The Dying Game

by Asa Avdic

  “There’s something about all this that doesn’t add up!” the colonel suddenly half shouted into the wind.

  “What do you mean?” The wind was making my eyes tear up as well. I wiped the corners of them with the back of my hand. The tips of my fingers still smelled like Anna, and a series of images—her body in the darkness—passed through my brain in a microsecond. The curve of her eyebrows. The shape of a hip bone. The dark hollow above her collarbone, like a bowl.

  “This. All of it. This island. This death. This gathering of people for this assignment.”

  He turned to me and scrutinized me, as if he were waiting for me to say something, give him the information he was currently lacking. When I didn’t say anything, he looked away again.

  “It just doesn’t add up,” he said tersely.

  His eyes were following Lotte, who, in her wool coat and with her practical haircut slightly mussed, was poking around aimlessly farther up the hill where the sparse bushes turned into a dense and almost impenetrable thicket. Now and again there was a gust of wind that almost dragged her a little farther down the slope. I wondered if it was safe for her to walk up there, or if I should call her down. In the shadow of the large house, which towered over her with its skewed proportions, she most closely resembled an old lady who had lost her wallet rather than someone who was searching for a murderer.

  “And then there’s the part about the communication radio,” said the colonel. “The fact that it’s out of order is troubling. Very troubling. By the way, do you know what this place is?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t either, and that concerns me too. I thought this was the sort of place I would have heard of. I won’t lie, I’m starting to wonder what it was created for. Why ever would they need an inaccessible cliff with a house on top?”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I don’t think anything. But I do wonder.”

  “Do you know the Chairman?”

  The wind carried my words away, but the colonel seemed to have understood them anyway.

  “I wouldn’t say I know him. But I’ve known of him for a long time. He’s a climber.”

  The colonel spat the word.

  “A climber with ambitions. Those are always the worst.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “No more than I trust you. Or anyone else here. Which, I would guess, is exactly how you feel?”

  When I didn’t respond, the colonel went on: “Just because I’m a drunkard doesn’t mean I’m stupid. I notice things. About you, for example. I see what you’re doing. You’re doing it well. But I can see you doing it.”

  I felt my heart beat faster. It doesn’t mean anything, he’s an old intelligence man, he sees ghosts, he suspects everyone. I hoped my voice sounded normal when I asked him what he meant.

  “Oh, I think you know,” the colonel said. “You’re keeping an eye out. I can tell.”

  He didn’t seem to want to say more, and I didn’t want to add to his paranoia by asking more questions. So much for his little speech about not spreading fear and suspicion. I wondered if it had truly been the right decision to let him take command on the island.

  “What did you think when you found her?”

  The question slipped out before I could stop it. I thought I had only formulated it silently in my head. I made up my mind to pay closer attention to my own symptoms of fatigue.

  “At first I thought she had fallen down somehow. Maybe fainted, the same way my wife’s blood pressure would often drop when she stood up, and I thought perhaps she had hit her head. But those marks on her neck . . .” His voice faded away. Neither of us made any move to leave the beach to search for an unknown killer. I realized that he also didn’t think one existed.

  The colonel suddenly turned to face me.

  “Where did you come from, by the way?”

  “I was on the other side of the house.”

  “Who else was there?”

  “Jon and Franziska.”

  The colonel stared at me, his watery eyes suddenly sharp.

  “Jon and Franziska?”

  “Yes, we were searching the boathouse, and they seemed to have everything under control so I thought I would come down here and help you two out.”

  “Jon and Franziska?” he asked a third time, this time in an ever sharper tone. “Just Jon and Franziska?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “But in that case, where’s the doctor? Katja?”

  My brain went perfectly still and I stared wildly back at him. Before I could open my mouth, the colonel made an about-face and began to jog up from the water’s edge.

  “Hold on!” I shouted after him.

  “Stay there,” he called to me, “keep searching the island!”

  I heard him say something to Lotte on his way up, and she immediately followed him to the house. I watched them go, in the gray light, and it felt like my head was going to burst. When they were out of sight I looked at my watch, and then I, too, began to run.

  ANNA

  I WOKE TO the sound of an urgent buzzing. The first thing I saw was the floor, and it took me a few seconds before I figured out what was wrong with it. It was empty. No Katja. I tried to raise my head, but the pain in my temple caused it to drop back. My mind was working slowly, sluggishly. I tried again to get up, and I managed to crawl into a sitting position. Someone had tidied up the room. The bed was no longer overturned; it was back in its usual spot. The floor had been mopped clean; anyone who didn’t know there had just been a large pool of blood there would never notice the faint lines the mop had left behind. And Katja was nowhere to be seen. The only odd thing about the room at that moment was that I was sitting there in my underclothes. I managed to stand up on unsteady legs. My head felt like a bowling ball and my mouth tasted like blood. Then I realized where the sound that had wakened me was coming from: someone was pressing the doorbell outside the medical station over and over again. And now they were banging on the door and yanking at its handle as well.

