Box 21 (13 page)

 

Do you understand, he had said, truly understand what I’m telling you?

 

In my country, in Lithuania, trading in narcotics, say, is a serious crime. Heavy sentences are passed. Long, harsh punishments are meted out. But trading in people, in young women, that’s risk-free. In Lithuania, pimps are hardly ever punished. No one is sentenced; no one gets a spell in prison.

 

I see what is happening to our children. I cry for them, with them. But I can do nothing. Do you understand? Truly?

 

The car was slowing down on the Nortull access route.

 

Ewert slowly let go of the image of the despairing man, the official with his hat and his briefcase, pleading with them to understand, and swapped it for the next, the long queues of wet cars. The lights blinked and swallowed ten cars at a time, a quick estimate told him that there were at
least a hundred stationary vehicles crowded in ahead of them. They’d have to wait for at least ten minutes.

 

Sven swore irritably, something he didn’t often do. They were late and about to be even later.

 

Ewert leaned back in the passenger seat, turned up the volume. Her voice:

 

Today’s teardrops are tomorrow’s rainbow,

 

And tomorrow’s rainbows I will share with you.

 

It drowned out Sven’s swearing and the idiot hooting of car horns.

 

Ewert was at peace, resting deep, deep inside himself. Only what had been, long ago, existed for him. Everything had been so simple, like black-and-white photos; he had more of a life then, and lots of time waiting for him. ‘För sent skall syndaren vakna’, (1964), original English title ‘Today’s Teardrops’. The empty plastic box in his hand had an insert with his photo of Siw on stage in a People’s Palace. He had snapped her and she had smiled into the camera, waved at him and said hello to him afterwards. His eyes wandered among the song titles on the list, tunes he had recorded himself, written down the lyrics.

 

He was listening to Siw, but couldn’t get the despairing little man from the embassy out of his head. When their coffee cups had been drained to the last drop, he and Sven had thanked the diplomat again, freed their hands and had scarcely managed to get out of the café when they heard him calling after them. He had asked them to stop and wait until he caught up with them.

 

He had walked between them down the stairs and started to tell them what he knew about Lydia Grajauskas and her father. He had come to the airport not only to ensure that Dimitri Simait was dispatched, but also out of respect and grief for the father and daughter; their history seemed to be without end and so sad.

 

He had fallen into silence until they reached the large entrance hall of the main terminal, then he continued his
narrative about a man who had been imprisoned and forced to abandon his family because he refused to deceive the authorities about his pride in flying the Lithuanian flag, a challenge to a society that wouldn’t allow it. And then, after serving his sentence, he had been sacked from his army post, only to be imprisoned a couple of years later for treason. He had been deemed a risk to state security because he and three erstwhile colleagues, still in defence jobs, had stolen and smuggled weapons and sold them to a foreign power.

 

At this point the Lithuanian suddenly interrupted his story to bemoan the tragic fate of the girl. Then he shook hands with them and walked off, disappearing among the queues of suitcases lined up at the check-in counters. Ewert and Sven followed him with their eyes for a long time, both of them with the feeling that he had done what he set out to do and had expressed in words a series of events which for some reason had clearly moved him, and so had tried to unload some of it on the two Swedish policemen.

 

Ewert stopped looking at the cassette player for a moment and glanced along the queue of stationary cars. Still as long as before. In the driver’s seat, Sven was twitching restlessly, revving the engine now and then.

 

‘Ewert, we’ll be late.’

 

‘Not now. I’m listening. To Siw.’

 

‘I promised. I promised this time.’

 

Today was Sven’s forty-first birthday. When he left in the morning, Anita and Jonas had still been asleep, they had all agreed to celebrate later on. He had taken the afternoon off, promised to be back home by lunchtime. His birthday. On his birthday, at least, he wanted to make sure that he was allowed to take his Anita in his arms, the woman he had loved since they met in senior school, and to be next to Jonas and hold his hand hard enough to make him protest.

 

For almost fifteen years they had waited for a child, for Jonas.

