Mattias Berg - The Carrier

Then Ingrid picked up the path to Stockholms Centralstation. Since she no longer knew if the tunnel system was safe or accessible, we had to take the external route, above ground, under the cover of the dense trees next to the motorway. For once, Jesús María was last in our column. But in spite of her heavy medical pack, and the fact that according to Ingrid she had been largely inactive for more than a month, she had no difficulty in keeping up with us.

I knew nothing of Sixten and Aina’s fate. I tried to picture in my mind’s eye whether or not they had got to their feet again on the lawn, like two burning torches, but had no memory of it.

I lifted the blind again, made a note of the temperature on some advertising display alongside the tracks. Seven degrees, and it was only the end of October—and as far south as this, relatively speaking. Ingrid had said that there were record low temperatures this fall and that it was certain to become worse further north. As the train sped on, I kept writing in my notebook: described all of these events, from when we emerged through the hatch to celebrate Aina’s birthday.

My pen made a soft scraping noise in the notebook, Ingrid sat and clicked away at her computer in the top couchette. In the mirror I could see her face in the bluish light from the screen: that new look I still could not get used to. Jesús María, unhappy with the middle couchette between Ingrid and me, was somewhere in the corridor, outside our locked door. The conductor had already passed by—clipped our tickets, looked at the false passports which Sixten had organized through some acquaintance at the relevant authority, without passing any comment—and would probably not return during the night.

To judge from the silence, there were not many others in our carriage. I turned off the light and paused until Ingrid too had switched off her computer, lying there under the matted gray woollen blanket: waited for the false sense of familiarity that darkness brings. Then I started to ask my questions, my voice low enough not to be heard beyond the door.

“Was it Sixten that gave us away? Offered up both himself and Aina, so that we would burn in hell?”

“Is that a serious question, my treasure?”

The silence that followed, Ingrid’s surprise, felt genuine.

“Sixten was devastated when he rang. As usual he was mostly worrying about us, about others,” she said.

“So he survived, miraculously?”

“Sixten has at least nine lives. Aina made it, according to the message he sent, also with quite bad burns.”

The corridor outside was quiet. No sign that Jesús María might be trying to hear what was being said, not the least movement beyond the door.

“I saw him with another woman when I was out running the other evening,” I said.

“Sixten?”

An exhalation in the dark.

“Let me guess: tall, blond pageboy cut, very fit. Figure to die for. At least twenty years younger than him.”

“I wasn’t looking that carefully.”

“It was his daughter, Lisa.”

“Daughter?”

“She should of course have been at Aina’s party—had apparently come home for the first time in a long while—but that’s where I drew the line. I’ve after all only seen a picture of her, didn’t dare to allow any more people into our circle.”

I lay quietly, calculating.

“O.K…. so that leaves Jesús María. Who was still in the bathroom when the attack came.”

“She’s my blood sister, Erasmus. Besides, she’ll never betray us. She hates Kurt and John more than she hates you.”

I tried to imagine the Team’s bodyguards in front of me. So very distant and yet at the same time imprinted in our minds for ever.

“Kurt and John… they’re animals, in every way. But why does she hate them more than me—even though I used her as a sledgehammer when we were escaping?”

“Because they did things to her that she will never forget.”

Ingrid’s voice floated through the sleeper compartment. Melodious even at low volume.

“Then she did things to them, in turn. So that they shouldn’t forget her either. And since both Kurt and John were equally guilty, identical in their rotten souls, she made them identical on the outside too. A grim and bitter-sweet little joke. Very much in Jesús María’s spirit.”

I heard coughing in the corridor outside. Maybe the smoke from the roll-up, the drug, had caught in her throat. Ingrid lowered her voice once more.

“This was long before you yourself got so deeply involved, Erasmus. Actually a routine although relatively comprehensive piece of surgery, advanced camouflage in preparation for a major covert operation. One of our two guards—I can no longer remember which—was dark and good-looking, brown eyes, and the other blond and with a much slimmer face, without that dimple in his chin. I think five or six interventions were needed before Jesús María was satisfied. Edelweiss let her have her way. Since then she has just reinforced the likeness with each new surgery, down to the smallest birth mark, until no-one can distinguish them any longer. I wonder if even Jesús María knows. Certainly not Kurt or John themselves.”

Another cough outside the door. In my mind’s eye I could see the conductor doing his night rounds, smelling Jesús María’s cigarette, making a quick call. How the police would then board the train before it had left the platform and arrest us all. There were mass murderers who had been caught because they happened to drop a piece of chewing gum in the street—but that woman in the corridor simply had to test all boundaries.

“So it was Aina who reported us?”

“Mmmm. Or why not you, my treasure?”

The yellow station light leaked in over Ingrid’s duvet cover. But her face was still in darkness: there was no way of seeing her expression.

“Me?” I said.

Once Ingrid had fallen asleep, I took the hybrid and opened the sliding door to the compartment as carefully as possible. Had to make what Edelweiss called an “Unreality Check”: even in surreal situations some things are still more real than others. Jesús María was sitting pressed against the window, her eyes closed to the beautiful dawn, hardly seeming to notice me—until she took a powerful grip on my arm.

“Got tired of the Witch’s tales, Erasmo?”

“She said it was you who turned Kurt and John into twins.”

“And you trust any shit she comes out with?”

Jesús María took a last drag on her cigarette and quickly squeezed it out, between finger and thumb, showing no sign of pain. Then she started writing with her sooty finger in the condensation on the train window.

It took me only a few seconds to decipher the sequence D19 N19 15R 212 319 N5N 316 121 NG, with the help of my key sentence. The one which for most of my life I was convinced nobody else knew about—apart from me and my mother. Before first Ingrid and now Jesús María proved me wrong.

Clearly it said: “DO NOT RELY ON ANYTHING.”

The sun is the strongest thing we know. The warmth which brings life to earth through constant nuclear explosions, fusions. Here even the sun had no chance.

As we slid into Kiruna station, the thermometer showed negative 26.7 at 11.00 a.m. when the sun should have taken the edge off the worst of the cold. There was still some time to go before it disappeared completely below the horizon. A month and a half, according to the calendar.

Ingrid led us alongside the railway tracks, in the direction the train had been traveling in, and then turned off onto a road. There were no people walking in front of us or behind, even though there seemed to be no other way into town. It felt as if the temporary station—more like a barracks building—had been lowered into the wrong place by a crane, left in the middle of nowhere.