Red Wolf_ A Novel Part 33

Slowly she started to climb the stairs all the way up to the attic floor, soundlessly, slightly giddy.

Sophia's front door was more modern than the others in the building white and minimalistic.

Annika stared at the brushed bronze nameplate, her feet wide apart, anch.o.r.ed to the marble. Her chest rose and sank, the stone tore and pulled. Then she took out her mobile again and dialled directory inquiries again, this time asking for the number of the Federation of County Councils.

'Sophia Grenborg, please,' she said.

The voice that answered sounded just as breezy as it had on the answer machine.

'My name's Sara, and I'm calling from the journal County Council World County Council World,' Annika said, staring at the nameplate. 'I'm calling a few people before Christmas to see if I could just ask one quick question.'

Sophia Grenborg laughed, a light, tinkling sound. 'Well,' she said, 'I suppose so . . .'

'What would you like for Christmas?' Annika said, running the palm of her hand over Sophia's front door.

The woman at the other end laughed again. 'A kiss from my beloved,' she said, 'although some bath salts would be good, too.'

Everything went black before Annika's eyes, a dark sheet drifting past through her brain.

'Beloved?' she said in a flat voice. 'Would that be your husband?'

More laughter. 'He's a bit of a secret at the moment. County Council World County Council World, you said? That's a decent magazine, you cover the things that matter in our field really well. Which issue will this be in?'

Annika closed her eyes and ran a hand over her forehead, the stairwell was starting to tilt, a sucking wave shifting from wall to wall.

'Sorry, what?'

'The questionnaire! Will it be out before Christmas?'

She was forced to crouch down, leaning her back against the door.

'We don't quite know how much s.p.a.ce we've got, it depends on adverts.' Did County Council World County Council World have adverts? She had no idea. have adverts? She had no idea.

The line fell silent. Annika could hear Sophia Grenborg breathing, listened to the other woman's rhythmic intake of air.

'Well,' Sophia said, 'if there wasn't anything else . . .'

'My surname's Grenborg too,' Annika said. 'Do you think we could be related?'

The laughter was less hearty this time. 'Hmm, what did you say your name was?'

'Sara,' Annika said. 'Sara Grenborg.'

'Which branch of the family?'

Was she imagining things, or had Sophia's accent got a bit posher?

'Sodermanland,' Annika said.

'We're from osterbotten, from the Vase manor-house. Are you descended from Carl-Johan?'

'No,' Annika said. 'From Sofia Katarina.'

All of a sudden she could no longer be bothered to listen to Sophia La-di-da b.l.o.o.d.y Grenborg, and she hung up in the middle of a word.

She sat in silence and waited for her pulse to stop racing, resting a hand against Sophia Grenborg's front door, gradually absorbing the woman into her bloodstream.

She closed her eyes and concentrated on the cold staircase, listened to her voice, saw her sitting doing her lovely work in her lovely Federation, just loving the articles in County Council World County Council World. A woman so cold and well-behaved and appreciated that her own husband had chosen to kiss her outside NK, a woman who was everything she would never be.

She left the building without looking back.

37.

The man woke up with the pink duvet cover tickling his nose. He snorted, then groaned as the pain from his stomach reached his head. The wooden panels in the ceiling swayed slowly to and fro, he looked away and stared into the boarded walls, shocked at how bad his breath smelled. The smell was taking him over.

La mort est dans cette ville, he thought, panting for breath.

He could see the doctor's face floating above him, as it had the day he woke up from the anaesthetic, his friend's clenched jaw and evasive gaze; he had already been informed about the consequences and alternatives and understood immediately.

Inoperable, untreatable. Three to six months from the diagnosis. The remaining time would entail a lot of pain, sickness, digestive trouble, weight loss, severe nausea, extreme tiredness, low blood pressure. Treatment consisted of anti-sickness medicine, painkillers and nutritional supplements.

He knew he would fade, almost rot, away. The smell would become more intrusive, his friend the doctor had advised him not to try to hide it with scent or aftershave. It wouldn't help.

