joona linna
There’s a festive feeling in the air as Midsummer draws near. The traffic is light on Tegnérgatan as Joona slowly walks along. He’s stopped trying to reach Disa. She’s turned off her phone and it’s obvious she wants to be left alone. Joona passes the Blue Tower and then turns down Drottninggatan, which is lined with antique stores and small shops. At the new occult bookstore Aquarius, an old woman pretends to admire the display. As Joona passes by, she gestures toward the glass and then begins to follow him.
It takes a few moments for him to realize that he’s being followed.
He stops at the black fence by Adolf Fredrik Church and turns around. The woman is ten meters behind him. She’s about eighty years old. She peers at him and holds out a card.
“This is you, isn’t it?” she says as she shows it. “And here is the crown, the bridal crown.” She holds out another.
Joona walks over to her and takes the cards from her hand. They’re playing cards from one of the oldest card games in all of Europe, tarot.
“What do you want from me?” Joona asks calmly.
“Nothing at all,” says the old woman. “But I have a message for you from Rosa Bergman.”
“You must be mistaken. I don’t know anyone by—”
“She’s wondering why you pretend that your daughter is dead.”
epilogue
It’s early autumn in Copenhagen. The air is clear and cool when a group of men, discreetly transported in four separate limousines, arrives at the Glyptotek Museum. The men walk up the stairs and enter. They walk past the fruitful winter garden beneath its high glass ceiling. Their footsteps echo on the stone hallway floor as they pass antique sculptures and enter the magnificent concert hall.
The audience is already seated. The Tokyo String Quartet is in its place on the low stage. The musicians hold their legendary Stradivarius instruments, the ones once played by Niccolò Paganini himself.
The four late-arriving guests find their seats around a table in the colonnades to one side of the hall. The youngest is still almost a boy, a fine-limbed blond man whose name is Peter Guidi. The other men wear expressions that are determined but also one step from fear; they are prepared to enslave themselves. They are all soon going to kiss his hand.
The musicians nod to one another and start to perform the Schubert String Quartet no. 14. It begins with great pathos, a deep emotion held in check, a power restrained. A violin calls, painfully and beautifully. The music takes a breath one last time and then it all pours out. The melody seems happy, but the instruments have, at the same time, an underlying tone of sorrow as if it were breath left behind from many lost souls.
Every single day, thirty-nine million bullets are made. Worldwide military spending, at the lowest estimate, is $1,226 trillion a year. In spite of the fact that enormous amounts of armaments are manufactured, the demand never lessens and it is impossible to estimate the volume. The nine largest exporters of weapons in the world are the United States, Russia, Germany, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, and China.
a note about the author
Lars Kepler is the pen name of a literary couple who live in Sweden.
Lars Kepler, The Nightmare
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