Before the Frost

  “Yes. Why?”

  “How long are they kept?”

  “For a year. Why are you asking?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get there.”

  It was twenty to eleven when Linda walked into the station. Her dad came out into the deserted reception area and met her. His room was full of cigarette smoke.

  “Who’s been here?”

  “Boman.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “He’s our D.A.”

  Linda was suddenly reminded of another district attorney.

  “Where did she go?”

  “Who?”

  “The one you were in love with? She was a D.A. back then.”

  “That was a long time ago. I flubbed my chances.”

  “How?”

  “One’s worst embarrassments should be kept to oneself. There are other attorneys here now, and Boman is one of them. I’m the only one who lets him smoke.”

  “You can’t even breathe in here now!”

  Linda opened the window.

  “What was it you wanted?”

  Linda explained.

  “You’re right,” he said when she had finished.

  Wallander stood up and motioned for her to follow. They bumped into Lindman in the corridor. He was carrying a stack of folders.

  “Put those down and come with us,” Wallander said.

  They went to the archive where the cassette tapes were stored. Wallander gestured for one of the officers on duty to come over and talk to him.

  “The evening of the twenty-first of August,” he said. “A man called and reported sighting burning swans at Marebo Lake.”

  “I wasn’t working that night,” the officer said after studying a log book. “It was Undersköld and Sundin.”

  “Call them.”

  The officer shook his head.

  “Undersköld is in Thailand and Sundin is at a satellite intelligence conference in Germany. It’ll be hard to get hold of them.”

  “What about the tape?”

  “I’ll find it for you.”

  They gathered around a cassette player. Between a call about a suspected car theft and a drunk man who was calling for help “looking for Mom” was the call about the burning swans. Linda flinched when she heard the voice. It sounded as if he was trying to speak Swedish without an accent, but couldn’t disguise his origins. They played the tape several times.

  POLICE: Ystad Police Station.

  MAN: I would like to report that burning swans are flying over Marebo Lake.

  POLICE: Burning swans?

  MAN: Yes.

  POLICE: Can you repeat that? What is burning?

  MAN: Burning swans are flying over Marebo Lake.

  That was the end of the call. Wallander was listening through headphones that he then passed to Lindman.

  “He has an accent, no doubt about it. I think he sounds Danish.”

  Or Norwegian, Linda thought. What’s the difference?

  “I’m not sure it’s Danish,” Lindman said and passed the headphones to Linda.

  “The word he uses for ‘burning,’” she said. “Is it the same in both Norwegian and Danish?”

  “We’ll find out,” Wallander said. “But it’s embarrassing that a police cadet has to be the one to bring this up.”

  They left the room after Wallander had left instructions about keeping the tape readily available. He led the others to the lunchroom. A group of patrol officers sat around one table, Nyberg and some technicians around another. Wallander poured himself a cup of coffee, then sat down by a phone.

  “For some reason I still remember this number,” he said.

  He held the receiver to his ear. It was a brief conversation. Wallander asked the person he was speaking with to come down to the station as soon as possible. It was clear that this person was resistant to the idea.

  “Perhaps you would prefer I order a patrol car with blaring sirens,” Wallander said. “And have the officers handcuff you so your neighbors wonder what you’ve been up to.”

  He hung up.

  “That was Christian Thomassen,” he said. “He’s first mate on one of the Poland ferries. He’s also an alcoholic, though currently dry. He’s Norwegian and should be able to give us a positive identification.”

  Seventeen minutes later, one of the largest men Linda had ever seen entered the station. He had huge feet stuffed into enormous rubber boots, was close to two meters tall, and had a beard down to his chest and a tattoo on his bald pate. When he sat down, Linda discreetly stood up to see the tattoo more clearly. It depicted a compass card. Christian Thomassen smiled at her.

  “It’s pointing south-southwest,” he said. “Straight into the sunset. That way the Grim Reaper will know which way to take me when the time comes.”

  “This is my daughter,” Wallander said. “Do you remember her?”

  “Maybe. I don’t remember too many people, to be honest. I’ve survived my drinking, but most of my memories haven’t.”

  He stretched out his hand so she could shake it. Linda was afraid he would squeeze too hard. His accent reminded her of the man on the tape.

  “Let’s go in,” Wallander said. “I want you to listen to a recording for us.”

  Thomassen listened carefully. He asked to hear the conversation four times, but stopped Lindman when he was about to play it for a fifth time.

  “He’s Norwegian,” Thomassen said. “Not Danish. I was trying to hear where in Norway he’s from, but I can’t pinpoint it. He’s probably been away from Norway for a long time.”

  “Do you think he’s been here a long time?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “But you’re sure that he’s Norwegian?”

  “Yes. Even if I’ve lived here for nineteen years and drunk myself silly for eight of those years, I haven’t completely forgotten where I came from.”

  “That’s all we needed to know,” Wallander said. “Do you need a ride back?”

  “I came down on the bike,” Thomassen said, smiling. “I can’t ride when I’ve been drinking. I just fall over and hurt myself.”

