“No one in their right mind would do that.”
“Can you keep going?” she asks softly.
He nods and they begin to move again, farther into the forest, farther away from roads, from houses and people.
40
the replacement
Axel Riessen unbuttons the cuff links from his stiff shirtsleeves and puts them in the bronze bowl on his dresser. The cuff links were an inheritance from his grandfather, Admiral Riessen. This design is civilian, however, a heraldry design consisting of two crossed palm leaves.
Axel studies himself in the mirror next to the closet door. He loosens his tie and then walks to the bed and sits down on the edge. The radiator hisses and he thinks he can make out snatches of music coming through the wall.
The music is coming from his younger brother’s apartment in their shared family mansion. One lone violin, Axel thinks as his mind gathers the fragments he’s heard into a whole. It’s the Bach Violin Sonata in G Minor, the first movement, an adagio, but played much more slowly than conventional interpretations. Axel hears not only the musical notes but also every single overtone as well as an accidental bump against the body of the violin.
His hands long to take up a violin. His fingers tremble when the music changes tempo. It’s been a long time since he’s let his fingers play with the music, running over the strings and up and down the fingerboard.
When the telephone rings, the music in his head falls silent. He gets up from the bed and rubs his eyes. He’s very tired and hasn’t slept much for the past week.
Caller ID reveals that the call is coming from Parliament. Axel clears his throat before he answers in a calm voice.
“Axel Riessen.”
“I’m Jörgen Grünlicht. As you may know, I’m the president of the Government Panel for Foreign Affairs.
“Good evening.”
“Please excuse me for calling so late.”
“I was still awake.”
“They told me you might be,” Jörgen Grünlicht says. He hesitates before continuing. “We’ve had an extra board meeting just now where we decided to try to recruit you for the post of general director for the ISP.”
“I understand.”
There’s silence on the other end. Grünlicht adds hastily, “I assume you know what happened to Carl Palmcrona.”
“I read about it in the newspaper.”
Grünlicht clears his throat and says something that Axel can’t understand before Grünlicht raises his voice again. “You are already aware of our work and—if you accept our nomination—could get up to speed fairly quickly.”
“I’d have to resign my UN post,” Axel replies.
“Is that a problem?” Grünlicht’s voice seems worried.
“No, not really—I’ve been taking some time off anyway.”
“We’ll be able to discuss the terms, of course … but there’s nothing that’s off the table,” Grünlicht says. “You must already know we would like you on board. There’s no point in keeping that a secret.”
“I need to think about it.”
“Can you meet us tomorrow morning?”
“You’re in a hurry.”
“We’ll take, of course, the time needed,” Grünlicht replies. “But it must be said that after what happened … there have been hints from the economics minister about a matter already delayed—”
“And that would be?”
“Nothing unusual, just an export permit. The preliminary report was positive and the Export Control Committee has completed its work, the contracts have been signed. Unfortunately, Palmcrona wasn’t able to sign it.”
“His signature was required?”
“Only the general director can approve exports of defense matériel or products of dual usage,” Jörgen Grünlicht explains.
“But can’t the government approve certain business transactions at times?”
“Only once the general director of the ISP has decided to turn the matter over to the government.”
“I understand,” says Axel.
For eleven years, Axel Riessen served as a war matériel inspector in the old system for the Foreign Office before being assigned to the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs. At fifty-one, he still looks youthful. His hair, flecked with gray, is still thick. His features are regular and friendly, and the tan he picked up recently on vacation in Cape Town gives him a healthy glow. It had been an exceptional vacation: he’d sailed solo along the breathtaking, rugged coast.
Axel walks to his library and settles into his reading chair. He closes his eyes and starts to reflect on the fact that Carl Palmcrona is dead. He’d read the obituary in the morning edition of Dagens Nyheter. It was not clear what had happened, but he’d gotten the impression the death was unexpected. Palmcrona had not been ill, that much was clear. He thinks back to some of the times they’d met through the years and recalls when they’d worked together on how to combine the Military Equipment Inspection Committee with the Governmental Strategic Export Control Committee. In the end, a new agency would emerge: the National Inspectorate of Strategic Products.
And now Palmcrona is dead. Axel remembers the tall, pale man with his military air and a sense of loneliness about him.
Axel starts to worry. The rooms are too quiet. He stands up and looks around the apartment, listening for sounds.
“Beverly?” he calls in a low voice. “Beverly?”
She doesn’t answer and fear rises in his mind. He walks quickly through the rooms and heads for the hallway to put on his coat when he hears her humming to herself. She is walking barefoot over the rugs in the kitchen. When she sees his worried face, her eyes widen.
“Axel,” she says. “What’s wrong?”
“I was just worried that you’d left,” he mutters.
“Out into the dangerous world.” She smiles.
“I’m just saying there are people you can’t trust out there.”
“I don’t trust them,” she says. “I just look at them. I look at their light. If it shines around them, I know that they’re nice.”
Axel never knows what to say when she says things like that, so he just tells her he’s bought some chips and a big bottle of Fanta.
