“Well, you can see for yourself. Subutex—a heroin substitute. And these are all benzodiazepines, or tranks, as they’re called.” He started pointing at the bottles. “Here’s something Russian. Here are three unmarked bottles. Here he has Spasmophen with morphine, and then a bunch of junkie stuff. You can see for yourself.”
“Does he have a prescription for Subutex?”
“Yes, I guess there are some slips in the bag there. But …”
“Spasmophen?”
The Mustache nodded reluctantly.
“In that case, I suggest that you apologize immediately and give all of the prescribed medicine back to my client. I want a confiscation receipt for everything else, and then we will deal with this once we get to court.”
Don was still holding on to the attorney’s hand, and now he was sure that he never wanted to let go.
The policeman began discontentedly to put the medicine back into the bag, and then he pushed it across the table to Don.
“And then there was that part about getting him something to eat,” said the attorney.
With a heavy sigh, the Mustache went over to his colleague by the door of the interrogation room. Once there, he turned around.
“It was Eva Strand, right?”
She nodded slightly but didn’t take her eyes from Don.
“From the law firm Afzelius in Borlänge?”
She nodded again.
“Are you new there?”
“I don’t know about new … I’ve been up here since last summer, when I moved here from Stockholm. I was with the criminal lawyers there for thirteen years. Why?”
“He just means that we so seldom see new faces,” said the colleague in a conciliatory tone.
“We usually work together up here,” said the Mustache.
“Oh … ?” said Eva Strand.
“That’s all. So, welcome.”
With that, the Mustache slunk off. His colleague gave a little smile after him as he disappeared down the corridor, then turned back to the attorney. “It’s been a long night.”
“I understand. For my client, as well. And now … if you could perhaps let us have some time alone?”
D
on didn’t release his grip on the attorney’s hand until the police officer had let the door swing shut.
She took off her coat and hung it on her chair. Under it, she was dressed in a herringbone jacket with shoulder pads and a rust-brown high-buttoned shirt.
Don thought she was a bit reminiscent of a blond Ingrid Bergman:
an angular face and dressed like someone who’d stepped out of a movie from the forties.
Timeless
—maybe that was the word.
Eva Strand’s eyes were blue and slightly transparent, and if Don hadn’t felt otherwise from holding her hand earlier, he would have thought that the expression in them was cold.
Then he broke their eye contact and turned all his attention to his bag. After some rummaging among the white boxes, he finally got out six milligrams of alprazolam. Light blue, oval, notched pills. He washed them down with a gulp of the now lukewarm coffee.
“Well then, Don …” the attorney began. “Perhaps you could tell me what it was that happened.”
He started at the beginning: the encounter in the television studio, Erik Hall’s late-night calls, nagging him to come up to Falun to look at the diver’s strange ankh. He told her a bit about his own research and tried to emphasize how little he actually cared about mystical objects and that his trip to Dalarna had been something of a snap decision. He said a few words about the motorcycle that had driven away, and it wasn’t until he arrived at the part where he entered Hall’s cottage that the attorney stopped him.
“So it wasn’t locked?”
Don shook his head.
“And then you took the opportunity to go in?”
“Well, he was the one who wanted me to come.”
She made a note and gestured to him to keep going. So they went through the story of why he had drunk the wine and how he had maybe walked around the cottage a little bit to have a look around.
“Did you find anything?”
He blinked.
“Why would I have found something?”
“Well, you went there to look at an ankh, right?”
Her pen had stopped. He was irritated and slightly confused. “How should I know where Erik Hall had put his damn ankh?”
“Maybe he told you on the phone?”
“I wasn’t exactly walking around looking for it, if that’s what you mean.”
“I don’t mean anything,” Eva Strand said, smiling slightly. “But as I understand it, the police are concerned because the ankh is gone.”
Under the table, Don fingered the lining of his jacket.
“Well, the police have searched through my clothes, of course, so it will be quite difficult for them to claim that I’ve stolen anything.”
“Have you?”
“What?”
“Stolen anything.”
