Strindberg's Star (24 page)

“Who are you calling?” Don asked.

Eva looked up at him, surprised.

“My colleagues at the firm, of course,” she said. “Someone has to help us figure out what is actually going on up there at the police station in Falun.”

“You’re not calling from here,” said the woman.

The attorney looked questioningly from her to Don.

“What my sister means,” Don said, “is that it might be better to wait a bit to call, until the searches in Greater Stockholm are finished.”

Eva’s hand, with the phone, sank down to the table.

“Your sister,” she said.

Don looked as though he wanted to swallow his tongue.

“I wish it were possible to say something different,” said the woman.

Don made a face at her to extend her hand, and his sister reluctantly obeyed.

“Hex.”

“Hex?”

The woman didn’t look as though she intended to repeat herself. Eva tried a smile:

“Eva Strand. Younger or older?”

“What?”

“Sister, I mean,” said Eva. “Younger or older sister?”

“Well, what the hell do you think?” said Hex.

A
fter an embarrassed silence, Don got up and helped Eva sit down in his chair.

“You have to let me look at that leg now,” he said. “If you … ?”

He nodded at her to pull down her nylon stocking, so he could get to the bandage. When she hesitated, he said:

“Who do you think taped you up while you were asleep?”

Eva felt a blush come over her cheeks, but then she began to take her stocking off anyway, so he could get to the bandage. When Don had crouched down next to her leg, she bent down toward his ear.

“Perhaps you can tell me where we are.”

“You’re at my place, in Kymlinge,” Hex said before Don could answer.

His sister had also sat down at the computers now; she leaned against the back of the chair.

“You don’t need to …” Don said.

“In that case, you probably didn’t need to bring her here,” said Hex. “I really can’t understand in the least what the point was supposed to be. You’re just losing time.”

Then she turned away and leaned forward, hunching over one of the keyboards. It looked as though she was starting to work on something, because soon several of the monitors on the bench had woken up.

“Do you live here?” Eva asked.

“Yes, does the lawyer have a problem with that?” Hex mumbled, without looking up.

Eva grimaced as Don reached the gauze over the pieces of tape; then she shook her head.

“No, I think it’s lovely.”

“How nice.”

Don sighed.

“What my sister means to say is that she is very happy here, in an uninhabitable, condemned basement under the Kymlinge subway
station, pretty much exactly between Hallonbergen and Kista. The blue line.”

“Kymlinge?” said Eva.

“Most people react more to the part about how she lives in a basement under the subway,” said Don.

“I didn’t even know there was a subway station in Kymlinge.”

“That’s what’s so great about it,” said Hex, concentrating on the movement of her fingers over the keys.

“Kymlinge,” said Don, as he began to wrap the bandage again, “was supposed to be a station on the blue line out toward Akalla, and the heart of a city center that was planned here in the seventies. The construction never happened, so the station just consists of a few concrete staircases and a platform. Above us it’s mostly evergreen forest and a little snippet of platform, and …”

“Soon you’ll have enough for a book,” Hex muttered.

“So the train that came …”

“… was on its way to Akalla, yes,” said Hex. “But they don’t usually switch over to the side tracks, otherwise that would really be a bad place to put your bedroom.”

“Right, because now it’s a great place,” said Don.

In the closest monitor, Eva could see that his sister made a face.

“Thanks for letting us come here.”

At first Hex looked as though she hadn’t really heard, but then the tapping of the keys stopped and she turned her pale face toward Eva, as though she were noticing her for the first time:

“It’s all right. No problem at all, actually.”

A crooked smile and then Hex went back to her hunched position in front of the quickly scrolling lines on the monitors.

“I
t looks good,” said Don, when he finally nodded at Eva to put on her stocking again. “Sorry about the window glass.”

After she’d pulled on her nylon again, Eva neatly straightened her
skirt over her knees and put on her high heels. She tried once again to put weight on her injured leg, and her mouth contorted with the pain. She let her foot relax and lie resting against the floor underneath the workbench of computers.

