Lars Kepler - The Nightmare

Svetlana’s head snaps backward. Sweat and snot spray out. Svetlana’s dark blue mouth guard flies away and her knees give out. She falls straight to the mat and rolls over once, remaining still for a second before she starts to move again.

After the match, Saga Bauer pads around the women’s dressing room feeling the tension run out of her body. There’s a taste of blood and tape in her mouth. She’d had to use her teeth to undo the fabric tape around her glove’s lacing. She looks at herself in the mirror and wipes away a few tears. Her nose is throbbing. She’d been thinking of other things during the match: her conversation with her boss and the head of the National Criminal Investigation Department and the decision that she was supposed to work with Joona Linna.

Inside her locker door is a sticker with the name Sodertalje Rockets and a picture of a rocket that looks like an angry shark.

Saga’s hands shake as she pulls off her shorts, pelvic protection and underwear, a black tank top, and the bra with the breast shield. Shivering, she steps into the showers and turns on the stream of water. Water pours over her neck and back. She forces her mind to think of things other than Joona Linna as she spits blood-tinged saliva into the floor drain.

There are about twenty women in the dressing room when she returns. A round of KI aerobics must have just let out. Saga doesn’t notice them stop and stare at her in disbelief.

Saga Bauer is astonishingly beautiful, beautiful in a way that makes people weak in the knees. Her face is perfectly symmetrical and free of makeup, her eyes remarkably large and sky blue. Even with her pumped-up muscles and recent bruises, at five feet seven she’s finely shaped; most of the women in the dressing room would take her to be a ballet dancer, not an elite boxer or an investigator with Sapo’s security department.

Or they’d see her as an elf or a fairy princess, like Tuvstarr the valiant princess, able to stand fearlessly before the huge, dark troll in the paintings of the legendary artist John Bauer. John Bauer had two brothers: Hjalmar and Ernst. Ernst was Saga’s great-grandfather. She never met him, but she still remembers well the tales her grandfather told about his own father’s grief when his brother John, wife Esther, and their baby son drowned one November night on Lake Vattern just a few hundred meters from the harbor of Hastholmen. Three generations later, John Bauer’s painting seems to have miraculously come to life in Saga.

Saga Bauer knows that she’s a good investigator, even though she’s never brought an investigation to its conclusion. She’s used to having her work pulled out from under her or being excluded after weeks of hard work. She’s used to being overprotected and overlooked for dangerous assignments. Used to it. But that doesn’t mean she likes it.

She did very well at the Police Training Academy; after that, she went to the Security Service to be trained in counterterrorism and there rose to the rank of investigator. She’s worked on both investigative and operational duties, and all the while, she’s never neglected continuing education and she’s always kept to a tough physical-training routine. She runs daily, boxes at least twice a week, and not a week goes by where she fails to make the shooting range with her Glock 21 and an M90 sharpshooter rifle.

Saga lives with a jazz musician, a pianist named Stefan Johansson, whose group won a Swedish Grammy for their sorrowful, improvisational album A Year Without Esbjorn. When Saga gets home from work or training, she’ll lie on the sofa, eating candy, watching a movie with the sound off, while Stefan plays the piano for hours at a time.

Leaving the gym, Saga spots her opponent waiting by the concrete plinths.

“I just wanted to congratulate you and say thanks for a good match,” Svetlana says.

Saga stops. “Thanks.”

Svetlana turns red. “You’re amazingly good.”

“So are you.”

Svetlana looks toward the ground and smiles.

Garbage is caught in the twigs of square-cut bushes meant to decorate the entrance of the parking lot.

“You taking the train?” Saga asks.

“Yeah, I guess I better start walking.”

Svetlana picks up her bag, but then stops. She wants to say something else but has trouble letting it out. “Saga… hey, I’m sorry about what my guy said,” she finally says. “I don’t know if you heard… but he’s not coming to any more of my matches.”

Svetlana clears her throat and then starts walking again.

“Wait a minute,” Saga says. “If you’d like, I can give you a ride to the station.”

Penelope cuts across the slope at an angle. She slips on the loose stones, slides; her hand shoots out to balance her and it gets cut. She cries out; pain shoots from her wrist. Her shoulders and back burn too. She can’t stop coughing. She forces herself to look behind, into the forest, between the tree trunks; she dreads catching sight of their pursuer again.

Bjorn helps her up, muttering something as he does. His eyes are bloodshot and haunted.

“We can’t stay still,” he’s whispering.

Where is the pursuer? Is he close-by? Has he lost them? Not that many hours ago, they were lying on a kitchen floor while he was looking in the window. Now they’re running up through a spruce thicket. They can smell the warm scent of the pine needles and they keep going, hand in hand.

There’s a rustling and, crying out in fear, Bjorn takes a sudden step to the side and gets a branch in the face.

“I don’t know how much longer I can take this,” he says, panting.

“Don’t think about it.”

They slow to a walk. It is hard to ignore the pain in their knees and feet. Through brushwood and rotting piles of leaves, they keep going, down into a ditch, up through weeds, and finally they find themselves on a dirt track. Bjorn looks around and whispers to her to follow. He starts running south, toward the more inhabited area of Skinnardal. It can’t be far. She limps a few steps and then begins to run after him. The track curves around a grove of birches and, once past the white trunks, they suddenly see two people. There’s a woman barely out of her teens, dressed in a short tennis dress, talking to a man standing by a red motorcycle.

Penelope zips up her hoodie and sucks in air through her nose to steady her breath.

“Hi,” she says.

They’re staring at her. It’s easy to see why: she and Bjorn are bloody and dirty.

“We’ve had an accident,” she says. “We need to borrow a phone.”

Tortoiseshell butterflies flutter over the goosefoot and horsetail growing in the ditch.

The man nods and hands his phone to Penelope.

“Thanks,” Bjorn says, although he keeps his eyes glued on the road and into the forest.

“What happened?” the man asks.

Penelope doesn’t know what to say. Tears begin to stream down her cheeks.

“An accident,” Bjorn says.

“Oh my God,” the woman in the tennis dress hisses to her boyfriend. “She’s that bitch.”

“Who?”

“The bitch on TV the other day who was criticizing our Swedish exports.”

Penelope doesn’t hear. She tries to smile engagingly at the young woman as she taps out Claudia’s number. But her hands are shaking too hard and she hits the wrong number. She has to stop and try again. Her hands shake so fiercely she’s afraid she’ll drop the phone. The young woman is whispering into her boyfriend’s ear.

She plants herself in front of Penelope. “Tell me something. Do you think that hardworking people, people working sixty hours a week, are supposed to pay for people like you to just say whatever the hell you want on some television program?”