The postcard was still lying there untouched; it was barely noticeable through the stiff fabric of the jacket.
“No. Like I said, this is all just an idiotic misunderstanding.”
“That’s good.”
He sighed and continued to tell her about the blood on his hands and how it had just been an automatic attempt to help Erik Hall. When he finally fell silent, she drew a line and then flipped thoughtfully back through her notes.
“If I understand you correctly, you broke into Hall’s cottage, had his blood on your hands, and were drugged when the police arrived on the scene?”
“Drugged, I …”
“And your fingerprints are all over the cottage, and you claim to have heard a motorcycle—a BMW endurance racer, if I wrote it down correctly—drive off just as you arrived at the scene, but you have no proof of that. In addition you take narcotics to such an extent that you could easily be labeled an addict.” A short pause, then she set down the notebook.
“Well, at least we know what we have to work with.”
Then the attorney looked over at the blinds inside the triple-pane windows but turned her head back when she caught sight of her own reflection.
“So what do we do now?” he asked at last.
“Is there anything else I need to know?”
He looked up at her between his fingers.
“I …”
“Yes?”
“I’ve actually been convicted once before.”
“I see.”
“But it was simple assault, a suspended sentence. A neo-Nazi demonstration that …”
When his voice caught, she grasped his fingers gently and pulled them from his face.
“Hey, Don. We can deal with that later. Is there anyone who should know that you’re here?”
He thought of his sister, but then he shook his head.
Then he could feel that the alprazolam had finally made his eyes start to feel heavy. He let the wave of drowsiness and calm wash up through his chest. The weariness soon made him lean forward, and he let his cheek fall to rest on the birch veneer of the table.
The attorney took his hand as his breathing became slower and slower.
S
he sat patiently with him until his rest was interrupted by the sound of a knock. When Don peered up, he saw that the Mustache and his colleague were once again standing over there by the interrogation room door. Their faces were dark.
“Yes?” said Eva Strand.
The colleague squirmed a bit.
“Well, we’ve just heard from the prosecutor that she got a call from down in Stockholm.”
“Oh?”
The Mustache interrupted: “Well, shit, what a way …”
“It seems,” his colleague continued, “that the suspect is to be moved.”
“Moved?” said Eva Strand.
Don got up on his elbows with difficulty, his back sunken, his hair gray and scruffy. He was still having trouble understanding that this conversation was about him.
“And quickly, it seems,” said the Mustache. “Some guys who will be taking care of the transport have already come over.”
“The National Police?” asked the attorney.
The Mustache raised his eyebrows and answered with a snort: “Sure. That would have looked great, if the National Police had decided to come here and stick their noses into a local murder investigation.”
His colleague walked up to Eva Strand and showed her the prosecutor’s decision.
“Perhaps your client can explain it.”
He looked at Don. “It’s two guys from Säpo.” The Swedish Security Service.
A
fter the long hours in the interrogation room, Don was blinded by the powerful sunlight, and he couldn’t make out his own crooked shadow until he had blinked a few times.
Then he looked down at his handcuffs, and when the light flashed on the metal, he started to wonder how even a
shmendrik
could think that it was worth the trouble to lock his thin wrists together. But judging by the Mustache’s firm grip on his upper arm, the risk that he would attempt escape must be considered imminent, even out here on the sidewalk in front of the Falun police station.
The two men from Säpo were standing by the parking lot, waiting next to a metallic-colored station wagon. One of them had sparse, thinning hair, and now and again he smoothed it in the wind. They were dressed in blue jeans and pale gray jackets, and attorney Eva Strand was standing in front of them and waving some papers indignantly. But when the thin-haired one discovered Don, he seemed to lose all interest in her questions and set a course for the entrance of the police station.
As he handed Don over, the Mustache attempted a sarcastic remark about Stockholmers. But the man from Säpo didn’t seem to be
in the mood for small talk; he just silently took over the grip on Don’s arm.
