The Black Path (44 page)

Ten minutes later they’re sitting in the new Hummer on the way to the gates. Ulrika’s driving. The little prince is sleeping in his child seat beside her. It takes two minutes to drive down to the gate, but when Ulrika presses the remote control to open the outer gates, nothing happens.

“They’re playing up again,” she says to Diddi, stopping the car a few meters away.

Diddi gets out. He walks toward the gate. He’s in the beam of the headlights. Ulrika can see his back. And then he simply falls forward.

Ulrika groans to herself. She’s so tired of this. She’s tired of his drinking and getting high, his hangovers and his fears. Of his regrets, of how pathetic he is, of his diarrhea and his constipation. Of the fact that he’s oversexed and the fact that he’s impotent. She’s tired of him falling over and not being able to get up. She’s tired of taking off his clothes and his shoes. And she’s tired of all those times when he can’t go to bed, the periods of manic wakefulness.

She waits for him to get back on his feet. But he doesn’t. A violent rage floods her body. This is the fucking limit. She thinks she ought to just drive over him. Back and forth, several times.

Then she sighs and gets out of the car. A guilty conscience over her recent unkind thoughts makes her voice gentle and considerate.

“Hey there! What happened?”

But he doesn’t reply. Now Ulrika is getting worried. She takes a few rapid steps toward him.

“Diddi, Diddi, what happened?”

She bends over him, places her hand between his shoulder blades and shudders. And her hand feels wet.

She doesn’t understand. She never will understand.

A sound. A sound or something makes her look up and turn her head. A silhouette in the beam of the headlights. Before she has time to put her hand over her eyes to avoid being dazzled, she’s dead.

The man who shot her whispers into his headset:

“Male and female out. Car. Engine running.”

He points a flashlight into the car.

“There’s an infant in the car.”

On the other end, the group leader says:

“Mission as before. Everybody. Turn off the engine and advance.”

Ulrika is lying dead on the track. She doesn’t have to experience it.

And up in the darkness of her room, Ester is standing by the window and thinking:

Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Now!

R
ebecka is lying in the snow outside her grandmother’s house in Kurravaara. She’s wearing her grandmother’s old blue quilted nylon jacket, but it isn’t fastened. It’s good to feel cold, it makes her feel better inside. The sky is black and studded with stars. The moon up above her is a sickly yellow. Like a swollen face with pitted skin. Rebecka has read somewhere that moon dust stinks, that it smells of old gunpowder.

How can you feel this way about another person? she thinks.

How can you feel as if you want to die, just because he doesn’t love you? He’s just a human being, after all.

Listen, she says to her god. I don’t mean to moan and complain, but soon I won’t want to be a part of all this anymore. Nobody loves me, and that’s really difficult to cope with. If the worst comes to the worst, I could live for another sixty years. What’s going to become of me if I’m alone for sixty years?

I made it a little bit along the way, you saw that. I’m working. I get up in the mornings. I like porridge with lingonberry jam. But at the moment I don’t know if I want all that anymore.

Then she hears the sound of paws in the snow. The next moment Bella is at her side, galloping around her in a circle, then over
the top of her, trampling all over her stomach so that it hurts, giving her a quick push with her nose, checking that she’s okay.

Then she starts barking. Reporting to her master, of course.

Rebecka hurries to get to her feet, but Sivving has already seen her. He rushes over to her.

Bella has already moved on. She’s racing joyfully over the old meadow, the fresh snow spraying up around her paws.

“Rebecka,” he shouts, failing to hide the concern in his voice. “What are you doing?”

She opens her mouth to lie. To joke and say she’s looking at the stars, but nothing comes out.

Her face just can’t pretend. Her body makes no attempt to hide her feelings. She simply shakes her head.

He wants to make everything all right again. She can understand that he’s worried about her. And who can he talk to, now his Maj-Lis isn’t around anymore?

