Хеннинг Манкелль: Firewall

The wind died down toward evening, then stopped completely.

He was standing on the balcony. Some days he could see a sliver of ocean between the buildings across the way. Right now it was too dark. Sometimes he set up his telescope and looked into the lighted windows of the other apartments. But he always started to feel as if someone was onto him and then he would stop.

The stars were very clear and bright.

It’s already fall , he thought. There may even be a touch of frost tonight, though it’s early for Scania .

A car drove by. He shivered and went back in. The door to the balcony was hard to close and needed some adjustment. He added it to the to-do list he kept on a pad of paper in the kitchen.

He walked into the living room, pausing in the doorway to look around. Since it was Sunday, the place was immaculately clean. It gave him a feeling of satisfaction.

He sat down at his desk and pulled out the thick journal he kept in one of the drawers. As usual, he began by reading his entry from the night before.

Saturday, the fourth of October, 1997. Gusty winds, 8-10 meters per second according to the National Weather Service. Broken cloud formations. Temperature at six o‘clock: seven degrees Celsius. Temperature at two o’clock: eight degrees Celsius.

Below that he had added four sentences.

No activity in c-space today. No messages. C doesn’t reply when prompted. All is calm.

He removed the lid of the ink pot and carefully dipped the nib in the ink. It had been his father’s pen, one his father had saved from his early days as an assistant clerk at a bank in Tomelilla. He never used any other pen for writing in his journal.

The wind died away as he was writing. The thermometer outside the kitchen window read three degrees Celsius. The sky was clear. He made a note of the fact that cleaning the apartment had taken three hours and twenty-five minutes. That was ten minutes faster than last Sunday.

He had also taken a short walk down to the marina, after meditating in Saint Maria’s church for thirty minutes.

He hesitated, then wrote, Short walk in the evening.

He pressed the blotting paper over the few lines he had just written, wiped off the pen, and replaced the lid of the ink pot.

Before shutting the journal, he glanced over at the old ship’s clock that stood next to him on the desk. It was twenty minutes past eleven.

He walked out into the hall, put on his leather jacket, and pulled on an old pair of rubber boots. He stuck a hand in his pocket to make sure he had his wallet and his keys.

Once he was down on the street, he stood in the shadows for a while and looked around. There was no one there, just as he had expected. He started walking down to the left, as he usually did, crossing the highway to Malmö and heading down toward the department stores and the red brick building that housed the Tax Authorities. He increased his speed until he found his usual smooth evening rhythm. He walked quickly in the daytime to get his heart rate up, but the evening walks had a different purpose. This was when he tried to empty his mind, preparing for sleep and the day to come.

Outside one of the department stores, he passed a woman with a German shepherd. He almost always bumped into her on his evening walks. A car drove by at high speed, music blaring.

They have no inkling of what’s in store for them, he thought. All these hooligans who drive around permanently damaging their hearing with their obnoxious music. They don’t know. They know as little as that woman out walking her dog.

The thought cheered him up. He thought about the power he wielded, the sense of being one of the chosen. He had the power to do away with the hardened, corrupt ways of this society and create a new order, something completely unexpected.

He stopped and looked up at the night sky.

Nothing is truly comprehensible , he thought. My own life is as incomprehensible as the fact that the light I now see from the stars has been traveling for eons. The only source of meaning is my own course of action, like the deal that I was offered twenty years ago and that I accepted without hesitation.

He continued on his way, increasing his speed because his thoughts were making him excited. He felt a growing sense of impatience. They had waited so long for this. Now the moment was approaching when they would open the invisible dams and watch their tidal wave sweep over the world.

But not yet. The moment was not quite here, and impatience was a weakness he would not permit himself.

He turned and started back. As he walked past the Tax Authority, he decided to go to the cash machine in the plaza. He put his hand over the pocket where he kept his wallet. He wasn’t going to make a withdrawal, just get an account balance and make sure all was as it should be.

He stopped in the light by the ATM and took out his card. The woman with the German shepherd was long gone. A heavily loaded truck drove past on the Malmö highway, probably on its way to one of the Poland ferries. By the sound of it, the muffler was damaged.

He fed his card into the slot, punched in his code, and selected the button for account balance. The machine returned his card and he slipped it back into his wallet. He listened to the whirring and clicking and smiled. If they only knew , he thought. If people only knew what lay in store for them.

The white slip of paper with his account balance slid out of the slot. He felt around for his glasses before he realized he had left them in his other coat. He felt a twinge of irritation at this oversight.

He walked over to the place under the street lamp where the light was strongest and studied the slip of paper.

There was Friday’s withdrawal, as well as the cash he had taken out the day before. His balance was 9,765 kronor. Everything was in order.

What happened next came without warning.

It was as if he had been kicked by a horse. The pain was sudden and violent.

He fell forward with the white piece of paper clutched in his hand.

As his head hit the asphalt he had a final moment of clarity. His last thought was that he didn’t understand what was happening.

Then a darkness enveloped him from all sides.

It was just past midnight on Monday, the 6th of October, 1997.

A second truck on its way to the night ferry drove by.

Then calm returned to the streets once more.

When Kurt Wallander got into his car on Mariagatan in Ystad, on the morning of the 6th of October, 1997, it was with reluctance. It was a little after eight o’clock. He drove out of the city, wondering what had possessed him to say he would go. He had a deep and passionate dislike of funerals, and yet that was exactly what he was on his way to attend. Since he had plenty of time, he decided against taking the direct route to Malmö. Instead, he took the coastal highway toward Svarte and Trelleborg. He glimpsed the sea on his left-hand side. A ferry was approaching the harbor.

He thought about the fact that this was his fourth funeral in seven years. First there had been his colleague Rydberg, who died of cancer. It had been a protracted and painful end. Wallander had often visited him in the hospital where he lay slowly wasting away. Rydberg’s death had been a huge blow. Rydberg was the one who had made a police officer out of him. He had taught Wallander to ask the right questions. Through watching him work, Wallander had slowly learned how to read the information hidden at the scene of a crime. Before he started working with Rydberg, Wallander had been a very average policeman. It was only after many years, after Rydberg’s death, that Wallander realized he had become not only a stubborn and energetic detective, but a good one. He still held long, silent conversations with Rydberg in his head when he tackled a new investigation and didn’t quite know how to proceed. He experienced a brief sense of loss and sadness at Rydberg’s absence almost every day. Those feelings would never go away.