Strindberg's Star (7 page)

And on the next page, the entire masthead was still there:

After that, they had begun to suck up the water from the pool around the stone where the diver said he had found the dead man.

In the sand on the bottom they had found a large awl with a broken red handle, and you didn’t need an extensive forensic education to realize what had hacked the deep hole in the vitriol-soaked man’s forehead.

A few hours later, the police technicians and the journalists would learn that the only prints that could be gathered from the handle had come from the dead man’s own fingers.

“So it’s not even certain that it was a murder? It could be a
suicide
? It might not even have been a story a hundred years ago?”

The Weasel from the big evening paper was waving his hands as though he couldn’t get air. The police spokesman nodded calmly.

“Fucking goddamn Dalarna,” said the Weasel, shoving his way out of the press conference to call home.

H
is editor reserved half a page for the story in the afternoon edition. The other evening paper chose to fill the space with a lighthearted column.

That evening the newspapers called their correspondents home from Falun. Time to pay the hotel bill and come back to Stockholm.

This wasn’t front-page news. It was something that could be discussed in science programs and explored on the culture pages—but as an explosive story, the Æsir murder was definitely banished to the archives.

F
ar, far,
far
back in the archives.

I
t was nearly five o’clock on the intern’s last day, and there was a send-off for him at
Dalakuriren
’s meeting table. He said his good-byes and sneaked off toward the stairs to the parking garage. When he’d made it halfway, he heard footsteps behind him, then felt the news director’s hand on his shoulder. Through labored breaths, the director offered him one last job. The intern had already opened his mouth to say no, when the news director spat out the three crucial syllables: “Erik Hall.”

Here’s the thing, the news director said when he had managed to catch his breath—that tiresome diver had called time and again the past week, asking what was going to happen with the
Dalakuriren
interview. What was up, were they still interested?

The mine story was dead and buried. But now something for the Saturday supplement had not come through, and there would be a gaping hole between the ads. Maybe the article didn’t need to be too long? Just a little weekend profile with the Dala diver who had been in the mass-media limelight for such a short time.

T
he diver hadn’t said anything unexpected, but it was enough to get five thousand characters, one page in
Dalakuriren
’s Saturday section. The intern hadn’t planned to put his byline on some portrait of a hero anyway, so now there was just the part about the pictures …

The intern turned off his computer and walked with his head held high through the reporters’ corridor. He sauntered past the coffee machine and turned left where he found the photographer leaning over an evening paper at the scratched layout table. The photographer was a part-timer just out of high school, hired so that she could gain experience. She had a ponytail and was quite heavily made up, and her childishly round cheeks revealed that she could hardly be twenty years old. The intern asked her to take a few pictures that felt fresh. Nothing with that diving suit that had been in every paper.

The photographer nodded, excited for the opportunity. She heaved the heavy camera case up onto her shoulder, grabbed her denim jacket, and disappeared down toward the staff cars in the parking lot.

*

“W
elcome to Svartbäck,” said Erik Hall. “You’d like some coffee, right? I’ve just put some on.”

Hall was already waiting for her by the gate to his yard. And now, as they walked along the raked gravel path, the photographer felt the diver’s hand on her back. With a firm shove, the hand pressed her up the steps to the glassed-in sunporch.

Inside, behind the barred French windows, she quickly took off her shoes. It felt like something you didn’t need to ask about here. The green-painted planks of the floor shone, and from the inside of the cottage came a sharp scent of cleaning products.

The diver showed her to the kitchen. Erik Hall took the pot off, filled two cups, and handed one to the photographer. Then he suggested that she sit on the wooden bench.

Once the photographer had squeezed her way onto it, the diver shoved the oak table toward her, so close that it almost blocked in her
legs. He sat down with his legs spread in an armchair on the other side of the table.

She should probably hurry back. But maybe, she thought, it would be worth a few extra minutes of chatting to get the diver in a good mood. Because at first he was really not in high spirits.

Apparently everything had been wrong: The other papers had misquoted him about the technical details of mines and diving, which made Erik Hall appear uninformed. Then, when he had tried to correct them, he had been ignored repeatedly.

And there was more he wanted to say—this was just the beginning. But who was going to listen?

Take
Dalakuriren
, for example. The paper hadn’t even bothered to send their reporter here, had they? Journalists were so damned sloppy and completely lacked professionalism.

Then Erik Hall had spoken at length about professionalism, and about how he had worked at an electrical company in Falun that hadn’t had the correct attitude either.

The photographer had nodded and agreed until Hall started to ask about her more private circumstances. Then she had pointed at her empty cup and said that she’d like to find a place with good light.

“Well, we can go take a look at the suit; surely you want a picture of that,” said Erik Hall.

He shoved the table a bit with the weight of his body so the photographer could manage to wriggle her way out.

In the hall outside the kitchen, the diver unlocked a blue-painted country-style door. It led to a dining room where the afternoon sun was still shining in. Through the row of windows, you could see down toward the grass behind the cottage, which became a pine-wooded slope beyond the yard.

“How lovely,” she said.

“Mom was the one who fixed up the whole shack. She and I were always here in the summers. I want it to be like it was then.”

The photographer nodded.

“It’s a great place. If you go down the hill, you can swim. Sometimes there are too many water lilies and algae, but it’s been good this year.”

The diving suit was hanging on a hanger by the short wall of the room. It had been hooked up on an open door like a human body without a head.

“That’s the one you people usually want me to wear. Shall I?”

He made a motion as though to start taking off his sweater, but the photographer quickly told him not to bother:

“No, you know, this is about you and not the diving, so we want more personal pictures. Maybe from the kitchen, or if you have some place where you usually …”

She took hold of the suit and opened the cracked door. It smelled completely different in there; musty. A sagging bed with some glossy magazines spread out on top of soiled sheets and the pale gray light from a computer monitor.

