He was roused from his thoughts by Erik, who thanked him for dinner and left the kitchen to resume his computer game.
Ann was still at the table. Sammy felt her gaze and guessed what she was thinking.
“I have a dishwasher,” she said suddenly.
Sammy turned his head and smiled.
“I like doing dishes.”
He folded up the pizza cartons and scrunched them into the trash bag, wiped off the table and counter, and closed the door to the hall, before sitting down across from her.
“Tell me about Brant’s work with Russia,” he said.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Ann answered after a moment’s hesitation, “other than that he’s been there. He doesn’t like the country, that much I understood. What about it?”
Sammy did not know whether this was the right tactic, but he hoped that by disrupting her line of thought he could get her to talk about Brant from a police perspective, and then perhaps bring up their brief but intense relationship. He was convinced that it was in conversation, in talking about what she had experienced and felt, that she might find relief.
He told about Jeremias Kumlin’s business deals, the little he knew, and Henrietta Kumlin’s conviction that it was a Russian who had murdered her husband.
“What does this have to do with Brant?”
“He’s been in Russia, he’s an investigative journalist. In his apartment we found material about Russia-books, lots of computer printouts, newspaper clippings, and such.”
“You think that Brant ran into Kumlin there?”
“Or his deals, shady or not. He did know Kumlin.”
“You want to link him to the murder of Gränsberg and Kumlin?”
Sammy shook his head.
“At first I thought he had something to do with the murder of Gränsberg, but not now. I guess he’s in Brazil, right? He hasn’t come back, has he?”
“No, not as far as I know.”
They sat quietly for a moment and Sammy assumed that Lindell too was thinking about the possibility that Brant had quietly returned.
“We’ve found his fingerprints in Ingegerd Melander’s apartment, so he’s certainly still relevant in the investigation. He has connections to both Gränsberg and Melander, and through bandy to Kumlin. He e-mailed you that he had interviewed Gränsberg for an article about the homeless, and it is conceivable that he was at Melander’s to meet him on the job, so to speak.”
“You think he’s physically been there, at Melander’s?”
Sammy Nilsson nodded, but did not say where they found Brant’s fingerprints.
“He has a lot to explain. How tall is he, this Brant?”
Ann looked at him with surprise.
“Like me?”
“Shorter, maybe a couple, three centimeters taller than me.”
“That’s good,” said Sammy. “The Russian outside Kumlin’s was about one hundred eighty centimeters.”
Normally Lindell would have asked how he knew that, but now she simply nodded, absent, already on her way elsewhere.
“Brant said that the Russians lacked sympathy, that was something he read in a book. Do you know that he read out loud to me sometimes? I don’t read much, but he consumed everything. It was a little tiresome sometimes. He might be reading a paragraph, and when he stopped he looked at me as if I should comment on what he’d read. What could I say? I felt so stupid.”
Sammy smiled.
“You should have told him about the pain,” he said.
Lindell looked at him, perplexed.
“Your pain, what they try to write about in books. Do you remember Enrico and Ricardo from Peru? The one murdered and the other pressured into suicide. I was there, I saw your pain when you were told about it. Do you remember the mother and daughter by the roadside out in Uppsala-Näs, massacred, the girl had been picking flowers and Josefin, dying, who tried to crawl to her Emily, but didn’t make it? We stood there beside each other. Do you remember Jansson’s tears? That monster of a patrol officer was crying like a child.”
“Stop!” said Ann, but Sammy would not let himself be stopped.
“Those are the true stories. People don’t believe that we see, smell, and feel pain. No, we should be cops, some kind of caricature from a video, or… fiction, to put it simply. That beats all Brant’s reading out loud. The best thing would be if all of us were like Riis, then we wouldn’t have to think about what’s happening around us. Then we could be like Persbrandt in a TV series, with a little fake angst for the sake of effect, but in reality machines to create smutty headlines about our cleaning job.”
“We can’t-”
“No, we never can!” Sammy interrupted her. “People don’t want to hear that sort of thing. They want to know everything else about our job, but not what it’s really like. For us, for the ones who shovel up from roadsides and concrete floors, pick up along the railroad tracks, for those we met, for those we are compelled to visit with horrible news.”
Lindell nodded and looked very tired.
“And it will only get worse, no one understands anything anymore. Think if we were to write down-”
“We can’t!”
“We shouldn’t. We mustn’t. The true story would tear everything apart, the politicians’ talk and all the empty words. Behind every crime is greed and the imperfection of our society, people’s anxiety. And not only our stories. On the way to us, the final station, there are lots of truths that should be told. Away with the fine words, the lies in the newspapers!”
“You sound like Brant,” said Ann.
“We would avoid eighty percent of all crimes if…”
Sammy fell silent, as if the air had gone out of him, and suddenly looked very helpless.
“If what?”
“I don’t know,” he retreated.
“That other twenty percent, what’s that about?”
“Craziness,” Sammy replied, after thinking a moment. “Craziness and love.”
“It’s the same thing,” said Lindell.
He started to say something, but changed his mind. They heard a car drive into the lot, car doors opening and closing, voices and laughter. Sammy thought about getting up, going to the open window, and looking out, curious about the life outside, but he remained seated.
“We needed that pizza,” he quietly said at last.
“Do you want to go home?”
Sammy shook his head.
“You wanted to get me to talk,” said Ann. “But what comes bubbling out is your own terror.”
Sammy made an effort to protest but knew she was right.
“I know all about the lies, but I hoped that here at home I could bring a few truths to life,” she resumed. “Instead I got lies here too.”
“What got into you outside the preschool?”
Ann closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled, as if it required an enormous effort of will to remember what had happened.
“I got tired,” she said at last. “I just wanted to lay down and sleep, go away. I couldn’t cope, couldn’t take another step. All my reserve energy was gone. The mask fell, you know. The preschool, chat a little, answer all of Erik’s questions, fix dinner, put Erik to bed, and then… keeping your inner self closed, picking up around here, and then-”
“Have some vino to fall asleep,” Sammy observed.
“But you wake up again. When he was here, then… well, you know. I got a taste of intimacy for a few weeks. I was starved. In the beginning I was just happy and satisfied, then came the thoughts, hopes, plans. It got serious. Besides, he’s different than anyone I’ve ever met, even if he did remind me of you, Sammy. A kind of restlessness, close to sweetness, but also to fury, an inconceivable fury. He could get hopping mad over a trifle.”