  “A remarkable man,” Wallander said to Linda after he left. “He has a beautiful bass voice. If he hadn’t been so lazy and drunk so heavily he could have been an opera singer. I suspect he would have become world famous, for his sheer size if nothing else.”

  They went back to Wallander’s office.

  “So he’s Norwegian,” Wallander said. “And we know that the man who set fire to the swans was the same as the one who set fire to the pet store, just as we suspected. It will probably turn out to be the same man who set fire to the calf. The question is whether he was the one who was hiding out in the hut in the forest.”

  “The Bible,” Lindman said.

  Wallander shook his head.

  “Swedish. They’ve managed to decipher a lot of what’s been written in the margins, and it’s all in Swedish.”

  They were quiet. Linda waited. Lindman shook his head.

  “I have to sleep,” he said. “I can’t think clearly anymore.”

  “Eight o’clock tomorrow,” Wallander said.

  Lindman’s steps died away in the corridor. Wallander yawned.

  “You should get some sleep too,” Linda said.

  He nodded, then stood up.

  “You’re right. We need to sleep. I need to sleep. It’s already midnight.”

  There was a knock on the door. One of the officers on phone duty looked in.

  “This just came,” he said, handing a fax to Wallander.

  “It’s from Copenhagen,” the officer said. “Someone called Knud Pedersen.”

  “I know him,” Wallander said.

  The officer left. Wallander skimmed the fax, but then sat down at the desk and read it more carefully.

  “Strange,” he said. “I know from way back that Knud Pedersen is a policeman who keeps his eyes open. They’ve had a murder there recently, a prostitute by the name of Sylvi Rasmussen. She was found with h
er neck broken. The unusual thing is that her hands were clasped in prayer—not severed this time, but Pedersen has read about our case and thought we should know about this.”

  Wallander let the fax fall to the desk.

  “Copenhagen again,” he said.

  Linda was about to ask a question, but he lifted his hand.

  “We should get some sleep,” he said. “Tired policemen always end up giving the perpetrator a chance to slip away.”

  They left the station. Wallander suggested they go on foot.

  “Let’s talk about something completely different,” he said. “Something to clear our thoughts.”

  They walked back to Mariagatan without saying a single word.

  40

  Each time he saw his daughter it was as if the ground disappeared beneath his feet. It could take several minutes before he regained his equilibrium.

  Images from his younger life flickered through his mind. Normally he bore his memories with calm; he checked his pulse and it was always steady no matter how upset he felt. “Like the feathered animal, you should shake hate, lies, and anger from your body,” God had said to him in a dream. It was only when he met his daughter that he was overcome with weakness. When he saw her face, he also saw the others: Maria and the baby left behind to rot in the steamy jungle that crazy Jim Jones had chosen for his paradise. Sometimes he longed passionately for those who had died, and he also felt guilty that he hadn’t been able to save them. God demanded this sacrifice of me in order to test me, he thought.

  He always varied the times and places he met with his daughter. Now that he had stepped out of his former state of invisibility and shown himself to her, he made sure in turn that she did not disappear from him. He often tried to surprise her. Once, just after they had been reunited, he washed her car. He sent a letter to her Lund address when he had wanted her to come to their hideout behind the church in Lestarp. He had visited her apartment several times without her knowledge, using her phone to make important calls and even once spending the night there.

  I left her behind once, he thought. Now I have to be stronger so that she doesn’t do the same to me. He had prepared himself for the possibility that she wouldn’t want to follow him. Then he would have disappeared again. But already after the first three days he decided he would be able to make her one of the chosen. The fact that convinced him was the unexpected coincidence that she knew the woman who Torgeir happened upon and killed in the forest. He had understood then that she had been waiting for him to return all these years.

  This time he was going to see her in her apartment. She had placed a flowerpot in the window as a sign that the coast was clear. A few times he had gone in with the set of keys she had given him without waiting for the flowerpot because God told him when it was safe. He had explained to her that it was important to act natural in front of her friends. Nothing has happened on the surface, he told her. Your faith grows deep inside you for now, until the day I call it forth from your body.

  Each time they met, he did something that Jim Jones had taught him—one of the few lessons that was not spoiled by betrayal and hatred. Jones had taught him how to listen to a person’s breath, especially those who were new and who perhaps had not yet found the proper humility to put their lives in their leader’s hands.

  He walked into the apartment. She knelt on the floor of the hall and he laid his hand on her forehead and whispered the words that God demanded he say to her. He reached for a vein in her throat where he could feel her pulse. She trembled but was less afraid now. It was starting to become more familiar to her, all these elements of her new life. He knelt in front of her.

  “I am here,” he whispered.

  “I am here,” she replied.

  “What does the Lord say?”

  “He demands my presence.”

