‘It glitters like …’ said Birger, swallowing a big lump in his throat.
‘Gold,’ said Greger.
________
Spiderman was the name of one of the least repulsive creatures created by the comic-book wizard Stan ‘the Man’ Lee. He was a poor boy with six arms and he never knew what to do with them. Henry Morgan always followed his fate very attentively down at the Cigar Seller’s shop. In fact, Henry the bartender was rather like that Spiderman. The only difference was that Henry knew exactly what he was supposed to do with his arms: pour, measure, shake, stir, mix, sweeten, spice, crush and serve. We were witness to his full range of talents on that day when we celebrated Greger’s resurrection.
Our depressed mood had been replaced with joyous exhilaration. We had not only found Greger in the best possible condition, but we had also come a good deal closer to the Treasure. Of that we were fully convinced.
‘This is a gift from above, a portent, a streak of light and hope as we head into the darkness of winter,’ intoned Henry, holding up the still-muddy golden cup. ‘It’s a sign of hope and consolation, while this is a gift from me personally,’ he concluded as he served four delicious drinks. ‘Down the hatch!’
‘Skål, you counts and barons,’ said Birger, just as we all expected him to say.
All disasters have a certain number of casualties and a certain number of heroes. Greger belonged to the latter category, and he had grown in stature down there in his newly discovered passageway. Greger had acquired a certain presence; he looked a bit like Franzén and Fälting, the first to board the Wasa, as he stood there balancing his Vanderbilt cocktail. What Greger had accomplished might be viewed, in the near future, as just as remarkable as the salvaging of the royal warship Wasa. That’s what Greger had concluded himself, and no one tried to rob him of his illusion.
Henry got out the map, that strange document that had set everything in motion in 1961, and spread it on the table in the sitting room. The rest of us gathered round to look at it.
‘It must be the alternative passageway that is hinted at here with this dotted line, going due west, parallel to Hornsgatan. Don’t you think?’
We murmured our agreement as we stared at the collective efforts, hopes and illusions, facts and dreams of the old historian and member of the WWW Club now manifested in the equally blessed and cryptic form that a treasure map by necessity possesses when it’s reconstructed after the fact. The dotted passageway led to one of four alternate treasure chambers. Until now the expedition had focused on two others, lying in a more easterly direction. We unanimously decided that the only valid alternative was the one going due west.
‘I propose that we call the new find “Greger’s Grotto”.’ said Henry.
Greger turned bright red in the face from pride, and there were no objections. We drank a toast to Greger’s Grotto, and presumably we were so engrossed in the solemn mood that no one noticed Leo as he slipped into the sitting room. He was suddenly just there, and he seemed extremely uninterested in any new discoveries.
‘Anyone have a cigarette?’ he asked as he yawned and sat down on the windowsill.
‘Sure,’ said Birger ingratiatingly, handing him a Pall Mall.
‘Did you almost die, Greger?’ asked Leo.
Greger instantly came back down to earth.
‘No, not at all,’ he assured Leo. ‘It just caved in a bit, but it opened up a new passageway. Here, here it is,’ he went on, pointing at the map. ‘It’s going to be called Greger’s Grotto.’
Leo made no move to look because he wasn’t interested, not the least bit curious. He stayed where he was over by the window, peering out at the even grey haze settling over the rooftops, the streets and all of Stockholm.
‘Well, well,’ he said with a sigh. ‘That’s a fine name.’
________
‘Damn, I feel good,’ said Henry when Greger and Birger had left us after several hours of discussion and drinking. Leo hadn’t managed to bring our spirits down, and then he had slunk back to his incense. Henry and I were in top form that evening.
‘We need to make a whole night of it!’ I said.
‘Of course,’ agreed Henry. ‘But first we just need to check on our finances.’
After some rather dubious calculating we came up with enough for a minor binge that evening. Henry had a flash of genius: we could ring Kerstin, the daughter of the football-pool king, the one who drove a Picko’s delivery van. A flash of genius was the right term for it, and I took it upon myself to ring Kerstin. She was actually home, and she would definitely come for dinner, and everything seemed simply too good to be true.