It seems as if she’s stopped listening. He tries to read her face, to see if she is restless or depressed or closed off.
“So are we still going to get married?” she asks.
“Yes,” he lies.
“It’s just that flowers make me think of Mamma’s funeral and Pappa’s face when—”
“We don’t need to have flowers,” he says. “Though I like lilies of the valley.”
“Me, too,” he says weakly.
She reddens contentedly and he hears her pretend to yawn for his sake.
“I’m so sleepy,” she says as she leaves the room. “Do you want to go to sleep?”
“No,” Axel says, but only to himself.
Parts of his body want to stop dead, but he gets up and follows her, clumsily and strangely slow, over the marble floor that leads along the hallway, up the stairs, through two large rooms, and finally into the suite where he retires in the evening. The girl is skinny and short and doesn’t even come up to his chest. Her hair is frizzy. She shaved it last week, but it’s begun to grow out again. She gives him a quick hug and he can smell the odor of caramel from her mouth.
41
sleepless
It’s been ten months since Axel Riessen met Beverly Andersson, and that only came about because of his acute insomnia. Ever since he experienced a traumatic event thirty years ago, he’s had difficulty sleeping. As long as he took sleeping pills, he was able to manage, but he slept a chemical sleep without dreams and without real rest. At least he slept.
Eventually he had to keep increasing the dosage. The pills caused a hypnotic noise that drowned out his thoughts, but he loved his medication and he usually mixed it with expensive, well-aged whiskey. One day, after twenty years of high consumption, Axel’s brother found him unc
onscious in the hallway, blood flowing from both nostrils.
At Karolinska Hospital, he was diagnosed with severe cirrhosis of the liver. The chronic cell damage was so serious that, after the usual medical tests, he was placed on the waiting list for a liver transplant. He was in blood group O and his tissue type was unusual, so the number of possible donors was fairly slim.
His younger brother could have donated a partial liver if he hadn’t suffered from such severe arrhythmia that his heart could not have endured an operation.
The hope of finding a liver donor was nearly nonexistent, but if Axel refrained from drinking and using sleeping pills, he would not die. As long as he took regular doses of Konakion, Inderal, and Spironolakton, his liver functioned and he lived a normal life.
Except that he never slept more than an hour or two at night. He was admitted to a sleep clinic in Gothenburg and underwent a polysomnography and had his insomnia officially diagnosed. Since medication was out of the question, he was given advice about meditation, hypnosis, self-suggestion, and sleep techniques. None of this helped.
Four months after his liver collapsed, he was awake for nine days straight and had a psychotic episode.
He had himself voluntarily admitted to the private psychiatric hospital Saint Maria Hjärta.
There he met Beverly. She was just fourteen years old.
As usual, Axel had been lying awake and it was about three in the morning. It was totally dark outside. She just opened his door. She was like an unhappy spirit who walked all night through the hallways of the psychiatric hospital. Perhaps all she was looking for was a person she could be with.
He was in bed, sleepless and disconsolate, when the girl came into his room and stood in front of him without a word. Her long nightgown brushed against the floor.
“I saw there was light in this room,” she whispered. “You’re giving off light.”
Then she crawled into his bed. He was still sick from lack of sleep and he didn’t know what he was doing. He grabbed her tiny body hard, too hard, and pressed her to him.
She said nothing. She just lay there.
He buried his face in the back of her neck. Then he fell asleep.
It was as though he had plunged deep into the waters of sleep and found dreams. He slept only a few minutes that first time. Every night after that, she came to his room. He would hold her tightly and then, covered with sweat, he’d fall asleep.
His psychological instability slowly dissipated like condensation from a mirror. Beverly stopped wandering through the hospital hallways all night.
Axel Riessen and Beverly Andersson left Saint Maria Hjärta Hospital with a silent and desperate agreement. Both of them understood that this close-knit arrangement had to be a secret. As far as the outside world could see, Beverly Andersson was temporarily housed in one of the apartments in Axel Riessen’s mansion until a student apartment opened up.
Beverly Andersson is now fifteen and had been diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder. She has no sense of boundaries between herself and other people. She also has no self-defense mechanism.
In past eras, girls like Beverly might be locked up in mental institutions permanently or they might be forced to undergo sterilization or a lobotomy to control their lack of morals and unrestrained sexuality.
Girls like Beverly often still follow the wrong people home and trust people who are not worth their trust.
Beverly is lucky she found me, Axel Riessen would reassure himself. I am not a pedophile, do not want to harm her or make money off her. I just need her next to me so I can sleep. Without sleep, I’ll be destroyed.
She often talks about their getting married once she’s old enough.
Axel Riessen lets her spin her fantasies of marriage because it makes her happy and calm. He convinces himself that he’s protecting her from the outside world, but he also knows that he’s using her. He’s ashamed, but can’t figure out any other alternative. He’s afraid of returning to relentless insomnia.
Beverly walks out of the bathroom with a toothbrush in her mouth. She nods toward the three violins hanging on the wall.
