The sun in the window behind me was starting to set over Stockholm. Like a freshly powdered corpse, it’s always most beautiful in the twilight. Stockholm can’t bear the day; it lives at night, like a vampire.

The light shone into the eyes of the woman walking into my office. She could see me as nothing more than a silhouette, but I could observe her in detail.

She didn’t wear much makeup. She sat down in what passed for an armchair in front of my desk. Well, neither the armchair nor the desk were worthy of the name, but they were what I owned and obviously she decided they were enough.

For what? For help?

That’s what goes through my head each time I meet a new client. Self-esteem is not one of my strong points. I’m still fairly good at my job, but my grip on things is growing more tenuous by the day. The signs are all there — sentimentality, compassion, thoughtfulness, all those complicating emotions tied to goodness — but I can scarcely help myself these days, especially that day, as I was hungover and had already downed the hair of the dog, a bad sign for sure, but of late my life has consisted of one bad sign after another, my job of bad news, really bad news. I had tried to lighten my depression by reading the book on the desk in front of me, but the words made no sense, even less than usual.

Human beings, in the shape of angels or demons, come into my office in Birkastan somewhat randomly. The woman sitting in the armchair in front of me, now crossing her legs, resembled an angel who had determined to forsake the light of heaven to glide down the stairway to the dark, to the earth. To me. But her eyes were cold, as if she’d already seen everything, been everywhere down here.

“Can I get right to the point?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“I need your help to find John.”

“Who’s John?”

“A man I know.”

“I’ll need more than that.”

“He’s disappeared,” she said before looking at something out the window behind me — but there was nothing there, just Stockholm dying her death in beauty. The woman shifted her gaze to the bookshelf just to the left of my window. It was filled with crime novels. Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Borges, Stendhal, Yates, Burroughs, Hemingway, Strindberg. She examined the open book on my desk.

“What are you reading there?”

“Finnegan’s Wake,” I said. “James Joyce.”

“Is it good?”

“I’ve just started.”

“You’re at the end,” she said, nodding toward it.

“I always start at the back,” I replied.

“Is that how people read Joyce?”

“That’s how people should read this book. I’ve solved the riddle.”

“I see,” she said. “I never read.”

“Reading is good for the soul.”

“So what should I read? Any suggestions?”

“The Red Room by August Strindberg,” I said. “It’s about Stockholm.”

“I’m tired of Stockholm.”

“If you’re tired of Stockholm, you’re tired of life,” I said.

“So you’re a philosopher.”

“You get that way in this job.”

“You look tired,” she said.

“Not that way.”

“Can you philosophize some help for me?”

“Is John your spouse?”

She stared at me as if she didn’t understand the word. Spouse. Sounds a little old-fashioned, but I’m an old-fashioned man. I keep a bottle of Dewar’s White Label in my desk drawer. I wear a suit and tie. I was about to lighten the bottle a bit when she came in. I listen to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, in that order. When evening falls, I like to remember my youth, 1969 and 1970. I can say I had a year of real life, which many people don’t even get.

“Are you married?” I asked to clarify.

“Yeah, but not to each other,” she said, elegantly fluttering her wrist.

The murder plan was perfect, Klas knew — after all, his intended victim was old and in a wheelchair.

The plan was simple. The murder easy.

The only problem was getting out of Kallhäll alive.

Twilight comes on quickly.

The pub is housed in a small shed in the back courtyard, not far from Rörstrands porcelain factory. The dank premises measure barely thirty square meters. Black smoke is thick on the walls and across from the door a scratched wooden bar runs down the long side of the room. On the far end of the counter, a tiger-striped tomcat with scarred ears sits cleaning his fur with slow strokes of his tongue.

Behind the counter, there is a man wearing a soiled apron over his protruding stomach. He runs his hand through his enormous walrus mustache. One of his thumbnails is missing.

The fire crackles in the cast-iron heater in the corner. From the building across the Vikingagatan comes the furious song of the riveting machines from the porcelain factory. Their monotonous clatter is broken by the dull thump of four bronze candlesticks hitting the surface of the bar counter.

“Light is on the house.”

The bartender strikes a match and lights the candles. He’s set the candlesticks down between two men sitting at the bar. They both wear blue shirts and the heavy vests of rock blasters. The older man is carrying a trowel in his belt as if it were a weapon. Their wooden clogs are spattered with white mortar. The younger man nods listlessly, his elbow on the counter. He’s holding a three-cornered schnapps glass in one hand. It’s empty.

The back door creaks, and a girl, her blond hair in a bun, enters. Cobwebs stick to her knitted cardigan. She wears wool socks with her clogs and carries a wicker potato basket filled to the brim with sawdust.

“Make sure you do a better job than last time! Spread the stuff out all the way to the corners!”

The bartender shakes out the match and puts it back into its box. The girl nods and with a rustling sound she shakes the sawdust over the floor. She works methodically from one side of the room to the other. She kicks the sawdust under the tables and chairs. The men at the bar follow her movements in silence. The scent of resin and fresh shavings fills the room.

In the corner, beneath a warped rectangular window, a woman sits at a table and the grease stains on her wide-brimmed hat gleam in the grainy, fading light that comes through the dirty, lead-rimmed panes. She’s darkened her eyebrows with burnt cork and black flecks have fallen onto her eyelashes. Her lips are painted red. She holds a cigarette between her fingers. On the table, there’s a pack of Bridge and a broken white enamel cup holds a number of cigarette butts stained with red lipstick.

As the girl with the basket of sawdust approaches, the woman shifts her skirt aside and lifts her high-heeled, worn-out, lace-up boots — she’s not wearing stockings. A large bruise shows on her pale calf. The girl looks away as she kicks the last of the sawdust beneath the woman’s chair.

“Well, what a shrinking violet we have here! Don’t worry, soon she’ll be making a living with her legs in the air too, just wait and see.” Slurred, but loud, the woman’s voice cuts through the clatter of the machines. The men at the bar hold back their laughter, but their shoulders shake. The younger man slaps the older one on the arm. The girl says nothing. She makes her way quickly over the sawdust and sets the basket by the back door. She looks down, smoothing her apron with both hands.

