The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

The leader of the bullies says, “Sure. Okay!” He tries to look as if he isn’t bothered, but all three of them look shifty all of a sudden. It’s an ancient reflex, the eyes are looking for an escape route.

  Jocke leads them out of the recreation room where there are supervisors and teachers, to the storeroom outside the craft rooms. He shows Mauri and the leader of his tormentors into a corridor that is a dead end, with clothes closets along both sides.

  The leader’s two pals think they’re going with him, but Jocke stops them. This is between Mauri and the leader.

  The match begins. The leader pushes Mauri in the chest so that he falls into a closet, hitting his head and his back. Fear floods his body.

  “Come on, Mauri, get him!” yell Jocke’s pals.

  Jocke doesn’t yell. His face is expressionless, almost inert. The leader’s friends daren’t shout out, but their body language grows bolder. They’re beginning to think that the only one who’s going to get beaten up here is Mauri. And they don’t have a problem with that.

  Then it happens. A different system is switched on in Mauri’s head. Not the system that gives in and backs away and puts its hands up to its head to protect itself. There’s something shining inside his head, his body is moving of its own accord while Mauri looks on.

  It’s everything Jocke taught him. And a little bit more.

  In a single movement: his feet dance forward, his hand supports itself on top of one of the closets and helps to give height and strength to the kick. A kick like a mule, hitting his opponent on the side of the head. Straight after that a kick in the stomach, a fist in the face.

  An insight: this is how he has to fight, distance, strike, distance. You can’t wrestle and push people around when they’re bigger than you. Mauri is back inside himself, but he’s on the ball, looking around for a weapon. It’s a loose closet door that the janitor is going to fix, any year now, he’s got his cottage to fix up after all, and he’s hardly ever in school.

  Mauri gets hold of the closet door with both hands, it’s made of orange tin, and slams it down. Crash. Bang. It’s the leader of the bullies who’s holding his hands up now. He’s the one who’s trying to protect his head now.

  Jocke grabs hold of Mauri’s arm and says that’s enough. Mauri has driven his opponent right into the corner. He’s lying down. Mauri isn’t afraid he’s killed him, he hopes he has killed him, he wants to kill him. He reluctantly lets go of the door.

  He walks away. Jocke and his pals have already disappeared in a different direction. His arms are shaking with the effort.

  The three boys from the other class don’t tell a soul. They might have taken their revenge if it hadn’t been for Jocke and his pals. Jocke probably wouldn’t have bothered, but they think Jocke is on Mauri’s side.

  Mauri doesn’t become king of the class. He doesn’t win respect. He doesn’t advance one single step up the status ladder. But he’s left in peace. He can sit out in the schoolyard waiting for the bus and thinking his own thoughts, instead of constantly being on his guard, ready to slip away and hide.

  But the following night he dreams that he kills his mother. Beats her to death with an iron pipe. He wakes up and listens, because he thinks he might have been screaming. Or was she the one who was screaming, in the dream? He sits up in bed and tries to stay awake, afraid of going back to sleep.

  Diddi is standing in Mauri’s student room. His hair is wet, he’s making a noise, he wants money. His money, he insists. Mauri says pleasantly, in his foster father’s voice, that he’s sorry things have turned out like this between them, but they had a deal and it stands.

  Diddi says something contemptuous, then he gives Mauri a push in the chest.

  “Don’t do that,” Mauri warns him.

  Diddi pushes him again. He probably wants Mauri to push him back, then they can push each other harder and harder until it’s time to give up and go home and sleep it off.

  But the blow comes straightaway. It’s foster brother Jocke, who needs no run-up time. Right in the middle of the nose. Diddi has never been hit before, he doesn’t have time to raise his hand to his nose, the blood doesn’t have time to begin flowing before the next blow falls. And then his arm is being twisted up his back and Mauri leads him out into the corridor, down the stairs, and throws him out into the wet snow.

  Mauri takes the stairs back up to his room three steps at a time. He’s thinking about his money. He can take the lot out tomorrow if he wants to. It’s just about two million. But what would he do with it?