“Why don’t you ever play them?” she asks.
“I can’t,” he replies with a smile.
“Are they just going to hang there? Why don’t you give them to someone who can play them?”
“I like these violins. Robert gave them to me.”
“You hardly speak about your brother.”
“We have a complicated relationship.”
“I know he makes violins in his workshop,” she says.
“Yes, that’s what he does … he also plays in a chamber orchestra.”
“Maybe he can play for us at our wedding?” she asks as she wipes toothpaste from the corner of her mouth.
Axel looks at her and hopes that she doesn’t pick up on the mechanical way he answers as he says, “What a good idea.”
He feels exhaustion flowing over him like a wave, over his body and his brain. He walks past her and into the bedroom and sinks down on the edge of the bed.
“I’m very sleepy. I …”
“I feel very sorry for you,” she says in total seriousness.
Axel shakes his head.
“I just need to sleep,” he says. All at once, he feels as if he’ll burst into tears.
He stands up again and picks out a nightgown in pink cotton.
“Please, Beverly, why don’t you wear this one?”
“Sure, if you want me to.”
She pauses to look at a large oil painting by Ernst Billgren. A fox is wearing clothes and sitting in an armchair in some upper-middle-class home.
“I hate that picture,” she says.
“You do?”
She nods and starts to undress.
“Can’t you change in the bathroom?” he asks.
She shrugs and as she pulls off her pink top, Axel moves away so that he won’t see her nude. He walks over to the painting of the fox, looks at it, then takes it down to set it, facedown, on the floor.
Axel’s sleep is stiff and heavy, his jaw clenched. He’s held the girl very tightly. Suddenly he startles awake and lets her go. He sucks in air like a drowning man. He’s sweating and his heart is pounding from fear. He turns on the lamp on the nightstand. Beverly sleeps as relaxed as a child, mouth open and a little sheen on her forehead. Axel starts to think about Carl Palmcrona again. The last time they’d met, they mingled with the nobility at a meeting in Riddarhuset. Palmcrona had been drunk and aggressive. He’d gone on and on about the UN weapon embargoes and finished his tirade with those strange words: If everything goes to hell, I’ll pull an Algernon so I won’t reap my nightmare.
Axel turns off the lamp and lies down again while he tries to understand what Palmcrona meant by saying “pull an Algernon.” What was he talking about? What kind of nightmare was he thinking about? And did he really say that strange I won’t reap my nightmare?
What had happened to Carl-Fredrik Algernon? It was a mystery in Sweden. Up until his death, Algernon had been the military-equipment inspector for the Foreign Office. One January day he’d had a meeting with the CEO of Nobel Industries, Anders Carlberg. He’d told Carlberg that their investigation had turned up information that one of the members of the conglomerate had smuggled weapons to countries in the Persian Gulf. Later that same day, Carl-Fredrik Algernon had fallen in front of a subway train in Central Station in Stockholm.
Axel’s thoughts slip away and become increasingly blurred, circulating around accusations of arms smuggling and bribery concerning the Bofors Corporation. He sees a man in a trench coat falling backward in front of an oncoming train.
The man falls slowly, his coattails flapping.
Beverly’s soft breathing catches him up, calms him, and he turns toward her to wrap his arms around her again.
She sighs as he pulls her closer to him.
Sleep comes to him in the softness of a cloud. His thoughts fade away.
For the rest of the night,
he still sleeps restlessly and wakes again at five in the morning. He’s been holding on so tightly to Beverly, his arms are cramped. Her stubbly hair tickles his lips. He wishes desperately that he could take his sleeping pills instead.
42
national inspectorate of strategic products
At seven in the morning, Axel walks out onto the terrace he shares with his brother. He has that eight o’clock meeting with Jörgen Grünlicht in Carl Palmcrona’s old office at the National Inspectorate of Strategic Products.
The air is already warm but not yet humid. His younger brother, Robert, has opened the French doors to his apartment and come out to sit on a lounge chair. Robert hasn’t shaved yet and just lies there with his arms hanging limply. He’s staring up into the chestnut tree’s foliage, still damp from the morning dew. He’s wearing his worn-out silk bathrobe, the same one their father used to wear every Saturday morning.
“Good morning,” Robert says.
Axel nods without looking at his brother.
“I’ve just repaired a Fiorini for Charles Greendirk,” Robert says in an attempt at conversation.
“He’ll be happy, I’m sure,” Axel says. He sounds down.
“Something bothering you?”
“Yes, a bit,” Axel admits. “I might be changing jobs.”
“Well, why not?” Robert says, though his thoughts are already elsewhere.
Axel looks at his brother’s kind face with its deep wrinkles, and at his bald head. So many things could have been different between them.
“How’s your heart?” he asks. “Still pumping away?”
Robert puts his hand on his chest before he answers. “Seems to be.”
“That’s good.”
“What about your poor old liver?”
Axel shrugs and turns back into his apartment.
“We’re going to play Schubert this evening,” his brother calls out.