As they walked past the attorney, Don felt his legs suddenly wobble underneath him, and the thin-haired man had to support him so that he could manage to get into the backseat of the car at all. Then he sat there helplessly and looked out at Eva Strand through the tinted windows.
She still didn’t seem to want to give up. He could see her talking on her cell phone now. The men from Säpo just seemed bored, standing there with their arms crossed, waiting out her conversation.
After a bit, the back door on the other side was opened. “Is there room?”
Don nodded gratefully as the attorney moved into the seat next to him. She fastened her seat belt and placed her papers into her bag, with her legs pressed together under the close-fitting suit skirt. Then she turned to him and asked, “Are you sure there’s nothing you’ve forgotten to tell me?”
But Don had no answers, and then the thin-haired man walked once around the car and slammed all the doors.
When the motor had purred to life and they began to move forward, they passed slowly in front of the Mustache. The last thing Don saw was how the
shmendrik
turned around, scratched his head, and then trotted back to the entrance of the police station.
A
t the first red light, the back-door locks slid down and locked.
“You really must tell us where you’re planning on taking us,” said Eva Strand.
But the man from Säpo just looked disinterestedly at her in the rearview mirror, and then his eyes moved back to the traffic light just as it turned green.
“This must all be some sort of misunderstanding,” she said to herself.
The car began to roll again.
Her fingers drummed against her handbag. Don noticed that the skin covering the attorney’s hands was very thin; it lay like a veil over her veins.
Then she continued to put her frustrated questions to the men from Säpo, but after a while Don no longer had the energy to listen. Instead his thoughts wandered back to the long interrogation. But no matter how he turned the conversation over in his mind, he couldn’t understand what he could have done differently.
It must just be an idiotic misunderstanding.
Nor Got vaist farvos.
Only God knows why. Soon he would presumably be back in his airless room in the Department of History in Lund, among piles of mixed-up lecture notes and unread student essays.
Don dug out a blister pack of comforting Halcion, mild sleep aid, pushed out a few white tablets. Then he placed them on his tongue, swallowed, and glanced down at the edge of the window, with the depressed lock button.
“Also … die Türen bleiben geschlossen, bitte.”
Once again that disinterested look in the rearview mirror from the thin-haired one. Don let his head fall back against the seat, closed his eyes, and repeated quietly to himself:
“Die Türen bleiben geschlossen, bitte. Und wenn den Juden Wasser so gefällt, gefällt ihnen Jauche noch viel besser.”
I
n the darkness behind his eyelids, he slid in through the doors to the 1950s house, and it was summer again, and he was lying on a mattress that smelled like dust and listening to his grandmother’s voice. He used to lie like that at Bubbe’s feet, under the glass table, his eyes closed while she told stories.
Die Türen bleiben geschlossen, bitte
—the words came from a deserted train station in the beech forests of Poland, where her freight car had stopped on the long journey from the Warsaw ghetto to the concentration camp Ravensbrück.
One hundred degrees, burning rays of sun in through the rusted gaps in the narrow metal walls. They had sat silently in there, waiting, for five days, forgotten on a sidetrack in the railroad chaos of the Holocaust.
Bubbe had with her bare feet trampled the bodies of those who had already suffocated, in the short instances when she wasn’t being lifted up toward the ceiling by the pressure of those who still had energy to stand. The Germans had managed to squeeze almost two hundred Jewish men, women, and children into the freight car, behind the bolts of the sliding doors. August, the dog days, and they had received nothing to drink. But when the screams had become too difficult to bear, one of the Germans had enough.
They had heard a fire pump start up, and a few seconds later water had flooded in through the gaps. But the gesture had been meaningless, because the rusty metal had been so hot that most of it immediately turned to steam.
But the commander had been enraged,
toyt meshuge,
about this wastefulness, and the man who had sprayed them was beaten like a dog. Then Bubbe had heard these words:
“Die Türen bleiben geschlossen, bitte. Und wenn den Juden Wasser so gefällt, gefällt ihnen Jauche noch viel besser.”
The doors will remain closed, and if the Jews like water, they’ll like piss even better.