Clinch (19 page)

I point at the dog again and shoot. She rolls around, legs in the air, but this time her tongue flops out of her mouth as well.

‘You two!’

Doris slips into my arms, tittering. I calm my breathing and embrace her.

‘Sweets, get your sweets here!’ cries a uniformed boy with a pillbox hat on his head.

It’s the end of one screening, with another soon to begin, and, in the half-light of the Palladium foyer, a thousand people are exchanging places. A porter gesticulates wildly with his torch, as if trying to direct the horde single-handedly. The weak beam of light flies through the dense tobacco haze hanging under the ceiling. A couple of young women in three-quarter-length evening dresses give us odd looks and whisper among themselves. One of them is wearing gloves reaching up to her elbows. Both wear green eye shadow. Behind one of the columns, a young man gets a loud slap in the face when he tries to kiss his girl.

I am standing there holding out Doris’s fur coat for her, my hat between my teeth, when a spotty teenage boy with a grammar school badge in his hat approaches with a slight bow.

‘Excuse me, could I trouble you for a moment?’ He holds out a pad and a fountain pen.

‘No trouble at all.’ Doris scribbles in the pad, and adds with a laugh: ‘Just a pleasure.’

I wait there with her fur coat until she puts it on. The boy bows again, then shakes her hand.

‘He was hardly born when your films were around.’

‘Ah, it happens all the time. Some movie fan remembers me. It’s not so very strange. Or maybe you thought he was coming over to you?’

I grunt. Doris laughs again.

‘You should never have stopped. If they still remember you.’

Doris doesn’t answer, but I feel a poke of her elbow: ‘Watch out, here comes Signe Rudin.’ She fires off her most magnificent smile at an elegant lady in a fox-fur muff and a long fur coat, who’s heading directly for us.

‘Who?’

Doris leans in closer to me. ‘Good God! Who wears a muff nowadays?’ She rolls her eyes. I put on my hat and fumble around for a cigar.

‘Wasn’t she in
Uncle Frans
?’

Doris doesn’t have time to answer. At last I find a cigar.

‘Doris! How nice!’

‘Well hello there, it’s certainly been a while!’

The two ladies hug each other. Signe Rudin glances at me. I recognise her long, aristocratic nose and dark eyes.

‘So you’re out amusing yourself. Where are Ludvig and Leo, then?’

Doris laughs and puts her hand on her arm.

‘Do you know, I decided to go out on my own tonight. Not very respectable, perhaps, but what’s one supposed to do?’

I light my cigar.

‘You should have called, my dear. You know how people talk when they see an unaccompanied lady.’ Mrs Rudin throws me another glance. Her teeth are white and even when she smiles.

‘My driver,’ says Doris, nodding at me over her shoulder.

I blow out a heavy cloud of smoke.

‘Driver?’ The old bat coughs a little.

‘I’ll go and bring the car, then.’

I blow out another blue-grey cloud of smoke. Doris laughs sharply and shakes her head. I get out the car key and rattle it in front of the ladies before turning my back on them and walking out of the foyer. Doris’s laugh rings out clearly even as I am
walking through the front doors. I’ve started suspecting that she has a whole armoury of different laughs, but she usually only deploys this particular high-pitched variety when there’s a bloke around. Not that it makes any difference; there isn’t a jot of sincerity in any of them.

The middle of the five glass doors opens with a metallic sound. Outside it’s freezing, the falling snow sweeping down. On the pavement, a shivering bloke in a grey sheep’s-wool cap is holding a placard that says,
TRY MUNKEN’S DELICACIES
. A young man without an overcoat approaches. His coat sleeves are rolled up and he wears a straw hat even though it’s midwinter. The skin on his face is flaming red in the cold air.

‘Buy a song from an unemployed man.’ He holds a little paper leaflet in his blue fingers. I shake my head and march off through the whirling snow, scratching my groin. Behind me I hear the monotonous sound of wheels clattering across the joints in the rails as a train lumbers into Central Station.

The car is parked on the other side of Vasagatan. I turn up my collar and hold it in place with one hand as I jog down Kungsgatan. A weather vane screeches in the cutting wind. One part of me would like to drive off and leave Doris here, just to see if she knows how to hail a taxi.