 

They had agreed early on to try to create a life that was
a combination of them both, but failed and failed. Anita had been pregnant three times. The first time she had a still birth after seven months: an induced labour in a hospital bed, complete with pushing and contractions and pain. Afterwards, with their dead baby girl next to her, she had wept in his arms. The next two pregnancies ended in late miscarriages, tiny hearts that suddenly stopped beating.

 

Their shared longing was something he could feel any time. For years it had tainted everything they did together, robbing them of pleasure and almost suffocating their love for each other. Until one day, almost eight years ago to the day, when they had travelled to a small town some twenty kilometres west of Phnom Penh. The representative from the adoption bureau had met them at the airport and taken them on a journey through an unknown landscape.

 

And then there he was, waiting for them, lying in a simple little bed in the local orphanage. He had arms and legs and hair, and was already called Jonas.

 

‘I should be sitting on the bus back home.’

 

‘You’ll make it.’

 

‘Or be waiting at the bus stop at Slussen. At the very least.’

 

‘You’ll get there soon.’

 

He had promised. This time too.

 

He remembered it well, his fortieth. It had been a very hot day and his birthday cake had gone sour in the back seat of a police car. A five-year-old girl had been raped and tortured and dumped in a wood near Strängnäs. He had promised, had been on his way home to the table, all set for his little party, and it had been hard to explain to Jonas on the phone why someone would hurt a child with a knife and why it meant that he had to wait for his dad to come home.

 

He wanted to be with them so much.

 

‘I’ll turn on the blue light. Fuck the rules. I want to get home.’

 

Sven glanced at Ewert, who shrugged. He stuck the plastic dome on the roof of the car and waited for the siren to kick in. Then he pulled out of the queue, crossed the double white lines and zigzagged between cars that were trying to get out of his way into some space that hadn’t existed before. In a minute or two they were clear of the hold-up and the three sets of lights.

 

Sven accelerated towards the centre of town. That was when the emergency call came through.

 

They missed it the first time. What with the siren and Siw’s singing, it was drowned out.

 

A doctor had found Hilding Oldéus’s dead body on a staircase, near the ward where he was being treated for a heroin overdose.

 

Oldéus had been badly beaten. Difficult to identify. The doctor, a woman, had said that he had had a visitor; she had taken him in herself. Her voice had sounded very weak, but her description of the visitor was clear. He had been tall, heavily built, shaved head, sunbed tan, a scar running from the corner of his mouth to his temple. That was why the emergency call had been for Grens and Sundkvist.

 

Ewert stared straight ahead. There was something like a smile on his face.

 

‘Twenty-four hours. Sven, twenty-four hours was all it took.’

 

Sven looked at him.

 

He was thinking about Anita and Jonas, who were waiting, but he said nothing. He just changed lanes to get to Väster Bridge and on to Söder Hospital.

 

 

 

 

 

She was sitting at the back of the bus. It was almost empty now, with an older woman a couple of rows in front of her and a woman with a pushchair in one of the centre seats. That was it. Alena Sljusareva would have preferred to hide among lots more passengers, but most people had got off two stops before, at Eriksdal Sports Complex – the athletic type, off to some event.

 

The bus turned off the ring road and drove on, past the Söder Hospital Casualty reception. She had been there a year or so before, with Dimitri trailing her. Someone who had wanted extras had lost his cool and done things they hadn’t agreed on. Up a small slope, a half-turn to the bus stop right in front of the main hospital stairs: the end of the journey.

 

She looked around. If someone was watching out for her, that person was keeping a low profile.

 

She tipped her umbrella forward to cover her face. It was bucketing down.

 

In the entrance hall she cautiously scanned the walls, hung with artwork made of metal, glanced at the hard benches full of people with paper cups of coffee and then quickly looked down the four corridors.

 

No one took any notice of her at all. They were all preoccupied with getting better.

 

She went to the kiosk, bought a box of chocolates, a magazine and a bouquet of flowers already wrapped in transparent plastic. She was obviously going to see someone who wasn’t well; she was one of the people who popped in to visit during their lunch break. One of the many.