  He feels remarkably free. Now he doesn’t have to wait for Diddi to get in touch.

  Inspector Tommy Rantakyrö poked his head around the door of the interview room.

  “Mr. Kallis and company are here,” he said.

  Anna-Maria Mella shut down the computer and went down to the main office along with her colleagues Tommy Rantakyrö and Sven-Erik Stålnacke.

  Mauri Kallis had Diddi Wattrang and his chief of security, Mikael Wiik, with him. Three men in long black coats. That alone made them stand out. Men in Kiruna wore jackets.

  Diddi Wattrang kept shifting from one foot to the other, his eyes flicking everywhere. When he shook hands with Anna-Maria Mella, his grip was fierce.

  “I’m so nervous,” he confessed. “When it comes to the crunch I’m a real wimp.”

  Anna-Maria was disarmed by his honesty. She was completely unused to men who admitted they were weak. She was overcome by the desire to say the right thing, but only managed to mutter something about understanding that it must be difficult.

  Mauri Kallis was shorter than she’d thought. Not as short as she was, of course, but even so. Seeing him in the flesh, she was struck by how sparse his body language was. It was so obvious with the restless Diddi by his side. Mauri spoke in a calm, quiet voice. There was nothing left of his Kiruna dialect.

  “We want to see her,” he said.

  “Of course,” said Anna-Maria Mella. “And afterwards I’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right.”

  If that’s all right, she thought. Stop creeping!

  The chief of security shook hands with the police officers, and it quickly emerged that he himself had started off in the police.

  He gave them each his card. Tommy Rantakyrö put it in his wallet. Anna-Maria resisted the urge to throw it straight in the wastepaper basket.

  Anna Granlund, the autopsy technician, had rolled Inna Wattrang’s body into the chapel, since her relatives were going to come and see her. It was free of religious symbols. A few chairs and a bare altar.

  The body was covered with a white sheet; there was no reason to reveal her stab wounds or burns. Anna-Maria folded the sheet back from her face.

  Diddi Wattrang nodded and swallowed. Anna-Maria noticed that Sven-Erik discreetly moved to stand behind him so that he could catch him if he fell.

  “That’s her,” said Mauri Kallis sorrowfully, taking a deep breath.

  Diddi Wattrang dug a packet of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and lit one. Nobody said anything. It wasn’t their job to make sure the no-smoking rule was followed.

  The security chief walked around the bier and lifted the sheet, looked at Inna Wattrang’s arms, looked at her feet, paused for a second when he saw the circular mark around her ankle.

  Mauri Kallis and Diddi Wattrang followed his actions with their eyes, but when he lifted the sheet where it covered her hips and pudenda, they both glanced away. Neither of them spoke.

  “I don’t think the medical examiner will appreciate your doing that,” said Anna-Maria.

  “I’m not touching her,” replied the security chief, leaning over her face. “Chill out, we’re on the same side.”

  “Perhaps you could wait outside,” said Anna-Maria.

  “Sure,” said the security chief. “I’m done here.”

  He left the room.

  At a sign from Anna-Maria, Sven-Erik followed him. She didn’t want the security chief roaming around the autopsy suite.


  Diddi Wattrang blew his fringe out of his eyes and scratched his nose with the hand that was holding the cigarette. It was a thoughtless movement. Anna-Maria was afraid he was going to set fire to his hair.

  “I’ll wait outside,” he said to Mauri Kallis. “I can’t do this.”

  He went out. Anna-Maria Mella moved to replace the sheet over Inna Wattrang’s face.

  “Could you leave it a moment?” asked Mauri Kallis. “Her mother wants her to be cremated, so this is the last time I…”

  Anna-Maria took a step backward.

  “May I touch her?”

  “No.”

  There were just the two of them left in the room.

  Mauri Kallis smiled. Then it almost looked as if he were going to cry.

  Two weeks go by. Mauri threw Diddi out in the snow, and there’s been no sign of him at college. He tells himself he doesn’t care.