“The kitchen is probably better,” said the photographer.

Once again she felt the diver’s hand on her back as he led her out.

T
he light was good in the kitchen. The thin linen of the curtains would work as a filter, perfect for the type of pictures she wanted to take. A bit dreamy, sitting at the kitchen table, Erik Hall with his heavy head leaning on one hand. Personal, that was what the intern had said, after all.

The photographer worked quietly, and for a long time the only sound was of her breathing as she changed position and the rhythmic click from the camera’s shutter.

“You seem to know what you’re doing, anyway,” said the diver.

She gave him a quick smile, just a few more pictures …

Hall continued: “Hey … there’s actually something I could tell you that would change this whole story.”

“Mm-hmm,” she mumbled, clicking one last time.

“You seem to be a girl who doesn’t give it away. You can keep a secret, I mean.”

“I see.”

She put the cap on the lens and let the camera fall down and hang against her stomach.

“So what is it, then?”

“Well, maybe it’s kind of a bit silly, but … there were a few things down there in the mine that I didn’t …”

The diver looked away from her, out through the kitchen window toward the gravel path and the fence around the yard.

“You know, I was in quite a bit of shock when I came up, so I threw everything down into one of my bags. And the police … when I came back home, they had just put the bags outside my door. They hadn’t opened them, I think, because, you know, the things were still there. They haven’t asked any questions, either, and I … it just didn’t occur to me to tell them. It felt so strange to say something, you know, several days later.”

“Oh? Things like those old newspapers that the police found down in the mine, or what?”

Hall sneered. “Aha … now it’s a little more exciting, huh?”

He looked at her in silence for a long time, and finally she had to look away.

“Wait a second.”

The diver got up and disappeared out into the hall. When he came back a few minutes later, he was carrying something that looked like a wine-colored terrycloth towel.

He placed the bundle on the kitchen table and unrolled it slowly. Deep inside the red lay a bone white cross with an eye: a shape the photographer immediately recognized.

“That’s one of those ankh-crosses, right?” she said.

Then she wrinkled her forehead.

“But isn’t it made of plastic?”

“Plastic? No, no …” said Erik Hall.

He held it out to her so that she could feel it. Well, wasn’t it made of plastic? Very light, cast in one piece, like a cheap toy.

“The key to the underworld, I’ve read,” he said.

“What?”

“In Egypt, the ankh was also called Osiris’s key, the key to the underworld. It’s all over the Internet, if you just look.”

The photographer bit her lip.

“You’re saying that that plastic ankh was down in the mine?”

“It’s not a plastic ankh!” the diver hissed. “I found it down there; he was still holding it in his hands.”

She looked from the diver to the ankh and back again.

“So that’s your secret?”

She noticed that the diver swallowed and that his eyes somehow became shinier.

“Yes, isn’t it fantastic?” said the photographer.

But she could hear that this didn’t sound very convincing, and the diver didn’t seem to think so, either:

“I don’t get you journalists. This lends a whole new dimension to everything. What was the ankh doing down there, right?” He placed the object on the towel again and quickly began to wrap it up.

“I will fucking kill you if you say anything about this.”

At first the photographer wasn’t really sure if she’d heard correctly, but then came a silence that was so uncomfortable that she rushed to pack up.

“I
t seems like a cool job, though,” the diver ventured when they had gone out to the sunporch.

“Indeed,” said the photographer.

She put on her tennis shoes and felt in her jacket to find her car keys.

“Hey—” he began.

The photographer turned around in the doorway.

“Couldn’t we get together in town sometime, just you and me?”

She smiled quickly, without answering.

N
ot until she had gotten outside the gate to the fence around the yard did she notice that her hand was trembling as she went to unlock the car. But on her way home, when she called the intern, she still couldn’t help telling him about the diver’s latest discovery.

T
he window next to Don’s table was greasy, and the odors of reheated children’s meals, mini-weenies and meatballs, interfered with the taste of his coffee. Perhaps you had to expect such things if you chose to turn off the European highway to go to a motel restaurant, and anyway, life was essentially a
tsore,
a torment, as Bubbe would have said.

D
on had unfolded the printed-out
Dalakuriren
article and placed it beside his tray. He glanced down at the picture of Erik Hall. It wasn’t particularly flattering.

After their short morning conversation a week or so ago in the makeup room at the television station, Hall had called countless times to remind him of his secret discovery from down in the shaft, and his invitation to the cottage in Falun.

His muddled calls to Don had come late at night, and there didn’t seem to be any civilized way to get the diver to give up.

But then
Dalakuriren
had published a whole article about the diver’s secret and disseminated it to tens of thousands of subscribers. At the same time, the person who’d written the article didn’t seem
to put much confidence in Hall’s strange story of the found ankh. It appeared to be a cheap trick by someone who just wanted to make himself appear interesting: forced, belated, and false. In the morning, the diver had called Don at home, sounding thoroughly dejected. It
really
had not turned out as he’d imagined, and no matter what that journalist had implied in the article, the story about the ankh had actually been true.

In addition, there was yet another thing he’d found down there in the mine. A document that was difficult to decipher, which Don could perhaps help him with. So once again, when would the researcher from Lund be able to come? Don answered with something evasive and hung up.

But then he suddenly felt the need, from deep within him, to go up to Falun after all, if only to put a stop to the diver’s endless nagging.

He had taped the usual note to the doorjamb of his office at Lund University: In illegible handwriting he had written the message “temporarily out” to all the tiresome students. And at the very bottom—if, contrary to expectation, someone managed to decipher all the digits—was the number to a cell phone that was permanently off. Then he had gotten into his Renault, outside the Department of History offices, and in some magical way, he got its motor to sputter to life.