Strindberg's Star (11 page)

And the quick patter of his heart soon turned into that fluttering under his sternum that had become so familiar these days. An overwhelming anxiety that would soon be followed by a dry taste in his mouth and great difficulty swallowing.

Don dug his hand into his bag and found a packet of Russian-bought clonazepam. This would be his first time trying these particular pills, but it would have to do.

He took six flat two-milligram capsules, which landed on his rough tongue, and he tried to get them down his throat. Then he realized that there was, in fact, wine, and he took a few steps toward the table, where he poured a glass. It tasted vaguely of iron, and as Don stood there drinking, he considered that this was not exactly something that a
choshever mensch
, a respectable person, would have done, as Bubbe would have said. But then again, it hadn’t been his idea to come here to Erik Hall’s cottage outside of Falun.

He placed the glass back and listened to the ticking of the clock.

He saw on his wristwatch that there was half an hour left until midnight.

Perhaps he could wait thirty minutes for the diver here in the cottage, if only he could avoid the pressing darkness.

He couldn’t find any lights in the hall, but in the living room there was an old light switch of Bakelite.

The incandescent light made the row of windows flash, and when
Don looked over toward the short end of the room, he caught sight of a figure without a head or feet. It was on a hanger, which was hooked onto an open door.

He walked up and felt the rubbery fabric of the dry suit and wondered what kind of person would voluntarily crawl down into a labyrinth hundreds of yards underground. Then he heard the hinges creaking, and the door slowly swung open. For an instant he thought there was someone lying on the bed in there, but what looked like a body was a mess of blankets.

But everything suggested that the diver was nearby—a machine was on in here, too: a computer, whose monitor displayed the local paper’s article about the ankh. On the floor there were magazines with other pictures, photographs of women with their legs spread, and a jumble of clothes, cups, and glasses.

The room was
ein chazzershtal
, a real pigsty, and Don was just about to let the door swing shut when his gaze fell on something that didn’t really fit in.

On the nightstand, behind a bottle of gin, a sepia-toned photograph was leaning against the wall. It depicted some sort of … church?

He took a step into the mess, snatched the photograph, and took it with him out into the light of the living room.

Out here, he could see that it wasn’t a church in the photograph; it was more like a cathedral. The building had three naves, with crosses on the very tops of their facades. A rose window, which was flanked by two tall spires, formed an arch above the closed side doors.

One side of the picture was somewhat faded, and three blurry figures, one of them the size of a child, stood on the cobblestone square in front of the cathedral. They must have happened to pass by just as the photograph was taken, which must have been a long time ago.

Don carefully bent the paper, which was remarkably rigid. And when he turned it over, he realized that it was actually a postcard.
There was no stamp or address on the dotted lines, but printed in the upper left-hand corner was

La Cathédrale Saint Martin d’Ypres

Where there should have been a closing, there was a print of a red mouth, as though someone had given the postcard a kiss with painted lips. And above the kiss, written with blue ink in neat handwriting:

la bouche de mon amour Camille Malraux

le 22 avril

l’homme vindicatif

l’immensité de son désir

les suprêmes adieux

1913

Don turned the card over and looked at the picture again. The cathedral in Ypres, a few years before World War I. And a few isolated lines in French. The twenty-second of April 1913, written to a beloved woman—it reminded him of a poem.

Something rustled suddenly over by the hall and the sunporch, and Don thought it must be the diver coming home, but then the first of twelve strokes sounded from the clock.

He tapped the postcard lightly against his palm, waited for the sound to stop, and then declared that the time was up. When he turned the light off in the living room, he could once again see the starry sky outside the row of windows. Over by the fence there was a clothesline with a few bath towels hanging on it, and down below that, there seemed to be a slope of tall trees.

There was something about these pills that didn’t feel very good, and Don would have preferred to sit in a chair inside the cottage to rest. But out in the car would be better, and perhaps not as obtrusive if the diver were to end up coming home very late.

W
hen Don had left the sunporch behind him and was walking back along the gravel path to the gate, he realized that he was still holding the postcard in his hand.

He absentmindedly put it into the torn inner pocket of his jacket, where it slipped all the way down and landed against the bottom seam of the jacket lining. At first he cursed, but then he thought it could just stay there until he met Erik Hall.

In the car, he lowered the back of the seat as far as it would go, and he lay there with his eyes closed and thought about the postcard, but the clonazepam had really made him start to feel thoroughly rotten.

He opened his eyes again and saw that the steering wheel in front of him had been stretched out into a strangely oval shape, and despite the short distance, it was difficult to find the car door so he could let in some air.

His fingers were soft as dough when they finally found the door handle, and he had to throw his whole body against the door to be able to get out. At first he just lay doubled over in the warm air, panting. Then it felt as if his legs began to fill with carbon dioxide, and he had to move somehow. Don forced himself to stand up and found that he had suddenly started to walk. He must have been reeling around for some time when he noticed that he had ended up below the cottage. In front of him, the moonlight showed him the beginning of a path. It snaked off through the night, or was
snaked
really the right word … ?

Don searched in his bag for something that would bring clarity, fumbling among bottles and plastic-sealed syringes, while his carbonated legs continued to carry him away of their own accord.

In the pine forest, the trees pressed in closer and closer, encircled themselves around him, pressed down over his head, as though they wanted to close him in a cave. And when he finally managed to get a few more pills out, he dropped the first one on the path, where he couldn’t find it even though he dug in the ground with his fingers, and now he had slumped down into a sitting position, and how would he be able to get up again while he felt like this?

There was something on his chest, too, which felt heavier and heavier, and his breaths sounded dangerously shallow, panting and weak; he truly became frightened then, and he pulled up a random box in the dark and swallowed something without having any idea what it was, and soon after that he dropped off.

