The Shadow Woman (15 page)

“Yeah, very nice,” Winter said.

She nodded and pointed at the portable CD player that lay next to her on the bed.

Winter took out a little bag from his inside pocket. “It was the last one they had at the record store. They didn’t have that Dylan album you wrote down, so I took the liberty of buying a record by a new band that’s really got something special.”

Aneta Djanali pulled out
London Calling
from the bag and looked at Winter quizzically. “U Wrascch?”

“Yes, the Clash.”

“Ew and?”

“New band? No, I guess it’s not a new band.” Winter smiled.

Aneta Djanali wrote “1979!” on a pad of paper and handed it to Winter.

“Time flies,” he said. “But they’re new to me. Macdonald told me about them. In fact, he even sent me the album. Guess he didn’t think we had stuff like this over here among the glaciers.”

While he spoke, Aneta Djanali slipped the disc into the CD player, pressed play, and pulled on the earphones: “London calling to the underworld . . .” She moved her body back and forth to the music and beat the rhythm with her fist against the covers to show Winter that she understood how good it was and how happy she was to be able to sit here and relish something she had left behind centuries ago.

“Have you listened to any of the other songs on the album?” she wrote on her pad.

“Not yet,” Winter said. “That first one requires a lengthy evaluation.”

“Here’s one called ‘Jimmy Jazz,’” she wrote.

“Really? Let me see.”

She handed him the disc and wrote, “That ought to suit you.” Then she handed him the earphones and Winter listened.

“That’s not jazz,” he said.

Aneta Djanali gripped the head of the bed firmly so as not to laugh her reconstructed jaw out of joint.

“But you haven’t seen the other album in the bag,” he said. “That’s real jazz, and a good album for someone who hasn’t listened to much music from the underworld.”

She pulled out a CD with a close-up of a black face on it and then held up the album cover and wrote, “Wow, a compact mirror!” on her pad.

Winter burst out laughing while Djanali pretended to study herself in the face on the album cover.

“Lee Morgan,” Winter said.
“Search for the New Land.”

She put down her mirror and wrote, “How’s Fredrik doing?”

“Not too good without you. Apparently, the two of you have some kind of chemistry that feeds on mutual animosity.”

“Hit the nail on the head,” wrote Djanali. “Between a darky and a skinhead.”

“He’s a good skin.”

“Keep an eye on him.”

“What?”

“He could go off the rails. Not doing too well.”

“He’s not the only one.”

“Shouldn’t be writing this. But he’s,” she hesitated with her pen, “nervous, desperate.”

“You know Fredrik best of all,” Winter said.

I’m not so damn sure about that, she thought. And now my hand hurts. I’ve been talking too much.

She leaned back against the mountain of pillows and closed her eyes.

“You’re tired.” He rose and patted her blanket. “Don’t forget Lee Morgan, now.”

 

Outside, he breathed in the night air. It smelled of salt and sand that had been baked at high heat for months. That’s no Scandinavian smell, he thought to himself. At least not this late in the year. What will all the Mediterranean tourists think?

An ambulance drove slowly by and pulled in front of the entrance to the ER. Two orderlies wheeled up a gurney, hauled a body onto it from the ambulance, and pushed the gurney in through the double doors that were suddenly radiant portals in the darkness.

Winter drove home and parked in the basement garage and then sat at an outside table at the Wasa Källare restaurant. He drank a beer and listened to, without deciphering them, the conversations at the handful of tables.

Right in front of him the empty streetcars rumbled past and on across Vasaplatsen. Once he saw a face in one of the cars that he thought he recognized, like some vague memory. The waiter took his glass and asked if he wanted another, but he said no and lit up a Corps. He could see the smoke halfway across the park.

He took out his cell phone and turned it on. He had three missed calls and saw on the display that one of them was from Angela. Here I go, he thought, and punched in her number.

