Lars Kepler 2-book Bundle (84 page)

Four months after his liver collapsed, he was awake for nine days straight and had a psychotic episode.

He had himself voluntarily admitted to the private psychiatric hospital Saint Maria Hjärta.

There he met Beverly. She was just fourteen years old.

As usual, Axel had been lying awake and it was about three in the morning. It was totally dark outside. She just opened his door. She was like an unhappy spirit who walked all night through the hallways of the psychiatric hospital. Perhaps all she was looking for was a person she could be with.

He was in bed, sleepless and disconsolate, when the girl came into his room and stood in front of him without a word. Her long nightgown brushed against the floor.

“I saw there was light in this room,” she whispered. “You’re giving off light.”

Then she crawled into his bed. He was still sick from lack of sleep and he didn’t know what he was doing. He grabbed her tiny body hard, too hard, and pressed her to him.

She said nothing. She just lay there.

He buried his face in the back of her neck. Then he fell asleep.

It was as though he had plunged deep into the waters of sleep and found dreams. He slept only a few minutes that first time. Every night after that, she came to his room. He would hold her tightly and then, covered with sweat, he’d fall asleep.

His psychological instability slowly dissipated like condensation from a mirror. Beverly stopped wandering through the hospital hallways all night.

Axel Riessen and Beverly Andersson left Saint Maria Hjärta Hospital with a silent and desperate agreement. Both of them understood that this close-knit arrangement had to be a secret. As far as the outside world could see, Beverly Andersson was temporarily housed in one of the apartments in Axel Riessen’s mansion until a student apartment opened up.

Beverly Andersson is now fifteen and had been diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder. She has no sense of boundaries between herself and other people. She also has no self-defence mechanism.

In past eras, girls like Beverly might be locked up in mental institutions permanently or they might be forced to undergo sterilization or a lobotomy to control their lack of morals and unrestrained sexuality.

Girls like Beverly often still follow the wrong people home and trust people who are not worth their trust.

Beverly is lucky she found me
, Axel Riessen would reassure himself.
I am not a pedophile, do not want to harm her or make money off her. I just need her next to me so I can sleep. Without sleep, I’ll be destroyed.

She often talks about their getting married once she’s old enough.

Axel Riessen lets her spin her fantasies of marriage because it makes her happy and calm. He convinces himself that he’s protecting her from the outside world, but he also knows that he’s using her. He’s ashamed, but can’t figure out any other alternative. He’s afraid of returning to relentless insomnia.

Beverly walks out of the bathroom with a toothbrush in her mouth. She nods towards the three violins hanging on the wall.

“Why don’t you ever play them?” she asks.

“I can’t,” he replies with a smile.

“Are they just going to hang there? Why don’t you give them to someone who can play them?”

“I like these violins. Robert gave them to me.”

“You hardly speak about your brother.”

“We have a complicated relationship.”

“I know he makes violins in his workshop,” she says.

“Yes, that’s what he does … he also plays in a chamber orchestra.”

“Maybe he can play for us at our wedding?” she asks as she wipes toothpaste from the corner of her mouth.

Axel looks at her and hopes that she doesn’t pick up on the mechanical way he answers as he says, “What a good idea.”

He feels exhaustion flowing over him like a wave, over his body and his brain. He walks past her and into the bedroom and sinks down on the edge of the bed.

“I’m very sleepy. I …”

“I feel very sorry for you,” she says in total seriousness.

Axel shakes his head.

“I just need to sleep,” he says. All at once, he feels as if he’ll burst into tears.

He stands up again and picks out a nightgown in pink cotton.

“Please, Beverly, why don’t you wear this one?”

“Sure, if you want me to.”

She pauses to look at a large oil painting by Ernst Billgren. A fox is wearing clothes and sitting in an armchair in some upper-middle-class home.

“I hate that picture,” she says.

“You do?”

She nods and starts to undress.

“Can’t you change in the bathroom?” he asks.

She shrugs and as she pulls off her pink top, Axel moves away so that he won’t see her nude. He walks over to the painting of the fox, looks at it, then takes it down to set it, facedown, on the floor.