We ran over to Åhléns downtown to buy delicacies like crabs, eel, salami, spreadable cheeses, and various pâtés, as well as all sorts of other things that might embellish what was a grey and gloomy evening, as far as the climate was concerned, at the very end of November. Henry was still wearing his muddy overalls, and I hadn’t even washed my hands after the disaster, so people may have taken us for two desperate fugitives, blowing our money on fine food in the last tense hours before the police caught up with us.
Then we headed back home to wash up and shave, take a brief rest and put on more appropriate attire. Henry was even generous enough to ask whether Leo would like to join us, but he was going into town, to the cinema. We would have Kerstin all to ourselves, or so we thought.
Just before eight o’clock another glorious and artistic table was laid out by Henri le gourmet. It was a splendour to behold, and he hadn’t neglected a thing. The table setting was crowned by a magnificent parlour palm, adorned with small pineapples, which gave the arrangement a certain touch of the Riviera, the Mediterranean and Monte Carlo.
Kerstin arrived fashionably late and was in high spirits. Henry served us each a Palm Breeze, which consists of rum, Chartreuse and crème de cacao, a drink that had won a cocktail contest in London back in 1949, at least according to the bartender.
‘I probably made several hundred of these Palm Breeze cocktails when I was in …’ Henry began and then continued to hold forth for a dumbstruck Kerstin, who gave off a strong scent of eau de cologne.
‘Well, that was good, at any rate,’ she said as she awoke from Henry’s numbing monologue.
‘But there’s just one detail,’ said Henry. ‘You’re very beautiful tonight, Kerstin, but you’re not allowed to chew gum when you drink a cocktail!’
‘Sorry,’ she said, embarrassed, and spat the gum into her hand. ‘I always chew gum.’
‘And you do it very beautifully. It makes some people look ugly, but not you.’
‘That’s going a bit too far,’ I felt forced to intervene.
‘OK, Klasa,’ said the host, holding up his hands as if at a robbery.
‘That was rude.’
‘Don’t fight, boys,’ said Kerstin. ‘How about showing me around?’
‘Klasa will show the lady around while I take care of things in the kitchen,’ said Henry and disappeared.
The dinner later proceeded according to a slightly strained and yet very dignified ritual. The delicacies were excellent, and the various wines quite superb. Above all, they made the host relax the proprieties a bit.
Kerstin chewed gum even over coffee, but neither Henry nor I felt like nagging her. All three of us were quite satiated after the repast, and we each sat in an armchair in the sitting room, digesting our food with our feet up on footstools. Between the two Parian figures of Truth and Falsehood the fire hissed and crackled in a sleepy, anaesthetising concert.
Henry was undoubtedly very pleased with himself. Whenever he was pleased with himself and his efforts, he would get a particularly foolish expression on his face. It looked, quite simply, as if his eyes became narrow slits. He had now conversed and served food and entertained for several hours like a fully fledged host, and he was entitled to sit and revel in front of the fire with some coffee and a cognac.
‘You’re a couple of strange birds,’ said Kerstin with a sigh,
apropos of nothing.
‘Birds and birds,’ Henry repeated. ‘I can’t agree with that. We practically live like monks up here.’
‘Monks and monks,’ I repeated.
‘Dammit all, Klasa!’ Henry suddenly exclaimed. ‘You know what we should do now, don’t you?!’
‘Take it easy, that’s what I suggest.’
‘The song …’ he whispered. ‘“The Girl with the Contact Lenses and Mourning Ribbon.”’
‘Hell yes!’
We quickly finished off our coffee and cognac and enticed Kerstin into the room with Henry’s grand piano. We sat her down on the sofa with the black tassels, lit a couple of candles for the mood and got out the sheet music for the song that we had cobbled together on All Saints’ Day in honour of Kerstin. By this time we had almost forgotten it, and when Henry cleared his throat and struck a couple of chords on the piano, he seemed slightly embarrassed. Kerstin, on the other hand, looked very amused.
