver instruments that had been repaired. It was as I emerged from the Metro with a parcel under my arm that I had found myself in the middle of a huge crowd. At first I thought there had been an accident, but then I realised people were waiting for someone to pass by. I peered down the road and saw President de Gaulle approaching; he was standing in an open-topped car. I had the instrument under my arm, and I made a movement with the other hand to get my cigarettes out of an inside pocket. I immediately felt two pairs of hands seize my wrist and shoulder. I dropped the clarinet. The two men, who I later realised were plain-clothes security guards, had thought I was reaching for a gun.

  When they were satisfied that I had no evil intentions, and that my parcel contained a clarinet and not a bomb, they simply shrugged and let me go.

  By that time the president was long gone, and the crowd had begun to disperse.

  ‘I once saw President de Gaulle just here,’ I said to Olof Rutgersson.

  He was busy sending a text and didn’t hear what I said.

  ‘I once saw de Gaulle,’ I repeated. ‘Just here. Almost fifty years ago.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ he replied. ‘Of course you saw de Gaulle just here. Fifty years ago.’

  I felt like punching him. After I’d taken his phone and chucked it out of the car window. I wished I were that kind of person. But I wasn’t.

  I didn’t notice the name of the street on which the police station in Belleville was situated. Rutgersson leaped out of the car with an energy I found surprising. He had spent the journey yawning, hunched over his phone. Now he was transformed. He repeated his earlier exhortation to let him do the talking.

  A young drug addict was throwing up in the shabby reception area while two uniformed officers observed him with distaste. A plain-clothes officer behind the tall desk nodded to Rutgersson when he waved his diplomatic pass. After a brief telephone call an older officer who walked with a stick emerged from another room. We accompanied him to an office where the air was thick with dust from a desk piled high with papers and shelves bellying under the weight of books and files. I had the sense of having been transported several hundred years back in time. The premises of law enforcers must have looked like this during Napoleon’s day.

  The man lowered himself laboriously into the chair behin
d the desk; I realised he was in considerable pain. His stiff hands told me that he probably suffered from severe rheumatism.

  Olof Rutgersson took the visitor’s chair on the other side of the desk and waved me to a seat by the door. He spoke fluent French. He also spoke very quickly, with the emphasis typical of those who tolerate no contradictions. I found it difficult to follow the conversation, but I did grasp that there was some doubt as to whether Louise was actually at this police station. The officer, whose name was Armand, sent for a younger colleague who couldn’t help either. When the two Frenchmen had finished talking, Rutgersson stood up and came over to me.

  ‘It’s always the same with the French police,’ he said. ‘You can never get any sense out of anybody.’

  ‘So Louise isn’t here?’

  ‘The French police often lose people, but of course we’re not giving up. I expect the Swedish police are the same.’

  After yet more confused conversations and various junior officers running in and out, it seemed that Louise had been at the station, but earlier that morning she had been transferred to a custody suite on the Île de la Cité. Armand was unable to tell us why. He drank cup after cup of strong black coffee; as he grimaced at the temperature of the liquid, I saw that he had bad teeth, which made me feel slightly nauseous. Olof Rutgersson showed great tenacity, insisting that he wanted to know why Louise had been moved and what exactly she was accused of. He didn’t get any answers. The van that had collected her and a number of other individuals who were under arrest had taken all the paperwork.

  ‘Was she with anyone else?’ I asked.

  Rutgersson passed on the question, but no one could tell us whether Louise had known any of those who had been arrested at the same time.

  It took half an hour, with Rutgersson getting increasingly annoyed, before he realised there was no point in staying in Belleville. When we left the police station, he wanted something to eat, so we went to a nearby cafe while the chauffeur waited in the car. I drank tea while Rutgersson had coffee and a sandwich.

  My phone rang; it was Lisa Modin. Rutgersson listened discreetly to our brief conversation.

  ‘The girl’s mother?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s dead. That was a friend.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d lost your wife.’

  ‘We weren’t married, we just had a daughter together.’

  As we left Belleville, the traffic heavier now, Rutgersson went back to making calls and sending texts. He wore a wedding ring on his left hand. I tried to picture his wife but without success.

  I was waiting for Lisa to call back. I hadn’t been able to work out whether she was already in Paris. The thought of sharing a room with her, lying right next to her, sometimes drove Louise out of my head completely. I was too old to have a guilty conscience. I didn’t want to end up like my father. As he got older and was plagued with severe joint pain, he began to brood about the people he had treated badly or bullied during his lifetime. Even though he had been just as shabbily treated by unpleasant maître d’s and toffee-nosed customers, it was as if he was determined to spend the time he had left atoning for his sins.

  I remember one occasion just after my mother’s death when I went to visit him in the small, dingy apartment in Vasastan. I had recently qualified as a doctor, and had taken my stethoscope and blood pressure monitor with me to show my father that I was now able to check those aspects of his health that he constantly worried about.

  I stayed the night, going to bed early because I had to be at the hospital in the Söder district the following morning. My father had a tendency to wander late at night. He had spent so many years as a waiter that he rarely went to bed before three o’clock in the morning.