The front door opens and the leather curtain made of pigskin is pushed aside with a swish. The flames of the candles flicker in the draft. The men at the bar turn around. The tomcat pauses in his cleaning, his tongue halfway out of his mouth.

The sawdust crunches under heavy soles as the youth walks into the room. He’s wearing a sailor’s cap that seems to be a few sizes too large. He hides his mouth behind his hand as he glances around. Fish scales glisten on the frayed sleeves of his jacket.

He chooses the table farthest from the door and pulls out a chair. Beneath his slight blond mustache, his upper lip has a cleft that stretches halfway along his nose. The edges are pale pink. His yellowed front teeth show through the gap.

He sits down with his back to the wall, facing the door. The girl comes to him with a schnapps glass and an unmarked bottle. She shows him the bottle and the youth nods. The girl quietly fills the glass to the rim. The oily surface of the liquid glimmers as she strikes a match and lights the candle on the table. She is already turning away when the youth raises his hand. She stands silently, holding the bottle in the crook of her arm.

The young man grips the narrow stem of the glass with three fingers and lifts it up a few millimeters before setting it back down on the table. He closes his eyes. His chest heaves twice. Then, in one swift movement, he brings the glass to his lips and drinks it all down. He grins crookedly with his mangled lips. The girl pulls the cork from the bottle with a plop and he nods. She fills it to the brim again before he waves her away.

The front door opens again; the leather curtain is drawn aside and the breeze makes the flames of the candles dance. One flickers out. A black line of smoke drifts toward the ceiling. The cat jumps softly down onto the sawdust. He lifts one of his forepaws and shakes it slightly before he heads toward the door. He slides between the newcomer’s well-polished leather boots and disappears outside. The constant clatter of machines stops suddenly when the whistle of the factory signals the end of the workday.

The new arrival bends his head slightly to avoid hitting the top of the doorframe with the bowler hat that sits atop his head. He has a rolled-up newspaper under one arm while in his large hand he carries something wrapped in an oil-stained piece of sackcloth. With his free hand, he fishes out a watch with a gold chain from his vest pocket. He checks it and looks around. The bartender nods toward him and he nods back. The woman in the corner hastily stubs out her cigarette in the enamel cup. She gathers her skirts and disappears out the door behind the man’s back. The door slams shut behind her with an echoing thud.

The burly newcomer slips his watch back into his pocket. He glances around the room one more time before he moves forward to the table where the youth with the cleft palate is sitting. In the total silence in the wake of the stopped machines, the other people in the room can hear the young man inhale deeply. The large man smiles broadly and sits down across from him. There’s a clunk of metal as he sets the sackcloth on the table. The youth nods in greeting and stares down at the full schnapps glass in front of him.

The bartender goes over with a filthy rag and wipes down the table, avoiding the sackcloth bundle and newspaper between the two men. He brushes crumbs into his cupped hand as he speaks.

“Good that Belzén sent you, Hickan. I sent word to him two days ago that I—”

The man called Hickan holds up his hand. “I’m here for another reason.”

“I understand, I understand! Do you want the usual?”

Hickan nods. “The usual.”

The youth glances up for a second. Both of the men at the bar are counting coins. They put their money on the counter and head out the door without waiting for change.

The bartender comes back with a bottle of Estonian vodka. He fills a schnapps glass for Hickan as Hickan stares at the youth. The bartender sets the bottle on the table and walks away. Hickan smiles as he lifts his glass.

“For better luck next time!”

Both men throw back their heads and let the schnapps run down their throats. Hickan shrugs his shoulders and shudders. The youth runs a finger over his thin mustache as he glances at the package in front of him. Hickan takes out cigarette paper and a small silver box, placing both on the table.

“So, how are things on the islands?” Hickan removes the lid from his silver box. There’s a slight whisper as he drops tobacco into the cigarette paper he keeps pinched between his fingers.

The youth clears his throat: “The windstorm last week got up to gale force eleven.” His voice is high-pitched, and he has a slight lisp.

“And?”

“The gale hit when we were out. The boathouse, where we live right now, lost part of its roof. Lindén up on the hill was able to loan us some sheet metal to keep the water out for a while.”

“There was a bit of wind here in the city as well.”

Hickan rolls the tobacco in the paper, licking the adhesive side, sealing the seam of the cigarette tightly. The youth keeps stroking his sparse mustache.

“I was with Lindén and we had to anchor that night with a defective engine. We drifted a few hundred meters and then the chain broke. I put together a sail from a bunk to guide our drift.”

“And that worked?”

“With Neptune’s help, as Lindén put it.”

“You archipelago fishermen have always been resourceful.”

“You take what you have and you do what you can.”

“I have a story about Olsson, the Berghamn pilot. You know him?”

“Only by name.”

“Oh well, I’ll leave it for another time, then.”

The match scratches against the tabletop and flares as Hickan lights his cigarette. He rolls it between his fingers and watches the smoke curl and make its way to the soot-covered ceiling.

“I used to smoke that English brand Mixture but it got difficult to get ahold of. During the war, I started smoking Windsor, but it was too harsh for me. Now I keep changing brands, but I can’t seem to find one I like. This one is Perstorps Prima.” Hickan nods toward the silver box. “You’re welcome to roll one of your own.”

“No thanks. I prefer to chew.”

Hickan smiles and brushes some ashes from the tabletop. Behind him, the bartender is putting clean glasses on the shelf. They clink as they touch.

“So I hear your engine broke down the day before yesterday.” The end of Hickan’s cigarette burns through a full centimeter of paper.

The youth nods and looks away. “The coast guard was after me.”

“Yeah?”

The youth clears his throat. “Yeah, they were after me. I was pushing the engine hard and thought I’d gotten away when it started dying just outside of Yxlan. Pund-Ville was on the island and saw what was going on so he fired a couple of shots into the air to distract them. But it didn’t work. A few minutes later, the engine died completely.”

“I had two men waiting for you in Gröndal.”

