Clinch (28 page)

‘No!’ The sofa creaks when Leonard almost starts jumping on it. ‘I did it myself! I did it all myself! Just like Apollo, father!’

Steiner chuckles and nods. Doris’s eyes open wide. In seconds, she has put her full repertoire of thespian emotions on display. Her eyes fill with tears.

‘How did that happen?’

I fix Doris with my eyes. The armchair to my right groans under Steiner’s weight when he pinches his front creases and sits down.

‘Possibly Leo acted slightly too rashly. The family wasn’t in quite so much trouble. He’s always been a passionate lad.’ Steiner laughs.

Leonard grins in that way of his and looks right at me. He has the same brown eyes as his sister. Then he lisps: ‘At first my father was going to hire some rough brute to do it. That was how your name came up. But one has to be able to stand up for oneself. I wanted to show Father. But I’m not stupid, I realised someone else would have to take the blame for it.’

‘And that was me, then.’

Leonard titters. He doesn’t take his eyes off me. Doris puts her hand over her mouth.

‘I forged that letter, and the same night you got it I drove around until I saw you standing about outside Zetterberg’s house. I knew you wouldn’t say no, there was so much money on offer. It wasn’t exactly difficult getting you to come for a drive either. And you said I’m retarded, but I’m not, am I, Father?’

Leonard smiles, showing the gap between his front teeth. Doris struggles for breath and meets my eyes for the first time that night, so that, for an instant, it’s as if we’re staring into the very depths of each other.

I don’t know how many times I’ve stared down my opponents. It’s a part of the game, and I don’t yield an inch. If you as much as glance in another direction you’re already defeated, and you may as well throw in the towel right away. I don’t look away this time either – I have nothing to lose. I notice that I’ve been holding my breath, then straining for air. Doris cocks her pistol, her hand trembling violently.

Leonard leans back in the sofa and lays his arm across the back, briefly inspecting the state of his nails on his other hand; his trousers make a swishing sound as he crosses his legs.

‘Why did you hit me up there in the park?’

‘Because you’re a rich nutcase,’ I answer truthfully.

‘That’s what you think.’ Leonard shakes his head slightly. ‘When I woke up, I went and beat him to death. It wasn’t difficult. I did it myself, Mum! It wasn’t Herberger who did it, it was me!’

‘Yes, you’ll have to forgive us, my treasure,’ Steiner interjects. ‘I thought it would be for the best to keep quiet about Leo’s doings and put the blame on Herberger. I suspected that it would prove too much for your nerves, and that you might not be able to fully play your own part, if you knew what your little brother had done.’

‘You sent her to me so I’d lead you to Sonja?’

Doris’s mouth is like a straight line. Steiner smiles, then sucks on his Havana.

Leonard looks at Doris as if expecting praise. She puts her right hand on his shoulder. Inhaling deeply, her modest-sized bust stretches the green velvet of her dress. The boy refocuses straight ahead. The crackling of the wood fire is subsumed into the explosions of the New Year rockets, their red and yellow bursts reflecting in the window-glass at the back of the room. On the radio, someone mumbles that midnight is only ten minutes away. Steiner nods and hums, while the blood continues dripping onto his shoulder.

‘As I said, someone’s going to die here tonight, but it won’t be me,’ he goes on, briefly removing his spectacles to mop his forehead. ‘The world is not made that way. It’s for the strong, for the dynamic. It eats those who are weak.’

‘And who’s doing the dirty work this time? Does the director have what it takes, or will he let his bum-boy do it again?’

Steiner looks startled, and for a moment he lets his gaze wander around the room, before perching on the edge of his seat.

‘I want to do it!’ Leonard raises his hand like an urchin in a school bench. ‘He hit me! I want to do it!’

For a few moments the room is absolutely silent, apart from the crackling fire and the radio’s mumbling. A pair of tears paint streaks of black mascara down Doris’s cheeks. Her larynx moves as she tries to swallow her pain. As if wanting the smell of her brother one last time, she leans over him, closes her eyes and inhales through her nose.

Then, without the slightest trembling of her hand, she puts the muzzle of the revolver against his neck and shoots him, as if putting down a dangerous dog.