Axel’s sleep is stiff and heavy, his jaw clenched. He’s held the girl very tightly. Suddenly he startles awake and lets her go. He sucks in air like a drowning man. He’s sweating and his heart is pounding from fear. He turns on the lamp on the bedside table. Beverly sleeps as relaxed as a child, mouth open and a little sheen on her forehead. Axel starts to think about Carl Palmcrona again. The last time they’d met, they mingled with the nobility at a meeting in Riddarhuset. Palmcrona had been drunk and aggressive. He’d gone on and on about the UN weapon embargoes and finished his tirade with those strange words:
If everything goes to hell, I’ll pull an Algernon so I won’t reap my nightmare.

Axel turns off the lamp and lies down again while he tries to understand what Palmcrona meant by saying “pull an Algernon.” What was he talking about? What kind of nightmare was he thinking about? And did he really say that strange
I won’t reap my nightmare
?

What
had
happened to Carl-Fredrik Algernon? It was a mystery in Sweden. Up until his death, Algernon had been the military-equipment inspector for the Foreign Office. One January day he’d had a meeting with the CEO of Nobel Industries, Anders Carlberg. He’d told Carlberg that their investigation had turned up information that one of the members of the conglomerate had smuggled weapons to countries in the Persian Gulf. Later that same day, Carl-Fredrik Algernon had fallen in front of an underground train in Central Station in Stockholm.

Axel’s thoughts slip away and become increasingly blurred, circulating around accusations of arms smuggling and bribery concerning the Bofors Corporation. He sees a man in a trench coat falling backwards in front of an oncoming train.

The man falls slowly, his coattails flapping.

Beverly’s soft breathing catches him, calms him, and he turns towards her to wrap his arms around her again.

She sighs as he pulls her closer to him.

Sleep comes to him in the softness of a cloud. His thoughts fade away.

For the rest of the night, he still sleeps restlessly and wakes again at five in the morning. He’s been holding on so tightly to Beverly, his arms are cramped. Her stubbly hair tickles his lips. He wishes desperately that he could take his sleeping pills instead.

At seven in the morning, Axel walks out onto the terrace he shares with his brother. He has that eight o’clock meeting with Jörgen Grünlicht in Carl Palmcrona’s old office at the National Inspectorate of Strategic Products.

The air is already warm but not yet humid. His younger brother, Robert, has opened the French doors to his apartment and come out to sit on a lounge chair. Robert hasn’t shaved yet and just lies there with his arms hanging limply. He’s staring up into the chestnut tree’s foliage, still damp from the morning dew. He’s wearing his worn-out silk bathrobe, the same one their father used to wear every Saturday morning.

“Good morning,” Robert says.

Axel nods without looking at his brother.

“I’ve just repaired a Fiorini for Charles Greendirk,” Robert says in an attempt at conversation.

“He’ll be happy, I’m sure,” Axel says. He sounds down.

“Something bothering you?”

“Yes, a bit,” Axel admits. “I might be changing jobs.”

“Well, why not?” Robert says, though his thoughts are already elsewhere.

Axel looks at his brother’s kind face with its deep wrinkles, and at his bald head. So many things could have been different between them.

“How’s your heart?” he asks. “Still pumping away?”

Robert puts his hand on his chest before he answers. “Seems to be.”

“That’s good.”

“What about your poor old liver?”

Axel shrugs and turns back into his apartment.

“We’re going to play Schubert this evening,” his brother calls out.

“How nice.”

“Maybe you could …”

Robert falls silent and looks at his brother. Then he changes the subject.

“That girl in the room upstairs—”

“Her name is Beverly.”

“How long is she going to be living here?”

“I don’t know,” Axel says. “I’ve promised her that she can stay until she finds a student apartment.”

“You always want to rescue birds with broken wings.”

“She’s not a bird, she’s a human being,” Axel says.

Axel opens the tall French doors to his own apartment and watches the reflection of his face glide past on the curved glass surfaces as he steps inside. Once behind the curtain, he silently observes his brother. He watches Robert get up from his lounge chair, scratch his stomach, and walk down the stairs from the terrace to the small garden and workshop. As soon as Robert is gone, Axel returns to his room and gently wakes up Beverly, who is still asleep with her mouth wide open.