“The boat is ready to go. I fixed it. The fuel looked like coffee grounds when I pumped it out. I took the whole motor apart and cleaned it. I even paid for a new filter.”

“And the barrels of alcohol?”

“The engine works just fine now, even better than before. It purrs like a kitten.”

“The barrels?”

“I had no choice.”

“Can you search for them in the water?”

“Not in Norrviken. It’s too deep.”

Hickan stubs out his cigarette in the mug. There’s a slight glug-glug sound from the bottle as he refills their drinks. He lifts his own glass while putting his other hand on the sackcloth package.

“If the coast guard caught you with the alcohol, at least there’d be a written report. Now we have nothing but your word.”

The youth stares down at the table. The back door creaks and then slams shut, as the bartender and his helper slip out. Someone inserts a key from the outside and there’s a thud as the bolt slides home. Hickan nods toward the young man’s glass.

“I imagine you’re too young to remember that pub called Hamburg Cellars? They closed about seven or eight years back.”

The youth lifts his glass with a shaking hand. Hickan smiles.

“It wasn’t much bigger than this place here, but it had an interesting story. You could find it at the crossroads of Götgatan and Folkungagatan not far from Södra Bantorget. The horses would stop there on their way to the gallows at Skanstull. In this country, we’ve always thought a man deserves one last drink. A nice custom, don’t you think?”

Drops of liquor spill between the fingers of the youth’s shaking hand. Sweat slides down his face beneath his sailor’s cap.

“They had a special cupboard there. All the glasses were on display. They engraved the name and the date.”

The spilled liquor collects in one of the grooves in the table, making a small pool.

“They say one of the condemned refused his drink and told them he’d come back for it. Of course, he didn’t.”

“My wife... she’s in that way.” The youth’s voice could hardly be heard.

“How far along?”

“Seven months.”

“Let’s drink to her health. Skål!”

Both men throw back their drinks. Hickan pulls at a corner of the sackcloth and opens it, revealing a revolver. It’s black with a grip made from light wood. Right beneath the drum there’s something stamped in Cyrillic letters as well as the year: 1915. Hickan places his huge hand over it.

“Do you know why Belzén trusted you with this job?”

“Because I know every bay and inlet in all the islands and know all the good hiding places.”

“Like pretty much every other inhabitant of the archipelago.”

“So why did he trust me?”

“Because your brother vouched for you. He’s worked for us for years. It’s the only way to get into our little organization. Would you say that you’ve let him down?”

“Perhaps I have.”

“As well as us?”

“Maybe so.”

Hickan runs his hand over the hard contours of the revolver. Outside it is starting to rain. The first drops hit the dirty pub windowpanes. Night has fallen.

“I have two daughters myself. The youngest just started elementary school. It seems like yesterday when I held her in my arms for the first time.”

Hickan holds up his huge hand. Between the middle finger and the ring finger, a wide scar runs all the way down his palm. He laughs.

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for them. A man who can’t take care of his family is not a real man at all.”

The rain is picking up. It hits the tar-papered roof with an intense clatter, like the riveting machines had made earlier. The revolver scrapes against the tabletop as Hickan pushes it toward the youth.

“Don’t you agree?”

The youth smiles quickly and he puts his hand on the revolver. Hickan nods.

“It’s a Nagant. You have seven bullets, no more, no less.”

The youth nods eagerly. He takes the revolver and stuffs it under his belt, pulling his shabby jacket tight around his body. He clears his throat. “I won’t disappoint Belzén again.”

“Make sure you don’t.”

“Who’s the mark?”

“One of our own. A piece of crap brazen enough to steal an entire truckload right from under our noses. We’ll send you his name in a few days.”

“I don’t know if I—”

“As we see it, you don’t have a choice.”

The youth nods and pulls his wallet from his pocket. Hickan raises his huge palm.

“No, it’s on the house.”

The youth nods, pushes the chair away from the table, and stands up. The two men shake hands.

“So, you’ll hear from me in a few days.”

The youth pulls up his collar and with his fist outside his coat he leaves the pub. Hickan fills his glass and rolls himself another cigarette. He doesn’t notice the cockroach climbing up one of the table legs.

Almost immediately, the bartender and the girl come back in through the back door. The girl is carrying the tomcat in her arms. The rain has left dark patches on their clothes and has plastered their hair to their heads. The bartender runs his hand over his walrus mustache, shakes the liquid from his hand, and then makes his way across the sawdust. He has a slight limp. He sits down across from Hickan and brushes his hand over the table before he starts to speak.

“You scared away all my other customers!”

“They’ll be back.”

“So, did you tell him the Hamburg Cellars story?”

“Works every time.”

The bartender’s laughter echoes throughout the bar. He’s missing a few of his upper teeth. He runs his hand through his hair. The cockroach climbs over the edge and stands on the table, its long antennae sweeping back and forth.

“As I told you, I contacted Belzén a few days ago. We’re running out of inventory and I need a delivery as soon as possible.”

“I understand. Unfortunately, we have a break in our supply lines at the moment.”

Hickan picks up his newspaper and rolls it tightly and laughs. “That kid?”

He raises the newspaper over his head. “We can stand to lose a few hundred liters overboard. But his brother is a piece of crap...” Hickan smashes the cockroach with his newspaper, then turns it over to survey the mangled remains. He wipes them off on the edge of the table as he lowers his voice. “Did he really believe he could make off with one of our trucks? And get off scot-free?”

The bartender laughs and twirls his mustache. “So they’ll both learn a lesson.”

“It was Belzén’s idea. Business is business.”

The bartender nods, pulls the cork from the bottle, and fills both glasses.

I was busy with another murder when my cell phone rang unexpectedly. In media res or in flagrante delicto or whatever the proper technical term may be. The victim was a young woman, yet another of all these young women who have to die, and unfortunately she also had a rather striking resemblance to my famous ex, Anette. I had my priorities, so I ignored the call. Not answering the phone makes one look busy and important these days, I told myself, and kept my hands hovering over the keyboard. I’m a writer.

That’s another thing I kept telling myself. A crime writer. I knew that status was far from reality. At the moment, I was a minor criminal who’d worked in advertising. I was nobody.