The crack of the gun deadens the ears. A gush of blood slaps out of the boy’s mouth over the table. He topples forwards very hard, hits the table and falls back into the sofa. Microscopic droplets fill the vacancy where he sat like a fine, reddish mist. A stench of burnt hair fills the room. I lower my guard. A pair of teeth gleam like white opals in the gunk on the table.

Steiner shakes his head, and the fat around his throat starts trembling. His eyes dart between us, while croaking sounds rise from the back of his throat. Slowly, Doris lowers her revolver and straightens her back. She bites her lower lip, and her mascara leaves another sooty smudge when she mops her tears with the back of her right hand.

I have backed away a half-metre. A thin line of smoke coils up from behind the table and rejoins the cloud of gunpowder smoke hovering above the sofa. Leonard’s foot makes a few jerking motions. Steiner holds out his hands, his cigar pointing down between his fingers, cupping his palms as if he’s carrying water in them.

‘Doris?’ He keeps shaking his head. ‘Doris?’ he whispers.

His wife goes round the sofa and table and stands opposite him. Steiner puts his hands on the ends of the armrests. Doris lifts the revolver and cocks it, making the well-oiled drum spin by one sixth of a turn with a soft click. The blood from Leonard’s head is running along the edge of the rug. Doris takes aim at her husband from the hip, but she seems to be looking right through him.

‘Doris,’ says Steiner in a firmer tone. ‘You’d better think bloody good and hard now! When I picked you up you weren’t much more than a drug addict, remember that!’

The armchair creaks as he leans back, splaying his legs wide. One hand is still leaning on the armrest, while the other leaves
sticky red marks as he fumbles over the pockets of his dinner jacket.

‘Have I not been a good husband to you? Did I ever deny you anything? Irrespective of the price tag?’ He grunts and glares at her, beads of sweat glistening over his face. The edge of the rug guides Leonard’s blood under his armchair, from where it emerges between his legs on the other side. Steiner’s breathing becomes laboured, and he raises his voice.

‘Wasn’t I lenient about your little habits and vices? Didn’t I look the other way when you ran all over town with all sorts of riff-raff and behaved like a damned whore?’

Now Doris opens her mouth for the first time. She still doesn’t seem to be looking at anything, and the dark words issue slowly from her mouth: ‘You only married me because of my poor little brother.’

For a moment, everything is utterly silent apart from the mumbling of the radio. Steiner lunges to get onto his feet, and I throw myself forwards to stop him, but another shot cuts the silence to pieces. The muzzle spits its tongue of fire across the room.

I back away. Steiner’s eyes distend and he slowly sinks back into the armchair, while fumbling with his spectacles, which have slipped off his nose. A patch of blood on his stomach grows across his white shirt, so dark that it’s difficult to make out against his black silk sash. He nods drowsily and drops his cigar, which goes out with a fizzle when it falls into the blood on the floor. His chin sinks down over his chest. My ears are ringing.

‘I meant nothing to you,’ Doris whispers in a low voice, scarcely audible through the high-pitched whining in my ears. The snake bracelet around her wrist slips down when she lowers her revolver. Though her voice is wavering, she stands firm and straight-backed, with her heels dug into the rug. ‘Creep!’

Steiner tries to lift his head. His eyelids tremble with exertion but at long last he manages it, and man and wife look each other in the eye.

‘You ruined me. And you ruined him.’ Steiner coughs blood. ‘You treated him as if he were a trophy, just another of your toys. You made him sick.’ Doris takes a step towards him. ‘You made him mad.’ An intense cannonade of New Year rockets ring out, with hardly a pause between the explosions.

I hold my breath. She grabs his pulpy chin and forces his face up. His spectacles are smashed when she hammers the butt of the pistol twice against his forehead. The blood is spattering around them. Steiner screams piercingly and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, she pushes the pistol into his stomach and squeezes the trigger.

She’s pressing the revolver so hard into her husband that the report of the weapon is dampened. I hunch up behind my arms.