Henry the entertainer made it all the way through the song without a single mistake. It may have been a bit strained but it wasn’t lacking in feeling. Kerstin was deeply moved by the tribute and applauded with shining eyes. We each received a kiss and a hug, and her lips tasted of Stimorol gum.
‘One more time … Let me hear it one more time,’ begged Kerstin. ‘I’ve never had a song dedicated to me before … oh, please …’
Henry couldn’t very well resist, and so he sang ‘The Girl with the Contact Lenses and Mourning Ribbon’ one more time. Our muse soaked up every single word about the marvellous daughter of the football-pool king with the bad eyesight and grief. Then we went back to the sitting room to drink whisky, put more wood on the fire and talk about mutual friends and enemies. We found no mutual friends before we also discovered that we were very drunk, all three of us.
At that moment Leo came home. It turned out to be well past one in the morning, and Leo had been to the cinema. He greeted Kerstin with unusual politeness, and her eyes lingered on him for a long time. Leo poured himself a whisky and lit a cigarette over at the chess table, because all of a sudden he had decided to make the weekly move against Lennart Hagberg in Borås.
Henry was in an exuberant mood, and he started talking up his brother, boasting right and left about his poems and amazing chess skills.
‘I’ve always wanted to learn to play chess,’ said Kerstin.
‘Well, there’s a genius of a teacher over there,’ said Henry, nodding at Leo.
Kerstin was not particularly shy, and she went over to the genius, who for once was actually feeling sociable, and he started explaining how to move the pieces. He showed her the weekly move, why and how he had chosen it, and what effect it would have on his opponent.
Henry yawned loudly, while I sat there in my armchair, nodding off now and then. It had been a demanding day, the dinner had taken its toll, and the strong whiskies had made things even better. Soon all I heard was a quiet hissing from a slumbering Henry and a slumbering fire. Kerstin and Leo, who were murmuring quietly over in the corner at the chess table, sounded like muffled voices from a neighbour far away beyond the walls. The fire cast its warm, calm light over the easy chairs, and I too fell asleep.
________
It was extremely cold in the sitting room when I came to. Henry was standing in front of me, kicking at my foot to wake me up. Dawn was making its way through the room like a ghost, filling the flat with that special chiaroscuro that could seem so depressing. Although right now it didn’t feel particularly depressing, but actually rather pleasant.
‘Kerstin …’ whispered Henry.
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘What about her?’
‘She and Leo,’ he said and tsk’ed. ‘It ended up being the two of them, at any rate.’
‘Nice for him,’ I replied sullenly.
‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ said Henry shrugging his shoulders morosely. ‘I’m going to make a fire.’
It was only seven a.m. and we thawed ourselves out properly before there was even talk of any breakfast. By that time it was completely pointless to go to bed because then the whole day would be done for. It was better just to get on with things as if nothing had happened.
Out in the kitchen the dishes were waiting from yesterday, and there was nothing for it but to take a deep breath and dig in. About an hour later we had cleaned up and set out a monumental breakfast with glasses of hair-of-the-dog. As soon as we had sat down in peace and quiet with the morning papers on our laps, we heard footsteps coming from the bathroom, and soon a rather haggard looking Kerstin turned up in the kitchen. She looked quite embarrassed but we tried to cheer her up, because there was absolutely nothing remarkable about what had happened. On the contrary. At any rate, she ate her breakfast with a ravenous appetite and then had to run off to her job. Someone might already have called her on the radio.
‘You two are much too sweet,’ she repeated over and over again. ‘You’re not angry about this, are you?!’
‘Angry?’ said Henry emphatically like a wounded actor. ‘Me, angry?!’
Kerstin smiled happily and gave each of us a combination good-morning and thanks-and-goodbye kiss before she started gathering up her things, which lay strewn over the whole flat. God only knew what they had been doing.