Still, these were my words on the smudged laptop screen:

I changed light-blue to forget-me-not blue. I deleted small mouth and put in a different sentence: Her mouth was covered by police tape. I added, In her lap, a volume of the Swedish law book, Regulations Concerning Property and Buildings, was open to the famous Chapter 12: How Pigs Should Be Let Loose in an Oak Forest. This I deleted again. It was too ridiculous, even by the standards of Swedish crime novels.

The whole scene was nothing but a piece of shit. Deader than the victim it described. Nothing left to do but start over; but I couldn’t concentrate. When you stop answering the phone, after a while people stop calling. The only ones who keep on trying are people who believe they are too important to be ignored. And so my thoughts immediately turned to...

I picked up my cell phone. Just as I suspected. Anette.

Of course, I had no intention of calling her back, but as I was about to put it back down, it buzzed with an incoming text message. Anette again: Am in town. Want to get together?

Get together? Did I want to get together?

I looked out from my office window: the factory buildings, the rusty water towers, the glittering water...

After an aborted attempt at reflection, I texted back: If you want to meet me, you’ll have to come to my end of town. I don’t know why I used those exact words (I was thoroughly interrogated about them later on), but my idea, in addition to playing hard-to-get, was probably the chance to meet like we used to — at a bar in Hornstull. Those were my best years, when I held down both her job and mine. I was a copywriter, and I hadn’t started to think so damned much.

It was now just about a year since we had broken up, ending our own personal party, which had gone on, with few interruptions, for thirteen months. We’d hit the town, mostly as part of Södermalm’s promiscuous and sorrow-free — or perhaps soulless — art and media circles. Her ambition then was to be a fashion designer, a dream of so many young women.

Anyway, we met at work and soon went on to happy hour, which merged into parties and weekends at bars and clubs, including gatherings on apartment balconies during the light summer nights. Events. Retro raves. Pretend-bourgeois dinner parties. Microbrews and MDMA. Sex in bizarre places. That idiotic conviction of youth that everything you hope for will come true.

Not long after she left me, I lost my job. Hit by depression, I self-medicated with uppers and downers, and it seems I said a few things to my boss and coworkers, things I didn’t have enough talent to get away with. I was also the last hired, and then the economy tanked, so I was the first to go.

But I’d bounced back.

Or so I told myself.

This past summer, I’d been spending many late nights by my wide-open window in the cramped office. I watched the guard dogs running around off leash on the grounds of the cement factory across the street. Often, when I would hear the bass booming from one of the nearby clubs, I’d think of it as the rhythm of a life that was no longer mine. A life retreating farther and farther away.

In retrospect, I’m amazed that I ever met a woman like her. She was way out of my league, even back then, or should have been. She was always the center of attention. The kind of person people say could be a model and who later actually becomes one, moving up and away from their lives and toward other parties in other cities. (I assume you’ve seen a photo of her somewhere. By then, I was already out of the picture.) And what did I have? Besides a reasonable face and a reasonable fashion sense?

So if I was going to go out and see her again, I wouldn’t hurt my reputation to have our acquaintances see us together again.

But that’s not how it turned out. She interpreted my text message more literally than I’d intended. Or perhaps she was hit by childish inspiration. She wrote: Playing hard to get! Still, I have an errand close by. Let’s meet at the swimming dock, 6 p.m., okay? I’ll bring wine!

She meant the little floating dock down by the lake so quaintly named the Triangle. You can find it between Liljeholmen and Gröndal. Just a few hundred meters from my tiny office. I thought it would be embarrassing — we’d skinny-dipped there one late, drunken evening, shortly after we first met — but I couldn’t see how to get out of it. So I agreed. I didn’t believe her about that errand in the vicinity. Either she wanted to relive her teenage years (I knew she’d attended a Waldorf school not too far from there) or she was working on her image of being spontaneous and crazy.

I sighed and started a new crime scene, one a bit less far-fetched. They found her naked body, cut to pieces, in the water...

The hum of a sewing machine came from the office next door. It was three hours until six. I had time to think about the details.

Details matter to losers. I really wanted to see myself as a careful, rational, and methodical person that year — sitting, as I was, in a tiny office between Liljeholmen and Gröndal, wanting to become a crime writer. I had read interviews with successful crime writers. According to them, all it took was a bit of discipline. The only thing that mattered was regular work hours and a strict schedule. Don’t deviate from the conventional narrative arc, follow it without sentimentality, and you will reach the pot of gold at the other end. I had also read countless articles on “How to Write a Best Seller.” The pathways to achieving this miracle differed only slightly. A story that worked always began with presenting the protagonist, preferably in a different situation from what he finds himself in at the end. Step two is introducing a conflict that forces the protagonist to act. And so on, until all seems lost before it eventually reaches a perfect conclusion — neatly tying up all loose ends.

That was the plan. And how hard could it be if you had enough pens and Post-its, a computer and a sick imagination, and a tiny office in an old rundown building?

Wanting to become a crime writer was not the most original or even greatest of ambitions. In Sweden, there are police officers and lawyers and criminals and psychologists all writing crime novels; poets and intellectuals all writing crime novels; hundreds of journalists and doctors and teachers and housewives all writing crime novels. This was a country where even the minister of justice wrote crime novels!

So the general impression was that anybody could write a good mystery, and once you’d written one, you’d become an international success. Who gives a shit that there are fewer homicides in all of Sweden in a year than in any large American city in one or two months? That’s exactly what makes Swedish murders so tantalizingly exotic and symbolically loaded. And if your prose is a bit lacking, your foreign editors would improve it. Yep, you didn’t even have to write well to write crime novels. An equitable business worthy of the world’s most equitable society: the Swedish Model!

Even I wanted to write a detective novel, of course. Then I’d make some money and gain some status and — not the least important thing — I’d be able to revel in macabre scenes of violence in a socially acceptable way. Which, when you get down to it, is exactly why so many people read these books.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that I soon got tired of my pathetic plots and wound up in a never-ending cycle of creating new descriptions of crime scenes and murders. Not being all that rational of a person, I seldom came up with a good method.

