Strindberg's Star (22 page)

He looked at her and felt the nails with his fingers.

I
n silence they continued to clear away the shelves until they got down to the bottom board, which turned out to be screwed into the brick wall. Don thought this was actually a good thing, because maybe then it would be able to bear his weight. He motioned to Eva to support him, and when he got a grip on her shoulder, he carefully braced his boot against the bottom shelf. Then he took a step up but swayed backward, and she had to help him so that he wouldn’t lose his balance completely.

The small cellar window was now within reach, just three or four inches above his head. Don rocked on the sagging board, and it seemed to hold. So he stretched out his hand.

“Give it to me.”

She gave him the board with the protruding nails.

“And you’ll have to support me,” he said.

Nothing happened.

“And you’ll have to …”

He felt her hands on his back.

A firm grip on the board, the nails turned to the front. He didn’t know how hard he should hit, so first he tried a light knock.

There was a rattle as the tips bounced back from the mosaic glass.

Then he tried again, harder this time, a short, powerful swing, and
the pane cracked, falling in blue and red shards down onto the stone floor. The sharp sound of broken glass, and Don felt Eva give a jump. After a long silence, she hissed, “Well, that was discreet.”

Don pulled the arm of his jacket as far as he could over the knuckles of his right hand, then began to knock away the last sharp fragments from the edges. He could already feel the night air trickling in.

When most of the shards were gone, he released his grip on his jacket arm and stretched his hand through the window. About four inches down, his hand ran into something moist, and when he brought it back into the wine cellar, Don saw in the glow from the lightbulbs that it had become black with dirt. He showed Eva.

“I’m not sure that this is a good idea,” she said.

Her hair was a mess, her eyes edged with red.

“Do you have a better one?” Don asked, climbing down.

He didn’t receive an answer.

T
he benzodiazepine in the Xanax capsules had really kicked in now, and it was with a sense of remarkable calm that Don moved back toward the glass door, out to the pantry.

His black bag still lay on the plastic mattress, and the light from the ceiling was reflected in its shiny leather. He lifted it up by the strap and then went over to the locked kitchen door to listen.

No steps, no voices, nothing.

He looked at the clock. It was three thirty, and it would still be dark outside the villa.

A quick run down the avenue of oaks, and he would come to the road that went past Skansen. From there to Karlaplan, and then to the central station. Change to the subway running north, to the only place that he knew was safe.

Don placed the strap of the bag over his shoulder, made sure it was hanging securely at his side, and with a final glance out toward the pantry, he pulled the glass door closed behind him.

T
he attorney was waiting for him in the brick vault. She looked up at the gaping cellar window.

“It’s way too narrow,” she said. “You’ll never get out, and even if you did, what would you do then?”

“I have a vague idea,” said Don.

“That sounds reassuring,” said Eva.

Her arms crossed over the herringbone pattern.

“Better than staying here,” said Don. “What do you say?”

Eva looked over toward the stairs to the upper floor. Then she said with a weak smile, “An attorney must look for alternatives in a process and never lead her client into a dead end where the door locks behind them.”

She looked at him; he had managed to stand up, balancing on the lowest shelf.

“Good luck.”

D
on had taken two white towels with him from the pantry. Now he wound them around his hands, stretched them toward the frame of the window, and grabbed hold. When he realized that the strength of his arms wasn’t enough, he called for help.

Eva gave him a shove upward, and then he braced his boot against one of her shoulders.

“This does not feel dignified,” he thought he heard her say, just before he really got a good grip and managed to heave himself up so he landed with his chest halfway out the window.

There was a sting in his stomach from some shard of glass that he had been too careless to clear away. Then he moved his head and looked around, out into freedom.

To the right, a few yards away, he glimpsed the wooden shingles of the villa’s facade. To the left were branches and leaves, a garden shrub, Don thought, heaving himself a little farther out. Then he managed to wriggle his legs up from the cellar window and crouched with his back pressed against the dark wall.

A whisper from down in the wine cellar. “How does it look?”

Don moved as quietly as he could back to the window. He looked in. Eva Strand’s face down there, anxious now.

“I didn’t think you were serious,” she hissed.

“You were a great help anyway,” said Don.

She nodded and looked aimlessly around in the empty brick vault.

“So you’re staying there?” Don asked.

“I …”

He stretched out his hand.

Eva uncrossed her arms and took a hesitant step forward. Don gripped her wrists and succeeded in lifting her up onto the lowest shelf.

He leaned backward and braced his boots against the outside of the window frame. She was surprisingly light; it was like lifting a child.

When Don had managed to pull her almost halfway out of the window, he heard Eva cry out suddenly. He immediately released her hands, and he saw her give a jerky kick with one leg, as though she had become caught in something. Then she finally managed to get loose, and she crawled behind him, in among the branches next to the wall of the house.

He saw that she was stretching one hand down to her leg to feel it. Showed him her fingers. He couldn’t make it out in the dark, but when Don took her hand he realized that it was covered in blood.

“I cut myself on something. You could have been …”

The words disappeared in a moan before she managed to continue. “You could have been a little more careful to remove all the glass.”

Don couldn’t think of an answer. Instead he took off one of his towels and pressed it to the spot she had shown him: Just under the crease of her knee, a four-inch gash ran diagonally down her calf. She held herself up with the help of his hand, and he felt her grip become harder with the pain. They sat like that for a few minutes until
Don thought he heard a faint rustling, which soon turned into the sound of steps.

“Someone’s coming,” he whispered.

He heard her trying to hold back her breathing, short puffs through her nose, her lips pressed tight together.

D
on crawled forward through the shrub, crouching, and moved a few branches aside so he could see.

Out on the terrace, illuminated by the villa’s floodlights, stood the thin-haired Säpo man. He had taken out a cigarette, and soon Don could see the flame from within his cupped hand, and then the glow from his first drag.