The National Inspectorate of Strategic Products is a government agency that was established in 1996 to take over responsibility for all matters concerning arms exports and dual-usage items. Its offices are on the sixth floor of a salmon-pink building located at Klarabergs Viaduct 90. After riding up in the lift, Axel sees that Jörgen Grünlicht is already waiting for him, nodding impatiently. Grünlicht is a tall man with a blotchy face: irregular patterns of white patches contrast with his reddish skin.

Grünlicht slips his identification card in and keys in the code to admit Axel. They walk to Carl Palmcrona’s office. It’s a corner suite with two huge windows overlooking a cityscape of southbound roads behind Central Station and across from Lake Klara and the dark rectangle of city hall.

Despite its exclusive location, there’s something austere about the ISP offices. The floors are laid with synthetic carpet and the furniture is simple and neutral in pine and white—its neutrality almost an intentional reminder of the morally dubious nature of arms exports, Axel thinks with a shudder. This is the national agency entrusted with the responsibility of making sure that Swedish weapons do not wind up in war zones and dictatorships. But Axel can’t help feeling that under Carl Palmcrona’s directorship, the ISP began to drift off course. It was less inclined to cooperate with the United Nations, and more likely to behave like the proactive Export Council. Axel is not a pacifist. He is well aware that arms exports are vital for Sweden’s balance of trade. But he believes that the Swedish neutrality policy must be protected as well.

He looks around Palmcrona’s office. Being there so soon after his death feels macabre.

A high-pitched whine is being emitted from the light system in the ceiling. It sounds like an inharmonious overtone from a piano. Axel remembers he once heard the same overtone on a recording of John Cage’s first sonata.

Closing the door behind them, Grünlicht asks Axel to take a seat. He appears tense in spite of his welcoming smile.

“Good that you could come so quickly,” he says, handing over the folder with the contract.

“Of course.”

“Go ahead and read through it,” Grünlicht says as he sweeps his hand over the desk.

Axel sits in a straight-backed chair and puts the folder back down on the desk. He then looks up.

“I’ll take a look at it and get back to you next week.”

“It’s a very good contract, but this offer won’t last for ever.”

“I know you’re in a rush.”

He looks at Grünlicht’s pale, expectant face.

Axel knows there is no one in this country with a track record that can equal his own. This is perhaps the greatest argument for him to take the position. If he says yes, it will enable him to prevent some idiot from getting control over arms exports. He can stay committed to limiting the spread of weapons—and stay in Sweden with Beverly.

Grünlicht leans forward and says, with a shadow of guilt in his voice, “I know I’m pushing you, Axel, and I’m sorry for that. But the situation is a bit urgent. Palmcrona left several urgent matters hanging, and the companies are about to lose their deals, and—”

“Why doesn’t the government take over for the time being?”

“Sure,” Grünlicht says with a thin smile. “They can certainly take over, but they would still need advice, preferably from you.”

Silence fills the room. It’s as if feathers are falling all around them.

“I hear what you’re saying,” says Axel slowly. “But I’m still …”

Grünlicht slides the folder directly in front of Axel. “I just got off the phone with the prime minister. He asked if you were on board. You really should look at the agreement we’ve produced for you. It’s a pretty—”

“I believe you,” says Axel, “but you should know that I’ve been sick.”

“Who has not?”

“I mean, I have—”

“We know all about it,” says Grünlicht.

Axel lowers his eyes. “Of course.”

“But we also know that the problems are a thing of the past. ISP is an authority based on trust. You have worked against the flow of weapons to war zones, and that is precisely what ISP stands for. There is only one name at the top of the government’s list—and it is yours.”

As Axel reaches for the agreement, he wonders if it is possible that they know everything about him—except for Beverly.

Opening the folder, he tries to push away the gut feeling that this is a gold-plated trap.

He reads through the contract carefully. It’s very good, almost too good. Often he feels a slight blush as he reads through it.