The Viper (3 page)

Emrik Jansson awaited Arvid Traneus’s return with a certain trepidation. According to what he had heard it wouldn’t be today. But you couldn’t always trust the grapevine. Rumors. There had been a lot of talk over the years about Arvid Traneus and his long trips to Japan. Every so often, somebody would pop up claiming to have it on good authority that he was supposed to be on his way home, but then he didn’t show up and it all turned out to be just talk. Or else he really did show up, only to leave again just a few days later.

This time was different. Word had it that he was coming to stay for good.

That’s what Emrik Jansson had heard when he’d popped into his neighbor’s the day before yesterday to buy some potatoes. That was how it worked. When you couldn’t see something with your own eyes, there was always someone else who had the facts. And it spread. In simple phrases, said in passing. It wasn’t gossip exactly, but subjects came up, names were named.

He heard a tractor approaching behind him. The driver slowed down and rolled past the old man with the bushy white beard who, despite the heat and the strong sun, was dressed in a thick black woolen suit. Beneath his suit he wore a slightly yellowed shirt that had once been white.

Emrik squinted toward the driver’s cab of the green tractor and slowly raised his hand in greeting. He got a wave back. It was Magnus Hjälmrud from Kauparve, the eldest son of Hans-Göran. Emrik Jansson had taught him in school the last three years before retiring. But that was not why he remembered him. He remembered all of them. His mind didn’t need any extra support. Not yet anyway. He remembered every student that had passed through the little community’s school system during his roughly forty years as a teacher. He knew their names and what years they had been in his class. And if they lived close enough he knew the names of their children and parents and where they lived. He saw them drive by on the road. How they came and went. Weather permitting, he could spend hours slowly shuffling back and forth along the road. It was his self-appointed task to keep track of people and in doing so keep track of himself.

He had also had Arvid Traneus in his class. Arvid, his cousins, and his eldest child. He had seen them almost every day since they finished school. Those of them who were still alive, that is. He saw them, followed them, saw cars arrive and drive off again. Comings and goings that did not mean much to most, those who did not have the time to reflect on it and remember.

But Emrik Jansson did have time and he remembered. Today he was spending his time waiting for Arvid Traneus. But also for something else, it had to be said. Something else. He sighed heavily and looked up at the sky.
Not a cloud,
he thought to himself,
not a single dark cloud on the horizon.
But he could see them nonetheless.

*   *   *

HE WAS TALL
and wan, standing there with his left hand shoved deep into the pocket of his washed-out black jeans. He had burrowed his chin down into the collar of his dark-blue tracksuit top, the zipper pulled all the way up. He had recently celebrated his thirtieth birthday at Norrtälje Prison. If celebrated was the right word for it.
Turned
lay closer to the truth. He had turned thirty. Nobody had cared, he barely did himself. He was out now, and that was the main thing.

The wind knocked the ash from the cigarette he was holding in his right hand and sent it dancing off in an ascending spiral along the quayside and on out over the Baltic.

He had called up an old friend, yesterday to be precise, and they had started to talk about Stefania.
He
had started to talk about Stefania. And it was then that his friend had mentioned that Arvid Traneus was coming home. At least that’s what he had heard anyway, that whatever it was he had been doing over there in Japan, it was over now, and that he was coming home to Levide.

“Bullshit!”

That was his first reaction. His second was that he didn’t want to know about it. What the hell did he have to do with Arvid Traneus anymore? But something else had already begun to stir inside him, that soaked up that information like a bone-dry sponge soaks up water. Inexorably it started to grow, plans took form as if by themselves, demanding his attention. And he listened, of course he couldn’t stop himself from listening to
that voice,
and the more he listened the more obvious it seemed to him that this was something that had come to him as some kind of gift. That it was as if fate, which seldom, if ever, had anything good to offer him, had tapped him on the shoulder and given him an opportunity.

