The Viper (42 page)

It was the beginning of March. Tokyo was chilly and it was often raining. The rain came suddenly, was strangely silent and seldom lasted very long. When Elin had arrived in the city, she had gotten off the bus at the wrong stop. She had pulled her wheeled suitcase three blocks through one of those rain showers. Suddenly a man in uniform had appeared from out of the arcade beneath one of the hotels along the way. He had hurried up to her and given her a simple umbrella of see-through plastic. It had been such a beautiful gesture. She still felt moved every time she thought about it.

The Hotel Okura was built in the sixties and had appeared in one of the James Bond movies. She had read that in a brochure she had found in the lobby that was as cavernous as an aircraft hangar. The hotel also had a bar that served excellent dry martinis. She was going to try not to spend too much time in those gloomy rooms, among all the middle-aged, Japanese salarymen.

She didn’t sleep much. The first three days she had mostly spent on her balcony looking out at the city. She had also wandered around in the immediate neighborhood that was ugly and drab. Despite the peculiar Japanese address system, she had eventually managed to find the building where her father had lived. The building was a graphite gray, anonymous high-rise of forty or so stories. Of course, she had no way of confirming that this was actually where he had lived.

Molly had gone with her to Gotland for the funeral. Elin was eternally grateful to her for that. She couldn’t have handled it otherwise.

The funeral had taken place at Levide church one week before Christmas, in the unfamiliar church on the wrong side of the road. Or rather the
funerals
. No doubt there were those who felt that it was inappropriate, or downright offensive, to hold one joint funeral service. But for Elin it would have been unthinkable to do it any other way, no matter what had happened.

All three of them were buried together. Of the three people lying in the oak caskets with brass handles, two of them had each murdered one of the others. Her family. Now they were resting in peace with Stefania. That might not have been an altogether uncomplicated choice, either, but that was how it turned out.

Who was actually guilty of what? She couldn’t bear to think about it like that. They were gone now, all of them, so what difference did it make?

The lights on the skyscrapers came on as the sky darkened. In the building opposite the hotel, men and women were still working away in an open office landscape beneath the fluorescent lighting. She stood out on the balcony looking at them while she thought about whether to order room service or head down to the gloomy bar.

Hotel Okura was an expensive hotel, but that wasn’t a problem. It had turned out that she was the heir to a small fortune. The sole heir. In addition to the farm in Levide, which was worth at least 4 million, her father had left behind 320,000 in cash, plus stocks and funds worth about 2 million. There was also a company on the island of Jersey that owned shares and options with a combined value of 112 million crowns. In a yield account, the same company had over 3 million crowns worth of Eurodollars.

When she had spontaneously said that she would really prefer to just give it all away, the lawyer had looked shaken. She got the feeling that he was considering if there was any way to have her declared temporarily of unsound mind. Think it over, he had urged her. The money in Sweden couldn’t be touched in any case until the estate was settled, and that couldn’t be done until any wrongful death claims had been paid. The lawyer had been quick to reassure her on that point. Swedish courts never granted any large sums in cases like that. Regardless of the extent of the assets of the defendant. A few hundred thousand at most.

Think it over, he had asked her once again. She could start a foundation and put the assets in a fund if she was determined to give them away. Then the assets could grow and she could devote herself to donating the proceeds and if she were to change her mind one day, the money would still be there.

He didn’t understand. She didn’t want to devote herself to charity. She just wanted to get rid of the assets. But above all, she had other things to think about. And now she went traveling with the money. Father’s money.

A soft, silent rain began to fall. Elin went inside from the balcony, but let the door stand open. It would soon stop.

She was unsure why, but the trip to Tokyo had been necessary. She had needed to stand outside father’s anonymous skyscraper and feel that it meant nothing. She couldn’t explain what it did to her exactly, but she felt that it did her good. He was far away now. There was a sea between them. Another kind of sea.

A loud, piercing shriek echoed outside. She looked out and just caught a glimpse of a black shadow in front of the lit-up facade. She had heard them the first time the night before, when she had lain awake on her bed and long since given up any hope of falling asleep. The awful shriek had given her a start and made her sit up. She had looked out through the window and wondered what it was. She had stared single-mindedly out into the night. Until she finally caught sight of them and understood that they were ravens. It was ravens that flew shrieking among Tokyo’s skyscrapers after dark.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Håkan Östlundh grew up in Stockholm, Sweden, where he still lives today. He has worked as a journalist for Sweden’s bestselling morning paper and spends summers on Gotland with his wife and three sons.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

THE VIPER.
Copyright © Håkan Östlundh 2008 by agreement with Grand Agency. Translation copyright © 2012 by Per Carlsson. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Cover design and digital imaging by James Iacobelli

Original photograph of landscape ©
Nikki Smith
/Arcangel Images

Original photograph of windmill © Carl Hanninen/Alamy

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.minotaurbooks.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Östlundh, Håkan, 1962–

    [Blot. English]

    The viper / Håkan Östlundh.—1st U.S. ed.

                p. cm.

    ISBN 978-0-312-64232-7 (hardcover)

    ISBN 978-1-250-01127-5 (e-book)

  I.  Title.

    PT9877.25.S85B5613 2012

    839.73'8—dc23

2012010101

eISBN 9781250011275

First Edition: August 2012

*
Translator’s note:
The late Swedish financier, Jan Stenbeck, who died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine, is said to have enjoyed gorging himself on this eccentric concoction from time to time.