Sometimes Monsieur Simon would send me out to various music shops to deliver instruments that had been repaired. It was as I emerged from the Metro with a parcel under my arm that I had found myself in the middle of a huge crowd. At first I thought there had been an accident, but then I realised people were waiting for someone to pass by. I peered down the road and saw President de Gaulle approaching; he was standing in an open-topped car. I had the instrument under my arm, and I made a movement with the other hand to get my cigarettes out of an inside pocket. I immediately felt two pairs of hands seize my wrist and shoulder. I dropped the clarinet. The two men, who I later realised were plain-clothes security guards, had thought I was reaching for a gun.
When they were satisfied that I had no evil intentions, and that my parcel contained a clarinet and not a bomb, they simply shrugged and let me go.
By that time the president was long gone, and the crowd had begun to disperse.
‘I once saw President de Gaulle just here,’ I said to Olof Rutgersson.
He was busy sending a text and didn’t hear what I said.
‘I once saw de Gaulle,’ I repeated. ‘Just here. Almost fifty years ago.’
‘Of course you did,’ he replied. ‘Of course you saw de Gaulle just here. Fifty years ago.’
I felt like punching him. After I’d taken his phone and chucked it out of the car window. I wished I were that kind of person. But I wasn’t.
I didn’t notice the name of the street on which the police station in Belleville was situated. Rutgersson leaped out of the car with an energy I found surprising. He had spent the journey yawning, hunched over his phone. Now he was transformed. He repeated his earlier exhortation to let him do the talking.
A young drug addict was throwing up in the shabby reception area while two uniformed officers observed him with distaste. A plain-clothes officer behind the tall desk nodded to Rutgersson when he waved his diplomatic pass. After a brief telephone call an older officer who walked with a stick emerged from another room. We accompanied him to an office where the air was thick with dust from a desk piled high with papers and shelves bellying under the weight of books and files. I had the sense of having been transported several hundred years back in time. The premises of law enforcers must have looked like this during Napoleon’s day.
The man lowered himself laboriously into the chair behind the desk; I realised he was in considerable pain. His stiff hands told me that he probably suffered from severe rheumatism.
Olof Rutgersson took the visitor’s chair on the other side of the desk and waved me to a seat by the door. He spoke fluent French. He also spoke very quickly, with the emphasis typical of those who tolerate no contradictions. I found it difficult to follow the conversation, but I did grasp that there was some doubt as to whether Louise was actually at this police station. The officer, whose name was Armand, sent for a younger colleague who couldn’t help either. When the two Frenchmen had finished talking, Rutgersson stood up and came over to me.
‘It’s always the same with the French police,’ he said. ‘You can never get any sense out of anybody.’
‘So Louise isn’t here?’
‘The French police often lose people, but of course we’re not giving up. I expect the Swedish police are the same.’
After yet more confused conversations and various junior officers running in and out, it seemed that Louise had been at the station, but earlier that morning she had been transferred to a custody suite on the Île de la Cité. Armand was unable to tell us why. He drank cup after cup of strong black coffee; as he grimaced at the temperature of the liquid, I saw that he had bad teeth, which made me feel slightly nauseous. Olof Rutgersson showed great tenacity, insisting that he wanted to know why Louise had been moved and what exactly she was accused of. He didn’t get any answers. The van that had collected her and a number of other individuals who were under arrest had taken all the paperwork.
‘Was she with anyone else?’ I asked.
Rutgersson passed on the question, but no one could tell us whether Louise had known any of those who had been arrested at the same time.
It took half an hour, with Rutgersson getting increasingly annoyed, before he realised there was no point in staying in Belleville. When we left the police station, he wanted something to eat, so we went to a nearby cafe while the chauffeur waited in the car. I drank tea while Rutgersson had coffee and a sandwich.
My phone rang; it was Lisa Modin. Rutgersson listened discreetly to our brief conversation.
‘The girl’s mother?’ he asked.
‘She’s dead. That was a friend.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d lost your wife.’
‘We weren’t married, we just had a daughter together.’
As we left Belleville, the traffic heavier now, Rutgersson went back to making calls and sending texts. He wore a wedding ring on his left hand. I tried to picture his wife but without success.
I was waiting for Lisa to call back. I hadn’t been able to work out whether she was already in Paris. The thought of sharing a room with her, lying right next to her, sometimes drove Louise out of my head completely. I was too old to have a guilty conscience. I didn’t want to end up like my father. As he got older and was plagued with severe joint pain, he began to brood about the people he had treated badly or bullied during his lifetime. Even though he had been just as shabbily treated by unpleasant maître d’s and toffee-nosed customers, it was as if he was determined to spend the time he had left atoning for his sins.
I remember one occasion just after my mother’s death when I went to visit him in the small, dingy apartment in Vasastan. I had recently qualified as a doctor, and had taken my stethoscope and blood pressure monitor with me to show my father that I was now able to check those aspects of his health that he constantly worried about.
I stayed the night, going to bed early because I had to be at the hospital in the Söder district the following morning. My father had a tendency to wander late at night. He had spent so many years as a waiter that he rarely went to bed before three o’clock in the morning.
I suddenly woke up without knowing why. The door of my bedroom was ajar, and I could hear my father dialling a telephone number. I wondered who he was calling at this hour. I got out of bed and crept over to the door; I could see him sitting there with the receiver pressed to his ear. When he didn’t get an answer, he gently replaced it and crossed off a name on the handwritten list in front of him.
He was asleep when I got up in the morning. I looked at the piece of paper by the telephone; it was a list of names, people I didn’t know. Next to some of the names he had made a note that the person in question was dead. There were also various telephone numbers followed by a question mark.
The next time I visited him, I asked him about the nocturnal calls. Who was he ringing? Who were the people on his list? He told me without hesitation that they were people he thought he had mistreated during his life. Now, before it was too late, he wanted to call them and apologise. Unfortunately many of them had already passed away, which he found very difficult to deal with. I wondered whether that was why he had started neglecting his clothing; he no longer bothered to change if there were stains on his shirts or trousers.