Black Lies, Red Blood

by Kjell Eriksson

  There was nothing to match Vanessa’s beauty. She attracted attention wherever she went, especially during her visit in Sweden, and he had often been proud to walk by her side.

  During her stay in Sweden they did not spend many days in Uppsala. For a week and a half they stayed in a borrowed cabin outside Ludvika. The cabin was completely isolated by a small lake. Vanessa had watched in amazement as he threw himself into the water from the wobbly pier. She never got in more than up to her thighs. For a week they did Stockholm, acting like real tourists, stayed at a hotel and ate at nice restaurants every night. He wanted to spoil her, but sensed that she had been most at home in the simple cabin in Dalarna, taking care of themselves and with nature at their doorstep.

  He lost himself in memories, ordered a third beer, and built on the painful feeling of loss, longing, and guilt.

  When they separated at Arlanda, she was sure he would soon follow her to Brazil, where the mutual promises would be fulfilled and plans for the future take more substantial form. Doubt had started to gnaw in him, but he kept up appearances. After his return home he started brooding, sat in his apartment, and got nothing done.

  Her visit had clearly shown that she would have a hard time adapting to Sweden, which she had also expressed in her careful way. But could he imagine living in Brazil?

  Only a few days after her departure, he called Ann. He was ashamed afterward of his faithless initiative and how their first encounter immediately developed into a violent, uninhibited sex orgy.

  He had a hard time admitting to himself that he called and asked Ann out because he had been attracted to her at Görel’s dinner, which took place only a few days before Vanessa showed up. Yet until he was standing in front of her, with her wrapped in a bathrobe, he convinced himself that it was only about dinner, some nice conversation, and nothing else. Deep down he knew differently.

  Now he was torn between two women. And he didn’t know what love was.

  The third beer was finished. The proposals for massage came more often, quickly whispered invitations, and he decided it was time to get up and make his way homeward.

  On the other side of the square, right where September Seven Avenue begins its climb up toward Vitória, a young woman was standing, with one hand against a railing, one leg raised and crossed over the other. With the other hand she was adjusting the heel strap of her shoe. Their eyes met.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  Instead of answering dutifully with the same phrase, he shook his head.

  “No, an inferno,” he said, and stopped.

  As if by silent agreement they left the square and without exchanging a word along the way they went to a small hotel on the beach promenade.

  The desk clerk looked bored as they stepped into the cramped, dirty lobby. An unbelievably large grandfather clock stood ticking in one corner, a Portuguese product, Brant saw on the face of the clock. The clock was wrong, almost exactly five hours slow. It showed Swedish time.

  For 25 reais they got a room to use for an hour, and a condom. The woman took the key and he the condom. She led the way up the stairs; he plodded behind, stumbled, laughed.

  The air was stifling and still. The woman, who introduced herself as Monica, seemed to be familiar with the room, because she went up to the window at once and opened it. The breeze of the trade wind immediately came in with an odor of sea and rotting garbage. A threadbare curtain billowed listlessly. She fastened the curtain to a nail, turned her head, and smiled.

  Anders Brant had the feeling that she was buying a little time, that she wanted a moment with the view over the Atlantic. He went up and stood beside her.

  On the other side of the bay was Itaparica, the island where he had stayed so many times. For a few moments they stood together as if they were a couple who had just arrived on vacation to a charming beach hotel and were taking in their first impressions, not wanting to say anything before they each formed an impression of the place and tried to judge whether they would like it.

  His eyes spanned the coastline south of Mar Grande and tried to work out on which beach he had stayed.

  Monica slipped out of her dress with minimal movement. She had a white lace bra and matching tanga, which shone against her dark skin. Afterward he wished they had frozen the scene there. She could have leaned her head against his shoulder, he could have put his arm around her waist, told about Itaparica, about the fishermen who pulled their nets and about the carnival where the men dressed up like women.

  She would tell him something about her family, about where she came from, what she dreamed about, perhaps lie a little, but he would be treated to a story, something personal, testimony that he could store along with all the others.

  Without having said more than perhaps ten words to each other she kneeled before him and loosened his belt, pulled down his fly, and then his shorts and underwear. She did it slowly, carefully, and patiently, careful not to scratch him with her long, red-painted nails, as if he were a little boy being lovingly undressed by his mother at bedtime.

  He observed her pale belly and her blackness, which in the folds around her armpits took on a bluish-black hue. He was leaning against the windowsill, she was on her knees.

  She sucked him off while he tried to remember the names of the villages on Itaparica, from Mar Grande all the way down to Cacha Pregos. It went fine, he could remember almost all of them.

  Monica disappeared into the bathroom, he heard the gushing of the shower. When she came back a minute or two later she was naked. On her belly a few water drops glistened like pearls.

  She lay down on the dirty-brown, stained bedcover, and looked at him with what seemed to him a peculiar smile, perhaps critical, taunting in an elusive way, perhaps conditioned by boredom or fatigue, probably both. She turned indolently onto her belly, thrust up her ass, but changed her mind almost immediately and rolled over on her back again. Her eyes were warmer now, he wanted her to say something that reconciled them, something forgiving, but he was not able to meet them in earnest to see. Instead he inspected her body, she was very beautiful, the light ruptures across her breasts and crotch revealed that she had a child. A child who could be his grandchild.