 

The lift to the surgical wards was the one furthest away. The long corridor wormed its way into the interminably large building; she met recent admissions, off to some test or other, and slowly fading long-stay patients, and lost souls who didn’t know what was going on and never would. Every now and then new corridors opened up, going this way or that, all identical to the one she was in. Too many corridors, she didn’t like them.

 

The lift was waiting for her with its door open. She had to go right to the top, all seven floors. Alone in the tight space she watched someone in the mirror, a twenty-year-old wearing an oversized raincoat, someone who wanted to go home, nowhere else, just home.

 

The door opened. She hid behind her shield, kept a firm grip on the box of chocolates and the bouquet of flowers. A doctor passed her in a hurry and vanished through a door halfway along the corridor. Two patients walked towards her, in the usual plain hospital clothes with plastic bands around their wrists. She glanced at them quickly and wondered how long they had been there, if and when they would ever leave.

 

The TV room was on her left. She heard the sound of the news as she approached, a burst of music that was trying to sound important. She spotted the guard, who stood near the door, his arms crossed on his chest. Green uniform, truncheon at his side and a holster for the handcuffs. He was looking at the patients on the sofa: two boys, wearing their own clothes, and next to them a woman. Her face was badly damaged and one of her arms was in plaster. Her eyes were fixed unseeingly on the news presenter. Alena wanted to
meet those eyes – just a moment would be enough – but the woman on the sofa sat motionless, isolated from the world around her.

 

A few more paces carried Alena past the guard and the people on the TV sofa. The corridor ended here. The door facing her had a toilet sign and a disabled symbol. She stepped inside and locked herself in.

 

She was shaking, her legs felt weak and out of control, and she leaned forward, letting go of what she was holding to support herself against the wall.

 

Again, she saw someone reflected in the mirror, someone who wanted to go home. Just wanted to go home.

 

Alena put her shoulder bag on the lid of the toilet seat. She had wrapped the plastic bag tight round its contents, trying to make the package as small as possible. Pulling it out, she weighed it in her hand before putting it into the waste-bin. She saw the tap, swore at herself as she turned it on and flushed the toilet. Noises which had to be there, in order not to be noticed. The paper towel dispenser was nearly empty, but she got out a wad, scrunched the towels up one by one and hid the plastic bag underneath them.

 

Lydia hurt everywhere.

 

Her body punished her every time she moved. A little earlier she had asked the Polish nurse for a couple of morphine tablets.

 

She sat on the TV sofa next to the two boys, whom she had seen before and smiled at several times but never talked to. She didn’t actually want to know them, there was no point. She wasn’t interested in the news broadcast and didn’t understand a word anyone said. The guard didn’t take his eyes from her.

 

From the corner of her eye she had noticed the woman walking past, holding a box of chocolates and a bouquet.

 

Ever since, her breathing had been laboured.

 

She waited for the sound of the toilet door opening again

 

and for the woman’s footsteps to pass and fade away. She wanted to close her eyes, to lie belly down on the sofa and sleep through it all, only waking up when it was all over.

 

It didn’t take long. Or maybe it did. She wasn’t sure.

 

The woman opened the toilet door. Lydia heard it perfectly clearly. Shutting out the noisy TV programme was no problem. She only registered the sounds from the corridor. The woman’s steps came closer; she picked up the moving shape without turning her head, barely an awareness of the passing body, a glimpse of a person walking swiftly back in the direction she had come from.

 

Lydia stole a glance at the man in the green uniform.

 

He had noted the passing visitor but no more. He didn’t get up to follow her, and her presence passed out of his head the instant she left the ward.

 

Lydia let the boys know she wanted to get up from the sofa and passed them. Then she looked at the guard, nodded to him, pointed at her bladder and then in the direction of the toilet. He nodded. It was fine for her to go to the toilet. He would stay here.

 

She locked the door, sat down on the lid and took several deep breaths.