Arne Dahl - Misterioso

“Did you play darts with him?” asked Chavez, throwing the dart at the board. It didn’t stick but instead fell down, puncturing the parquet floor. “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling out the dart and looking at the annoying little hole in the wooden floorboard.

It seemed so irrelevant.

“Sometimes we used to play a game,” said Lena, without casting a glance at Chavez’s dubious activities. “Just for fun. Although it wasn’t really much fun. He always gave me a head start, but he always caught up in the end. He hated to lose. You know, you go from five-oh-one down to zero. You have to finish with the checkout, as it’s called, hitting the double ring with the last dart you throw, so that you end up right at zero, no more, no less. The checkout and zero have to coincide exactly.”

Paul Hjelm is slouched in an armchair in the hotel room, staring at the third photograph. It’s the most recent one of Göran Andersson, taken only a couple of weeks before the bank incident. He has his arm around Lena and is smiling broadly. They’re standing outside in the snow in front of their house; they’ve made a snow lantern, with a little candle burning inside. His cheeks are rosy, and he looks happy and healthy. And yet there’s a certain shyness in his clear blue eyes.

Hjelm recognizes that look. It’s the quiet shyness of a child.

“And he doesn’t know that you’re pregnant?” said Hjelm.

Lena looked down at her coffee cup again and murmured, “I was just thinking of telling him. But he hadn’t been himself after getting the pink slip. It arrived in the mail in an ordinary brown envelope from Stockholm. Not even his boss at the bank, Albert Josephson, knew about it. I watched him open the envelope and saw how something died in his eyes. Maybe I knew even then that I’d lost him.”

“So you haven’t had any contact with him since he disappeared?”

“On the morning of February fifteenth…” said Lena, as if she were leafing through a calendar. “No. Nothing. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.”

Suddenly she looked Hjelm straight in the eye. He had to look away. “What exactly has he done?”

“Maybe nothing.” Hjelm lied, feeling ill at ease.

Jorge Chavez gets up from the bed, stretches, and gathers the photographs. He hesitates for a moment. “Maybe we should tell Hultin about this?”

“Let them spend one last night guarding the Lovisedal board members,” Hjelm says tersely. “Nothing’s going to happen there anyway.”

“Besides, we should probably wait for that sketch of our so-called colleague,” says Kerstin Holm, yawning.

“The guy who stopped the whole damned investigation,” says Chavez, and after a moment continues: “No, listen. That’s enough for today. A good day’s work. Although with a rather bitter aftertaste.”

He places the photographs on Hjelm’s nightstand and leaves the room in the midst of a huge yawn.

Kerstin is still lying on the bed, tired and incredibly… erotic, thinks Hjelm. He’s still uncertain whether the previous hotel room incident actually took place or not.

“Do you know anything about astrology?” he asks abruptly.

“Because I’m a woman?” she replies, just as abruptly.

He laughs. “Presumably, yes.”

“The alternative way of thinking,” she says sarcastically, sitting up on the edge of the bed and tossing back her black hair. “I know a little about it.”

“This morning-was it really this morning?-my daughter said that this… blemish on my cheek looked like the astrological sign for Pluto. What does that mean?”

“I’ve never thought about that,” she says, coming over to touch his cheek. “Maybe your daughter is right. Lately I’ve thought it looked like a hobo sign.”

“Have you really been thinking about my blemish?” He closes his eyes.

“Pluto.” She takes her hand away. “It can signify a lot of different things. Willpower, for instance. But also a lack of consideration.”

“Hmm. Really?”

“Wait. I’m not done. The sign of Pluto also signifies an individual’s ability to handle change. And catharsis, the final purification.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Hjelm’s eyes are still closed. “But does it really look like the sign for Pluto? What do you think?”

Again he feels the light caress of her hand. He keeps his eyes shut.

“I think it looks like you have an erection,” she says lightly.

“I’m sorry,” he says without feeling sorry. “And the blemish?”

“It’s disappeared in the rest of the crimson on your face.”

He opens his eyes. She’s now sitting on the edge of the bed a couple of yards away, looking at him with an inscrutable expression through the dim light.

“It’s the only way to make it disappear.” He sits up. “I have to ask you about the last time in Växjö. Did anything really happen?”

She laughs. “The masculine need to demystify everything,” she says. “You can’t live with uncertainty, can you?”

“But believe me,” he says, “the mist is still there.”

“I interpreted your wish,” she says. “That question about Anna-Clara Hummelstrand’s Gallic lover… I assumed you’d fantasized about me masturbating, that you had a certain preference for masturbating women.”

“Good Lord.” He’d hit the mark. “But how did you get into my hotel room?”

“You know very well you left the door open.”

“So the whole thing was about fulfilling my wish? But what about you? You didn’t look as if you were suffering.”

“One person’s pleasure is shared by the other. As long as there’s no coercion, no forcing the other person. It’s all a matter of being viewed as a human being.”

A warmth spreads between them. Kerstin continues, her voice a bit hoarse: “Have you interpreted my wish?”

He closes his eyes to think. Images of her fly past, phrases, words. He is feverishly searching for clues, hints, glances. He merely sees her with her feet propped up on the desk and her hand inside her panties.

He feels like a little boy. “Give me a clue,” he squeaks.

“Take off your clothes,” she says curtly.

He takes them off. He stands there naked, confused. He’s holding his hands in front of his genitals.

“Take your hands away and put them on top of your head,” she says. She’s still lying on the bed, fully dressed, with her hands clasped behind her head.

He’s standing there in front of her. His penis is sticking straight up, strutting with nowhere to go. Without ever getting there.

“Come here and stand next to the bed, near my feet.”

He walks over there, with his hands on top of his head. His penis sways back and forth as he moves. His knees are resting against the edge of the bed. His penis is sticking out over the bed. She comes closer. She studies it carefully without touching it.

“The scourge of woman,” she says without taking her eyes off his cock, “and most of us have fallen victim to it in one way or another. Me, I was raped when I was fifteen, and then over and over again by my dear husband, the cop, although he had no idea about it afterward, of course.”

Hjelm feels himself going limp, all at once.

“Come here and lie down,” she says.

He lies down next to her and closes his eyes. She lightly touches the blemish on his cheek. He lets everything happen.

“Can you forgive me?” she asks him softly. She sounds like a little girl.

He nods; his eyes are still closed. He hasn’t stopped feeling like a little boy.

“Look,” she says in the same bright voice. “Now the blemish looks like a tiny cross.”

He smiles and understands.

And yet understands nothing.

But it feels good.