‘Who was that?’ I ask a little later as we’re passing Zetterberg’s house. Snow is coming down chaotically from all directions. I sit with my nose pressed close to the windscreen, trying to stay on the right side of the tram track. The snow ploughs will have plenty to get on with tomorrow.

Doris opens the glove compartment, gets out a green bottle and takes a pull at it. It smells like cognac. She passes the bottle over and I have a little sip myself.

‘Signe Rudin, the actress. Slapstick movies and other rubbish.’

‘Were you ever in a film with her?’

Doris laughs. ‘No, that was after my time.’

‘Why did you stop?’

‘I met Ludvig, I got pregnant, and then I started suffering from rheumatic pains. I couldn’t just bounce out of bed and pick up where I left off.’

‘How did you meet?’

‘Through girlfriends we had in common, at Feith’s Patisserie.’

‘No, I mean you and your dear husband.’

Doris takes another gulp and jams the bottle between her thighs. We turn into Sveavägen. The number 14 tram comes towards us, ploughing its way through the snow. She fishes out a cigarette from a pack of Camels.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘He interests me.’

‘It was a few years after the war. Spring 1923. I really needed a big part to get my career going again.’

The matchstick snaps when she’s lighting the cigarette, and she gets out another. This time she has more success, and she blows a thin jet of smoke right at the windscreen.

‘I was working with Mauritz Stiller. He’d more or less promised me the main role in
Gösta Berling’s Saga
. He invited me and my brother for a dinner with Kreuger, on a ferry crossing. Ludvig was there. They knew each other from way back. Especially Ludvig and Mauritz.’

‘So you knew Ivar Kreuger, then?’

‘Of course!’ Slowly the car fills with smoke.

‘What was he like?’

‘Polite, urbane, considerate. Generous.’

‘I heard he was involved in a fair amount of shady dealings.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘How did your husband and Stiller know each other?’

Doris takes a deep drag and stares out into the night. ‘Don’t know.’

‘What happened at that dinner?’

She sighs.

At the junction of Sveavägen and Odengatan the passengers have had to get off the 51 bus. A policeman in the characteristic fur hat of the Traffic Division is directing a group of blokes pushing it up the hill. On the back of the vehicle is a promotional poster for milk, featuring a big smiling mouth with evenly shaped, white teeth. The wheels spin round, spattering sooty, slushy snow over the volunteers.

‘Mauritz and Ivar discussed the construction of yet one more picture house and other projects. My brother played at the edge of the water. Ludvig was mainly occupied with me. He was courting me.’

‘Why did you fall for him?’

‘Can we stop by a chemist?’

‘It’s gone ten o’clock. There are none open now!’

‘You can always ring the bell.’

‘We’re almost home. Do you have a prescription?’

‘It should be fine.’

‘Not without a prescription. Then what happened?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘After the crossing.’

‘Do you remember that accident, the big explosion in Ropsten?’

‘Sure.’ I don’t have any idea what she’s talking about.

‘Ludvig kept calling on me in the following days. We got engaged. On the same day that Mauritz told me the main part had gone to Greta Garbo instead of me, my father was killed in that accident.’ I hear Doris unscrewing the bottle top. ‘Three days later Ludvig proposed.’

‘Every cloud has a silver lining.’

I turn into Roslagsvägen. The back end of the car almost spins out of control. I accelerate out of the skid, and the car lurches. Doris puts her hand on the chrome-plated instrument panel.

‘I had my mother and younger siblings to think about.’

‘So you became pregnant almost straightaway, then?’

‘I could really do with some more Veronal. And I’ve run out of cigarettes.’

‘I can get you some cigarettes. Should I drop you off first?’

She nods. We pass the junk shop and Bruntell’s. She takes a pull at the bottle and stares straight ahead.

‘That fucking Greta Garbo.’

I glance at her. It’s the first time I’ve heard her swear.

Cautiously I slow down outside my house and Doris gets out. She holds the long black train of her evening dress as she goes inside.

I let the sixteen-cylinder engine throb for a moment before I release the clutch and softly pull away. For a moment I think about turning round and going to the cigarette boy outside Restaurant Monopol, but I keep going.

By the folk school I drive past a man in an elegant overcoat and decent boots. He’s holding onto the low crown of his hat, and he walks doubled up like an old miner in the stiff breeze. Just as I pass him he straightens his back. I stiffen. It’s Rickardsson, one of Ploman’s gangsters. There’s really nothing untoward about it; he lives somewhere around here with his wife and daughters and he likes to take an evening walk, but the look he gives me makes me tighten my grip on the steering wheel. I think about the shootings up in Vanadislunden and I realise that I have now got myself a bunch of powerful enemies.