He gazed around the room, looking over the kitchen area in the corner and the panels on the walls and the colourful rugs on the plastic floor, trying to find something that wasn't moving. He stopped at the window. Through the gap in the heavy curtains he could see blue daylight, cold, crisp. Gradually the world stopped swaying and he was able to breathe more easily, sliding into his dreamlike state where the limitations of reality were gradually wiped away.

'I'm from Bojen Sailing Club; I'd like to book a seminar room from seven p.m. on Tuesday,' he heard himself say with a peculiar echo in the background. In front of him the librarian had big books open on the desk. He knew she no longer believed him, because he couldn't possibly be a sailor and a fly-fisherman, a b.u.t.terfly collector and a genealogist.

Everyone who came to the meeting had a codename, regular names like Greger or Torsten or Mats. His choice of Ragnwald was met with frowns. You shouldn't give yourself airs; but he was better than them and they knew that.

He laughed quietly in his in-between-world, returned to the old works that fever-hot night in early summer 1969 when the world was on the brink of the great revolution and they were ready. They had prepared for armed struggle and had guards patrolling the camp day and night. The company carved cudgels by the campfire, they discussed guerrilla warfare and practised self-defence.

In Norway the antagonism between left-wing activists and the others had been much greater than in Sweden. A radical bookshop had been bombed. They were convinced that it would soon be their turn, and they weren't about to let themselves be led like lambs to the slaughter.

The fact that they were doing their training in Melderstein was particularly amusing, because the regime at the old works was religious. But because he had booked it as a parish a.s.sistant in Lulea no one had questioned his motives, and they had held thundering Maoist meetings in the little works church.

He was filled with the complete sense of harmony he had experienced in those few days, reliving once again how his capacity to remember all the quotations had given him a central position in the leadership, even though the delegates had come from all over the country. They practised battle skills and survival through the night, and it was there that he met Red Wolf.

He smiled at the ceiling, drifting off on the waves, seeing before him her soft face and thin little body. She was so young and so wide-eyed and she saw him as a Master. No one else had his experience of the Rebel movement and the Student Union occupation. He was secure on his throne, and even though little Red Wolf had only come to keep her friend company at the summer camp without realizing what it was about, she was swept up in it. She became a Servant of the Revolution quicker than he had dared hope, and she did it for his sake.

For his sake.

Karina who kissed him behind Melderstein church. He could still recall the taste of her chewing-gum.

He turned over in the bed.

In Bojen Sailing Club they had formed cells where they decided where people would live and work: a flat in ornnaset and the nightshift at the ironworks; a small cottage in Svartostaden and work with the local council. They had organized strikes, worked through tenants' a.s.sociations, unions, according to Mao's political theory about the people's front, the people's movements, but it was all going too slowly. They spent too long discussing things; the Fly-fishing Club was full of false authorities who loved the sound of their own voices. The movement's popularity brought with it a load of pretend revolutionaries who only came for the girls and the beer. After Melderstein the mood became rancorous. Two comrades challenged him for the leadership, with the support of others, so he took his family and left. He left bourgeois, small-town communism to die its slow, natural death, and formed his own group to plan how to get hold of real power.

The knife in his stomach twisted again. Ventricular cancer, stomach cancer, apparently rare in Europe these days, strikes without warning. Operation to see if it's treatable or not. Symptoms similar to those of a gastric ulcer, and a gastroscopy discovers an ugly running sore and a suspected tumour, later identified under a microscope. And the patient is opened up, the surrounding organs are found to be full of cancer, and they close up the stomach again. Tumours in the lungs, bones and brain, gradual death from general organ failure caused by too great a burden of tumours.

Three to six months.

Suddenly his father was standing beside his bed and he was panting hard, bouncing off the walls. I accuse you. I hold you responsible for the fall of Adam and Eve.

And the whip was raised and hit him in the diaphragm, a violent convulsion that made him throw up the nutritional powder onto his pillow. His father's voice grew louder, filling the room like a symphony of dissonance.

'You must start your life again, devilish child. Evil art thou, mean and filled with Satan.'

He tried to protest, to beg for mercy, the same song he had sung throughout his childhood: Father, please Father, have mercy; but the whip fell, striking him on the mouth. The pain made him stop breathing for a moment.

