Caroline Åberg: Stockholm Noir

“That’s not news.”

“I think I’m losing my grip,” I said.

She paused. “On what?”

“I’ll try to figure that one out while you’re getting my second glass.” I lifted the Alba. The color was deep red. “Tell the cook not to use too much cheese. Cheese is the corpse left over from milk.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? It sounds terrible.”

“It means just what I said.”

“Did you think that up yourself?”

“No, Bloom did.”

“Who’s Bloom?”

“ Ulysses . James Joyce. Bloom eats cheese. The cheese eats itself. It’s self-consuming. Just like dogs. They eat themselves, they vomit, they eat themselves again.”

“Cut that out,” she said.

“I can’t, Maria.”

“Then stop talking. I don’t like it.”

“But it’s true,” I said. “Everybody eats everybody. The city eats itself.”

She left me alone at my table after that. I looked around, but there was no one new to observe. I was the only customer at a table. Most evenings I’m the only one. Birkastan people usually just pick up their brick-oven pizzas. Nobody sits while they wait. I drank and closed my eyes. Maria was playing nineteenth-century opera at a low volume. Opera and pizza were a perfect combination. Large gestures, large promises, large voices — but most of it empty and superficial, followed by a heavy, greasy feeling in your belly, as if your body has been weighed down with concrete.

A young woman came in from the twilight and I overheard her ordering three pizzas: one Margherita, another Margherita, and... Margherita. She was clearly a creature of habit, as am I, simple is best. She was beautiful in an old-fashioned way and the kind I like, as if she’d stepped out of a Swedish film from the forties. Her round face, her pageboy haircut, that certain style of trench coat. Jussi Björling could have been singing in the background, although there weren’t any pizzerias in Sweden in the forties, let alone takeout places. Though perhaps in my decade, the fifties, you could find boiled hot dogs in paper, or fried herring. I was born after the war, in 1953, part of the smallest generation of children ever born in Sweden. I wonder how many of us are still around. Maybe I’m the only one. Though the Met in New York City was Jussi Björling’s main stage for decades, he died of a broken heart in Stockholm’s archipelago. He was forty-nine years old, ten years younger than I am now. It’s not right. He was a true artist in a false profession. He drank... but who doesn’t? He always had a black dog following him... but who doesn’t?

The woman looked in my direction. I lifted my glass in greeting. It was numero due . Not much was left in it either. She glanced away, without nodding or smiling. To her, I was a lone drunkard — that’s a good old-fashioned word, drunkard — sitting in a lonely pizzeria in the loneliest part of town. But she’d be wrong. I’m a thinker. Right then, I was thinking about my own youth, when I was two months shy of my sixteenth birthday and Led Zeppelin released their first album, on January 12, 1969. That was the life, then. And I was one month shy of my seventeenth birthday when Black Sabbath released their first album, on Friday, February 13, 1970. Led Zeppelin changed rock music forever and Black Sabbath picked up their riff and created heavy metal. The sound existed on Led Zeppelin’s first album, but the evil heaviness had been lacking. It was born with Sabbath, and everything since then has been nothing but repetition, just like my life. Like here, at Degiulio’s, where the woman had picked up her pizzas and was heading back out into the darkness without looking in my direction. By now, I was working on my third glass of Alba and my lasagna was in front of me. A perfect portion. I inhaled the aroma. It was slightly bitter from the portobellos, chanterelles, and black pepper.

My phone vibrated in my breast pocket, like a pacemaker with a low battery. I pulled it out: the client.

“So?”

“Somebody saw John,” she said.

“Where?”

“Karlberg station,” she said. “He was leaving.”

“Where was he heading?”

“I don’t know. God, time is running out!”

“Who saw him?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me,” I said.

“It’s not important.”

“I’m hanging up now,” I said. “I’ll call back later tonight.”

I ended the call and got up from the table. Maria glanced at me.

“I have to go out for a while,” I said.

“Take care of yourself,” she said.

Night had fallen over the city. I heard noises above my head and looked up. A dozen ravens were flying in loose formation toward the west; the flock looked like a Rorschach test against the electric sky. I didn’t want to interpret what I saw, it would just scare me. The ravens were cawing, hoarse and scoffing, as if they knew everything.

I followed Atlasgatan to Sankt Eriksgatan, then took a right and went south to Norrbackagatan.

Everything was quiet in front of Karlberg station. It was the time of day where normalcy rules, where healthy humanity draws inward, does the dishes, puts the kids to sleep, works on the crossword, all those things I’ve longed for all my life.

No John there. Nobody had seen him. To me, it seemed that the client knew who’d spotted him. Perhaps she had. She was nuts, really, which was why I was standing there uselessly.

I walked back the way I’d come. I met no one.

Maria nodded when I stepped back into Degiulio’s.

“Let’s start over from the beginning,” I said. “Including the wine.”

I sat at my table and called Rebecka.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Did you really go there?”

“Yes, and now I’m having my dinner,” I said.

“But it could be too late!” There was a note of desperation in her voice, raspy like a file. I’d heard it before. The client comes to me with a practiced cool air, with practiced replies, but those soon collapse and blow away just like bad rock music or bad literature. Only naked panic is left.

“It’s never too late,” I said. My own practiced reply, superficial and false.

“I trusted you!” she said.

“Congratulations.”

“He might take off again!”

“Then I’ll find him again,” I said. I put my fork into the fresh lasagna Maria had set before me. It was new, not the old portion warmed up in the microwave. The food steamed, just like it should, you could burn your tongue on it if you wanted; you ought to at least have the option.

“You didn’t find him!”

“No.”

Maria brought the wine. It had the same refracted color as before.

“But I will,” I continued. “Was John seen anywhere else?”

“No, just here in Birkastan.”

She’d tripped up. Earlier, she’d said she lived in Östermalm, that she was heading back there straight from my office.

“Give me something more specific,” I said. “Besides the station.”

“Have you been drinking?” she asked.

“Answer me,” I said.

“It sounds as if you’ve been drinking.”

“I’m trying to eat my dinner.”

She said something I didn’t catch, and I hung up and dropped my phone back into my breast pocket so I could eat. I remembered when I was a child, I’d gone with an uncle to the woods around Nykvarn to search for mushrooms and we found a glade that shone like real gold from the chanterelles, and that was the last time I was ever happy, actually happy, like the people in magazines and on TV. I thought about John. I thought about the song “Good Times Bad Times,” the single from Led Zeppelin’s first album.

The train station was once again as silent as the sky above Karlberg Lake. If John had been here earlier in the evening, he was certainly gone now, sucked into the glittering city. There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold . I thought of this other Led Zeppelin song as I glanced over at the bike rack with its long row of locked bikes with stolen wheels. Can’t trust anything or anybody these days. It resembled an art installation, a commentary on something about which I ought to be aware. This is true art as far as I’m concerned: pictures sent directly to my insides, lighting them up, something pure and clear and simple.