Hex had disappeared into her work, and Don sat quietly, his face gray with exhaustion. For a long time the only sound was the whirr of the fans.

“What’s going to happen now?” Eva asked at last.

Don didn’t answer.

“What’s going …” Eva began again, but she was interrupted by Hex:

“Your Eva wonders what you’re planning to do, Danele. She wants you to initiate her into your plans for the immediate future.”

“I’m not his …”

“I was planning to … leave the country for a while,” Don said without turning toward her.

“Leave the country?” Eva asked, confused.

“Danele is going to leave on a train tonight,” said Hex. “I’ve promised to help him with the tickets.”

“On a train?”

“Your friend has gotten stuck,” said Hex.

“Yes, on a train,” said Don.

“They’ve put out a national alert, and you’re going to get on a train,” said the attorney.

“Good God,” mumbled Hex. “This woman of yours is like an echo. I can’t concentrate if I have to listen to this.”

She turned to Eva.

“I’m going to send Danele out of the country like the damaged goods he is. Don’t worry about that. What you
should
worry about is how you’re going to clear up this legal mess with the police. If you listen to what Don says, it doesn’t seem like you’ve done much about it so far.”

“It will probably be difficult to …”

“Yes?”

“It will probably be difficult to do anything if Don just disappears somewhere, I’m afraid,” said Eva.

“Come with me, then,” said Don.

He had gone to stand behind Hex, and he was following the text on the screen. Eva wondered if she’d misheard. But then he turned to her.

“Come along, and your colleagues at the firm in Borlänge can help us until we figure out what’s going on. You must be in as bad shape as I am after what happened with that man from Säpo.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Okay, maybe not in quite as bad shape,” said Don.

“You and I, Erik Hall’s murderer and his forty-seven-year-old attorney, flee the police on a train on the way to where? South?”

“Southwest,” said Don.

The clattering from Hex had ceased, as though the sister was also waiting for an answer.

E
va suddenly felt that she needed time to think, time to herself, and she gripped the armrests with her hands. With a swinging motion she managed to heave herself up off the low office chair.

Her calf burned as she shifted her weight into a first, tentative step. With clenched teeth she soon realized that she could actually endure the pain well enough to limp on her own over to all the junk that had been piled along the walls of the concrete room.

Behind her she could hear the siblings arguing. Hex was speaking brightly and heatedly, now and again interrupted by Don’s hoarse voice, as it had sounded during the long hours in the locked pantry.

Eva couldn’t stop a small smile from moving over her compressed lips as she thought of how Don had grumblingly related a few samples of the bizarre theories that flourished among some of his students. He said that the long story in the library had been a condensed horror
version of a decade of seminars, but still he seemed somehow fascinated by Eberlein’s story about Strindberg and the spheres. Eva ran her hand along the rows of empty chassis and tubes on the shelves; her fingers passed by dismantled transistor drives and cooling paste for processors, and she realized that she had to stop fooling herself. Because she knew very well whom he reminded her of. Whom he had reminded her of from the first moment, and that that was what made it so hard for her to think clearly. The same hacking laugh she had heard so long ago, the same fascination with the extraordinary, with myths and treasures hidden in forgotten documents. The same resigned and slightly sad look.

She turned back toward the two siblings and thought there was no more time to hesitate.

“I
’m coming along,” said Eva.

She had sunk down next to Don. He didn’t answer, but she could see that he was relieved.

“Well, well, so it is possible to understand what you’re saying sometimes,” said Hex.

“But it will have to be some other way than by train,” said Eva. “That sounds like an incredibly bad idea.”

“I think you’ll be satisfied,” said Hex.

For a moment the only sound was the buzzing of the computers.

“Don?” said Eva.

Don hesitated, looked at his sister. “May I … ?”

Hex nodded. He cleared his throat:

“We’ll be traveling in a private compartment, you could say.”

“More of a freight car, actually,” Hex interjected.

“A freight car?” said Eva.

“The apple of my eye,” said Hex.

She tapped in a Web address and nodded to Eva to roll her chair closer so that she could see better.

