Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (42 page)

Nor was he interested in the behind-the-scenes action that would follow. Right now he just felt like sticking headphones on his ears and sinking down into his train seat.

John Coltrane,
Meditations
. He stepped into that vague state between wakefulness and sleep—the privileged space of serenity.

We thought something had only just come to Sweden, he
mused. The truth was that it was already here, and had been for a long time. It just had to be aroused.

He would get himself a piano. That decision ripened as he got out of the train at Norsborg and ambled through the rain. The standardized row houses seemed to watch him through the flying mists. He crept along slowly, allowing the rain into every pore. He needed to be thoroughly washed. Time after time.

It had been a long time since he’d seen the moon, and there was none tonight. In the United States he hadn’t thought to look. He had become close to Kerstin in a way he hadn’t expected. Somewhere inside he had longed for her, but his childish wish for a hot affair on the side had changed to something different. Was he getting old? Or was he growing up?

He arrived at his row house. It looked gray and dreary, as impersonal as a high-rise, but disguised as a tiny rise in status. It was all fiction. Nothing was as it seemed.

Above all, it wasn’t gray and dreary inside. On the inside, nothing is the same. That was something, at least. Some little trace of comfort after what he had been involved in.

He had, as Larner said, caught the Fucking Kentucky Baby all on his own. Well. The inspiration had been his own, anyway. And not just one, but two. That the other had slipped away was not his fault—it was more a law of nature. Or at least he could pretend that that was the case for a while.

Cilla was sitting on the sofa. A little candle was burning in front of her. She was reading a book.

“You can’t read in that light,” he said. “You’ll ruin your eyes.”

“No.” She put down the book. “That’s one of those lies that people spread. You can’t ruin your eyes by reading in too little light. There can never be too little light.”

He smiled faintly and walked over to her.

“Wait, don’t sit down.” She disappeared, then came back with a few towels and placed them on the sofa.

He sat on them. “I could have gotten them myself,” he said.

“I
wanted
to get them,” she said, “if that’s okay.”

There was silence for a moment.

“What were you reading?” he asked at last.

“Your book,” she said, holding up Kafka’s
Amerika
. “You never have time to read, after all.”

“What do you think?”

“Tricky,” she said. “But when you get into it, you can’t put it down. You think you understand, and then you realize you don’t understand anything.”

“I understand,” he said.

“Do you?” she said.

They laughed briefly.

Then she fingered his clothes. “You’re really wet. I’ll help you get them off.”

“You don’t need to—”

“Yes,” she said, “I need to.” She slowly undressed him.

He allowed himself to enjoy it, wholeheartedly.

“I’ll probably have more time to read now,” he said as she pulled off his pants. “And we’ll probably have a little more time together, too.”

“But you haven’t caught that Montana Murderer yet.”

“Kentucky Killer.”

“When are you actually going to catch him?”

“Never,” he said calmly.

She pulled off his soaking-wet underwear and threw it onto the pile of drenched clothes on the floor. “You don’t look too bad, Paul Hjelm,” she said, “for a middle-aged, lower-level official.”

“You don’t look too bad, either,” he said. “As you can see.”

She smiled and started to undress.

He reached for the candle. He put it out—and burned himself. “Ow, hell.”

“You’re so clumsy,” she laughed, lying down beside him.

He watched the wick. The glow ebbed until no light was left. “There can never be too little light,” said Paul Hjelm, letting himself go.

Outside, the rain streamed down.

About the Author
Arne Dahl is an award-winning Swedish crime novelist and literary critic.
Bad Blood
is the second book in the Intercrime Series.

About the Translator
Rachel Willson-Broyles is a freelance translator and a Ph.D. candidate in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Her other translations include Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s novel
Montecore
and the play
INVASION!
She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Also available in eBook format by Arne Dahl
Misterioso •
978-0-307-37964-1

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