  I suddenly woke up without knowing why. The door of my bedroom was ajar, and I could hear my father dialling a telephone number. I wondered who he was calling at this hour. I got out of bed and crept over to the door; I could see him sitting there with the receiver pressed to his ear. When he didn’t get an answer, he gently replaced it and crossed off a name on the handwritten list in front of him.

  He was asleep when I got up in the morning. I looked at the piece of paper by the telephone; it was a list of names, people I didn’t know. Next to some of the names he had made a note that the person in question was dead. There were also various telephone numbers followed by a question mark.

  The next time I visited him, I asked him about the nocturnal calls. Who was he ringing? Who were the people on his list? He told me without hesitation that they were people he thought he had mistreated during his life. Now, before it was too late, he wanted to call them and apologise. Unfortunately many of them had already passed away, which he found very difficult to deal with. I wondered whether that was why he had started neglecting his clothing; he no longer bothered to change if there were stains on his shirts or trousers.

  He died six months after our conversation. I have no idea how many of those on the list he managed to speak to by then, but I kept it when I cleared his apartment. It had been in my desk drawer ever since, until my house burned down. Now it was gone for good.

  We drove across the bridge to the Île de la Cité and found the address we had been given. Olof Rutgersson brandished his diplomatic pass like a crucifix, and within no time we had tracked down someone who would be able to tell us where Louise was. A female preliminary investigator called us into her spacious office, which I was surprised to see contained a grand piano, a Bechstein. She asked us to sit down and opened the file in front of her on the desk. She turned to me because I was Louise’s father, but Rutgersson immediately took over; he was the one who wanted answers to our questions. The woman, who was wearing a wine-red skirt suit and had a small burn mark on one cheek, spoke just as quickly as Rutgersson. I had no chance of following the conversation. I had begun to change my opinion of Rutgersson; he seemed to be taking his task extremely seriously. He was not indifferent to what had befallen Louise after all. From time to time he interrupted the Frenchwoman, and gave me a brief summary of what was being said.

  Eventually the picture became clear. Louise had been arrested after stealing a wallet from someone’s inside pocket on a crowded Metro train near Saint-Sulpice. It appeared that she had been taken to Belleville, which was some considerable distance away, because the local custody facilities were already full. There was no doubt that she had stolen the wallet. The elderly victim hadn’t noticed anything, but a fellow passenger had seen exactly what Louise had done and had grabbed her. It turned out he was a civilian employee of the French police.

  There was no evidence that anyone else was involved, but she probably hadn’t been working alone.

  Louise had been arrested and would be formally charged. According to Rutgersson, over the past twelve months the French police had made a point of tackling the increase in muggings and the large number of pickpockets operating in Paris, which had almost become like Barcelona, the pickpockets’ European paradise. When I asked him to find out if it would be possible to let Louise off with a caution because she didn’t have a criminal record in France and was pregnant, the French officer merely spread her hands wide. It seemed unlikely that Louise would be released any time soon.

  ‘Can’t they just fine her?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s too early to discuss any kind of penalty,’ Rutgersson replied. ‘The most important thing right now is to see her and hear her version of events.’

  ‘The most important thing is that she knows we’re here,’ I said. ‘Everything else is secondary.’

  A uniformed officer led us through corridors, down stairs and passageways, moving deeper and deeper underground. I began to wonder if this really was the place where I had been held when I was picked up by the police in 1968. I thought I recognised the whitewashed vaulted cellar, the steel doors, the wooden benches, the distant sounds of people shouting to one another. The place was a maze; you could get lost at any moment and never find your way out.

  Eventually Rutgers
son and I were shown into a windowless room with a dark-stained wooden table and a few rickety chairs. We waited, Rutgersson with a kind of exaggerated calm, while I became more and more agitated. Then the door opened and Louise was brought in by a female officer. She was wearing her own clothes, a pair of trousers and a shirt I recognised. She was very pale. For the first time I could remember she looked pleased to see me. She usually regarded me with some degree of caution, but not this time.

  She wasn’t handcuffed, and the officer made no attempt to stop me from hugging her.

  ‘You came,’ Louise said.

  ‘Of course I came.’

  ‘In my life people don’t usually come when I need them.’

  I introduced her to Olof Rutgersson. The police officer had stationed herself by the door and seemed to have no interest in our conversation. We sat down at the table, and Louise immediately began to tell us what had happened.

  She admitted stealing the wallet on the crowded train. I no longer had any doubt that this was how she made her living, but she was prepared to admit only this one incident. I had some sympathy with her; why should she reveal to Rutgersson that her principal source of income was whatever she managed to steal? We had established a tacit mutual understanding. She had been arrested for the theft of this one wallet, nothing else.

  ‘Are you so short of money?’ Rutgersson asked when she fell silent.

  Once again I changed my mind about him. I had thought he was an energetic and efficient embassy official; now I saw a remarkably insensitive individual sitting beside me.

  ‘Why else would she have stolen a wallet?’ I said. ‘Don’t forget she’s pregnant, and that her inheritance, my house in Sweden, burned to the ground just a few weeks ago.’

  Rutgersson looked at me in surprise, and I realised I hadn’t mentioned my house. I told him the story, and he nodded to himself.