As Eva moved closer to the screen, a green and white page lit up with text:

Green Cargo—Logistics solutions—customer to customer

“If you tell anyone about this, Eva Strand, I will haunt you for the rest of your life.”

“That would be taxing,” said Eva.

“Okay, it’s like this.”

Hex pointed at the green and white screen.

“In 2001, the Swedish State Railway was split up into six different companies. The old division for transport of goods, SJ Gods, would become, as they said, ‘market-oriented,’ and it was restructured into the corporation Green Cargo. It was quite a messy process, among other things when it came to the data system. I followed it with great interest and took the opportunity to snatch one of their approximately seven thousand railroad cars.”

“You stole a railroad car?” Eva couldn’t hold back the doubt in her voice.

“She borrowed a railroad car, you might say,” said Don.

“Okay,
borrowed,
then,” said Hex. “I gave myself access to Green Cargo’s incredibly faulty system and made a slight change. You might call it creative bookkeeping.”

“Creative bookkeeping?” Eva repeated.

“You really have to work on that,” said Hex.

She clicked off the page with the Green Cargo logo and pulled up something that resembled a flowchart. Then she continued: “Anyway, it was really mostly a test, you know, to see if it was possible to manipulate the system. But the really great thing about the freight car is that Green Cargo still doesn’t understand that I snatched …
borrowed
the car. In their transport system, it seems to be doing a completely ordinary freight transport when I use it, and when I’m not using it, I
instruct the system to place it on a sidetrack with other unused cars in a freight yard here near Kymlinge. It only takes a few simple codes to show that the freight car is booked or in for repairs, and then they leave it alone. It’s been like this for several years now.”

She pointed at a blinking row of numbers.

GC 21-74-2262098-9 Gbs

“I usually call it the Silver Arrow,” said Hex.

“But traveling in a freight car …” said Eva.

“It
was
a freight car,” said Hex. “Now it’s … well, something of a hobby, you could say. Holding areas for railroad cars are relatively unguarded, so I’ve devoted the last few years to renovating it a little bit.”

“Don’t be shy,” said Don.

“Well … it has a compartment, anyway, like he said, and I can guarantee that it is an extremely peaceful way to travel. At first I mostly used it within Sweden, but once I realized the implications of the Schengen Agreement and the open borders, I’ve also gotten out to the continent quite a bit.”

When Hex noticed that Eva was still shaking her head, she closed the flowchart and returned to her keyboard and the other monitors.

“You can think what you want, Eva Strand. But now I have to make some travel documents for you two, and if you want a ticket out of here, you should let me work.”

Eva crossed her arms, pushed her chair back from the table, and followed Hex’s hands for a while as they danced across the keyboard. She looked over at Don, but he sat waiting with his head resting against his hand. Then Eva could feel her leg really starting to ache again, and she slowly closed her eyes in an attempt to collect her thoughts.

“Green Cargo …” she mumbled to herself.

A
round two at night, the hard drives in the concrete room fell silent.

The sudden silence caused Eva to wake up. Hex stretched and yawned in her office chair before the row of darkening screens.

Then Hex turned around halfway and gave Don a nudge. When he had become somewhat responsive, Hex declared that it was time to get moving. The sender, addressee, and type of freight had finally been swallowed by Green Cargo’s system, and the freight car was now scheduled to be linked into the European flow of traffic, with a departure time of 3:43
A.M
. This gave them a tight time margin, but otherwise the trip would have to have been postponed more than twenty-four hours.

T
he drizzle blew in across Eva’s face above the condemned cellar on the half-finished platform. Hex had turned on a powerful flashlight, and she led them across the subway tracks, up the incline, into a thicket.

Eva clenched her arm around Don’s shoulder with all her strength for support, but still her high heels slipped under her, and the lashes from branches and twigs caused her to nearly lose her balance time and again. Then they came out onto a gravel road, and in the shine from the flashlight, a short distance away, they saw the rust-mottled wreck of a car leaning down into a ditch.