The princess of Burundi (24 page)

Lindell folded up the stroller and lifted it into the trunk of the car. Erik woke up when she strapped him into the car seat. He looked at her with his big eyes, and she stroked him gently on the cheek.

He knew that in some way John’s death had something to do with him. It could not be mere coincidence that two tormentors had been punished. Justice was being served.

Vincent had only vague memories from his first five, six years of school, during which time he had managed pretty well. The problems had started in middle school. He didn’t know why he had started to feel like an outsider, but it often had physical manifestations. His classmates avoided touching him. He was left out of the boys’ jostling, often gravitating to the girls, but too odd to be accepted fully. After seventh grade his classmates left their childish games behind, the games where boys and girls could play together, in favor of trying out their new gender identities. And then Vincent stood out even more. He was neither cute nor charming, only silent, something the girls often appreciated in contrast to the other boys’ loud and noisy behavior, but in the long run he became more and more isolated.

He had tried to approach Gunilla. They sometimes met on their way to school. They weren’t friends but Vincent felt comfortable with her, she was someone he could talk to. Their paths diverged once they reached school. She increased her stride as soon as they rounded the corner by Tripolis and the iron fence of the school yard appeared.

One recess he finally told her about his father, about how his father beat him. The trigger had been a bruise on his neck, below his left ear. Someone said it was a hickey. Most of the others ignored him, but Gunilla had walked over and looked at him, not with the teasing, taunting attention he usually attracted but with genuine interest. She had placed her fingers carefully on the blue-red mark. A light touch, lasting a second.

That was when he said it.

“My dad hits me.”

She had pulled her hand back and looked at him with frightened eyes. For a moment he thought he saw something else, but then her expression changed.

“Vincent gets spanked!” she had shouted in the corridors before they gathered to file into the classroom. Everyone had looked at him.

“Vincent’s a bad boy!”

“Do you wet your bed?” one of the boys asked.

“Poor Vincent gets spanked on his bottom!”

Gunilla had been smirking, then the teacher had opened the door to the classroom. Vincent recalled they had learned about amoebas that day.

With John it had been different. He was in a different homeroom, but they had a few classes together. It had started in home economics. Neither John nor Vincent said much in this class, and the teachers had to work to get either one to say or try anything. They had been paired one day when the class was learning to bake pound cake. They had followed the instructions uncertainly and mixed the ingredients together. Unfortunately Vincent managed to tip the bowl when they were adding the flour and both boys had watched paralyzed while the gray-white mixture flowed out toward the edge of the table and down onto the floor.

The teacher rushed over and for some reason assumed that John was the one who had caused the accident. Neither boy said anything, least of all Vincent, who assumed he would be beaten for it.

John was assigned to clean it up, Vincent was sent over to work with another group. From that day John had hated Vincent. With his quiet diplomacy he had steered the class to outright bullying. Vincent’s status changed from awkward outsider to outright victim. After that the machine was in full swing. Once he had complained to the teacher, but that only escalated the terrorism. He knew that John was behind it, although they never talked to each other and John was never an active participant in the persecutions.

Now he was dead and Vincent was pleased. Gunilla was not dead, but she had been severely frightened and she wouldn’t be likely to forget him. The fear would stay with her.

The early-morning confusion gave way to a harmonious, dreamlike state. He knew he was on the right track. The phone cord around Vivan’s throat, the terror in her eyes, and that rattling sound had done him good. She had gone quiet so quickly. Her eyes, filled with suspicion and then panic-stricken, had made him laugh. That was the last image she had seen, his laughing, foul-smelling mouth. He had wanted to draw out this laugh. Disappointed, he had kicked her dead body, kicked her in under the bed.

John had been killed by a knife. “Stabbed repeatedly,” the paper had said. Vincent suspected that his eyes would have been as full of terror as Gunilla’s and Vivan’s. Did Vincent have a helper? A quiet avenging force that he was unaware of, or had he been there himself? He was becoming more unsure. He had suffered memory blanks before, especially when he was angry. Maybe he had been there, had stabbed John.

As usual he stopped on Nybro bridge and stared down into the river. Even though it was bitterly cold and in the middle of December, there was a sliver of open water in the middle. Vincent Hahn rested his eyes there for a moment before continuing over the bridge. Again the feeling that he was wandering in a foreign land came over him, a land where no one knew him, where the buildings had been erected by unknown hands, and where even the language had become foreign to him. He became more alert to the people around him, trying to read something in their eyes, but they looked away quickly, or never met his gaze.