Oh, I forgot to mention how I supported myself. Inspired by my own drug use I had set up a modest and discrete mail order business. It was based on the ability to receive mail under a false name at this old rundown office building, where nobody kept track of who was renting which space. The same dynamic also got in the way at times. It meant a lot of running up and down the stairs and new faces all the time, who were, as Stockholm people are in general, often hard to tell apart. But I thought of this business as just something temporary until I achieved my dream of being a real writer, and, of course, that’s why I had this tiny office in the first place.

A common piece of advice to aspiring authors is to write about what you know. It was just about six when, reinforced by a few well-chosen pills, I left my office and walked into the heart of what I knew best. In front of me, the street with the streetcar tracks. To the left, the tracks went past the barracks-like building of the City Mission, and then on past the new, very sterile Liljeholmen — the shopping mall had just been completed and the square was decorated with benches designed to keep people from sleeping on them. To the right, the tracks swung past Gröndal’s small fifties-style center and past the marina with its derelict boathouse — a special place, where you can still find some of the last old eccentrics side by side with the well-off newcomers, polishing their old mahogany boats as if they were sarcophagi getting ready for their last trip down the river to the ruler of the underworld...

I felt an irrational loyalty to this place. But if I were going to impress the international audience I was dreaming of, I would certainly be forced to change this last remnant of an unexploited side of Stockholm to a darker, more derelict, and more dangerous place than it actually was. Isn’t that what they all do? Sure, somebody had been shot here a few years back. Sure, everybody heard that some pizzerias were really fronts for the cocaine trade. But not even the mafia from the Balkans could stand against the incoming tide of middle-class families. Soon the only poor people in this part of the city would be members of the so-called artistic class — my neighbors in the office building. Then, soon enough, they’d all disappear too. Real estate moguls were looking for locations like old factories and harbor areas for renovation. The building where I had my tiny office was doomed to be turned into luxury condos or offices. The reason none of this had happened yet was that it was very difficult to move the cement factory docks.

I didn’t walk to the left or the right, but straight across the street past the assisted-living building. I’d worked there one summer when I was a teenager. There were old folks who remembered how things used to be: when both this side and the other side of the water were working-class neighborhoods that people looked down on. The jail on Långholmen had still been open, and there was an infamous workhouse for the poor somewhere in Tanto...

I headed toward the Triangle past the pest control company Anticimex, to the swimming dock. They say the water still has large concentrations of heavy metals: one of the few reminders that this area once harbored an entire complex of workshops and small manufacturing plants. Bo Widerberg had used some of the decrepit factory buildings when he directed his film Joe Hill in the seventies. To find any traces of this activity these days, you have to know what to look for.

It was that time of year when summer turns to fall. Not all that warm anymore. Still, the sky was clear and the sun had not yet set.

She was perched on the edge of the dock and, at first, I didn’t recognize her. She had a new look, more mature. She wore a coffee-with-too-much-milk coat and her hair was done up in a retro-forties look. She greeted me with a huge smile, which I did not like one bit. I thought, She’s trying to be extra nice because she’s feeling sorry for me. She doesn’t know how, so she’s overdoing it. Then I thought, She’s still stunningly beautiful.

“You’re not mad at me anymore, right?” she asked.

“Of course not,” I replied.

“Good,” she said. She pulled two small bottles from her coat pocket. White wine with screw tops, the kind you get on airplanes or from a hotel minibar.

The swimming dock was deserted and totally pointless if one didn’t want to go swimming. Neither of us said anything, we just started walking together, following the path counterclockwise around the lake.

I held my bottle in my hand and tried to act nonchalant. I commanded my brain, Make small talk.

When she asked me what I was up to these days, I told her I was writing a mystery novel.

“How original,” she said. “So what is your mystery about?”

“Well, murder...” I shrugged and continued: “It’s tougher than I thought. I want it to be really noir. But look around you! The sun is glittering on the water and we live in the world’s safest and most secure country. The worst crime is if a few immigrant kids get caught smoking pot and the police break a minor law or two hauling them in.”

“I disagree,” she said.

“Why?”

She glanced around nervously. I followed the direction of her gaze: a dark-skinned guy in sweats leaned against a fence not far away. He was looking at us, and then he turned away. Nothing special about him.

Then she seemed to calm down again and surprised me (in the way that still surprised me when she abruptly shifted from being childish to being highly articulate) by giving me a mini-lecture on Stockholm’s past. Its soul, as she put it. She reminded me that during her lifetime both the prime minister and foreign minister had been assassinated in this very city.

“What? Were you even born when Olof Palme was killed?” I asked.

Apparently she’d been conceived by then.

I looked her over and tried to imagine how she’d appear dead in one of my crime novels, but it was hard. She was so alive right beside me. All I could imagine was fucking her. With a certain bitterness, actually a great deal of bitterness, all things considered, I remembered our last time together. She had been on top, and right after I’d come, she stood up in a no-nonsense way and walked to the bathroom to clean off the semen that was already coming out of her. She was beautiful right at that moment too. Efficient and beautiful at the same time, just like that damned midcentury modern furniture I’d let Commissioner Almqvist’s wife collect.

“Are you in Stockholm for a reason?” I asked.

“Every chance I get, I come back. I’ve been offered a part in a movie. It’s a small one in some kind of horror or fantasy film. What do you think about that?”

I’d heard that fantasy was going to be the next big thing after crime but I thought it was just a temporary trend. I shrugged. “You could always play the dragon,” I said.

“I wish! That would be a great part! But no... more like running around and showing skin...” She turned her head, and I could see her white neck.

I asked why she’d even wanted to see me.

She said there was something she needed to ask me. She’d remembered the photos I’d taken of her. Mostly innocent enough — photos from the parties we attended and the like, but there were a few nudes and a few more, well... unusual ones. Some taken in a cemetery, for example. I wished I had been able to forget about them. Not easy, when every single day I tortured myself by looking at them.

“Oh, the photos,” I said, “I’d almost forgotten them.”