  “Get the key from the kitchen!” I heard someone shout. It was clear that I had to get moving, make my way back down to the Strategic Level, and fast. I staggered over to the chest freezer, opened the top, and managed to climb in and close the lid after me. I desperately tried to remember the code. Nine digits. Wrong on the first try. I heard them struggling with the lock outside. My fingers shook until they almost couldn’t hit the numbers. Wrong on the second try. The door to the medical station was opening. Only one chance left. The voices were in the room. A woman’s voice, either Lotte’s or Franziska’s; it was hard to tell them apart.

  “She doesn’t seem to be in here.”

  “Are you sure?” That was the colonel.

  I heard them moving around in the room. It was only a matter of time before someone lifted the lid of the chest freezer. I slowly entered the digits, my last chance. My hand was shaking uncontrollably.

  “Will you check the medicine cabinet?” The colonel’s voice came closer. Only three digits left.

  “This is strange, don’t you think, that she would disappear?” I was almost certain it was Lotte. Her voice reached me from a greater distance. She sounded shaken.

  I entered the last digit and the control panel went dark. The freezer was locked. At that very moment, the lid shook. I held my breath. The colonel yanked at the lid once more.

  “Yes, it’s very odd, and unfortunate. Do you know how to get this open?”

  The interior control panel lit up, right next to my face. I realized he was trying out different codes, and I hoped they were random. As far as I knew, Katja and I were the only ones who could lock and unlock the freezer, but Katja had disappeared and I didn’t know where she was, only that someone out there had cleared her out of the way. If it was the colonel, maybe he had gotten her to give up the codes. His ha
nds were scratching at the control panel just inches from my face. I held my breath.

  “I can’t find anything here. Should we deal with the kitchen now?” That was Lotte.

  I heard the colonel stand up; the control panel went dark and his steps left the room. So whoever had attacked Katja had managed to stash her on the island somewhere, out of the way, given that the others seemed to be searching for her. That same person was likely the one who struck me in the head. Someone out there knew I hadn’t died last night after all.

  I lay where I was for a moment, breathing and going through my options. It occurred to me that the person who had attacked Katja and me might be hiding on the Strategic Level, along with Katja. If that was the case, I would be throwing myself right into his or her arms if I climbed down there right away. But it seemed even more dangerous to go the other direction, and remaining in the freezer box until the rescuers arrived from the mainland seemed like the worst option. So I decided to go down there after all.

  As quietly and cautiously as possible, I sneaked down the steep staircase. The room downstairs was empty, just as I had left it. I hoped that meant Katja and I were still the only ones who knew about the Strategic Level and how to get there. My knees were still dark with dried blood and I dampened a towel to clean them off. Then I placed the towel in a bag and taped it shut, in case it could somehow be used for evidence. There were drugs on the shelf above me, and with a certain amount of effort I reached for the bottle of painkillers, shook out three, and took them. My mouth was dry, and I had to swallow hard several times to get them down. The taste of medicine lingered in my mouth as I sat down at the screens on the other side of the room. I tried to force away thoughts of Katja and what her disappearance might mean, but it was hard. Should I interrupt my own assignment and look for her? I was hesitant. My instructions said that I must not reveal myself no matter what happened. I decided that I might have a better chance of finding Katja by looking for her from my current location and with the tools I had available: the screens and the walls.

  I began to go through the grainy images I had at my disposal, screen by screen. On the ground floor, I could see Lotte and the colonel methodically searching through both the kitchen and the parlor; upstairs I could see Jon and Henry jogging down the hall and opening the doors into all the rooms. Franziska was standing near the stairs, her arms crossed, and it didn’t appear that she was saying or doing anything at all. Her small, grainy, greenish-blue silhouette looked very cold; you could see that much even on my pixelated screen, because she pulled her fur-trimmed coat closer around herself again and again, as if it didn’t cover her thoroughly enough. The three of them eventually vanished out of sight of the upstairs hallway camera and instead showed up again on the one that captured the great hall. They went into the kitchen, where everyone was now gathered, and in order to hear what was being said I hurried to stand up, open the narrow door, and follow them, back into the wall.

  “HOW COULD THIS happen? I thought she was with you.”

  Lotte’s voice cracked; it sounded like she was on the verge of a breakdown.

  “People have to be responsible for themselves, don’t they? She was with us when we went out, I’m sure of that, and it’s not my job to keep track of where everyone is,” Franziska snapped back. She was leaning against the kitchen chair Jon had sunk down onto. He was really starting to look rotten. He was probably also terribly hungover, like the colonel, and he was leaning heavily forward on his chair, as if he were on the toilet.

  Franziska, however, looked as if she had recovered from the initial shock and had gathered new strength. She had somehow found time to fix herself up and dress in a well-coordinated outfit. She had taken off her coat and under it she was wearing wide black trousers and a bright pink tie-front cardigan with some sort of colorful pattern, the kind that looks hand-knitted but is in fact ridiculously expensive, probably imported. It was the sort of outfit she might have selected for an in-home interview in a women’s magazine, seemingly effortless and casual.