He raised his hand and walked straight across the street without paying any attention to the fact that the road was slippery and the cars had trouble braking on the icy surface. Someone shouted at him, words he didn’t understand. He could see that they were angry at him. He took out the knife he had picked up at Vivan’s apartment. A few teenagers shouted something, turned around, and ran.

Vincent repeated the maneuver, stepping straight out into the road. A car had to slam on the brakes, skidded to the side, and almost crashed into a parked taxi. The taxi driver got out and shouted at him. Vincent waved back with his knife.

He walked toward St. Erik’s torg, where people were selling things from stands. An older couple were selling Christmas ornaments. He stopped and looked at all their colorful wares. There were few customers and the couple looked at him expectantly.

“I don’t have a real home,” he said.

“It doesn’t cost anything to have a look,” said the woman.

The man, who was wearing an enormous fur hat, pulled off a leather glove, picked up a bag of homemade candy, and held it out to him.

“I have no money,” Vincent said.

“Take it, you look like you need a sweet,” said the woman. “It’s our house blend.”

The man nodded. The hand holding the bag shook slightly. Vincent looked at it, at how the blue-black veins made a pattern on the broad back of the hand. The nails were thick, curved, and yellowed.

“He’s had a stroke,” the woman said. “He can’t talk.”

Vincent took the bag without saying anything.

“This is the most beautiful present anyone’s ever given me,” he said finally.

The woman nodded. She had green-blue eyes, with a faint grayish cast over the cornea. Apart from a few liver spots on her cheek her skin was smooth and youthful. Vincent thought she had probably laughed a lot in her life.

A younger couple came over, looking through the collection of wreaths.

“They have wonderful candy,” Vincent said.

The young woman glanced at him and smiled.

“We’ll take one of these,” she said, holding up a lingonberry wreath.

Vincent left the booth and wandered on aimlessly, with a hole inside that was only growing bigger. He had felt it many times before. It was a black hole, indescribably dark and deep, from which thoughts both emerged and were drowned. He felt as if he were caught in a maelstrom and was being sucked down into himself.

He tried to say something and heard an echo in his head. The dizziness came and went. He had another piece of candy and stopped outside a shop window where a tabloid headline promised tips for a better sex life. People walked in and out, relaxed, carrying colorful packages, looking at him briefly, smiling.

Where should he go? His legs could hardly hold him anymore. The candy had given him some energy, but wherever he went there were new challenges. The sidewalk was becoming more crowded. He kept bumping into people and their packages repeatedly, pushed hither and thither.

When he had decided to head to the east side again he was stopped by a man wearing a Santa outfit who tried to interest him in a sleigh ride through the old town. Two hundred and ninety kronor for an hour. Vincent accepted a flyer and walked on. The dizziness was getting worse. He leaned against a wall and anxiety charged over him like a battalion on horseback. He took cover, put his arm over his face, and cried out into the wind.

The police came an hour later. The owner of an art gallery had alerted them. He had observed Vincent for a while before he called, had watched the snow falling around him. It was a striking image, or composition, the dark-clad man, a cap pulled down over his forehead, crouched against the wall as if he was afraid that the people walking by with their Christmas purchases would hit him, the gently falling snow—all this created an image of tangible authenticity. It was happening here and now. The gallery owner stood there in the warmth, with the miniatures on the wall, people came and went, Christmas greetings were exchanged.

This image was also a reminder of the timelessness of need. Through the ages thousands of needy people had wandered past on this street. They had come through the city gates to the north, fleeing hunger and punitive overlords, looking for something better. In times of pestilence they had gone in the opposite direction, driven away from the overcrowded and stinking city.

This could be any city in the Northern Hemisphere. The gallery owner saw the homeless man as a reminder of the limits but also the possibilities of contemporary art. A classic motif of genre painting; a challenge for contemporary video artists.

But these aesthetic ruminations eventually gave way to compassion. The gallery owner called the police and they turned up thirty minutes later. When he saw them he stepped out into the street. The officers seemed oblivious of any aesthetic dimension, seeing this only as a routine task of picking up a drunk, perhaps mentally ill, vagrant.

The cold had penetrated Vincent’s clothes. He had tucked his bare hands into his coat and his head had fallen toward his knees. One of the officers shook his shoulder. Vincent woke up, opened his eyes, and saw the uniformed policeman. The other officer was talking to the gallery owner.

Vincent had dreamed that he was in a country where there was snow on the ground all year round. A land of eternal ice where the people couldn’t spit at each other and had to make do with stiff grimaces when they wanted to express their displeasure. He had been standing on a street corner, selling lottery tickets that no one wanted to buy. He had gestured in vain. It wasn’t possible to speak, then the cold threatened to pierce your heart, and that was the end.