‘But in any case, I’d like to have that song,’ she said finally, from the doorway. ‘On tape. Could you record it onto a cassette?’
‘Sure, I can do that,’ said Henry.
‘Then I can listen to it in the car and think about all of you.’
Kerstin left, and Henry stared at me over the newspaper, smiling a foolish smile.
‘Chicks are also birds, you know,’ he said, imitating a moronic ornithologist who people had laughed at years ago.
I flung a piece of cheese at the idiot’s head.
For once Leo got up before lunch and was met with quiet sighs and low whistles from the kitchen. He too looked embarrassed, but also proud and slightly annoyed. He’d had a problem with Kerstin’s chewing gum. It had got stuck in a place where it absolutely should not have got stuck.
There was a lot of whispering going on outside the door to my bedroom. It was barely audible but still enough to wake me up. The fact of the matter is that from childhood on you become particularly sensitive to certain holidays and special occasions, and for the rest of your life they retain their specific magic in the calendar. This time it was the Lucia festival. Henry had opened twelve little doors on the Advent calendar with the three wise men, and I opened my bleary eyes and stared at the alarm clock. It was a few minutes past six and I’d had only a few hours of sleep because the evening before had been both long and intense.
The whispering continued out there in the corridor, and I drowsily tried to distinguish the voices. I thought I heard a woman, a Lucia, but if so, I couldn’t imagine who it might be. As I said, it had been a tumultuous evening, which started with a big bash on Strandvägen in honour of the year’s Nobel prize winners. To my great surprise I had been invited in my capacity as a young man-of-letters, and I felt deeply flattered, not least because of Henry Morgan’s reaction. When the invitation had arrived a week earlier, the inquisitive gossipmonger had read every single word over my shoulder, the very shoulder that he later pounded with all his might to congratulate me. According to him, this was confirmation that I belonged to the most elite, the crème de la crème of Swedish cultural life, and he insisted that I was a name to be reckoned with in the future. Things would not go for me as they had for Leo. But I couldn’t figure out who had sent the card, since as far as I knew, Mr Isaac Bashevis Singer and I were not yet acquainted.
In any case, it was a grand party. Lost there in the crowds and bolstered, of course, by a glass of champagne, I ran into my publisher, Torsten Franzén, and then it all became perfectly clear. He was the one who had invited me. Franzén had brought with him his stylish wife, who absolutely adored what I wrote and absolutely adored what Mr Singer wrote.
‘You haven’t talked to hi
m yet?!’ croaked Mrs Franzén, splashing a little champagne onto my jacket sleeve. ‘You really must see to it! He’s an utterly fantastic person, simply marvellous!’
‘I believe you,’ I said.
‘You have to tell me how it’s going with The Red Room,’ said Franzén the publisher. ‘How far have you got?’
‘I’m making good progress.’
‘When can you deliver it?’
‘How the hell should I know! Is this really the place to be discussing business?’
‘I never hear from you except when you need an advance. I really need to know how it’s going!’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘It’s going fucking great.’
‘The advances have really started to add up and people are beginning to talk, you know. I have superiors to answer to.’
‘That’s certainly candid of you, Torsten. Damn candid,’ I said, looking deep into his eyes. ‘I’ve never heard any boss admit that he has superiors he has to answer to except if there’s some sort of disaster.’
‘Klas, very soon this is going to be a disaster. The book is supposed to be on our desks this spring, preferably in April after the big spring sales. That’s four months from now.’
I was starting to feel pressured, and it was so hot in there that the sweat was trickling down my cheeks and there was no more champagne in my glass. Franzén had backed me into a sweaty corner, and I had nothing to say to him other than to offer random jabs in the form of bad promises and multiple excuses, but then my salvation arrived in the figure of a Jewish ambassador who, with Mrs Franzén’s shimmering gown right behind him, stepped over to me and said in English:
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 42