I turn into Vallhallavägen. I try to shake off my disquiet, and put a cigar in my mouth.

On the corner of Frejgatan stands a chestnut mare with an empty cart. The driver stands beside the horse. He’s wearing a long coat and a scarf wrapped around his chest. His hands are buried in the horse’s coat, to keep the warmth.

The late-opening tobacco kiosk by Östermalm Grammar School on Karlavägen has run out of Camel. The falling snow is intensifying, flying under my hat, lodging in my eyebrows and lashes. I blink.

‘Something that’s like Camel, then?’

‘Carat? Almost sounds the same.’ The man behind the glass window is wearing a hat with earmuffs and keeps his hands tucked into his armpits, even though on the floor behind him there’s a little glowing metal radiator.

‘What about the taste?’

Someone sighs loudly behind me. I turn around. It’s an old bloke with a monocle hanging by a black silk ribbon across his chest. He’s wearing a grey cylindrical hat and a black overcoat with a fur-trimmed collar, his stick hooked over his right arm, a pair of gloves in his hand. I smile at him. He doesn’t like that; he seems to withdraw.

‘Stamboul. But it’s filterless. What about Arab? Arabs and camels?’

‘Stamboul will be fine.’

‘One?’

‘Fifty.’ I’m stamping my boots at the snow. I can no longer feel my toes.

‘Fifty Stamboul. That’ll be two seventy-five.’

I hurry back to the car with the cigarettes. The snow is blowing directly into my face and I’m cowering behind my hat like an amateur keeping up his guard.

When I look up for a moment to see where I’ve parked, I sense
a familiar figure on the other side of the street. I stop. The wind almost sweeps off my hat.

It’s Leonard, the kid from Bellevueparken. He’s coming out of Gnistan Restaurant on the other side of the street and walking towards his black Mercedes. My heart skips a beat, then beats, then skips again.

‘Hey! Leonard!’

The broad lanes of Karlavägen are separated by an alley of bare trees with a pedestrian path in the middle. The wind catches my voice and tosses it back towards Karlaplan. My back groans as I bend down and scoop up a handful of cold powder snow. It seeps between my fingers as I try to form a snowball. Leonard is keeping one hand on his hat. As he moves along he puts a cigarette in his mouth. He doesn’t light it. He’s swaying slightly.

‘Wait, Leonard!’ I’m roaring as loudly as I can. By the time he finally sees me he’s reached his Mercedes. I take off my hat, and breathe a sigh of relief. He stares at me from the other side of the street. I break into a sweat.

He hops into his sports car, the engine rumbles to life and, before I know it, he’s sped off in a roaring cloud of exhaust and snow crystals.

I’m already back at the Cadillac, but when I open the door, it rebounds with a dull thud against the snowbank along the verge and closes again. I punch the spare tyre hanging on the side of the car, then open the door again and squeeze through into the driver’s seat.

The spinning wheels pack the snow down until the tyres gain some traction. The power of the engine presses me back into the seat. After a U-turn at the roundabout on Karlaplan some twenty metres away, I’ll be on his tail.

I reach the roundabout at high speed. From the left comes a small, four-horse-power delivery van, but I squeeze ahead of it, spin the wheel to the right and apply the handbrake. The back wheels glide away from me, but then the brakes bite and send the entire vehicle into a spin. The headlights pass over the Christmas trees piled up under Karlavägen’s own line of trees, then over the sign on the roof of the delivery van, which announces a
MASSIVE SALE OF WHITE GOODS
, and then finally reflect against the corrugated iron of the shacks around the Pit.

I release the handbrake and pump the clutch up and down. Snow sprays in all directions. The car keeps spinning, passing the pool construction in the middle of the roundabout and, for a moment, facing a truck from Karlavägen. My eyes meet the driver’s. He has a potato nose and a big, bushy moustache. Before the beams of his headlights hit me square in the eye, I see him opening his mouth in a silent cry.

I lunge at the accelerator and turn the wheel. The engine roars like a wounded bear. For a moment the truck is up on two wheels, and while I am accelerating north in the right-hand lane, a deafening din erupts, when dozens of milk churns fall to the ground.