“Hey, buddy, how’s it going?” the officer asked kindly. He didn’t smell the usual stink of alcohol on this man, he wan’t one of their regulars. In a half hour the officer was scheduled to finish his beat and start his holiday. He was going up north to Ångermanland with his family.

Vincent moved his head stiffly, trying to dispel the dream and focus on the officer. Slowly the present overtook his consciousness. He saw the uniformed legs, heard the voice, felt the hand, and with lightning speed he had taken out his knife and thrust it upward in a slicing motion. The bread knife sped toward the neck of Jan-Erik Hollman, born in Lund, christened in Gudmundrå church, where his funeral would be held in a week or so, hit the artery, pierced the neck, and went out the other side.

His colleague, Maria Svensson-Flygt, did all she could to stop the bleeding but it was no good. In a few minutes Jan-Erik Hollman had bled to death on the icy sidewalk of Svartbäcksgatan.

Vincent leaned back against the wall as if he was completely unaware of what had just happened. Maria looked at him. Passersby were standing around in a ring, in complete silence. Traffic had come to a stop. The bloodred puddle on the ground had stopped growing. One of Maria’s hands lay on her colleague’s chest, the other pulled out her cell phone. After a short call she grabbed the knife that Vincent had either thrown to the ground or simply dropped.

“Look, she has a gun!” a little boy shouted.

Vincent gave Maria a dull look and she saw the insanity in his eyes. Someone down the street laughed and a taxi cab honked, otherwise there was only silence, broken—after a few seconds—by the sound of approaching sirens.

Maria Svensson-Flygt had been very fond of her colleague. They had worked together for two years. She hated the man slumped against the wall and it struck her that if they had been alone, without staring witnesses, she would have shot his head off.

She sensed that the man in front of her was Vincent Hahn, who was wanted for the murder of a woman in Johannesbäck, although he did not really look like the picture she had seen.

The police were in mourning. Some cried, others were simply tense and quiet. The image of the pool of blood on Svartbäcksgatan returned over and over in their minds. Thoughts of Jan-Erik’s wife and his kids were interspersed in people’s minds with the most troubling point:
It could have been me
. These words were not actually spoken aloud by anyone—that would have seemed unprofessional and disrespectful—but it was there, strengthening the sense of connection with the deceased. Even the chief of police’s words at the brief meeting sounded genuine.

The chief, with his tinder-dry and normally so uninspired voice, earned a new respect from his colleagues. He spoke in a low voice without fuss and left the podium with heavy steps after an unexpectedly short amount of time. A paralyzing silence fell over the assembled group, then a middle-aged man who was familiar to most stood up.

It was the hospital minister who had been at the police station for other reasons when news of the death came in. Liselotte Rask had recognized him and asked him to stay until they had formally appointed a crisis management team.

Ola Haver listened to his words, letting them into his shaken mind. Fredriksson sat next to him with his head bent, as if in prayer.

Because Fredriksson had been the first on the scene at Gunilla Karlsson’s apartment, he had informally taken the lead in the hunt for Vincent Hahn. Now Hahn had been captured, but at what price?

Fredriksson had gone down into the holding cell in order to take a look at the two-time murderer. He wanted to see his face, and the sight of him was infuriating. Hahn was drinking a cup of tea and eating a cheese sandwich. It felt wrong, improper, almost indecent. The guard had been standing next to him and Fredriksson had been tempted to upbraid him, but had managed to calm himself.

Did Vincent Hahn have anything to do with John’s murder? There was a personal connection between them, in that they had grown up in the same area and gone to school together. Now Fredriksson’s thoughts centered on the knife. Could Vincent be tied to the knife they had recovered, the one the youth claimed he had stolen from the hospital parking garage?

Sammy Nilsson had immediately gone to see Vincent and asked him if he knew Little John. Vincent had smirked and admitted it.

“And he died,” he added, his smile broadening.

“Did you kill him?”

“He was stabbed,” Hahn had said.

After that he had stopped talking, even though Sammy Nilsson had shaken him, pulling him up from the cot and asking him again. The guard had been forced to show him out. Later, the guard told Fredriksson about it.

“He laughs sometimes,” the guard says. “I think he’s completely nuts.”

Fredriksson had asked the guard to tell him the moment Hahn seemed like he was ready to talk.

Haver turned on his cell phone after the meeting. After a few seconds the phone showed that he had received a voice message. It was Rebecka. He heard her straining to sound normal. She asked him to call back.

He dialed the number and Rebecka answered immediately.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Thank you, God.”

“What is it?”

“I heard it on the radio,” she said.

“It was a patrol officer, I don’t think you knew him.”

“Did he have a family?”

“A wife and two kids. A girl and a boy. Eight and four.”