“Anyway,” she said, “I just wanted to check in with you to make sure you weren’t still angry with me and that you had no intention of doing something stupid.”

Stupid? I’d never do anything like that. I used them for myself, masturbating and crying and keeping them as inspiration for my artistic ambitions. “I’d never do that,” I said.

“It’d be great if you just deleted them.”

“Sure. Trust me,” I lied.

We stopped by the fence. A jogger ran past us.

“How’s it going with the drugs?” she asked.

“Pretty much quit,” I said, but I noticed that even as I said it, my speech was slurred.

She asked me if I had a few “test products” on me. I’d expected her to ask and I handed over — after checking behind my shoulder to see whether the dark-skinned guy was still hanging around and looking at us, but he was gone — an envelope. What she was interested in was a medical product not available to just anyone. A niche drug.

“How much do I owe you?” she asked, reaching for her purse.

I stopped her by grabbing her wrist.

“Ow,” she said. I have strong hands. I’d grabbed harder than intended.

“I’m not going to sell to you,” I said. “And if I ever sell to you, I won’t do it like this.” Then I let go of her wrist.

I’ve pursued her for months. Waited. Waited for tracks she must have left behind, signs. People think they can be invisible moving through the world, but they always leave something behind. Sooner or later, if you wait long enough. If there’s anything I’ve learned, this is it.

At first, all I could do was sense her, a slender shadow in the investigation, she scarcely existed, but gradually she assumed a body, and finally all her names collapsed into one.

I hold it in my hand. Kim. There’s something about her that almost arouses jealousy in me. Her face in the passport photo, the narrow marked jawline, the serious expression. And then something in the eyes that doesn’t go with the rest of her expression, a slight feminine nonchalance almost creating a touch of condescension around her. Natural, inborn contempt. I can see how she uses it, how with only a glance or gesture she dismisses anything in her surroundings that doesn’t suit her. She knows the art of disdain and I can sense the feeling of being its target. The resentment that would call for revenge. But I’m not someone she can dismiss. She chose me such a long time ago, she waits for me as patiently as I do her. As if our lives sought each other out from the first moment. In retrospect, everything we ever experienced will appear as inevitable steps, slowly closing the distance between us.

I check the address again, Sköllerstagatan, and then the map.

Curled up in bed with my old-fashioned composition book, I’m finally feeling warm after the ice-cold night. And after such a strange encounter. She wants me to write down her tale. That’s all. A tale of winter and chill; an ice-cold saga. How fitting, that we are now in the middle of winter, with an unbelievable amount of snow covered by a shiny hard crust.

Everything was strange from the start — I mean yesterday, after I returned from my vacation and went out to see how my garden cottage had fared in the bitter weather. I wrapped myself in warm clothes and walked down to Bergsunds Beach, and then along the footpath by the edge of the expansive frozen water, toward Tanto.

The entire hillside seemed to be covered in a thick layer of white frosting. On the rock wall, at the first, lower wooden staircase, icicles hung like huge organ pipes. The second staircase, the one I usually take up to my cottage, had turned into an icy ramp, with barely visible steps. Still, I managed in spite of my slippery boots.

Once at the top of the hill, I could see out, over the encrusted surface of the water, the bridges, and the skyline with its glittering windows on the far side of the ice. The massive buildings on the horizon stood close to each other and seemed to exist in another time, a science-fiction future that appeared unreal and far removed from the garden colony — this special realm of small cottages painted in bright colors and their small yards with benches, tiny gazebos of glass, and other dreams embodied on their sloping plots. In the summertime, the whole effect is beyond idyllic, but now it seemed full of some fateful magic, as if a powerful winter sorcerer had bewitched it with frosting.

I’m describing all this because it all belongs. In the movies, characters never suspect that something unusual is afoot, but I felt it then. Everything was a premonition, a forewarning, but of something beautiful. As if something was calling to me. A crystal-clear, silent song vibrating in everything. Or am I reconstructing this after the fact? No, that I doubt.

The day had been sunny and clear, but the blue sky was beginning to darken as twilight approached; everything was breathtaking. The only thing that troubled me was the fear that the harsh weather might damage my cottage. This beloved small building, just one of the numerous playhouses for adults on the hillside, was my oasis during spring, summer, and fall. Mine was light blue like old-fashioned baby clothes for boys. The weather vane is less cute; it’s a rusty vulture. In addition, there’s a ceramic Poe raven nailed to the lowest branch of the apple tree.

I like to write in my little house, my refuge, now frozen solid. The snow lay heavy on its roof, the window panes were covered in strange, blossoming frost patterns. The ceramic raven watched me stolidly from the apple tree. I had to use a shovel to hack at the ice along the little door to open it.

An unpleasant smell struck my nostrils. Dead rat, I thought, but in this cold nothing dead should be able to give off such a stench.

With a bit of shock, I realized that someone had been in here. Nothing was damaged, but I was sure someone had been rummaging around.

No. That premonition I’d had on the way over had not been hinting at something beautiful. What I saw made me catch my breath. The instinct to vomit choked my throat. I saw a shape on the other side of the room — the thick plastic mat had been pulled up to cover something shoved right against the little bench, with its view over the spirea bushes, where I typically sat in the summer to drink my coffee.

Call someone. The words flew through my mind. Get out of here. Don’t check this out all by yourself.

But yet, a moment later, I still stood there, looking at the figure under the mat. The girl, this word came to me, as if she were all the girls in the world, as if there were no living girls, happy girls, girls eating ice cream in the sunshine.

She was curled in a fetal position. Her skin was bluish white, her limbs oddly thin. The body, frozen almost solid, wore nothing but a thin, dirty summer dress which had, perhaps, once been white. That the dress was trimmed in romantic, innocent lace made the sight especially creepy.

I couldn’t see her face. Her long dark hair curled over her features as if she herself wanted to hide them as a last gesture to spare any future gawkers. Or perhaps the killer had done this, covered her face, her stare. Trafficking, I thought. Crime scene, police. I felt so faint I had to sit down, powerless, but still unable to look away from the little naked foot. Repugnance and horror ran through me as well as wild tenderness, sorrow, and anger — as if I should be able to hug her and comfort her! Yes, that’s what it was like, what it was actually like.