HE BIKED TO HER STREET, UP ON THE HEIGHTS OF KUNGSHÖJD.
Angela pressed up close to him for a second and then pointed toward the balcony. Standing on the table were water and wine, and something that smelled of herbs and salt.

They sat there and saw the sea silhouetted black against a lighter sky. The roofs appeared sprinkled with ash in the moonlight.

“So you got back yesterday?” Winter asked.

“Like I said.”

She was wearing a soft shirt and shorts, hair in a ponytail, no makeup, and Winter thought about women’s finely chiseled features when he saw her profile against the pale stucco.

“What have you been doing?”

“Sitting out here mostly, as it happens. Yesterday you could see all the way down to the sandbars and those charter boats that take out sports fishermen. I could see them rolling and pitching.”

“It makes me seasick just thinking about it.”

“It didn’t me.” She took a sip of her water. “It was soothing.”

“Sounds wonderful,” Winter said.

“I thought of us.”

Here it comes, thought Winter. We only managed a few minutes of idle chitchat. “How was your mother?” he asked.

“Wonderful,” she said, “until we started talking about us.”

“It’s not as bad as all that, is it? And was that really necessary?”

“What?”

“To have a long discussion with your mother about us. We can reason it out ourselves, can’t we?”

“Reason it out? Since when did you ever want to reason anything out?”

“I’m considered to be quite reasonable.” He dipped a stalk of blanched celery into the cold dip made of sardines and black olives. It tasted salty and bitter, delicious. “This is really good.”

She looked at him without saying anything.

He wanted to be there in the moment with her, but when he bent forward over the bowls again, he saw Helene’s face as it had looked in the dead blue glow of the morgue. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Well, it’s not like this is the first time. And I’m not saying that to sound like a cop’s wife sitting up at night waiting.”

“I’m the one who’s waiting in this case,” he said.

She took his hand as he reached for the glass of water.

“What are you waiting for, Erik?”

What was he waiting for? That was a big question. Everything, from the name of a murder victim and a murderer to eternal peace of mind. For the triumph of good over evil. And for her.

“I waited for you today,” he said.

“Maybe mostly for my body,” she said.

“I resent that. I want all of you,” he said, and squeezed her hand.

She let go of his and drank again. A wind came in from the north and snatched a napkin from the table and took it down into the shaft below the balcony. Winter could see the napkin disappear like a butterfly into the shadow of the moon.

“Your mind is so often somewhere else.”

“I know. You’re right, but not all the time.”

“But right now.”

“It’s this case—”

“You know I’m not asking you to change jobs. But it’s everywhere, covering everything like a layer of dust—on us and over everything around us.”

“Not dust,” he said. “There won’t be any dust on us, since I keep stirring it up all the time. Any comparison you like, only not that.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I can’t help it, Angela. It’s a part of me. And of the job or whatever you want to call it.”

He told her how he’d seen Helene’s face just now, in the middle of a meal. He wasn’t looking for it. It had sought him out.

She didn’t ask anything about Helene, and he knew that was a good thing. Maybe later, but not now.

“You sometimes carry around images of your patients in your mind,” he said.

“It’s different with you.”

“I can’t help it,” he repeated. “And it helps me.”

“Does it? The great magical inspector? Eventually it’ll drive you—It could take over. More and more.”

“Eventually it’ll drive me crazy? Maybe I’m already crazy. Crazy enough to do police work.”

“The fight against evil,” she said. “Your favorite topic.”

“I know—it’s pathetic.”

“No, Erik, and you know that’s not what I think. But it can get to be too much sometimes, so big, you know?”

What was he supposed to say? Crime is an army. He was a policeman but he wasn’t cynical. He believed in the power of good, and that was why he spoke about evil. It was impenetrable, like observing the enemy through bulletproof glass. Anyone who tried to comprehend it with reason went under. He was starting to realize this, but he still had the urge to get in close in order to defeat that monster. If you couldn’t use your goodness and intellect to confront evil close up, what were you supposed to use? The thought had flashed through his mind before—a thought that was like a black hole right in the middle of reality, terrifying: that evil could be fought only in kind.