“Shit,” she said, although she seldom swore.

“I have to go,” he said.

“You’ll be careful, won’t you, Ola?”

“Of course, you know that.”

“I want to—” Rebecka started, but Haver interrupted her.

“I have to go. I’ll see you.”

He was left with mixed feelings. Her concern touched him but also filled him with irritation. They had had a huge fight when he came back late last night. She had been sitting silently at the kitchen table and given him an ice-cold look, a glass and a half-empty bottle of red wine in front of her. When Haver walked into the kitchen all hell had broken loose. Rebecka told him about Ann Lindell calling without leaving her name, but Haver knew it wasn’t the true source of her anger.

It was very late when they finally went to bed and he had lain awake for a long time. Rebecka had tossed and turned, sighed, and shifted pillows around. An oppressive silence had reigned. So much had been said, yet so much remained unsaid. At half past two he had tiptoed out into the kitchen. The bottle of wine was still on the table. That was unlike Rebecka, she was normally so neat. Haver poured himself half a glass. He should sleep. He should love his wife, make love to her, but first he knew they had to talk.

Haver dialed Lindell’s home number on his cell phone. The answering machine came on after four rings. He tried her cell phone but had no luck. He left a short message asking her to call.

Why had she tried to phone him, and why wasn’t she answering now? It wasn’t like her to be unreachable. Her call earlier this evening had to have had something to do with work. She would never have tried him at home to talk about what had happened between them. And what was it that had happened anyway?

Haver kept on thinking, with a growing sense of irritation. The feeling that everything was too late came over him, the same feeling that had been bothering him in the dark, that things had gone too far, both at work and at home. He had fallen into a light sleep. In his dream a woman was bent over him, repeating the words, “Why did my son die?” Over and over. Haver tried to answer but couldn’t make a sound because he was gagged and bound to his office chair. He helplessly listened to the grieving woman’s mournful cry. Rebecka had fallen asleep. Her breathing had become calm and regular and he wished he could snuggle next to her. He fell back into sleep and into the nightmare.

After the meeting everyone went his own way. Haver was irresolute. Ottosson had set up an investigative session with Fritzén, from the district attorney’s office, in ten minutes. Haver called Ann at home again and left a message there too. Then he went into the bathroom and cried.

Ottosson started by talking about Jan-Erik, their collective vulnerability, and also about all the flowers and phone calls from the public that had been pouring in. No doubt people were even more willing to show their compassion because it was so close to Christmas. Liselotte Rask had done an amazing job, Ottosson said. She had stood her ground in the reception area, taking the wind out of the sails of even the most aggressive reporter with a single look, a word.

The chief changed the topic of discussion.

“Now we can start to imagine how Berit Jonsson feels,” he said, and at least Fritzén was taken aback at these words, but Ottosson continued calmly.

“Death comes to us all, that is the only thing we can be certain of. It makes no difference whether it is a thief in a garbage dump or a policeman in the line of duty. When someone dies at the hands of another, the pain for the survivors is the same.”

Haver wondered about Ottosson’s relationship to Little John. He did not mention Vivan Molin, who had been strangled and brutally kicked in under her bed.

“It’s true,” Berglund interrupted, and all eyes turned to him, surprised because he rarely said anything at the meetings. “We have to do better. All of us. No one should have to die like Jan-Erik, Vivan Molin, or Little John, there we can agree. We need to be part of the solution because we are part of the problem.”

His words fell like heavy blows. Ottosson raised his eyebrows and Fritzén looked disgusted.

“What do you mean?” Fritzén said. “I don’t think this is the right time to air your homespun theories about the burden of guilt and the inadequacies of our society.”

“It’s always the right time,” said Berglund, now in a calmer tone of voice. “It’s our job and our responsibility to continue asking ourselves the question of what we could have done to prevent this.”

Fritzén moved as if to interrupt him again, but Lundin jumped in with a cough.

“I want to hear what Berglund has to say,” he said.

“I went up to see Oskar Pettersson on Marielundsgatan again. He knew Little John and his parents. He’s a wise old man,” Berglund said, looking at Fritzén. “We speak the same language. Most of you aren’t from around here, even if these things are the same all over Sweden, but you are also all too young. There is a kind of culturedness that exists apart from the kind transmitted by schools and universities, and Oskar Pettersson represents this educated culture. Once upon a time I think this kind of culture flourished in the neighborhood where Little John grew up, and it helped to stem the flow of today’s lawlessness. Of course, there were scum in the fifties and sixties, but there was also a social resistance that is lacking today.”

“What kind of resistance?” Sammy asked.

“Something upheld by normal people, but also by the authorities.”