The light in the cottage shifted into a darker blue, as if it emanated from her, oozed out of her. I was entirely alone in this cottage on the frosted hillside during twilight with the frozen body of a girl. A nightmare, said the voice in my head. And then I noticed a dead rat beside her body. A number of dead rats, actually. Had they chewed off her face? Don’t even think about that. A dark, trapped cry throbbed in my head, my throat, my chest. It carried no coherent thoughts with it; both the ability to think and the ability to act had fled.

Then a quick movement. Unexpected, incomprehensible. A rustle, an exhalation, and she sat up. I was so shocked I didn’t have time to be afraid, but I felt I had been thrown into another dimension, a kind of dream state, where this could happen.

I saw a tiny heart-shaped face. Her eyes were totally black, like bullet holes, with no whites. Her features shone gray-white, haloed by her black hair. Her lips were moving slightly, an almost silent sound reached my ears, but I could not make out what she was saying — was she speaking a foreign language?

Then came something resembling a laugh behind a closed mouth, and she said, “Welcome!”

Perhaps she’d already hypnotized me. At any rate, she seemed to be, in some inexplicable way, already familiar.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “My name’s Alma. I’m just sleeping here. It’s good that it’s winter. The days are short. And I never freeze.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“You realize what I am, don’t you?”

When I silently shook my head, she smiled briefly and I could see her sharp teeth, white as pearls and glistening. Yes, I must have been hypnotized. I didn’t even shudder.

“I’ve been finding places to sleep here and there,” she said. “Ever since it happened.” Her black, eternal gaze bored into me as she cocked her head. “You’re a kind person, aren’t you?”

Well, what was I supposed to reply to that? I shrugged and forced a smile.

She said, “I don’t kill people.” She fluffed her hair the way girls do. “I’ve been sleeping in different cottages until I came to yours. Yours was the right one. You’re a writer. I love books. Rather, I love to disappear into them. Brontë. Oates. Atwood. And, of course, Poe. I love your raven, by the way! I thought I would just wait here until you showed up. And now here you are.”

“Can I help you in some way?” I managed to say. I really hoped I would not have to help her die. I didn’t want to deal with a cross and a stake or old black blood. I didn’t want to hear her pleas for eternal rest.

“Sure, you can help me,” she replied. “I’ve been praying for you to come! You want to use words to scare people, so let me inspire you. You’ll hear my story, you’ll give me a few nights of your time, and I’ll be your Scheherazade. Yes, you will be the one to write my winter tale. You will make it beautiful. You will write it so that whoever reads it will want to weep. Their tears will become diamonds in the cold; they will be stars and shine forever in my memory. And what you will do for me, you will do out of love.”

I was sixteen years old then. You think I might have been younger, but I had just turned sixteen, I am sixteen, I will be sixteen. How long has it been? I think it’s been three years now, but five hundred years from now, I will still be sixteen.

My mother and I had argued. We often argued. She’d throw me out of the house, and then she’d call me on my cell phone and apologize: Come back, Alma, I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean to say that, I didn’t really think that, just come back and everything will be good. I’ll stop drinking and bringing home stupid men. I’ll become an angel, the moon is made of cheese, there’s peace on earth, the climate issue is resolved, the world is all candy fluff, just come home.

This time it was also winter, and she threw me out without warning. Just because. I was locked out in the falling snow and wind, late at night, no coat, just a long sweater, no phone, no keys. You whore, stealing Lasse from me.

You see, we lived in this neighborhood, in one of those huge tower blocks on Flintbacken, the ones shaped in a half-circle. In the same building, next to our entrance, were a school and a preschool for English-speaking children and I often wished I could live there instead. A sign said: Welcome to the Suns. If you took the stairs on the left side of the building, through the groves, you went down to the beach. The path along the beach always had joggers on it in all kinds of weather, but halfway up there was a bench not far from the stairs and I sat down on it in spite of the cold and the snow. I hoped I would get pneumonia or a urinary tract infection or something. Maybe even die. And it would be all her fault.

I sat there for a while, the falling snow muffling all sounds, although I could still hear the frenetic pace of the runners training for some marathon and a dog barking in the distance. I could hear the sound of a train crossing the Årsta Bridge — a train going away, I’ve always loved that sound.

Die, die, die! I kept thinking, and I don’t know who I wanted to die, me or her. Perhaps I wanted everything to die, sucked into a black hole and gone, like in Donnie Darko.

I hadn’t heard any footsteps, but a guy suddenly appeared in the snow in front of me. My first thought was he must have come from a costume party. He wore a tall black hat, sunglasses, and a tuxedo. A little like the Sandman. I remember thinking that he was trying for the creepy look and he’d succeeded, but in my state of mind, I was not afraid. I felt he was very attractive, extremely attractive, even sexy. Unfortunately.

“May I sit down?” he asked, and I said, “Sure.”

He sat down and we were silent for a while. Then he said, “Look, you’re freezing. You don’t need to freeze.” He was all over me in an instant and I remember his sickly black eyes as he whipped off the sunglasses and then everything faded.

I woke up with snow on me everywhere, in my mouth and eyes and nose; I was lying stretched out on the bench, completely covered in snow; he must have left me in this odd position. I sat up. Everything felt strange, shifted, changed, as if I’d had some kind of memory loss or had fainted. But the strangest thing of all was I wasn’t freezing. I had no idea what time it was. I didn’t have my cell phone. The air was so still, however, that I thought it must be very late at night. No sounds of running from the walkway, no day sounds at all. Had anyone seen me as they walked by? Do people bother to look around at all?

Then I heard a dog barking shrilly from the top of the stairs. It sounded like a tiny, terrified dog, and the voice of the owner trying to calm it was female.

I got up, reassured that someone was out and about, and a woman too, and I walked up the stairs to ask her what time it was.