  “What are you thinking about?” asks Mauri’s girlfriend. She’s so simple he can hardly stand it. “I’m thinking about when we met,” he replies. Or: “I’m thinking about how sweet you are when you laugh. You’re only allowed to laugh at my jokes though, don’t forget!” Or: “About your ass! Come to Daddy.” An easy way to avoid her “Do you love me?” That’s where he draws the line at lying. He can lie and dissemble about anything else. But it’s remarkable that it’s so difficult to answer “yes” to that particular question and look her in the eye and look as if you mean it.

  Then Inna Wattrang comes to call one evening.

  She’s so like her brother, the same distinctive nose, the same blonde bob. He looks almost like a girl and she looks almost like a boy. A young boy in a skirt and a white shirt.

  Her shoes look expensive. She didn’t take them off when she came in. She’s wearing pretty pearl earrings.

  She’s just finished her law studies, she says, sitting there on the edge of Mauri’s bed. He’s sitting on the desk chair, trying to keep a cool head.

  “Diddi,” she says, “is an idiot. He met the woman it’s every young man’s destiny to meet. The one who gives him an excuse to behave like a pig toward every other woman for all eternity.”

  She smiles and asks if it’s okay to smoke. Mauri notices that she has a single dimple, just on one side.

  “Oh, I’m terrible,” she says.

  She has a voice like a 1930s movie star, and blows out smoke like a little train. It’s as if she’s come from another time. Mauri has a vision of her surrounded by housemaids in black dresses and white aprons; she’s driving a car, wearing gloves and drinking absinthe.

  “I don’t want to belittle his pain,” she says. “That Sofia really crushed him. I don’t know what happened between the two of you, but he isn’t himself. I don’t know what to do. I’m really worried, you know? I know he regards you as his friend. He’s talked about you lots of times.”

  Mauri wants to believe. He really does. Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.

  “I know he wants to put things right between you. Come with me and meet him. He needs to be able to say sorry. The last thing he needs is to ruin the good relationships he has.”

  This isn’t what Mauri had in mind at all. But they take the number 540 bus and then the subway into town and he tramps with her through the wet falling snow to Strix.

  She walks a little close to him, her upper arm brushing against him from time to time. He’d like to take her arm, like in an old film. She’s easy to talk to, and she laughs often. It’s quite a low, soft laugh. They have time for a few drinks before Diddi arrives.

  Inna insists on paying. She’s done a job for a relative who owns a real estate company, and she just got paid. Mauri is interested and asks questions, she’s asked him about so many things already, but she slips skillfully past although he doesn’t notice it at the time. It’s just that suddenly they’re talking about something else. He’s pleasantly under the influence and forgets himself and he’s talking a little bit too much and his eyes become disobedient and slide down toward her heavy breasts beneath the man’s shirt.

  And when Diddi arrives it really is like an old film, where three best friends are finally reconciled. The snow falling outside on the dark Stockholm streets. Insignificant people walk along Drottninggatan like film extras, or raise their glasses, talking and laughing at the tables nearby, but they’re simply mediocre.

  And Diddi, who is the most beautiful ghost and wreck you can imagine, weeps openly there in the restaurant as the story of Sofia comes pouring out of him.

  “She had no problem squandering my money, as long as it was there.”

  And Inna fleetingly caresses her brother’s hand, but her knee is touching Mauri’s all the time, although perhaps that doesn’t mean a thing.

  And much later, when they’re standing under a streetlight outside an all-night store and it’s time to part, Diddi says he wants to carry on speculating on the stock market with Mauri.

  Mauri doesn’t say anything about the fact that he and Diddi have never speculated together, it’s Mauri who does the job. But the hardness inside him begins to wake up; no Inna or Diddi or any magic in the world can rock it completely to sleep.

  “Fine,” he says with a half smile. “Come up with the money and you’re in again. But this time I’m taking thirty percent.”