“Sweden isn’t how it was,” Riis agreed. “There’s a lot of new folk now, that’s bound to lead to trouble.”

Berglund turned his head and looked at Riis.

“I know you don’t like immigrants, but both Little John and Vincent Hahn are products of Swedish social democratic policy, our so-called People’s Home. I think it is the isolation of individuals in our country that breaks them. The gap between people’s dreams and the potential to get off track is too large. What was it we once dreamed of, what did Oskar Pettersson dream of?”

The silence was overwhelming. These questions were rarely or never aired. The backdrop was dark, a pool of three thousand milliliters of blood on the street, a dead colleague. Berglund did not feel able to articulate the questions he felt deep inside, what he had experienced as he sat at home with the old concrete worker. There was something about the way Pettersson talked about the old furnace workers at the Ekeby mill. That was why he had started thinking about these things, thoughts strengthened during the walk home. During the last visit Pettersson had remembered even more about Little John and his family. With an endless series of anecdotes Pettersson had described a utopia sunk into the mire. Berglund had spent most of the time listening. There was something about his way of talking that made Berglund widen his speculations beyond the usual sphere of things. The discussion went back and forth in time. Slumbering, undiscovered, and yet familiar connections emerged. Berglund wanted to retain these thoughts, deepen and refine them, but realized his limitations.

“And this doesn’t have anything to do with
svartskallar
?” Riis said peevishly.

“There’s something in what you say,” Sammy Nilsson said. “I’ve felt the same thing. But I don’t think it’s a question of age or even class.”

“I think we’re getting off track again,” Fritzén said.

“Look here,” Ottosson said, “we have to be able to talk this through. We’re police officers, not hung over army reservists guarding a completely unnecessary stockpile of military goods in the forest.”

Where Ottosson had gotten this image was not clear, but most of them thought it funny. Even Riis smiled.

“Take the kids in Gottsunda or Stenhagen,” Sammy continued. “They’re so lost. I’m starting to doubt my work more and more, maybe I should become a boxing coach or something. Get close to the kids like that UIF guy who does such a great job and has a name no one can spell. That would be better economically too. All the politicians talk about unemployment and segregation but they don’t do anything, they stay in their world.”

“That’s right,” Berglund said. “They don’t live there, they don’t know any immigrants, and they’re afraid. Then they send us out when things get out of hand.”

Fritzén made an effort to get up but ended up sinking back onto his chair.

“This is beginning to sound like a leftist consciousness-raising group from the seventies,” he said.

“So you were involved back then?” Ottosson asked innocently.

“I prefer to wash my hands of all that,” he said, and suddenly an emotional divide appeared in the room that they knew would be hard to bridge. They had all had good experiences working with Fritzén, but now a new factor came into the picture: politics. Not the shallow question of party adherence but the underlying convictions.

“We should talk more about this,” Ottosson said in an attempt to curb the discussion in an elegant way, “but now we have to turn to the matters at hand. I suggest Haver and Beatrice take care of questioning Hahn. He appears to be in bad shape and we probably need to bring in a physician. Can you arrange that, Ola?”

Haver nodded.

“I’ll talk with Liselotte,” Ottosson continued. “We have a press conference tomorrow at nine. She’ll handle that with the boss. I know what you’re thinking but he volunteered to be there. The question now is if Hahn had anything to do with Little John. Personally I find this hard to believe. I think it’s merely a coincidence that they went to school together.”

“He said he knew Little John,” Sammy Nilsson said. “And he knew that John had been stabbed.”

“He could have read it in the paper.”

“Sure, but the way he said it…it was like he was gloating or something.”

“Do we have anything new on the knife they found at the hospital garage?” Ottosson asked, turning to a new detail.

“No, we have been trying to trace where it was bought,” Sammy said. “So far we haven’t determined anything. It probably came from abroad.”

Riis smirked and Sammy looked up but did not allow himself to be provoked. Instead, he continued. “I believe Mattias when he says he stole it from a parked car, from someone who was at the hospital.”

“Isn’t there a construction site next door?” Berglund asked. “If we’re still talking about a pickup.”

“Yes, but those guys have their own parking area.”

Haver made a motion with his hand, almost a reflex, but lowered it immediately. Ottosson, who caught it, looked inquiringly at him.

“No, it was nothing. I just had a kind of flashback,” he said.

“To the hospital?”

“I don’t know. Maybe something about a construction site. You know how these things are.”

He sank back onto the chair, trying to shut out his environment and recapture his train of thought. Hospital, parking garage, construction, pickup, knife, he arranged the words in front of him, but it was only the set images that flashed past, everything that they had already discussed and considered.