She just can’t cope with it. Doesn’t want to see the longing in his face, wanting her to be cheerful and happy, for things to go well.

I haven’t the strength to be happy, she wants to say. I can hardly even manage to be unhappy. Standing on my own two feet is my biggest project.

He’s about to ask her to go for a walk with him. Or invite her in for coffee. In a few seconds he’s going to say it. And she’ll have to say no, because it’s just impossible. And he’ll hang his head, and then she’ll have made him unhappy too.

“I’ve got to go,” she says. “I’ve got to call on a woman in Lombolo and give her a summons.”

It’s such an extraordinarily far-fetched and terrible lie that she almost has an out-of-body experience. Another Rebecka is standing by her side and saying:

“Where the hell did you get that from?”

But Sivving seems to buy it. After all, he has no real idea of what she does at work.

“Oh yes” is all he says.

“Listen,” she says. “I’ve got a cat at home. Could you look after her for me?”

“Well, yes,” says Sivving, “but are you going to be away for long?”

And as she’s walking toward the car, he calls after her:

“Aren’t you going to change your jacket?”

She pulls out onto the road to Kiruna. And she takes note of the fact that she isn’t wondering where she’s going. Because she knows. She’s going up to the Riksgränsen resort.

“What’s that?” asks Anna-Maria Mella.

Sven-Erik Stålnacke is sitting in the passenger seat, and he peers up toward the first set of gates to the Regla estate. In the beam of the headlights of their Passat he sees a Hummer facing in their direction, parked just inside the gates.

“Could be those security guys?” he suggests.

They stop outside the gate. Anna-Maria puts the car into neutral and gets out of the car, leaving the engine running.

“Hello!” she shouts.

Sven-Erik gets out of the car as well.

“Jesus,” says Anna-Maria. “Jesus Christ!”

Two bodies, lying facedown. She reaches under her jacket for her gun.

“What the fuck has happened here?” she says.

Then she steps rapidly out of the beam of the headlights.

“Keep out of the light,” she says to Sven-Erik. “And turn the engine off.”

“No,” says Sven-Erik. “Get back in the car and we’ll get out of here and call for backup.”

“Yes, you do that,” says Anna-Maria. “I’m just going to take a look.”

The outer gate blocks only the road. It’s the inner gates farther up the avenue that are set in a wall. Anna-Maria walks around the gatepost, but stops a short distance from the bodies. She doesn’t want to go right up to them while they’re still bathed in the light from their car.

“Move the car back,” she says to Sven-Erik. “I just want to take a look.”

“Get in the car,” growls Sven-Erik, “and we’ll call for backup.”

So they end up quarreling. Suddenly they’re standing there bickering, like an old married couple.

“I’m just going to take a look, either get out of here or switch off the bloody engine,” snaps Anna-Maria.

“There are procedures! Get in the bloody car!” barks Sven-Erik.

Unprofessional. They’ll think about that in the future. About the fact that they could have got each other shot. Every time a conversation turns to how cleverly you can react in a critical situation, their thoughts will come back to this moment.

And in the end Anna-Maria walks straight into the beam of the headlights. With her Sig Sauer in one hand, she feels for a pulse at the side of the neck in each of the bodies lying on the ground. No pulse.

Crouching down, she takes a few steps over to the Hummer and looks inside. A child seat. A child. A little dead child. Shot through its little face.

Sven-Erik sees her lean against the windshield, supporting herself with one hand. Her face is chalk-white in the Passat’s headlights. She looks straight into his eyes with an expression so full of despair that his heart contracts.

“What is it?” he asks.

But the next moment he realizes he hasn’t uttered a sound.

She bends forward. It’s as if her whole body is gripped by agonizing cramps. And she’s looking at him. Accusingly. It’s as if something is his fault.

The next minute, she’s gone. She’s bolted like a fox, and he doesn’t know where she’s gone. It’s so bloody dark out there. Dense clouds are shutting out the moonlight.