  The atmosphere immediately becomes less pleasant. Mauri takes great gulps of the awkwardness and discomfiture. Thinks he’ll have to get used to this. If you’re going to do business, and do it successfully, you need to be able to put up with things. Unpleasantness, awkwardness, tears, hatred.

  And the homeless dog that sits somewhere inside his chest, he’ll need to keep that on the leash.

  Then Inna bursts out into her melodious laugh.

  “You’re wonderful,” she says. “I hope we can see each other again sometime.”

  Inspector Anna-Maria Mella pulled the sheet over Inna Wattrang’s face.

  “We’ll go down to the station,” she said. “I’d like you to tell me a bit about Inna Wattrang.”

  What can I say? thought Mauri Kallis. That she was a whore and a drug addict? That she was as much like God as a human being can be?

  And then he lied to the very best of his ability. And he could lie very well indeed.

  Rebecka Martinsson finished her work at one o’clock. She microwaved something boring and went through the morning’s post. Just as she’d sat down at her desk, her computer pinged. An e-mail from Måns Wenngren.

  Just seeing his name on the screen was enough to send a pang through her body. She clicked on the message to open it as if it were a reflex action.

  I assume all hell has broken loose up there. Read about Inna Wattrang this morning. By the way, everybody in the office is coming up to the Riksgränsen resort to go skiing this weekend. Three days, Fri–Sun. Come up and join us for a drink.

  Nothing else. She read the message several times. Pressed Send/Receive as if it might magic up something else, another message perhaps.

  He’d make me unhappy, she thought. I know that.

  Because she’d been his assistant advocate, she’d sat in the next office to him, listening to him talking on the phone, his “Look, I’m just on my way to a meeting,” although Rebecka knew he wasn’t. “I’ll call you…no, really, I will…I’ll call you tonight.” Then the conversation would be brought to an end, or else the person on the end wouldn’t give up, and then the door of his office would slam shut.

  He never talked about his grown-up children, perhaps because he had no contact with them, perhaps because he didn’t want to remind people that he was actually over fifty.

  He drank too much.

  He slept with newly employed lawyers, and even with clients.

  Once he’d come on to Rebecka. It was at an office Christmas party. He’d been pretty drunk, and everybody else had given him the brush-off. His drunken groping wasn’t even a compliment, it was an insult.

  And yet she still thought constantly about his hand on the back of her neck. About all
the times they’d sat in court together, had lunch together. Always a little bit too close to each other, just so that they happened to brush against each other now and again. Or was that just her imagination?

  And that time she’d been stabbed. He’d sat by her bed watching over her.

  This is exactly what it is, she thought. This is exactly what I’m so tired of. This brooding. On the one hand, on the other hand. On the one hand, this and this mean he cares. On the other hand, this and this mean he doesn’t care. On the one hand, I ought to forget him. On the other hand, I ought to cling on to every little scrap of love I can find, like a drowning man. On the one hand, it’ll be complicated. On the other hand, it’s never simple. Love, that is.

  Love is like being possessed by a demon. Your will softens like butter. Your brain is full of holes. You have no control over yourself.

  She’d done her best when she was working for Måns. She put on her straitjacket, muzzle and choke chain every morning. Watching herself all the time so that she didn’t give herself away. She climbed into a kind of stiffness and hid herself inside it. She didn’t talk to him any more than necessary. Communicated via yellow Post-it notes and e-mail, although she was in the office next door. Often gazed out the window when he was talking to her.

  But she worked like the devil for him. She was the best assistant he’d ever had.

  Like a pathetic dog, she thought now.

  She ought to e-mail him back. She wrote a reply, but deleted it immediately. Then all of a sudden it became difficult. Writing one single letter was like climbing a mountain. She turned and twisted the words. Nothing sounded right.

  What would Grandmother have said about him? She would have thought he was a boy. And that was probably true. He was like one of Daddy’s hunting dogs that didn’t want to stop playing. It never really grew up, racing into the forest and coming back with sticks for Daddy to throw. In the end it was shot. No room in the house for a useless dog.