'The Devil shall be driven from thy heart and thy eternal soul shall be saved for the Kingdom of Heaven.'

The whip was raised yet again and he looked up at the man who floated beneath the ceiling in his threadbare preacher's outfit, and he knew that his salvation would soon be over.

'Father,' he whispered, feeling the vomit and blood running through his nose. 'Mother never had any more children. Do you know why?'

The noise in the room died away as his father fell silent, the fevered look in his eyes vanished and the whip stopped.

'I remained alone,' he whispered to his father, 'and you never knew why. G.o.d knows that you did your duty to populate the earth, but there were never any more children. And you never realized why?'

His father floated hesitantly under the roof with bloodless lips.

'She aborted them with the Sami woman in Vittangi,' he panted, 'my brothers and sisters. She got the Sami woman to take them out of her belly rather than let you get your hands on them and beat the sin out of them.'

And the whip came to life again and hit him in the head and the world was empty.

38.

Annika threw her outdoor clothes in a heap on the floor in the hall, swept away her uneaten breakfast and put her laptop on the kitchen table. She logged on and looked at the organization of the Federation of County Councils, and on the back of the morning paper she jotted down the departmental t.i.tles Democracy & Health Policy, Economics & Devolution, and the Department of International Finance.

She was thinking hard, her hand over her mouth.

That ought to be enough. Three different sections that probably didn't have the best internal communication. Three stressed middle-managers on the same level.

She took a few deep breaths and called the number of the Federation's reception. She started by asking for the head of Democracy and Health Policy.

'h.e.l.lo,' Annika said, clearing her throat, 'my name's Annika Bengtzon and I'm calling from the Evening Post Evening Post-'

The overworked manager interrupted her abruptly. 'I'll have to refer you to our press office, we have public relations people there who can answer any questions you may have.'

She could hear her thudding heartbeat, and hoped it couldn't be heard at the other end.

'I know,' she said, 'I understand that, but my call isn't really about the sort of thing I can talk to the press office about. Sorry.'

Stunned silence.

'What?' the man said finally. 'What do you mean?'

Annika closed her eyes and said in a steady voice, 'I should begin by saying that I'm not going to quote you; I'm not actually writing an article yet. I just want to clarify some details that emerged when we looked into various aspects of your operations.'

Stress had given way to surprise and suspicion when the man responded. 'What do you mean? What aspects?'

'It's about over-charging on one of your projects.'

It sounded like the man was sitting down. 'Over-charg . . . ? I don't understand . . .'

Annika stared at the ventilation unit.

'As I said, I won't quote you at all at this stage. I just want to check a few things out, and I'd appreciate it if this conversation stayed between us. I shall never mention that I spoke to you, and you don't have to say that you spoke to me.'

Silence.

'What's this about?'

She could physically feel the tug on the line as he took the bait.

'Over-charging from the account connected to the project looking into threats against politicians,' Annika said. 'The one you're conducting together with the a.s.sociation of Local Councils and the Department of Justice.'

'Threats against politicians?'

'The working group trying to prevent violence and threats against politicians, yes. I have to point out that we think the project is incredibly important, and as far as we can tell the work has been very productive, but the problem is in your accounts.'

'I don't actually know what you're talking about.'

Annika waited, let the silence do the talking; her surprise carried off down the line, muddying the manager's senses.

'I see,' she said slowly, 'I was under the impression that you wanted to get to the bottom of this . . .'

Now the man started to get angry. 'What do you mean? The bottom of what? Who says there's anything irregular going on here?'

Annika sharpened her voice when she answered. 'I hope you're not trying to find out my sources. As I'm sure you're aware, that's a criminal offence. I shall ignore that last question.'

Silence fell again, growing, pulsating.

'What's all this about?' the Federation manager eventually said. 'Can't you tell me?'

Annika took a deep, audible breath, then spoke with a low, confidential tone of voice. 'According to my source there has been over-charging from the account containing the funds for the working group investigating threats to democratic representatives. One member of the group is said to have inflated the joint costs in order to conceal private expenditure.'