Strindberg's Star (52 page)

The rotor blades began to revolve, and the helicopter soared up over the chalk white expanses of the Arctic. She guided them forward without lurching despite the wind, and they sailed low over the tunnel, which was no more than a hole a yard in diameter by now. When Don looked down, he could see that the downdraft from the rotors was causing the rest of the opening to be covered over, and all that was left was the drifting snow.

Elena adjusted the pitch of the rotors, and as their lift increased, the craft rose up toward the stars again. In the roar of the motor, his headset crackled with static, and Don heard her shout that she was planning to fly them toward Longyearbyen on Svalbard, about three hundred miles away.

Elena tilted the helicopter’s nose down, and once the blades caught, it finally surged ahead. Don sat with his head against the window, looking down at the ice as it flew by; and vibrating in his lap were the remains of a star and an ankh.

The white metal, which had turned black, had also become noticeably
frail and brittle. Don took off his gloves and let his fingers glide over the ankh’s rough surface, where all the inscriptions had melted away.

He thought of a place they ought to visit on their journey south, and he began to search for the right coordinates on the map. Once he’d called them out to Elena via his microphone, he only had to explain them with a few concise words.

W
hen they had reached the edge of the pack ice, they flew out over the Arctic Ocean. Black swells, which were becoming increasingly gray in the light of dawn. The polar night receded with every nautical mile south, and far off on the horizon, there was a glimpse of something that resembled a sunrise. From inside the visor, Don could see the sunlight breaking, but then he closed his eyes and returned to the underworld and Eva Strand.

She was still lying there in the darkness, wrapped in the veils of pulverized dust. Once again he saw the sudden shine above her eyes, and in the rhythm of the rotors he tried to force himself to fall asleep.

*

D
on had lost all sense of time when Elena finally shook him awake. She pointed over at something that looked like floating ice, and it wasn’t until the helicopter had descended that he could see the jagged cliffs sticking up.

The island was covered in snow except for a small strip of beach, and Don shouted that they should land on the southwestern part. That was where the stone had been erected, as far as he could remember, and he was seldom wrong when it came to such things.

He grabbed the edge of the seat as Elena balanced the skids in the correct position, and soon they had landed on frozen gravel.

Don pulled off his helmet and wrapped himself in the red jacket that said
EARLY FALL ARCTIC CRUISE
. At the bottom of the helicopter’s metal stairs, he looked up at Elena, who waved at him to hurry.

He began to jog up the sharp stone cleft in the slope, and he came
up onto the hill where the monument stood. After he had read the names on the brass plate, he looked down at what he had brought along: the burned objects that had once been Strindberg’s star and ankh.

The two objects looked so unassuming in his hand, and he wondered how they could have brought him all the way here. Then Don placed the star and the ankh to rest on top of the cement monument.

When he returned to the cockpit, Elena was leaning comfortably backward and had taken off her helmet. He was struck by how green her eyes were when she directed them at him and said, “There’s something I’ve been sitting here thinking about.”

Don listened skeptically as she told him her suggestion. It was certainly not his experience that something so difficult could be so simple. But Elena didn’t seem to see any risks, at least not on her part. It was doubtful that she even existed officially; Vater had seen to that a long time ago.

T
hey continued to discuss the matter as the blades of the helicopter began to rotate, and soon the skids lifted from frozen ground. The blades of the rotor beat their way up over the hill, and they hung there motionless for a second, above the lonely monument on the island.

The draft under them caused the ankh and the star to tremble, but then the helicopter lifted higher and higher and sailed away.

The only things left, in the sunshine at the expedition’s final camp on Kvitøya, were two blackened objects and the names on the memorial stone:

A
few weeks later, in a drizzly Falun, the entrance doors of the Åhléns department store closed with a hiss behind a retiree with heavy bags. Outside of Systembolaget, the liquor shop, a few guys were messing around with a moped; and none of them was probably thinking it, but Falun’s shopping street, Åsgatan, was really terribly dismal.

If you were to cross the river, you would reach the part of town that was closest to the Great Copper Mine, built upon centuries-deep layers of slag. On that side, right after the bridge, was Falun’s police station, and in one of its interrogation rooms, a fluorescent light was buzzing. Leaning against the back of a chair sat a crooked figure in a velvet suit and aviator glasses. Directly across from him sat a policeman with a mustache. A letter with a German postmark lay between them on top of a notebook. The only sound was the monotonous buzzing from the ceiling and the hum of the ventilation system. Then the Mustache cleared his throat to bring the conversation to an end.

“So you mean to say you don’t know anything about who sent this
to us? Yet you return to Sweden just a few days after it lands on our desk?”

Don straightened his glasses.

“I assume I’ll have to explain this to Säpo, too,” he said. The policeman blew his nose.

“I don’t think you’ll have to do that. They don’t seem to be very interested anymore, and from what I’ve heard, there’s an internal investigation in progress about why you were taken from here in the first place. And this so-called attorney …”

Don waved his hand dismissively.

“Well, what a damned mess,” the Mustache mumbled to himself.

“And the fingerprints on the bottle you found?” Don asked.

“We will search the international registries as well, but here in Sweden, we haven’t found a match. And being able to hit like that, with such a small hand … You almost start to wonder whether Erik Hall was killed by a child. But of course, whoever wrote this letter was able to point out exactly where the bottle was and give a technical description of how the blow was dealt besides. So it was a letter from a murderer, but nothing about why …”

“Maybe there are some parts of this thing that you still don’t know,” Don said.

The policeman gave him a look that was meant to be piercing.

“Oh, really? Has something happened that you still haven’t told us?”

Don shook his head vigorously.

“Well, we should keep in touch, anyway,” the Mustache said tentatively. “I mean, in case something turns up.”

In the silence that followed, all that was audible was the occasional clicking of the fluorescent light. Finally, Don pushed his chair back and pulled on the strap of his bag.

“So I’m free to go, then?”

The Mustache nodded reluctantly, and Don stood up. When he reached the door, he heard the policeman’s voice.

“I’m sorry if we happened to involve you in this mess unnecessarily, Titelman. Do you perhaps have a legal representative we can contact if there are any more questions?”

Don looked at the Mustache, sitting there in the fluorescent light. Then he said, “No, I think I can take care of myself from now on.”

T
herese Uddenfeldt—without you, nothing would have been possible.

Thanks also to:

Stephen Farran-Lee and Karin Lundwall;

Michael Kucera, Anna-Karin Ivarsson, Daniel Öhman, Sara Hallgren Öhman, Lars Pahlman, Judit Ek, Niklas Möller, Pier Franceschi, and Margit Silberstein;

Anna Hedin, Katarina Wallentin, Lars Wallentin, Mikael Uddenfeldt, and Astrid Uddenfeldt;

Peter Giesecke, Ricardo Gonzalez, Elias Hedberg, Olov Hyllienmark, Roger Jansson, Håkan Jorikson, Olle Josephson, Daniel Karlsson, Johanna Mo, Margareta Regebro, Lotta Riad, Thomas Roth, Salomon Schulman, and Katja Östling;

In the few places where the novel diverges from reality, it’s reality that ought to change.