Sail of Stone (2 page)
Authors: Åke Edwardson
Tags: #Police Procedural, #Mystery & Detective, #Erik Winter, #Fiction, #Suspense, #General
I
n the harbor the ebb had put the boats ashore. They lay crooked, stems pointing at the steps in the wall.
Pointing at him.
He saw the bellies of the boats shining in the twilight. The sun was curving behind the cape to the west. The gulls cried under a low sky; the light thickened into darkness. The birds were pushed toward the surface of the water by the sky, which was stretched like a sail over the horizon.
Everything was pushed toward the sea. Pushed toward the sea, pushed down under the surface, pushed …
Jesus, he thought.
Jesus save my soul! Jesus save
my soul.
So foul and fair a day I have not seen.
He heard sounds behind him, footsteps on stone on the path back to the church, which seemed to be carved out of the mountain, pounded out of stone by a hammer, like everything else here under the sail of the sky. He looked up again. The sky had the same tint of stone as everything else around him. A sail of stone. Everything was stone. The sea was stone.
Here I have a pilot’s thumb,
Wrecked as homeward he did come.
The people moved behind him, on the way to a moment of peace in the Methodist church. He didn’t turn around. He knew that they were looking at him; he felt their eyes on the back of his neck. It didn’t hurt; they weren’t that sort of eyes. He knew that he could depend on the people here. They weren’t his friends, but they weren’t his enemies either. He was allowed to move about in their world, and he had done
so for a long time; so long, actually, that he had become something more than them, he had become like a part of the stone, the cliffs, the walls, the steps, the houses, the breakwaters, the sky, the sea, the roads. The ships. The trawlers.
The ones that lay here.
The ones that lay buried under the waves that moved in all those rolling quarries between the continents.
Jesus. Jesus!
He turned around. The footsteps had quieted and disappeared into the church, which was shut, closed up. The few streetlights down here were lit, and their only effect was to intensify the darkness too soon. The light thickens into darkness with time. He thought that thought as he began to walk. A darkness, before it was time. Every late afternoon. Before time and after time. I am living this life in after time. Way after time. I am alive. I am someone else, someone new. That other someone was a loan, a role, a mask like this one. You cross a line and become someone else and leave your old self behind.
There were children’s clothes hung to dry in the yard next to the steps up to the road. The small arms waved at him.
He stood on the street. The viaducts towered over him like railways built to the heavens. Here is the streetcar that goes to heaven; Jesus drives and God is the conductor. But there had never been streetcars here. He had ridden the streetcar, but not here. That was in another life, a life far away. Far away.
Before
before time, before he crossed the line.
The viaducts cut through the sky all the way across this part of the city. The trains had roared along up there, but that was a long time ago. The last train departed in 1969. Maybe he had seen it.
The stone road in the heavens was built in 1888. Had he seen that, too? Maybe he had. Maybe he was a part of the viaduct’s stone.
And nothing is but what is not.
They brought him here, and here he stayed.
No.
He stayed, but not for that reason.
He walked across the street and continued on to North Castle Street
and went into the pub at the crossroads. There was no one there. He waited, and a woman he’d only seen a few times before came out into the bar from the back room, and he nodded toward the taps on the bar in front of her.
“Fuller’s, right?” she said, and took a pint glass from the clean stack beside the register. She hadn’t yet had time to put the glasses on the racks.
He nodded again. She filled the glass and set it before him, and he watched the haze in the glass clear slowly, like the sky after a storm, or the bottom of the sea after a squall.
He ordered a whisky. He pointed at one of the cheaper brands behind her. She set the whisky glass before him. He drank and shivered suddenly.
“It’s gettin’ to be a cold night,” she said.
“Mmhmm.”
“It calls for somethin’ warming, eh?”
“Hmm.”
He drank some beer. He drank some whisky again. He felt the cold warmth in his stomach. The woman nodded in farewell and disappeared again into the back room.
He wondered if
she
would come this afternoon.
He heard the sound of a TV through the wall. He looked around. He was still alone. He looked around once again, as though for figures he couldn’t see. He was what he’d always been, alone. A lone visitor. He was the visitor, always a visitor.
He was not afraid of what would come.
Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.
The whisky was gone, and he finished the beer and got up and left.
The sky had become black. The silhouettes of the viaducts were like animals from a prehistoric time. Before time. A north wind blew in his face.
He walked on the road again. There were no cars. The city glittered under him. There was no light on the sea. He stopped walking, but he saw no light out there. He waited, but all was dark. A car drove past
behind him. He didn’t turn around. He could smell the sea. The sharp wind was like needles in his face. He felt the weapon in his pocket. He heard the scream of the sea in his head, other screams.
Jesus!
He knew now that everything would come to an end.
I
t was two hundred and twenty yards to the sea, or two hundred fifty. They walked across a field where no one had trampled any paths. It can be us, he thought, we can make paths here.
The sky was high, space without end. The sun was sharp, even through sunglasses. The sea moved, but nothing more. The surface glittered like silver and gold.
Elsa shouted out toward the water and began to run along the edge of the beach, on the small stones, hundreds of thousands of them, which were mixed with the grains of sand, millions and millions of them.
Erik Winter turned to Angela, who was crouching and running sand through her fingers.
“If you can guess the number of grains of sand in your hand right now, a lovely prize awaits you,” he said.
She looked up, raising her other hand to shield her eyes from the sun.
