Red Wolf_ A Novel Part 24

Berit took off her hat and gloves and folded her scarf. 'I'm thinking of going to lunch early today. Do you want to come?'

Annika logged out of the system, fished her purse out of her bag, and discovered she was out of lunch vouchers.

'Do we have to go down to the canteen?' she said, looking round, suspicious of the newfound warmth.

Berit hung up her coat on a hanger, brushing the garment's shoulders with her hand.

'We could go out if you like, but I did go past the Seven Rats, and it looked pretty empty. They've got stir-fried chicken with cashew nuts downstairs.'

Annika bit the nail of her left index finger, considering the offer, then nodded.

'What have you been out doing?' she asked as they went down the stairs.

'Rumours about a government reshuffle,' Berit said, puffing her hair where it had been squashed by her hat. 'The Prime Minister hasn't got long before the EU elections, and if he's going to rearrange his ministers he has to do it now.'

'And? Who's likely to go this time?' Annika said, picking up an orange plastic tray in the canteen.

'Well, Bjornlund, for a start,' Berit said. 'She's the worst Culture Minister we've ever had. She hasn't come up with a single proposal in nine years. There are rumours that Christer Lundgren is on his way back from exile at Swedish Steel in Lulea.' Berit opened a bottle of low-alcohol beer.

'Really?'

'Well, he never left the management committee, so a ministerial post was probably always in the pipeline.'

Annika nodded. Several years ago she had told Berit her thoughts about Christer Lundgren's resignation, showing her the doc.u.ments and travel receipts that proved that the Trade Minister hadn't even been in Stockholm the night Josefin Liljeberg was killed. He had been meeting someone in Tallinn in Estonia, a meeting that was so controversial that he would rather accept a murder charge than reveal who he had met. There was only one explanation, Annika and Berit had agreed: Christer Lundgren was sacrificing himself for his party. Who he met in Tallinn and what they discussed could never be revealed. And she had told Karina Bjornlund.

She had made the mistake of trying to get a comment from Christer Lundgren by telling the whole story to his press secretary. She never got a reply. Instead, Karina Bjornlund had suddenly become a cabinet minister.

'My stupid question paved the way for our Minister of Culture,' Annika said.

'Probably,' Berit said.

'Which means that it's really my fault that Sweden's got such useless cultural policies, doesn't it?'

'Quite right,' Berit said. 'What did you really want to see me about?' Berit leaned back in her seat.

'I'm after your past,' Annika said. 'What was the 9 April Declaration?'

Berit chewed a mouthful of food, a thoughtful look in her eyes, then shook her head. 'Nope, no idea. Why do you ask?'

Annika drank the last of her water.

'I saw it in the caption to a picture on the net, some lads in the sixties who were going to mobilize the ma.s.ses in the name of Chairman Mao.'

Berit stopped chewing and stared at her. 'Sounds like the Uppsala Rebels.' She put down her knife and fork, ran her tongue over her teeth, and nodded to herself. 'Yes, that fits,' she said. 'They made some sort of declaration in the spring of sixty-eight. I can't swear that it was April ninth, but they were certainly extremely active that spring.'

She laughed and shook her head, then picked up her knife and fork again and went on eating.

'What?' Annika said. 'Tell me!'

Berit sighed and smiled. 'I told you how they would phone and make threats to us at the Vietnam Bulletin Vietnam Bulletin?' she said. 'The Uppsala Rebels were proper little idiots. Every day they held marathon meetings, in various locations. They would start at one in the afternoon and carry on till long after midnight. A friend of mine went along once, said there was very little politics involved he described it as more of a hallelujah orgy.'

'A revivalist meeting?'

Berit took another mouthful, some water, and swallowed.

'That's what they reminded some people of, yes. Everyone who attended was a committed Maoist. They stood up one by one and bore witness to the way Mao's thoughts had been like a spiritual atom bomb for them. After every speaker there was wild applause. Every now and then there'd be a break, and they'd have sandwiches and beer, then they'd carry on with a new round of personal statements.'

'Like what?' Annika said. 'What did they say?'

'They quoted the Master. Anyone trying to formulate their own phrases was immediately accused of bourgeois use of language. The only exception was "Death to the fascists in the Communist a.s.sociation of Marxist-Leninists".'

Annika leaned back in her chair, picking out a cashew nut from under a lettuce leaf and popping it in her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully. 'But surely they were communists as well?'