Sven-Erik leaps into the car and turns off the engine. Everything is black and silent.

He straightens up, and hears footsteps running toward the estate.

“Anna-Maria, for God’s sake!” he shouts after her.

But he daren’t shout too loudly.

He’s about to run after her. But then he comes to his senses.

He rings for backup. Fuck her. The conversation takes two minutes. He’s terrified as he’s speaking on the phone. Afraid that someone will hear him. Someone who’ll come and shoot him in the head. He’s crouched down beside the car throughout the entire conversation. Trying to listen. Trying to see something in the darkness. He takes the safety catch off his gun.

When he’s finished, he runs after Anna-Maria. He tries to look inside the Hummer to see what made her react like that, but it’s too dark now the headlights have been switched off. He can’t see a thing.

He keeps to the side of the road as he makes his way up toward the estate, running silently on the grass. If only his own breathing didn’t sound like a pair of bellows, he might be able to hear something. He’s so scared he feels sick. But what bloody choice does he have? Where is she?

Ester can see someone in the mirror. Someone who looks like her. Science has come a long way, but there is nothing durable in us. A human being is a collection of vibrating chords. And the air around is also a collection of vibrating chords. It’s remarkable that we don’t walk straight through walls on a daily basis, melting into each other’s being.

She has surrendered herself. To what, she cannot say. She simply knows it at a deeper level than her intellect. At every stage, the contract has been signed. She moved into Mauri’s attic. She has trained her body. She has loaded her body with carbs. And now her head must follow her feet, and not the reverse.

Her head can rest as her feet run down the cellar stairs.

At that same moment, five men are advancing toward Regla. They are all dressed in black. The group leader is the one Ester called The Wolf in her mind. He and three of the others are armed with small machine guns. The last man is a marksman.

The marksman lies down in the grass with Mikael Wiik in his sights. He shouldn’t need to lie down, his target isn’t moving at all.

Mikael Wiik is standing on the steps outside the house listening for sounds from the road. Diddi and his wife took the car and drove away from Regla. Presumably Diddi’s had some kind of quarrel with Mauri. Bloody inconvenient, but Diddi’s completely unpredictable these days.

He heard the car stop down by the outer gate, then they turned the engine off. He wonders why they didn’t keep going. Presumably they’re sitting in the car having the row of the century.

I’m doing my job, thinks Mikael Wiik. And that isn’t my job.

I’m not getting involved, he thinks. And I’m not involved. Not in the business with Inna, either. I gave Mauri that phone number. But whatever happened after that, I’m definitely not involved.

He’d looked at Inna’s body up in the morgue in Kiruna. There had been a terrible entry wound.

It can’t have been a professional, he convinces himself. She died for some other reason altogether. It had nothing to do with Mauri Kallis.

He takes a deep breath. The spring is woven through the night air. The wind is warm, carrying a scent of green. He’s going to buy a boat in the summer. Take his partner out to the archipelago.

Then he doesn’t think anything anymore. As he falls forward and hits the stone steps, he’s already dead.

The marksman alters his position. Moves round to the other side of the house. Big dining room windows. Reads the room. Only one guard, standing by the wall in the dining room. The other guests are sitting ducks. He reports “All clear” through his headset.

Ester Kallis switches the electricity off at the fusebox. With a few rapid movements she unscrews the fuses for the outgoing lines. She throws the fuses under a nearby shelf. She hears them roll across the floor and stop. The darkness is solid.

She takes a deep breath. Her feet know their way up the stairs. She doesn’t need to see. They’re running along a black path.

And while her feet are following the black path, she herself is living in another world. You could call it a memory, but it’s happening now. Again. It’s happening just as much now as then.

She’s standing on a mountainside with
eatn
an
. It’s late spring. Only odd patches of snow left. Flocks of birds calling in the air all the time. The sun warms their backs. They’ve unbuttoned their cardigans.