When I look up again, Steiner is dead. He lies slumped in the armchair with his chin against his chest. There’s a regular mess from his stomach down. Doris’s eyes are shaded with smudged mascara, and the lower part of her dress is speckled red. The hand holding the revolver is smeared with blood. She pulls her husband’s hand off the armrest and leans over it, supporting herself on her right arm. Her breathing is tremulous and strained, and a few little muscles around her mouth are moving spasmodically.

Anders de Wahl’s languorous voice sings ‘New Year’s Bells’ from the radio. I have almost made my way over to her when she straightens up and lifts her revolver. The muzzle is hot against my forehead. When she cocks it, the sound is louder than the bursts of fireworks in the sky. For a few seconds we stand in silence, staring into one another’s eyes. Two has-beens.

A drop of blood falls from her hand, hitting the floor with a splashing sound.

‘Take your pistol with you. And your cigar butt.’

I step back. She doesn’t put down her revolver. She doesn’t even seem to see me. I bend down and put the butt in my trouser pocket. I make the Husqvarna safe and put it in my home-made holster, before turning round and walking out of the door. On my way, I hit the light switch and the hall lights up.

Just as I’m heaving open the heavy door, the Skansen fireworks on the Djurgården side are setting fire to the whole sky, with plumes of red, green, yellow and blue arcing over the dark expanse. The detonations come rolling across the ice like thunder.

I reach the big gate and push it open, then lift my hat to wipe the sweat from my brow with my sleeve. Behind me I hear an engine starting, and I turn around. To my right, Leonard’s sports car shoots out of an underground garage, skidding onto Nobelgatan in a cloud of exhaust and snow crystals, and coming to a stop in front of me. Doris winds down the window. She has wiped her face clean of mascara and had time to apply some fresh lipstick. On the passenger seat, the revolver reflects the lights of the fireworks.

‘You won’t get away,’ I say. ‘They’ll keep hunting you until you’re dead.’

She picks up an object from her lap and tosses it to me. I catch it. Steiner’s wine-red cigar case.

‘Happy New Year, Harry.’

I lift my hat, nod, and put it back. Doris smiles forlornly, releases the clutch and, before I know it, the car has disappeared around the corner.

I extract one of Steiner’s Havana cigars from the case and bite
off the end. The strong taste fills my mouth and I blow a heavy cloud of smoke into the night.

Just as I’m about to step into the street, someone whimpers behind me. I turn around. Dixie is standing there, pacing about in the snow halfway between the main door and the gate. The lights in the hall form a half-circle around her. Shivering with fear, she retreats a few steps, and then stops again. I get out the Husqvarna and, with a soft click, cock it and then squat down to wait for her to come running across the gravelled drive.

When Dixie is a metre away, I lift the weapon. She skids to a halt in a little cloud of powder snow, slides towards me and collides with my leg. I point the Husqvarna at her and she rolls onto her back, legs in the air and even remembers to droop her tongue from her mouth. Little flakes of snow have got caught in her long eyebrows. I put the gun against her chest. I have a sense of her pathetic heartbeats passing through the gun’s metal. I squeeze the hilt hard.

‘Anyway, it would be bloody stupid leaving a bullet behind.’

Dixie, reacting to the sound of my voice, looks at me with eyes as black as Durham coal. I make the Husqvarna safe, put it back in my holster, scratch the dog’s stomach with my undamaged hand and try to quieten her down. She spins round and rears up on shaking legs; I scoop up the little thing and put her under my jacket, with a little scratch behind her ear.

‘I don’t have a lot to offer you. No silk cushions for your dumb little head, and no paté for breakfast, just the odd bit of sausage at most. And there’ll be a hell of a lot of running about after bicycles.’

I stick the Havana into my mouth and button up my jacket so that only her head sticks out, next to my collar. Her warm body vibrates against mine.

‘But if we keep working hard and if we manage to stay out of the way of a touchy bloke called Olsson, old Kvisten should be able to make sure we have a decent time of it.’

I walk onto Nobelgatan. There are no people around. The New Year fireworks on the other side of the ice are starting to die down. My body feels as if I just went fifteen rounds. It’s going to be a long walk back to Sibirien.

I’m cold already.