  “What does it cost?” he asked, regretting it at once, but it was too late.

  The illusion that they had come together because life was an inferno could no longer be maintained.

  A drop of sperm fell from his shriveled sex to the floor. He happened to think of the desk clerk who would have to mop up after him. Or certainly there was some woman who had to clean, the man in the lobby appeared to be stuck behind his counter, and he too was probably always five hours too late.

  He lay down beside her and pushed his head into her dark hair.

  * * *

  When Anders Brant came home to the pension, Ivaldo Assis and his nephew Vincente were sitting outside the gate. Between them on the sidewalk was a bottle of Primus beer.

  On Ivaldo’s face Brant saw for the first time a hint of a smile, relief, that made him years younger, while the darkness from the jail still rested heavily over Vincente’s facial features.

  Brant opened the gate, signaled with his hand that they should wait, went up to the apartment and returned after half a minute. The two men had gotten up, there was something guardedly compliant about them. In his hand Brant was holding a sock, stuffed like a sausage. Without a word he handed it over to Ivaldo.

  “Obrigado,” said Vincente.

  “De nada,” Brant replied, who did not want to be thanked, actually did not want to hear anything from anyone.

  A group of schoolchildren came running on the sidewalk, their uniform T-shirts, white with a blue line across the chest, made them look like a soccer team. Brant backed up a step out into the street to give the noisy youngsters free passage, happened to see Ivaldo’s gesture, the outstretched arm, before the right side of his face was hit by the side mirror on a bus. He fell headlong to the ground and struck the sidewalk face first.

>   Thirty-six

  Becalmed. A feeble wind from the south that was making a half-hearted attempt on Saturday morning to create a little movement in the air quickly gave up, settled down over the Uppsala plain, and created a trembling haze of heat over city and countryside.

  Allan Fredriksson was sweating. He was upset besides. For the nth time in a row he was on duty over a weekend with brilliant weather, and he felt a major injustice.

  The building was quiet. Everyone who could had fled of course. He was sitting in his office, tapping away on a report of a disturbance at the Central Station. The whole story was simple and predictable. Two loosely composed gangs had collided. Five personal injuries, one of which somewhat more serious, a knife in the buttock of a twenty-year-old youth from Märsta, eight police reports including damage, unlawful threat, unlawful possession of weapons, everyone blamed everyone else, what a life, five of them in jail, a real mess that only created paperwork, because he knew it would all run out in the sand. In six months, maybe a year, a few fines levied, possibly a suspended sentence for one of those involved, if that. The issue of guilt was not crystal clear.

  No one was particularly worried, besides a Lebanese whose sausage stand was destroyed and an elderly woman who fell down the steps in the disturbance outside the railway station and broke her wrist.

  Fredriksson wiped his brow with a napkin. This was really not his job. Why should he, an experienced detective, have to deal with such trifles when they had three murders on their agenda?

  The whole procedure took two hours. Then he left the building and tried to think about considerably more pleasant things, horses that were running at Solvalla and hopefully crossed the finish line in the right order and made the cash register jingle.

  Allan Fredriksson was a successful gambler who in just the past six months had pulled in over 150,000 kronor. The free time he did not spend in the forest he devoted to gambling programs and speculations and tips in the newspapers. The fact was that he also spent more and more of his work time thinking about horses.

  Sometimes he thought about resigning to become a full-time gambler. He was casually acquainted with a few people who devoted their lives to harness and quarter horse racing, and they seemed to be thriving and living well. Why not? It seemed worry-free, no cocky, loudmouthed youths creating piles of paper, no weekend shifts, no nagging sensation that the job occasionally, and more and more often, was meaningless.

  In an hour he would be meeting the on-duty prosecutor, Gunnel Forss, and decided to take a walk before that. He walked through Svartbäcken, followed Timmermansgatan, and made his way in among the villas north of Gamla Uppsalagatan. A climbing rose against a wall made him stop.

  I’ll take Nelson Express, he decided, while he admired the luxuriant buds, and then moved on. His decision created a certain relief but also a tingling excitement, because the fourth run was a real hornet’s nest, and if that nail went in, the round could be very interesting and lucrative.

  When he reached Sköldungagatan, a woman came walking toward him. He immediately recognized her and she obviously remembered him, because she slowed down and smiled carefully in recognition.

  Allan Fredriksson, together with Beatrice Andersson, had gone with Gunilla Lange to the morgue to identify Bo Gränsberg, her ex-husband. He wondered what he should say; he could hardly thank her for their last encounter. But Gunilla Lange solved the problem by stopping and saying something about how amazing the weather in Sweden could be. Fredriksson agreed, even if he would probably spend the rest of the day indoors.

  Gunilla Lange talked on about the weather. Fredriksson cursed his decision to take a walk on these particular blocks.

  “I’ve been thinking about something,” she said after a brief pause.

  “I see, and what might that be?” he said, trying to look interested.

  “The last time I saw Bosse, it was only a couple of weeks before he died.”