He let his gaze slowly drift from the sea to the big stacks of timber behind the sawmill’s chain-link fence. The sea breeze had stiffened over the afternoon and his shoulder-length strands of hair were tossing about in the wind.

He took a deep drag from his cigarette. What the hell had happened? Nobody smoked anymore. When he had lighted a cigarette at the ferry terminal, people had glared at him as if he were a junkie who’d taken out his gear to shoot up. He had apologized. Of course he knew about the ban, but it wasn’t second nature to him. Once he was standing there with a cigarette in his fist it just didn’t occur to him. Perhaps he had apologized a little too loudly and profusely; he had felt that people had avoided looking at him, moved away a few yards, held on to to their children more tightly. Perhaps not. It was probably all in his mind. The feeling that he stood out, that he didn’t quite know how to behave to blend in with ordinary people.

He tossed his cigarette over the edge of the pier. It was crazy his being here. Completely fucking crazy. Just two days after being released, he had boarded a ferry back to the place he had once promised himself he would never again set foot. “Over my dead body,” he had sworn.

“Guess we’ll just have to see about that?” he told himself out loud.

He was there now, and he was there for one sole reason. Arvid Traneus. He had no plan, no idea what might happen. All he knew was that he had had no choice. He had been compelled to get onto that ferryboat.

He had really believed that he had succeeded in forgetting Stefania, that she was gone from his mind forever, but during the years in prison she had stubbornly clawed her way back into his head. The very first time she had appeared in a dream, and he had woken up shocked and dismayed. After that she had remained in his thoughts, sporadically in the beginning, and then with ever-increasing frequency, until she never gave him a moment’s peace. Not even for a single day. That’s how dead she was.

He abruptly turned his back on the sea and started to walk away; his emotions battling inside of him. One moment an intense feeling of joy at being on his way, a searing fire like a lodestar in the night; the next moment a cold wind that caused him to shut his eyes and see himself from the outside, making him shake his head in doubt. And then the heat and the light again that with each powerful wave grew a little stronger at the cold wind’s expense.

4.

The ground rocked beneath his feet. A twelve-hour flight from Narita to Heathrow and time had virtually stood still. His stomach growled and he took a big bite of the egg-white omelet he had ordered at one of the restaurants in the dimly lit transit hall. Gloomy as a November afternoon.

An egg-white omelet, steamed broccoli florets, and a few stray chickpeas dribbled with lemon-herb oil. No food for a man, but experience had taught him to eat carefully on long-haul flights. But there were other reasons for it as well. He had been forced to start watching what he ate. He had gone up in weight somewhat. It didn’t bother him much, he didn’t mind being overweight. But the scrawny little doctor that the fine print on his insurance policy stipulated that he visit every six months, had looked up from his test results and peered at him with a furrow of concern between his eyebrows.

He had two fixed times a week at an exorbitantly exclusive tennis club and had made radical changes to his eating habits. He hadn’t amassed a fortune just to come home to Gotland and die. No, he had no intention of ending his life prematurely with his head in a pot full of mashed potatoes, butter, and caviar.
*

He had indulged in a beer. Alcohol was another thing he usually avoided on long-haul flights, but now he had made it all the way to London on his final trip back from Japan. He had not come home to die, but nor had he come home to live as a monk. For him it was the perfect time to have a beer, even if it was only morning in London.

He had a tendency to become greedy. They had been too greedy where Pricom was concerned, that he had to admit. To himself, if not to anyone else. But when an opportunity presented itself, it was hard to resist not picking the bone clean. Pricom’s collapse might even be disadvantageous to his employer. For a company to disappear completely from the market created uncertainty, and that was never a good thing. To just take a substantial piece of the pie instead, as much as one could handle, and leave the rest for Pricom to bravely hang on to, would no doubt have been the ideal solution. But now that’s not how thing’s turned out. No one blamed him. Everyone was satisfied, and it would take a while before any negative effects began to appear. By that time, they would have forgotten his name and he would cherish his fortune on the other side of the globe. In this world, everyone’s gaze was firmly fixed forward.

