Once Wallander was on the road, he realized he had almost no gas. He thought he could almost make it to Malmö, but didn’t want to take any chances. He pulled into a gas station outside Skurup and doubted that he would be able to make it in time. He didn’t even know why it was so important to him. But he still remembered the time when he had been ten minutes late for a date with Mona and she had simply left.
But he did make it in time. He stayed in the car for a moment and looked at his face in the mirror. He was thinner now than he’d been a few years ago, and his features were more sharply defined. She wouldn’t know that he had his father’s face. He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. He forced all his expectations away. Even if he wasn’t likely to be disappointed, she probably would. They would meet in the bar, have a drink, and then it would be over. He would be back in his bed by midnight. When he woke up the next day he would already have forgotten her and also be confirmed in his suspicions that this dating-service business was nothing for him.
He stayed in the car until almost twenty to nine, then got out and walked across the street to the Savoy.
They saw each other at the same time. She was sitting at a table in the far corner. Apart from some men at the bar there weren’t many guests, and she was the only unaccompanied woman. Wallander caught her gaze and she smiled. When she stood up to greet him he saw that she was very tall. She was wearing a dark-blue suit. Her skirt came to just above her knees and he saw that she had beautiful legs.
“Am I right?” he asked as he stretched out his hand.
“If you are Kurt Wallander, I am Elvira.”
He sat down across the table from her.
“I don’t smoke,” she said. “But I do drink.”
“So do I,” Wallander said. “But not tonight. I’m driving, so I’ll have to stick to mineral water.”
He was dying for a glass of wine. Or better yet, several. But since that time many years ago when he had been stopped by his colleagues Peters and Noren after having had one too many, he had been very careful. They had not said anything, but Wallander knew he had been so drunk that it could have meant immediate dismissal. It was one of the worst memories of his career. He didn’t want to risk anything like it again.
The waiter came to the table and took their order. Elvira ordered another glass of white wine.
Wallander felt self-conscious. Ever since he was a teenager he had been under the impression that he looked best in profile. Therefore he now turned his chair so that he sat sideways to the table.
“Don’t you have enough room for your feet?” she asked. “I can pull the table over, if you like?”
“Not at all,” Wallander said. “I’m fine.”
What the hell do I say now? he wondered. Do I tell her I fell in love with her from the moment I stepped in the door? Or rather, when I first read her letter?
“Have you ever done this before?” she asked.
“Never.”
“I have,” she said cheerfully. “But it’s never led to anything.”
Wallander noticed that she was very direct in her approach, in direct contrast to himself. He was still mostly concerned over whether or not to appear in profile.
“Why hasn’t it worked out before?”
“Wrong person, wrong sense of humor, wrong attitude, wrong expectations. Some have been pompous or had too many drinks. A lot can go wrong.”
“Perhaps I’ve already done something wrong, too?”
“You look nice enough,” she said.
“I think that’s a word that is only rarely applied to me,” he said. “But I guess I’m no ogre.”
At that moment he suddenly thought of the picture of Eva Persson that had been circulated in the press. Had she seen it? Did she know he was accused of assaulting a juvenile?
But the picture never came up in the conversation that ensued over the following hours. Wallander started to believe she hadn’t seen it. Perhaps she never read the evening papers. Wallander sat with his mineral water in front of him and longed for something stronger. She kept drinking wine. She asked him what it was like to be a policeman, and Wallander tried to answer her questions as truthfully as he could. But he noticed that he kept bringing up the more difficult aspects of his work, as if he was trying to elicit sympathy from her.
Her questions were well thought-out, sometimes even unexpected. He had to keep his wits about him in order to give her meaningful answers.
She told him about her own work. The shipping company she worked for did a lot of moving of household goods for Swedish missionaries who were either setting off abroad or coming home. He began to realize that she held a position of some responsibility, since her boss was often away on business. She clearly enjoyed her work.
The time flew by. Shortly after eleven, Wallander was in the middle of telling her about his failed marriage with Mona. She listened attentively, seriously but also supportively.
“And afterward?” she asked when his story trailed off. “You’ve been divorced for some time now. There must have been someone else.”
“I’ve been alone for long periods of time,” he said. “But for a while I was seeing a woman from Lettland, from Riga. Her name was Baiba. I had high hopes for the relationship and for a while I thought she shared those hopes. But it didn’t work out.”
“Why not?”
“She wanted to stay in Riga, and I wanted to stay here. I had made all kinds of plans. We were going to live in the country, start over.”
“Perhaps your dreams were too big,” she said. “You got burned.”
Wallander had the feeling that he had talked too much, that he had said too much about himself and perhaps even Mona and Baiba. But the woman across from him was easy to confide in.
Then she told him about herself. Her story was much the same as his, except that in her case it was two failed marriages rather than one. She had one child from the first marriage and one from the second. Without saying anything explicit, she gave Wallander the impression that her first husband had been physically abusive. Her second husband had been Argentinean, and she told Wallander with equal measures of insight and self-irony how his passionate nature, which at first had been a breath of fresh air, had finally become stifling.
“He disappeared two years ago,” she said. “The last I heard of him he was in Barcelona and had run out of money. I helped him get a ticket back to Argentina. Now I haven’t heard from him for a year. His daughter is distraught, of course.”
“How old are your kids?”
“Alexandra is nineteen, Tobias twenty-one.”
They paid their bill at half-past eleven. Wallander wanted to treat her, but she insisted on splitting it.
“It’s Friday tomorrow,” Wallander said once they were out on the street.
“I’ve never been to Ystad. Isn’t that funny?”
Wallander wanted to ask if he could call her. He didn’t really know what he was feeling, but she seemed not to have found too many faults in him yet. For now that was enough to be encouraged.
“I have a car,” she said. “I could even take the train. Do you have any time?”
“I’m in the middle of a difficult homicide case right now,” he said. “But I guess even policemen need occasional time off.”
She lived out in a Malmö suburb, toward Jagersro. Wallander offered to give her a ride, but she said she wanted to walk for a while and then take a taxi.
“I take as many long walks as I can,” she said. “I hate to jog.”
“Me too,” Wallander said.
But he said nothing about his diabetes, the reason he was now an avid walker.