*

W
hen Don’s eyes opened again, he was lying on the forest path and looking up at the sky, and he thought it had completely lost its color. Hadn’t it just been black? Now it seemed to have turned beige or, wasn’t that a streak of blue? Was it morning already? And if it was: lucky that the diver hadn’t seen him.

He sat up and looked around.

Yes, it was morning. A blackbird was singing somewhere, and it looked as though water was glittering at the end of the path. A T-shaped dock extended out into the water, and the surface alongside the dock was covered in a thick layer of green leaves and white roses. A red patterned shirt had been left at the very end of the planks. Don had the thought that perhaps the diver had drowned, and maybe that explained why the machines were on up in the cottage and why the door had been open.

But then he caught sight of someone who was lying asleep just next to the edge of the woods. The dew glittered around the diver, because that must be him lying naked there in the grass, right? But there was no glitter around his large head; the ground was just sludge there. It looked as if Erik Hall had lain down to rest with his face in a rust-colored puddle.

A few steps closer now, and the sun really began to shine, strong even though it was still only dawn.

Nothing was bending or moving in an unnatural way anymore. Still, Don thought that this had to be some sort of dream or hallucination, because it was as though someone had ripped off a large part of the diver’s face—from his temple through his right eye socket and all the way into the root of his nose.

One eye was missing, or maybe it was there in the sludge somewhere. It was hard to tell, because from the curls on his forehead down to his neck, Hall’s face was covered with something that looked like a cowpat of coagulated blood.

Don wanted to stop, but his legs just kept moving, and they lowered him to his knees by the diver.

At the same time, his hands, a doctor’s hands, wanted to find something to do—but when he poked at all the red, his stomach turned, and he had to bend forward to force the vomit back down. Now his heart started to flutter away again, and he searched through the medicine in his bag, but all his fingers found was some angular object made of plastic.

When Don lifted it up, he saw that he was holding his cell phone. Pushed the power button; the battery was way down in the red. And while he continued to force back his vomit reflex, his fingers started to search for the buttons that made up the emergency number: one, one, two.

T
he asphalt of the Øresund Bridge rushed by about four inches below the foot pegs of ridged aluminum. Elena was crouched in place on the motorcycle, behind the carbon-fiber windshield, with her thin chest pressed against the snow-white gas tank. Since she had retooled the suspension, there was hardly any cushion left between her body and the spinning tires, and as soon as a crack or bump in the road made the machine bounce, she had to answer the throw quickly with the strength of her thighs. She forced her mind to concentrate fully to stop the image from coming back. But then there it was again—the diver’s body falling onto the grass, and all the blood that came from his face. And if the bottle in her hand hadn’t been broken, it would have been easier to come up with an excuse. Then maybe she could have said that she had tried to use the least possible amount of violence, that the blow from the bottle had happened to land in an unnecessarily bad place.

But that wasn’t what had happened.

In reality, she had purposely broken off the wine bottle against a stone before she struck its sharp edge with full force against the part of the Swede’s head she knew was fragile and weak.

She could still smell the odor of his crotch, but she couldn’t remember what it had looked like when the glass had carved its groove through his temple.

Her next memory was only noise: the creaks inside his face as she tugged and wriggled the neck of the bottle to get it loose from the Swede’s nasal bone and eye socket.

Then came a few random fragments of having put on her cardigan and boots. It must have been at that point that she first noticed the sound of a sputtering motor approaching up on the road, above the pine forest.

Then she saw herself running on the dark path, and when she had reached the fence, she could remember being surprised that she was still holding the bottle in her hand. She had taken a running start and heaved it as far off into the underbrush as she could, and she’d heard it land in thick bushes. Then, when she’d turned back to continue to the cottage, she had been blinded by headlights. The unfamiliar car had slowed down and stopped on the road outside the sunporch. It was standing there waiting with its high beams on, and in her confusion, she hadn’t been able to think of anything other than protecting her ankh.

She had started running again—this time toward the grove beyond the house where she had hidden her motorcycle. When she reached it, she had wrapped the pale metal of the ankh in her poncho and then pressed the bundle hard, hard underneath herself, against the motorcycle as it shot away through the coal-black night.

T
he next clear image was a blue sign that said
LUDVIKA 10
. She had stopped there and squatted in a grove of birches to pee. At this point her senses had become clear, and she realized that it had been a mistake to leave the cottage in a panic, without even trying to find the diver’s other secret. But now it was too late to turn around, and no matter what they said, at least she had gotten the ankh.

She slid into her tight leather gear and put on her helmet. She let her glove twist the throttle lever, and was once more on her way.

W
hen she’d left the Copenhagen area behind, she followed the directions: exit onto Cordozavej, then a left on Jersie Strandvej, until the radial-mounted brakes stopped the BMW in front of the last row of brick buildings. She pulled off the helmet and massaged her temples to quiet the buzzing sound that filled her head. She had started to hear it at dawn, and during her journey she had thought it was only background noise from the motor. But now it was turned off, and the humming just kept going. It varied in intensity, but nevertheless it was always there, like the whispering voices of your parents before you fall asleep.

She’d had the ankh pressed against her chest inside her leather outfit during the entire journey. Now she pulled down the zipper in order to feel it through the poncho. Although the metal should have been warmed by her body, it was still ice-cold.

Just as they had told her, next to one of the buildings there was a mailbox with a sticker: DF, an oval encircled by red arrows, the symbol of the Danish People’s Party. She opened the lid and picked up an envelope.

E
lena followed the walkway down to the long beach. The wind had started to pick up, and gusts from seaward swept plumes of sand from the tops of the dunes.