The waiter came rushing up toward the row of tables where Arvid was sitting, and he took the opportunity to hold out his card to pay. The waiter stopped him by holding his palm out in front of him like a traffic cop.

“I’m sorry, sir, fire alarm. You’ve got to leave immediately.”

“Fire alarm?”

“Yes, you’ve got to leave.”

Arvid slipped his card back into his wallet and stood up holding his black leather briefcase.

Fire alarm? Strange, he hadn’t heard any alarm. All around him businessmen as well as the odd backpacker stood up and moved slowly toward the exit exchanging quick glances, more confused than anxious.

“This way please, this way.”

The airport staff, dressed in neon-yellow vests, tried to hurry the slow-moving air travelers along and pointed in a rather vague direction toward the far end of the hall’s gray luminescence. Refreshment areas, tax-free outlets, and other shops chased out their customers, closed gates, and pulled down shutters.

He quickened his pace somewhat, without overdoing it. He hadn’t amassed a fortune just to die at Heathrow, either. A fire alarm? What could it be? A terrorist bomb, an outbreak of fire, someone who’d lit their cigar beneath a smoke detector?

He shuffled along with the other passengers until they’d reached a distant wing of the terminal that seemed to be a dead end. One by one they slowed down and stopped. No vest-clad personnel anywhere to be seen anymore.

A man about his age in a suit, leather briefcase, and designer glasses, gave him a look of resignation and threw out his arms. Arvid responded with a shrug of the shoulders.

The evacuation seemed to have petered out and now there was nobody with enough sense to inform them whether they were hovering in imminent danger of their lives, or if it had just been a false alarm.

Arvid spotted an empty seat on a bench and sat down. He was filled with an absurd sensation that nothing mattered. It was a feeling that was completely alien to him. For him, usually everything mattered. Naturally things were of varying importance and had to be prioritized accordingly, but when you began to think that nothing mattered, then you were in trouble.

He wasn’t getting the information he needed to make a decision. Should he run toward the emergency exit or could he return to the eternal gloom of the transit hall and order another beer to replace the one he had not been allowed to finish? Or should he just remain sitting there on the bench in some kind of limbo?

In order to pass the time, he tried to sort through his still very sketchy plans of setting up his own consulting firm. All that talk about never having to work again was of course just a ploy for talking about money without having to mention a concrete sum. He had no intention of retiring. People who strived for economic independence just to devote the rest of their lives to playing golf and lying on beaches baffled him.

The plan was to start out with a core management group of ten senior consultants and then bring in other professionals and support staff as necessary on a project-to-project basis. He counted on a planning and build-up phase of one year, during which time he would fine-tune his ideas and establish the appropriate contacts. It would be something completely different from the solo projects he had heretofore handled; not unsuccessfully, it had to be said, but having his own company would open up a whole new range of possibilities. It would probably be difficult to remain in Sweden, but he had nothing against the idea of moving to London or possibly Zurich. And this time he would take Kristina with him.

Two Asians, a man and a woman, were engaged in an intense, hushed discussion on the bench along the opposite wall. He could hear that they were Japanese and was able to place them, with 95 percent certainty, in high positions within the business community.

One of Pricom’s board members had committed suicide, after first having shot his wife and their seven-year-old daughter. It was so typically Japanese—assuming the information was correct that is—they could never handle a setback. It was so feudal somehow, as if they couldn’t reconcile themselves to the fact that people in a modern society climbed and fell, got up and continued climbing, constantly taking up new positions depending on choice and performance and sometimes as a result of events that lay outside an individual’s control. There was no place for honor and shame in that world.

Arvid concealed an involuntary yawn behind his hand.

*   *   *

KRISTINA HAD RUSHED
up from the kitchen table and into the living room to watch the morning show that was on the TV. The woman with the warm ginger hair, the friendly smile, and the slightly sad eyes was speaking about London. A fire had broken out at Heathrow International Airport just outside London.