  He stroked her cheek, then they stood up and walked out into the kitchen. She had put out the food he requested: salad, crisp-bread, two slices of meat. He ate slowly, in silence. When he was done, she came over with a bowl of water, washed his hands, and gave him a cup of tea. He looked at her and asked her if anything had happened since they had last met. He was interested in hearing about her friends, especially the one who had been looking for her.

  He sipped the tea and listened to her first words, noticing that she was nervous. He looked at her and smiled.

  “What is troubling you?”

  “Nothing.”

  He grabbed her hand and forced two of her fingers into the hot tea. She flinched but he held her hand there until he was sure she had scalded herself. She started to cry. He let go.

  “God demands the truth,” he said. “You know I am right when I say that something is troubling you. You have to tell me what it is.”

  Then she told him what Zeba had said when they were at the café and her little boy was playing under the table. He noticed that she wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing. Her friends were still important to her. That wasn’t unusual—in fact, he had been surprised at the speed with which he had been able to convert her.

  “Telling me about this was the right thing to do,” he said when she was finished. “It is also only appropriate that you hesitated in this. Hesitation is a way to prepare to fight for the truth and not take it for granted. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at her for a long time, scrutinizing her. She is my daughter, he thought. She gets her seriousness from me.

  He stayed a while and told her about his life, wanting to bridge the years of his long absence. He would never be able to convince her to follow him if she did not fully understand that his absence had been ordered by God. It was my time in the desert, he had said repeatedly. I was sent out not for thirty days, but twenty-four years.

  When he left her apartment, he was sure she was going to follow him. And even more significantly, she had given him yet another opportunity to punish a sinner.

  Langaas was waiting for him at the post office, since they always tried to meet in public. They had a brief conversation, then Langaas leaned forward so his pulse could be checked. It was normal.

  Later that same day they met at the parking lot. It was a mild, cloudy evening with rain likely at night. Langaas had replaced the truck with a bus that he had stolen from a company in Malmö, being careful to put on a new license plate. They drove east, passing Ystad and continuing on minor roads toward Klavestrand, where they stopped at the church. It lay on a hill, approximately four hundred meters from the nearest house. No one would be likely to notice the bus where it was parked. Langaas unlocked the church door with the key that he had copied. They used shielded flashlights as they erected the ladders and covered the windows looking out onto the road with black plastic. Afterward they lit the candles on the altar. Their footsteps made no sounds; all was silent.

  Langaas came to see him in the vestry, where he was making his preparations.

  “Everything is ready.”

  “Tonight I will let them wait,” Westin said.

  He gave the remaining hawser to Langaas.

  “Put this on the altar. The hawser inspires fear, fear inspires faith.”

  Langaas left. Westin sat down at the pastor’s table with a candle in front of him. When he closed his eyes, he was back in the jungle. Jim Jones came walking out of his hut, the only one that was supplied with electricity from a small generator. Jim was always so well groomed. His teeth were white, his smile carved into his face. Jim was beautiful, he thought, even if he was a fallen angel. I cannot deny that there were moments with him when I was completely happy. I also cannot deny that what Jim gave me, or what I believed he gave me, is what I am trying to give the people who now follow me. I have seen the fallen angel; I know what to do.

  He folded his arms and let his head come to rest on them. He was going to let them wait for him. The hawser on the altar would be a stimulus of the fear they should feel for him. If the ways of God were inscrutable, so too would be the ways of
his servant. He knew Torgeir would not disturb him again. He started to dream. It was like stepping down into the underworld, a world where the heat of the jungle penetrated the cold stone walls of the church. He thought about Maria and the child; he slept.

  He woke up with a start at four o’clock in the morning. At first he wasn’t sure where he was. He stood up and shook life back into his stiff body. After a few minutes, he walked out into the church. They were all sitting in the first few pews, frozen, fearful, waiting. He stopped and looked at them before letting them see him. I could kill them all, he thought. I could get them to cut off their hands and eat themselves. Because I too have a weakness. I do not completely trust my followers. I am afraid of the thoughts they think, thoughts I cannot control. He walked out and stood in front of the altar. This night he was going to tell them about the great task that awaited them, the reason they had made the long journey to Sweden. Tonight he would pronounce the first words of the text that would become the fifth gospel.

  He nodded to Langaas, who opened the old-fashioned brown trunk on the floor next to the altar. Langaas walked down the row of people, handing out the death masks. They were white, like masks in a pantomime, devoid of expression, of joy or sorrow.

  God has made man in his image, Westin thought. But no one knows the face of God. Our lives are his breath, but no one knows his face. We have to wear the white masks in order to obliterate the ego and become one with our Creator.

  He watched while they put on the death masks. It always filled him with a sense of power and strength to see them cover their faces.

  Finally, Langaas put on a mask. The only one not wearing one was Westin.

  He had learned this too from Jim. The disciples always have to know where to find their Master. He is the only one who should not be masked.

  He pressed his right thumb against his left wrist. His pulse was normal. Everything was under control. In the future, this church may become a shrine, he thought. The first Christians who died in the catacombs of Rome have returned. The time of the fallen angels is finally over.