  Now that I could observe her undisturbed, I noticed that there was a strange little indentation on her throat just below her chin, and that the skin around her eyes seemed too tight when she spoke. Plastic surgery, presumably. There were rumors that the top party members and other dignitaries had their own clinic, and American cosmetic surgeons were flown in to cut on the country’s best for sky-high fees and in the utmost secrecy. I wondered if Franziska had been there. Maybe her brother-in-law in the Department of the Interior had arranged the operations. That was how it usually worked. I heard Nour’s loud, resonant snort in my head. She had always hated that sort of vanity and shallowness with a fervor that made me wonder if it was really a matter of jealousy.

  It struck me that Nour and Franziska must have moved in the same circles once upon a time, and I wondered if they knew each other. It wasn’t impossible. Maybe Franziska had been one of those who sat around in Nour’s apartment in Hökarängen, cigarette smoke stinging her eyes and her vodka glass constantly refilled, singing party songs and discussing politics as I lay in the next room with a pillow over my head, trying to sleep. I would have liked to ask Franziska about this, if only to see her reaction, but now it was too late. And whatever she’d done in her youth, she had obviously maneuvered her way up through the party apparatus better than Nour, considering her current position. If you were to place her and Nour side by side today, it would be clear that Franziska was the success story. It was really only the reserved look in her eyes that spoke to something different.

  THE CONVERSATION ABOUT what might have happened to Katja flowed back and forth in the room.

  “How do we know she didn’t leave the island?” This was Jon, lifting his head with great effort.

  “There’s no way,” the colonel said wearily. “You checked the boathouse, right? As far as I’m aware, there is no boat here that is seaworthy enough to take her any great distance in this gale.”

  “Then could someone have picked her up?”

  Apparently Jon didn’t really want to let his theory go. The colonel continued to contradict him. His tone of voice made him sound like he was talking to an unruly child who refused to listen.

  “If she had been picked up by helicopter, we would have noticed. This island is too small for anyone to land without everyone seeing it.”

  “Maybe she’s hiding of her own volition.”

  “Why on earth would she do that?” Franziska snapped.

  It occurred to me that, up to this point, I had heard her use only two tones of voice. The cheerful one, which she had used on Jon at dinner last night, and this snappish, displeased one, which seemed to be her normal mode of conversation. Jon looked at her.

  “I don’t know . . . Maybe she’s afraid. Maybe she knows something we don’t.”

  Jon took a deep breath and went on:

  “Maybe she knows who the killer is and she’s keeping away from him . . .”

  “Or her,” Lotte interjected.

  “Or her,” Jon conceded. “Or maybe she’s even the one who . . . She was the one who found Anna’s body, wasn’t she? How do we know she didn’t strangle her and then . . .”

  He looked at the others to garner support for his theory, which he seemed to find more appealing the longer he spoke. His voice grew firmer and more didactic; it was obvious once more that he was used to being listened to. “It’s totally plausible. She murders Anna, locks up the body so the rest of us can’t examine it, and then goes into hiding. I consider this a reasonable scenario, and I think we ought to start acting accordingly.”

  “The floor,” the colonel said quietly.

  The others turned around and looked at him.

  “What?” Jon said.

  “The floor,” the colonel said again, a bit louder this time. “It looked as if someone had mopped the floor. From what I could determine, someone had wiped up blood.”

 
He took a white handkerchief from his pocket and held it up. One side was rusty brown. Everyone else in the room looked at the handkerchief in confusion, and the colonel suddenly seemed to realize that they didn’t understand what he was showing them. “When I was down in the doctor’s office with Lotte, I noticed it looked like someone had wiped something off the floor. So I took a handkerchief and wiped a little more, and I think . . .”

  He steeled himself.

  “I think this is blood, and if it is, it’s reasonable to assume it came from Katja. Which means she was bleeding on the floor, and someone—or maybe she herself—later mopped it up. So as it stands now, it seems most plausible that someone harmed her and then cleaned up afterward. But we don’t know this. At the moment, I can see no good reason for why Katja would harm herself, then clean up after herself and disappear. Occam’s razor, my friends. That means . . .”

  “What is likely is the truth. Yes, I know, no need to lecture me.” Franziska sighed.

  The colonel seemed to take no notice of her sarcasm; instead he went on: “This is what we have right now. We have nothing more. We know nothing more.”

  “That could be any old dirt,” Jon said, but there wasn’t much weight to his voice anymore.

  “Incidentally, I tested the communication radio while I was down there,” the colonel said. “Still dead.”

  Henry said nothing. He seemed fully occupied with pouring coffee into an insulated carafe. A strangely old-lady-like gesture, instead of serving it directly out of the coffeemaker carafe. When he started going around and pouring coffee into the others’ cups, he looked like one of the servants. I had noticed earlier that he had a way of making himself invisible sometimes, and I knew he did it on purpose, when he would rather listen than speak. A thrill ran through my body when I looked at him, a longing to walk right through the wall and place my nose behind his ear, my arms around his waist.