“What kind of prize?” she asked.
“First say how many grains of sand you have in your hand.”
“How can you tell how many there are?”
“I know,” he answered.
“What kind of prize?” she repeated.
“How many!” he said.
“Forty thousand,” she answered.
“Wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Wrong.”
“How the hell do you know?” She got up and looked at Elsa, who was fifty feet away, collecting stones. Angela couldn’t see how many she had. She moved closer to the man in her life before he had had time to answer her question with “intuition.”
“I want my prize. I want my
prize
!” she said.
“You didn’t answer correctly.”
“
Prize, prize,
” she shouted, falling into a clinch with Winter; she tried to put a reverse waist hold on him, and Elsa looked up and dropped a few stones, and Erik saw her and laughed at his four-year-old daughter and then at the other woman in his life, who was now trying to do a half nelson, not too bad, and he felt his feet starting to slide in his sandals and his sandals starting to slide in the sand and now he really started to lose his balance, and he slowly fell to the ground, as though he were pulled by a magnet. Angela fell on top of him. He kept laughing.
“
Prize!
” Angela shouted once more.
“
Prize!
” shouted Elsa, who had run up to the wrestlers.
“Okay, okay,” said Winter.
“If you know, admit that I guessed right,” said Angela, locking his arms. “Admit it!”
“You were very close,” he answered. “I admit it.”
“Give me my prize!”
She was straddling his stomach now. Elsa sat on his chest. It wasn’t hard to breathe. He raised his right arm and pointed inland.
“What?” she said. “What is it?”
He pointed, waving with his hand.
“The prize,” he said. He felt the sun in his eyes. His black sunglasses had fallen off. He could smell salt and sand and sea. He could see himself lying here for a long time. And often. Making those paths across the field.
From the house.
From the house that could stand over there in the pine grove.
She looked across the field. She looked at him. At the sea. Across the field again. At him.
“Really?” she said. “Do you really think so?”
“Yes,” he answered, “you’re right. Let’s buy the lot.”
Aneta Djanali was still producing her police ID when the woman closed the door that had just been opened. Aneta hadn’t had time to see her face, only a shadow and a pair of eyes that flashed in the disappearing daylight, which seemed to be the only light in there.
She rang the doorbell again. Beside her stood one of the local police officers. It was a woman, and she couldn’t have had very many months on
the job behind her. A rookie. She looks like she came straight from high school. She doesn’t look afraid, but she doesn’t think this is fun.
She doesn’t think it’s exciting. That’s good.
“Go away,” they heard through the door. The voice was muffled even before it came through the double veneer or whatever it was between her and the long arm of the law.
“We have to talk for a minute,” Aneta said to the door. “About what happened.”
They could hear mumbling.
“I didn’t understand what you said,” said Aneta.
“Nothing happened,” she heard.
“We have received a report,” said Aneta.
Mumbling.
“Excuse me?” said Aneta.
“It wasn’t from here.”
Aneta heard a door opening behind her, and then closing immediately.
“It isn’t the first time,” she said. “It wasn’t the first.”
The officer beside her nodded.
“Mrs. Lindsten …,” said Aneta.
“Get out of here.”
It was time to make a decision. She could stand here and continue to make the situation worse for everyone.
She could more or less force Anette Lindsten to show her face. It could be a battered face. That could be why.
To force herself on Anette now, to force her way in, could be more or less irreparable.
It could be the only right thing to do. It could be settled here and now. The future could be settled here and now.
Aneta made her decision, put away the badge that she still held in her hand, signaled to the girl in uniform, and left.
Neither of the two policewomen saw anything in the elevator down. They could read the walls if they wanted to, a thousand scribbled messages in black and red.
Outside, the wind had started to blow again. Aneta could hear the streetcars down at Citytorget. The massive apartment buildings marched along, in their particular way. The buildings covered the entire area;
sometimes they also covered the sky. The buildings on Fastlagsgatan seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon.
Some were being torn down now; there was a crater just over the hill. Buildings that had been built forty years ago were torn down and the sky became visible again, at least for a while. Today it was blue, terribly blue. A September sky that seemed to have been collecting color all summer and was ready now. Finished. Here I am, at last. I am the Nordic sky.
It was warm, a ripening warmth, as though it had accumulated.
Indian summer, she thought. It’s called
brittsommar
in Swedish, but I still don’t know why. How many times have I meant to find out? This time I’m going to; as soon as I get home I’ll check. Must have something to do with the calendar. Is there a Britta Day in September?
And as though by chance she caught sight of the street sign on the street they’d swung into earlier: Brittsommar Street. Good God. They’d parked on All Saints Street. You could quickly wander through all the seasons of the year here. Season Street itself ran to the south. All time was gathered, placed in a ring north of Kortedala Torg: Advent Park, Boxing Day Street, Christmas Eve Street, April Street, June Street.
She didn’t see a September Street. She saw Twilight Street. She saw Dawn Street, Morning Street.
One could be battered by all the hours of the day and all the seasons of the year here, she thought as she steered away, toward a different civilization to the south. It was like crossing a border.
Arabic-speaking children were playing on Citytorget. Women with covered heads came out of Ovrell’s grocery. On the corner was a video-game store that also sold vegetables. Across from it was a flower shop. The sun cast shadows that divided the square into a black part and a white part.
“Have you met Anette Lindsten?” she asked the police officer in the seat next to her.