'Oh yes,' Berit said, wiping her chin with the napkin. 'But nothing upset the rebels more than those who almost almost thought like them. Torbjorn Safve, who wrote a brilliant book about the rebel movement, called it "paranoid discontent". The sort of posters people put up on their walls was a big deal for them. If anyone had a poster of Lenin that was bigger than the picture of Mao, that was regarded as counterrevolutionary. If the top edge of a picture of Mao was lower than the top edge of a picture of Lenin or Marx, that was enough for someone to be accused of a lack of conviction.' thought like them. Torbjorn Safve, who wrote a brilliant book about the rebel movement, called it "paranoid discontent". The sort of posters people put up on their walls was a big deal for them. If anyone had a poster of Lenin that was bigger than the picture of Mao, that was regarded as counterrevolutionary. If the top edge of a picture of Mao was lower than the top edge of a picture of Lenin or Marx, that was enough for someone to be accused of a lack of conviction.'

'I don't suppose you knew an active rebel by the name of Goran Nilsson?' Annika asked, looking expectantly at Berit.

Her colleague reached for a toothpick and pulled off the plastic. 'Not that I can recall. Should I?'

Annika sighed and shook her head.

'Have you tried the archive?' Berit asked.

'Nothing.'

Berit frowned in concentration.

'The first of May that year, the rebels marched through Uppsala in a big, organized demonstration. As far as I remember, all the big papers covered it. Maybe he was involved?'

Annika got up, her tray in one hand and her purse in the other.

'I'll check right now,' she said. 'Are you coming?'

'Why not?' Berit said.

They went out of the canteen's back door and took the emergency staircase to the second floor, then went through a narrow corridor to the huge text and picture archive. Everything ever printed in the Evening Post Evening Post and and Fine Morning News Fine Morning News in the past hundred and fifty years was stored here. in the past hundred and fifty years was stored here.

'The files are at the back on the left,' Berit said.

They found the morning papers from May 1968 after a minute or so. Annika pulled down the bound bundle from the top shelf, covering herself in dust and dirt. She coughed and pulled a face.

2 May 1968: the front page was full of the rebels' demonstration through Uppsala the day before. Annika frowned and looked more closely.

'Are these your revolutionary rebels?' she said in disbelief. 'They look like any other middle-cla.s.s kids, the whole lot of them.'

Berit ran her hand over the yellowing newspaper, a rustling sound beneath her dry fingertip, her middle finger stopping on the cropped head of the leader of the march.

'That was a conscious decision,' she said, her voice distant. 'They were supposed to look like ordinary people as much as possible. They tried to agree on a prototype for the highly industrialized worker, but I don't think that ever happened. But they did agree on a smart jacket and white shirt. They were really weird in Uppsala.'

She leaned back against the bookcase, folded her arms and looked blankly up at the ceiling.

'A general strike broke out all over France in the first week of May, nineteen sixty-eight,' Berit said. 'One million demonstrated in Paris against the capitalist state. The rebels wanted to show solidarity with their French comrades and organized a revolutionary meeting on the Castle Hill in Uppsala one Friday evening. A gang of us from the Bulletin Bulletin went along, it was really awful.' went along, it was really awful.'

She shook her head and looked down at the floor. 'There were a lot of people there, at least three hundred, and the rebels made the mistake of carrying on like they usually did at their own seances, with readings from their holy scriptures. Most of the audience were just ordinary people, and they reacted as you'd imagine, started booing and laughing.'

Annika was absorbed in the story and took a step closer. 'What scriptures?'

Berit looked up. 'Readings from Mao, of course,' she said, 'Lin Biao's pamphlet, Long Live the Victory of the People's War! Long Live the Victory of the People's War!, the Chinese Communist Party's Sixteen Points for cultural revolution . . . The rebels lost all their inhibitions at that meeting, and when the ma.s.ses failed to support them they fell back on their usual tactics savage, rabid diatribes.' She shook her head at the memory.

'One direct consequence of that meeting was that ordinary left-wing organizations were no longer allowed to sell The Spark The Spark and the and the Vietnam Bulletin Vietnam Bulletin in workplaces. Can you see your Goran?' in workplaces. Can you see your Goran?'

'I'm going to stay and read for a while,' Annika said, pulling over a rickety chair.

'Well, you know where I am if you need me,' Berit said, and left her among the paper and dust.

28.

The telephone rang, making Anne start. She quickly pushed the bottle back in the drawer and locked it before she picked up the receiver.

