“He’s Gunnar?” Tina said uncertainly. “Your real dad?”
“I suppose you could call him that,” Tommy rumbled, and gave Benny an audible kiss so that he stopped crying, and then he sat at the table with a crash. “After all,” he added with a broad smile.
“Come in,” said Tina, rising to her feet. “Don’t just stand there!”
Gunnar Nyberg took off his shoes and took a seat at a respectable distance from the child. He felt ill at ease.
“Hi.” Tina extended a hand across the table.
Nyberg greeted her awkwardly. “Hi,” he said softly.
They were quiet for a moment. The silence ought to have been uncomfortable, but it wasn’t. The three of them looked at Gunnar, curiously, not hatefully.
“This is your grandfather,” Tommy finally said to one-year-old Benny, who looked as though this information would bring on another attack of crying. But a scoop of porridge from his mother distracted him.
“Well then,” said Tommy, “where have you been keeping yourself?”
“I didn’t know you lived here,” Nyberg whispered. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen each other.”
“Oh well, you’re here now, anyway. Would you like some coffee?”
Nyberg nodded and watched his son disappear into the kitchen.
“He’s been talking about contacting you ever since we moved here,” said Tina, sticking a spoon of porridge into Benny’s mouth.
“Has he said anything else?”
She inspected him, as if searching for a motive. “Just that the family moved to the west coast early on, and that you had promised not to contact them. But I don’t know why.”
Gunnar Nyberg knit his eyebrows. For the first time he felt distinct pain in his nose and hand. It radiated up through him, in one fell swoop. Like a vague recollection of Wayne Jennings’s nerve pinching. Or rather, as though a long-acting anesthetic had worn off.
“Because I was an extraordinarily bad father,” he said.
She nodded and regarded him curiously. “Is it true that you were Mr. Sweden?”
He laughed, long and noisily, and his voice seemed to return after an eternity in exile. “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? I’d have been happy to have done without that, believe me.”
He looked at Benny’s stout little body. The child snatched the spoon from Tina’s hand and threw it at him. Gunnar caught it in midair. Porridge spattered on his clothes. He let it be.
“Do you want to hold him?” asked Tina.
She lifted his grandchild over to him. The boy was heavy, compact. He’d probably become a strapping fellow.
Bad blood always comes back around.
That wasn’t true. It was possible to break the cycle.
It wasn’t even true that what goes around comes around.
There was such a thing as forgiveness. He understood that now.
Tommy reappeared from the kitchen brandishing the coffeepot. Suddenly, at the threshold, he stopped and took off his wet farmer cap.
“Hey, Dad, what the hell?” he said. “Are you crying?”
32
Paul Hjelm emerged from police headquarters and lingered at the entrance, feeling that something was wrong. He went back in to retrieve his umbrella.
He came back out again, feeling as if he had been wandering around the hold of a ship for a month. In the raw autumn night, he opened the umbrella; the small police logos beamed down at him powerlessly. The storm pummeled the rain horizontally, from all directions at once. After he’d gone just a few yards on the flooded Bergsgatan, the wind shredded his umbrella; he chucked it into a garbage can at the subway entrance.
He had called Ray Larner and told him every detail of the case, without inhibition. He didn’t give a damn about the consequences. Larner had listened, then said, “Whatever you do, Yalm, don’t keep looking. You’ll go crazy.”
He wouldn’t keep looking, but he would keep thinking-he wouldn’t be able to stop; he didn’t want to stop. The case of K would always be in his consciousness, or just under it. He hadn’t yet absorbed its horrible, awful knowledge more than superficially. Knowledge was always good, after all; he was enough of an Enlightenment rationalist to be certain of that. The question was what effect one would allow knowledge to have on one’s own psyche. The risk in this case, he realized, was that it would make him crazy.
Wayne Jennings had turned an apparently hopeless disadvantage into a pure victory. Hjelm felt a reluctant pang of admiration.
But who could really tell whether it had been a success or a setback? Who knew, today, what the three Iraqi officers’ disclosures would have resulted in had they been able to speak to the press? Was it true that the media today were the only counter-force against military and economic might? Or were the media themselves the actual threat? And was fundamentalism the only real alternative to an unrestrained market? Nothing anywhere seemed particularly attractive.
What is the worth of a human life? What sort of life do we want to have, and what sort do we want others to have? What price do we pay for living as well as we do? Are we ready to pay that price? And what do we do if we’re not?
Simple, basic questions echoed within him.
“I haven’t tickled the bass in six months,” Jorge had said, plucking a few strings on a fictive double bass. “Now I’m going home to play all night, until the police come and take me away.”
People had died in their arms, heads had been torn off before their eyes, other people’s blood had washed over them, and no one outside their own little circle would ever know. What could they do? Play. And put their whole blackened souls into it. It had to come out somehow.
He bought an evening newspaper and took the subway for the brief stretch from City Hall to Central Station, then switched to the train to Norsborg. He read the headline: “Still no trace of the Kentucky Killer. The police defend their passivity, citing limited resources.”
Mörner was the one who was quoted. Hjelm laughed. His fellow riders looked at him. It did not interest him.
Nor was he interested in the behind-the-scenes action that would follow. Right now he just felt like sticking headphones on his ears and sinking down into his train seat.
John Coltrane, Meditations. He stepped into that vague state between wakefulness and sleep-the privileged space of serenity.
We thought something had only just come to Sweden, he mused. The truth was that it was already here, and had been for a long time. It just had to be aroused.
He would get himself a piano. That decision ripened as he got out of the train at Norsborg and ambled through the rain. The standardized row houses seemed to watch him through the flying mists. He crept along slowly, allowing the rain into every pore. He needed to be thoroughly washed. Time after time.
It had been a long time since he’d seen the moon, and there was none tonight. In the United States he hadn’t thought to look. He had become close to Kerstin in a way he hadn’t expected. Somewhere inside he had longed for her, but his childish wish for a hot affair on the side had changed to something different. Was he getting old? Or was he growing up?
He arrived at his row house. It looked gray and dreary, as impersonal as a high-rise, but disguised as a tiny rise in status. It was all fiction. Nothing was as it seemed.
Above all, it wasn’t gray and dreary inside. On the inside, nothing is the same. That was something, at least. Some little trace of comfort after what he had been involved in.
He had, as Larner said, caught the Fucking Kentucky Baby all on his own. Well. The inspiration had been his own, anyway. And not just one, but two. That the other had slipped away was not his fault-it was more a law of nature. Or at least he could pretend that that was the case for a while.
Cilla was sitting on the sofa. A little candle was burning in front of her. She was reading a book.