  Fredriksson nodded encouragingly.

  “Well, he was happy somehow, or maybe excited. I thought it was strange, because otherwise it was mostly problems, the company he wanted to start, and that he didn’t have an apartment. He was always saying he was blacklisted by all the landlords. But this time he was optimistic, like he could be in the past. He said that he and Bergman, who he was going to start the company with”—another nod from Fredriksson—“now had everything as good as arranged. When I asked whether they had scraped enough money together, it costs a hundred thousand just to register a corporation, did you know that?”—nod—“he said that it would work out.”

  “How is that?”

  “I asked that too. There was talk that I was going to loan him a little. He started talking about an old buddy who was well-off, as he put it, someone who had more money than he needed.”

  “And who could make a loan?”

  “Yes, as far as I understood. Or even go in as part owner, but without working in the company. Bosse and Bergman really believed in it, that the company would make money and then someone else might come in—”

  “Did he mention any names?”

  “Well, he didn’t want to say who it was, but that I had met him. He was like that, Bosse, he liked to be a little secretive and then surprise you.”

  She suddenly smiled, as if she were remembering the Bo Gränsberg she had once known.

  “He gave no clues?”

  Gunilla Lange shook her head.

  “He said something about old times, but that can mean anything. Someone on the work team from before, was what I understood.”

  “He said team?”

  “That’s what I understood,” said Gunilla.

  “How well do you, or did you, know his coworkers from construction?”

  Gunilla Lange thought a moment before she answered.

  “Not that well. I met some over the years, but not so that we socialized. Bosse probably had enough at work.”

  “Maybe he meant the bandy team?”

  She shook her head skeptically.

  “Could it have been Anders Brant?”

  “You mean the journalist? Would he be interested? That’s hard to believe. True, they played bandy together, and we saw each other quite a bit at that time. He had a girlfriend named Gunilla too, she and I worked together for a while besides. But he doesn’t have money, does he?”

  “We know that Brant saw Bosse right before he died. Did he say anything about that?”

  “No, not a word that he had seen Anders. It was strange. I mean, he should have mentioned it, he liked talking about the past, when he played bandy and that.”

  The good times, thought Fredriksson. The unexpected meeting had, against expectations, improved his mood.

  Fredriksson thought about the photo that Sammy Nilsson had taken from Brant’s apartment, and how he called around to everyone on the team.

  “Did he mention anything about a Jeremias Kumlin?”

  “I know who that is too,” Gunilla Lange replied.

  “Sadly he was murdered yesterday,” said Fredriksson.

  The news of the murder had appeared in Upsala Nya Tidning, but no name had been mentioned, as they had not yet been able to get hold of Kumlin’s mother. She was in northern Sweden. Henrietta Kumlin had a vague recollection that her mother-in-law had talked about Padjelanta, where she would be hiking with a friend. Ottosson had contacted the police in Jokkmokk and asked them to locate her in the wilderness.

  Gunilla Lange was staring at him.

  “It’s not true,” she exclaimed. “I saw that in the newspaper this morning, but that it was him … Poor Henrietta.”

  “You know her?”

  “We’ve met at a few parties, then, when everything … and they have two small children, a boy and a girl.”

  “They’re almost grown up now,” said Fredriksson. “Can Kumlin be the one Bosse was talking about?”

  Gunilla Lange had turned pale. There was nothing left of her initial light mood. Fredriksson understood that it no longer mattered that S
weden, on a day like this, was amazing.

  * * *

  They went their separate ways after a few minutes of additional small talk. Fredriksson had done his best to try to give Gunilla Lange back some of the carefree feeling she had shown only a few minutes earlier, but failed completely. Her day was ruined, he realized that, and he was not without a touch of bad conscience.

  His day on the other hand looked brighter. Now nothing was left of his slow strolling gait, and he paid no attention to the gardens, but instead walked at a rapid pace toward the police building, with his eyes fixed a few meters ahead of him. His thoughts were circling around Gunilla’s scanty, but perhaps significant information.

  He formulated various theories to himself, but wanted to talk this over with someone. There was no point in trying to get hold of Beatrice, she always made herself inaccessible, Sammy was in Tärnsjö, you couldn’t talk with Riis, Lindell seemed completely engulfed by the murder of Klara Lovisa, and Ottosson was presumably sitting in his summer house in Jumkil playing with the grandchildren.

  He phoned Sammy Nilsson on his cell. Sammy answered immediately, as if he was expecting a call. He had not left yet, but would be leaving in a matter of minutes. He was packing the last few things in the car.

  Sammy listened, hummed, and asked a few follow-up questions. Fredriksson thought he detected a satisfied tone in his comments and sensed why: the bandy lead, to which Sammy had devoted so much time, might perhaps prove to be a navigable road.

  They both realized that Gunilla Lange’s meager information that someone from Bosse’s previous life had perhaps been prepared to put money into the company, could be a possibility, a thread to spin further on.

  “It might be anyone,” said Fredriksson, to restrain Sammy’s growing enthusiasm. “Some old friend from work won at the track, or—”

  “Or Jeremias Kumlin,” said Sammy.

  “Or Anders Brant,” Fredriksson countered.