'What did you do to Sylvia yesterday?' Mehmet's voice was treacherously smooth, but Anne knew him, knew there was lava and sulphur bubbling beneath the calm surface.

'Surely the real question is, what the h.e.l.l was she doing at my daughter's nursery?' Anne said, as the world shattered into tiny pieces. Anger and despair turned the sky outside black.

'Can't we at least behave like adults?' Mehmet said, the temperature of his voice rising.

'And which particular adult plan had you worked out yesterday? That I'd get to the nursery and find that Miranda had disappeared? What was I supposed to think? That Miranda had left me because she'd rather be with Sylvia? That she'd been kidnapped?'

'Now you're just being ridiculous.' He was no longer able to conceal his anger.

'Ridiculous?' Anne screamed down the phone, standing up. 'Ridiculous? What the h.e.l.l are you up to with your cosy f.u.c.king nuclear family? First you come round and say you and your new f.u.c.k want custody of my daughter, then she tries to steal her from nursery, what the h.e.l.l are you up to? Are you trying to terrorize me?'

'Calm down,' Mehmet said, and the phone went ice-cold, the heated anger exchanged for hatred, the chill striking her ear, making her stiffen.

'Go to h.e.l.l,' she said, and hung up.

She stood there, staring at the phone. He called her straight back.

'So now Miranda's yours alone? What happened to all your fine ideals about mutual responsibility? Your high-flown theories about shared parenting, that the child should belong to the collective and not the individual?'

Anne Snapphane sank onto her chair again. She had never imagined she could be sucked into such a stinking swamp of bitterness and ill-will and envy, the place where below-the-belt blows come from. And she couldn't help it, she was there already, the quicksand had her, and if she struggled she would only sink to the bottom even faster.

'Oh, come on,' she said. 'Who betrayed who? Who left who? Who's trying to mess things up? It b.l.o.o.d.y well isn't me.'

'Sylvia spent the whole evening crying. She was inconsolable,' Mehmet said, his voice sounding thick and tearful in a way that made Anne furious.

'Good grief,' she shouted. 'It's hardly my fault she's got bad nerves!'

Mehmet paused for breath, gathering his larynx for a full-frontal a.s.sault.

'Sylvia said that you had destroyed her, and there's something you need to know, Anne: if you ruin things for my family, I won't be responsible for my actions.'

Anne felt the air being squeezed out of her lungs, all the oxygen disappearing from her brain.

'Are you threatening me?' she said. 'Are you mad? Have you really sunk that low?'

The distance on the line grew, rolling round and round the swamp, and when he came back on the line he was light-years away.

'Okay,' he said, 'if that's how you want it.'

And then it was silent, gone, the dialogue broken, and all around her everything was bubbling and frothing, and Anne leaned over her desk and wept.

Annika was getting more and more restless as she climbed the stairs back to the newsroom. Her search through the old editions had given her nothing but dirty hands and dusty jeans. The political climate of the time had not been consciously addressed in the contemporary media. Every day was just a new headline, then as now, with adverts to sell and stories to write and police reports to check.

The layout and print quality of newspapers in the sixties was terrible, scratchy fonts and badly reproduced pictures. She was glad she hadn't been working then.

But every age has its own ideals, she thought as she headed towards her gla.s.s room. You live in an age just as much as you do in a place, and the sixties wouldn't have suited her.

Did the twenty-first century, though?

She heard the phone start to ring and lengthened her strides.

'I heard you were trying to get hold of me,' said Hans Blomberg, the archivist of the Norrland News Norrland News.

'Oh, I'm glad you called,' Annika said, pulling the door shut behind her. 'How are you?'

A brief moment of surprise. 'Why do you ask?'

She sat down on her chair, surprised in turn that he sounded so nonplussed.

'The receptionist said you were ill, I was worried.'

'Ah, yes, the tenderness of women,' Hans Blomberg said, sounding as Annika remembered him, and she had to smile, picturing him sitting there in his cardigan next to his battered desk with the noticeboard above it, the child's drawing, the sign telling him to hold out until retirement.

'Nothing serious, I hope?' Annika stretched back in her chair.

'No, no,' the archivist said, 'just the usual. I'm past my sell-by date, but I'm probably okay in the fridge for a few more days before they throw me out.'

Her smile faded as he spoke. The tone was cheerful but his frustration was obvious.

'Ha,' Annika said brightly, choosing to ignore the bitterness. 'To me you're like a vintage wine.'

'Oh, it takes a Stockholm girl to appreciate a real man. What can I help you with, young lady?'