 

“There’s nothing to wait for,” Angela said when their breathing had calmed.

His head had exploded into a white light as he once again experienced the sensation where the boundaries between body and soul and body and body disappear, and they were united into a single whole for a few seconds while the white light lasted.

After that came the languorous exhaustion. Then the voice returned.

“What are we waiting for?” she repeated. “I want to throw out those damn pills.”

He couldn’t answer. Anything he might say could end up wrong, so he unfolded himself from the bed. “I’m going to get something to drink.”

“Get back here!”

“I’ve got to have something.” He pulled on his shorts by hopping on one leg at a time, then stepped out onto the balcony to fetch glasses and bottles. The wind from the early evening was gone. It felt as if it had grown warmer, warmer, almost, than inside the room.

He raised his gaze and the sky was empty. It might have been one o’clock or two. He could blame work and cycle home, but that would be cowardly. To say that he wanted to spend an hour hunched over the PowerBook, basking in its pleasant electronic glow, would be true in a way, but it sounded insane.

He carried two glasses filled with equal parts white wine and water into the kitchen, but there was no ice left in her freezer, so he walked back to the bedroom and handed one to Angela.

“So tell me what we’re waiting for,” she repeated. “I’m tired of this arrangement.”

“What arrangement?”

“Everything.” She drank thirstily. “I don’t want to live apart anymore.”

“It was your idea from the beginning.”

“I don’t care whose idea it was. And that feels like years ago, back when we were both young urban professionals.”

“We still are.”

“You’re thirty-seven, Erik. You’re nearly forty. I’m thirty.”

He drank and heard a car driving at high speed down on Kungsgatan, going toward Rosenlund. Could be a taxi or a private car on its way down to the hooker strip along Feskekörka. Sometimes the johns produced a heavy flow of traffic below her window, but tonight had been quiet. He wondered why. The conditions were perfect.

“It may sound silly, but playtime is over,” she went on. “You know I didn’t make any demands before, but I am now.”

“Yeah.”

“Is there something wrong? We’ve been together for almost two years and at our age that’s a long time for an LAT relationship.”

“You want us to move in together?”

“You know what I want, but that would be a start.”

“You and me, in an apartment?”

“That is what moving in together usually involves.”

He had to let out a giggle, like a little kid. The situation was untenable, awful. He was being held to account for his desire to live on his own and have her within comfortable reach, within biking distance on a warm evening. She was right; it was as she said. Playtime was over.

“You have to choose sometime,” she said softly, as if to a child that can’t make up its mind. “This is no surprise to you, Erik.”

“We could always see more of each other.”

“So you’re not ready?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“This is the only chance you’ll get.”

WINTER LEFT KUNGSHÖJD UNDER PRESSURE FROM THE SUN. HIS
black glasses dampened the pain in the crown of his head.

Angela waved from the balcony as he turned down the hill. He had been given time to think it over, but that was really the wrong way to describe it. He couldn’t think of the right way, so he didn’t.

 

“She hasn’t gotten in touch,” Ringmar said after morning prayer. “Should we go over there?”

Winter thought for a moment. As the head of the investigation, he had the discretionary authority to “bring in a person of potential interest for questioning.” They couldn’t just barge into somebody’s house, but they could bring someone in for questioning who was important to the preliminary investigation and hadn’t come in voluntarily. He looked in his papers. Andrea Maltzer lived on Viktor Rydbergsgatan. Nice address.

“Okay. Let’s go over there.”

They drove across Korsvägen. Someone merging into the traffic circle in a hurry had not paid proper attention. Two damaged cars stood at a nasty angle, and a uniformed officer was sorting out who was at fault together with two men whom Winter guessed were the drivers. The police sergeant was a man in his fifties, and he looked up as they edged past, then nodded in greeting. Ringmar raised his hand through the window.