The thin-haired man had stopped only about thirty feet away from the bushes where they sat hidden in the dark, alongside the wall. Don could smell the pungent scent of smoke. Some distance away, in the turnaround, he could see the metallic-painted station wagon. The Säpo man slowly finished smoking. Then he shook another cigarette out of the pack, coughed, and stuck it between his lips.

Don began to search through his bag, trying in vain to find some sort of weapon. He could hear Eva carefully changing position. Her movement against the wall shouldn’t have been noticeable, but something about the thin-haired man’s posture changed. He took the cigarette from his mouth and threw it on the ground. Then he turned around, with his gaze aimed in their direction. As Don looked into the policeman’s eyes he was sure that they had been discovered. But as the thin-haired man slowly began to move forward, toward the bushes, he realized that there was still time.

He looked down at the small plastic tube he had taken out of his shoulder bag, and he was surprised at how well he knew all of its corners and compartments. Then he tried to back up toward Eva, but the small movement was enough for the thin-haired man to see.

D
on felt himself being lifted up by his left arm and hauled out into the sharp light on the terrace. Somewhere along the way he must have succeeded in getting in a kick to the Security policeman’s leg with the Dr. Martens boots on his flailing feet, because something caused his grip to loosen, if only a shade.

In that short instant, Don managed to twist himself around so that he could get the plastic tube up to his mouth. With his teeth, he ripped the cover from the syringe, and then he stabbed the long needle haphazardly into the policeman’s neck.

There was no doubt he had hit his target and stabbed deeply, because the thin-haired man cried out and let go. But when Don looked up from the granite terrace, there was still something that didn’t make sense. The Säpo man remained standing up.

At first, Don didn’t understand what had gone wrong, but then he discovered that the plunger of the syringe still wasn’t depressed. The needle must have hit the carotid artery, because it was bobbing in time with the man’s heartbeat. The policeman fumbled clumsily along his neck with his hands, and Don tried to gather the strength to get up.

But then he caught sight of a herringbone-patterned figure limping into the light. The thin-haired man didn’t have a chance to see her, because she was approaching from behind. And when she was just behind his back she slipped her hand onto the syringe in the man’s neck from the back and resolutely pushed the six milliliters of Leptanal in with the plunger.

The policeman had time to turn around and look deep into the attorney’s eyes. Then he swayed, stumbled a few yards to the side, and collapsed.

E
va Strand was crouching next to the supine body with her hands against her bleeding leg.

Don ran up and started to search through the Säpo man’s jacket
pockets. He cursed and swore until he finally found the key to the car. Together they stumbled toward the turnaround, she with her arm over his shoulders.

Don unlocked the station wagon from a few yards away. At the same time, Eva’s legs gave out, and Don had to carry her the rest of the way. After he’d thrown her into the passenger seat, Don went around the car panting, tore open the other door, and sat behind the wheel. After one failed try, he turned on the dome light to find the keyhole. He turned the key—the sound of a powerful motor, something that could carry them away.

The hand brake off, the car rolled off toward the avenue; then Don pressed the gas pedal hard. At the last second, he had time to swerve around the large tree trunk that came rushing toward them, and the wheels finally spun them away.

A
s they sped along Djurgårdsvägen, Eva began to cry out when the car jolted, and Don stopped at the 47 bus stop. Searched in his bag again and took out six purple tablets. But as she swallowed them, he realized that it was way too much.

He patted her comfortingly on the thigh and looked down at her leg.

Her nylon stocking was completely wet and dark, and when he took her shoe off, it was full of blood. He wrapped the last towel around her as hard as he could and knotted it.

Eva leaned her head against the back of the seat. Don released the brake, looked in the rearview mirror, and decided at the last minute that he would probably make it out before that clattering truck drove by.

S
trandvägen, he thought. Strandvägen, Hamngatan, central station. Dump the car and then the blue line northbound.

A
sharp morning light hit Elena as she pushed open the door that led out to the small square with the walled-up fountain.

It was no longer possible to make out any signs of last night’s dreams in her face. She had been extra careful around her eyes, and she took a chance and powdered her cheeks with rouge. It was a balancing act, because she knew that Vater didn’t want to see any signs that she had become an adult. To avoid provoking him further, she had put on a loose-fitting tracksuit and a pair of jogging shoes.

The ankh lay like an icicle in her backpack as she reluctantly began to move through the city in the direction of the banking hall. But then she couldn’t help increasing her pace, and despite all of the weight inside her, her steps were light and springy as she ran along the familiar cobblestone streets. At Landgasthaus Ottens Hof she turned in at the gate between the timber-frame houses, which would lead her to Wewelsburg’s town square.

As she jogged the last bit up to the large bank building, she couldn’t resist peering up over its roof toward the silhouette of the castle. As a child, she had taken it as a sign that she had truly come to a fairy-
tale place—her own castle!—but now it just stood there as a depressing reminder of everything that she had lost.

Elena stopped at the glass entry hall and stretched her arm backward over her shoulder, to fumblingly reassure herself one last time that the backpack really did contain what she had promised him. Then she drew as much air as she could into her lungs and stepped into the great marble hall of the bank.

When she approached the reception booth in the echoing room, both of the guards greeted her tersely, as usual. One of them pushed out the tablet to take her fingerprints, even though she had known them since she was a child.

As soon as she touched the tablet, there was a buzz in front of her, and an opening appeared in the bulletproof glass. Her jogging shoes moved up the staircase, their shuffling the only sound, and Elena tried to stop all the thoughts that would lead way too far.

Then the stairs finally came to an end, and she turned off into the corridor, to the right. She followed its long carpet to the elevator that brought her up to the waiting room outside the management office.