Åke Edwardson - Never End

She didn't answer. They sat quiet for some minutes.

It was getting darker all the time. It was a little darker now than it had been at the same time last night. Just as warm, but darker. The darkness for a new season was moving in. "Do not step gently into the good night," thought Halders.

"Here comes another car," Helander said.

It was approaching from behind them.

"Keep sitting up," said Halders. He ducked down just a little bit.

The car stopped outside the house. The door opened. A woman emerged from the car.

"Is that her?" asked Halders, speaking mainly to himself.

"No."

The woman seemed young. She went into the house. No more lights were turned on. The car left.

They waited. Halders drank some coffee, which steamed shyly as he poured it out from his Thermos.

"Somebody's coming," Helander said. "On foot."

Somebody emerged from the shadows below them, from the river. He climbed up the steps to the street. The steps were almost directly opposite the house. It was a man, and he looked around before crossing the empty street that was now lit up by the moon and the stars and the streetlights, or was it the sky? He was wearing a light-colored suit and his hair was the same color as the streetlights. He wasn't a young man. He turned right and seemed to be looking straight at them, as they sat hidden in the darkness of their car.

"He can't see us," said Halders. "Sit still." He'd placed a piece of paper over the steaming cups.

The man turned toward the house and went in.

"Kurt Bielke," said Halders softly.

It was quiet again in the street. The man had disappeared into the remarkable house. Helander had never seen Kurt Bielke before.

Night was starting to turn into day. She could see the lights from the night's last ferry from Denmark on its way to the dock on the other side of the river.

Halders got out of the car.

"What are you going to do?" she whispered.

"Take a look at this place."

"Isn't that a little risky?"

"We'll soon find out."

"Should I call for backup?"

"Good God, no. I'm only going to take a little look."

"Don't do anything silly, Fredrik. I'll check on you every twenty minutes." The mobile phone would vibrate in Halders's pocket, but there would be no sound.

"I'll call you," said Halders. "But if you do call and I can't answer, I'll turn it off to signal that everything's OK."

"Twenty minutes."

He didn't reply, but left without a word. She never saw him cross the street, but shortly afterward thought she might have seen a shadowy figure in the garden behind the house.

Halders stood under one of three trees ten meters from the house. There were lights in two of the windows, but he couldn't see anybody. There was no sound coming from inside.

Now what?

There was no door leading down to the basement. That would have been too easy.

The two windows on the left were dark. He moved swiftly over the lawn. Both windows were the old-fashioned sash type and appeared to be closed, but the left-hand one didn't close quite flush. Halders guessed there would be a latch that he couldn't see, and he took a thin chopstick, which he'd taken from Ming's that same afternoon, from his inside pocket. He inserted it into the narrow crack, located the latch, and unfastened it. It wasn't easy, as the window was almost two meters from the ground.

He opened the window and put the chopstick back in his pocket.

He looked around. There was a cistern at the gable end a few meters to the left. He went up to it to test how heavy it was, and found it was fairly light, as there had been no more than one or two short thundery showers for ages. It wasn't difficult to carry it to the window.

He climbed onto it and peered in: furniture outlined in the murky darkness, a door looking grayish-white at the back of the room. Nothing animate in there.

Halders clambered through the window, and looked back, but saw nobody racing up with a machine gun. Nobody came barging in through the door.

He could hear the usual sounds of night from outside.

Now what?

He went to the door and listened. No footsteps. A mumbling sound coming from somewhere, music perhaps. He could see there was no light on the other side of the door, so he opened it.

He found himself in a hall, empty. There were a couple more doors. A Chinese box, he thought. Go in through one door, and you find another one. Go in through that, go in through the next one. You always go in, but never out.

There was a light behind the door to the right, at the end of the hall, but a weaker light under the door to the left. As if it were coming from farther away. He walked quickly and quietly to this one and took hold of the handle. He opened the door carefully and saw a staircase leading down to the light.

Helander expected Halders to come back at any moment. The idiot. I was supposed to be playing the heroic part in this drama. I found the house. It should be me creeping around inside.

She knew that she would never do that.

A car approached from behind and passed. She'd heard something but not seen it until it drove past and parked outside the house. It had been moving slowly with no lights on. A shiver ran down her spine. Had they seen her sitting in the car?

Nobody got out. She ducked down but was able to see the silhouette of somebody in the driving seat. Their arm was bent. Whoever it was might be on the phone. Maybe talking about the occupied car not far away.

This is dangerous, she thought. More dangerous than we anticipated. I'll call as soon as I can. More than twenty minutes has passed.

Halders went down the stairs. He crept down. He felt as if he were acting in a film. Normally he never crept. When had he last crept? When he reached the fourth step he suddenly thought about his children. He could see Margareta. My whole life is passing before my eyes. Does that mean I'm dying? Huh. We're all dying. Nobody lives forever. Am I scared? No. I have my Sig Sauer in its holster, and I'm strong. It's definitely stupid of me, coming in here. There's a woman I think I'm in love with.

He was at the bottom. This was the basement. There was another door in the Chinese box, and it wasn't closed. Ten meters to go. He could walk that without casting a shadow. There was music. He could see a shadow himself. The music was some awful disco rubbish from the lunatic seventies. He went closer and the music came closer. He saw that the door led into another hall, or a narrow corridor. Somebody was moving in there. Halders took out his gun, which was cold and comradely in his hand. What am I getting into? he thought. He could hear a voice, a woman's voice, and then a man's voice, shouting, or bellowing, no, something different, sobbing now, Good God, the voice was rising and falling, the awful music bounced down the brick-lined corridor, which felt narrower and narrower the farther he went. He could see the woman gyrating to the music; she was wearing a G-string, nothing else: she was chewing gum, thinking about something else, and Halders was closer, there was a pane of glass between her and the man who was on all fours in front of her and baying to the moon, wearing nothing but a dog leash around his neck. Kurt Bielke was staring at everything and nothing without seeing, it was him, and Halders saw his body starting to twitch, like a religious fanatic in a state of ecstasy at some religious cult meeting, a cult meeting, Halders repeated to himself. I'll shoot that filthy bastard right between the eyes. Bielke swayed backward and forward and Halders had seen all he needed to see for the time being, thank you very much, and took a step backward, then another, and felt the blow, actually felt it, saw it with the eyes in the back of his head, as if it were coming at him in slow motion, as if it were all over before it actually smashed into his skull.