I will never forget the expression on her face. She was as terrified as the dog. She told me the time — one thirty in the morning — and then she pulled the Chihuahua, still barking at the top of its tiny lungs, as far away from me as she could, while striding down the path in a different direction. Her reaction terrified me too. I knew nothing but had the urge to go home. Mama would ask me for forgiveness, I thought, and she’d make me a cup of hot chocolate. She is nice to me as soon as she regrets what she’s done, which usually happens after a few hours.

I couldn’t get the door code to work. I pressed the call button for our apartment, again and again, until she answered over the intercom. The connection was bad. She said hello a number of times and couldn’t seem to hear what I was saying, but she must have realized it was me, because she let me in. Once inside, I pressed the elevator button, but it didn’t work that night either, so I ended up taking the stairs three flights up. The elevator was waiting right by our door, so why hadn’t it come down? I rang the bell at the door to my home.

She opened it and screamed, then slammed the door shut. I hoped no neighbors had heard her. I pushed the mail slot open and said in as friendly a way as I could, “Open the door, Mama, it’s me, Alma!” No answer. I slumped against the door, ready to cry. I decided I would wait it out until she opened it again. Instead, the mail slot opened and she pushed a piece of paper out. She’d written a message: Whoever you are, go away! I’m calling the police.

Whoever I am? Had she gone completely psycho or had I?

I thought I heard a noise from one of the neighboring apartments and my first reaction was to hide in the elevator, which was, of course, waiting right by our — or should I now say her — door.

The next shock of the night — I was looking straight into a mirror and there was no reflection of me. Only the inside of the elevator. I put my hand on the glass. No matter what I did, I was not there. I can’t begin to describe how terrifying that was. You’re used to checking yourself in the mirror, right, to see how you look? I thought I’d found myself in the middle of a nightmare, but I could not wake up.

I tried to press the down button and heard a crackling sound, but the elevator refused to work. I went down the stairs and into the basement where I found a moldy blanket. I hid under it, shaking like an animal, but not from cold, because I could no longer feel the cold.

Terror short-circuited my thought process and saved me from realizing, at that moment, what my existence would be like from here on out.

Awhile back I decided to join a dating site and created a profile starting with the following description: I’m thirty-six years old and I’m looking for a gentle, but not too gentle, man.

Under “Interests” I wrote none, under “Favorite Writer” I also wrote none. As well as under “Favorite Food” and “Favorite Places.” Under “Life Motto” I came up with: Meeting the man mentioned above. Then I thought about the word motto, that it’s probably something else, a sentence or something you could use as your words of wisdom in certain situations. But I’ve never had a motto like that, so I didn’t change it — even though that could say something about me, could reveal a nonverbal side that might repel some people. On the other hand, I wasn’t looking for a verbal person.

After I’d written what I’d written, I posted a photo of myself. It’s a picture a friend of mine took, where I’m lying on my stomach on his bed. My signs of aging don’t show in the photo, because the only light comes from a few candles, and, like my friend says, most people look fairly decent in that kind of lighting.

A week passed before I logged onto the site again, and by then I’d gotten a flood of replies. Surprised, I went through them all, one by one. An older gentleman promised me an economically carefree existence in exchange for his sexual satisfaction three times a week. A twenty-year-old wondered if I could teach him everything I knew. I sat there with my cup of coffee and laughed, but at the same time I felt oddly moved; not so much by all this appreciation (the photo was really a fraud), but because it was clear to me that they all truly and strongly believed in love, and believed that I could give them what they were looking for.

Several more weeks passed before I went back onto the site. But once I did, I noticed that many of the men who had first contacted me had kept writing. Some had written almost every day for weeks. The twenty-year-old who thought I could teach him something almost seemed obsessed, and in one message he wrote: I’ve always had girls who just talk and talk, they never seem to do anything but talk, but you feel so genuine, so free from words. Genuine, so free from words. I liked the sound of that.

I wrote to him: I guess you somehow send out the message that you like to talk. Try to send another message. Kind regards, M.

Others had sent pictures of themselves, their cars and their sailboats. One had sent a photo of his organ, fully erect. They all said something nice about my photo, and at first I was flattered, and thought I might not be all that bad. Then I realized there was nothing to be flattered about. No, this was something else, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, that had nothing to do with me.

I replied to one of them: Thank you for your words, but don’t have any illusions about me. I am thirty-six years old, the photo is taken in a candlelit room... Here is a real picture.

I attached a photo of me that I took then and there in regular daylight, the way I was: wearing panties and a bra (although I edited out my head). Without mentioning details I can only say that this picture was not as flattering as the last one, but still I managed to laugh a little at the cooling effect it would have on the man in question. But just a minute or so after I’d sent the photo came his response: Besides the fact that your age implies that we could have many interesting conversations, and you most likely can cook a good meal (for which I would choose the wine), I’m convinced your body, which I guess has already been enjoyed by many, holds an abundance of possibilities. And your womb is surely a repository of dirty deeds that I wouldn’t mind taking part in either.

You fucker! I wrote back immediately.

But I remained by my computer. Frankly, I was curious about the man who had expressed himself like this. Curious about him, but also about masculinity itself, which I, the more I learn about, understand less and less, but despite this am still fascinated by it — conceptually, but also on a very concrete level. I seriously considered continuing my correspondence with this man. Maybe setting up a date. An adventure like this would have a strong antidepressive effect on me during the dark season we were about to enter.

So I wrote: When can we meet?

In three weeks, he replied.

What’s your name and where do you live?

My name is Calisto and I live in Stockholm.

Calisto? I wrote.

My mom was Catholic, he replied, but I didn’t see how that explained anything.

Your name reminds me of something, I wrote, but he didn’t respond. Okay, so I’ll book a train ticket and a hotel, I added.

You’re welcome to stay at my place, he wrote, but I declined.

The phone in my pocket was silent. Cold and dead. I sat on the Skeppsbron wharf while the summer night smiled at me with scorn. A cold, white twilight sun in a clear sky — scrubbed clean, as if to wipe out all traces of a crime that had been committed. I took the phone out of my pocket and flung it straight into the light, without once checking if a new message or missed call had come. I threw hard, right toward the sun, as if I were trying to hit it. With a miserable little splash, a disappointing plop, it fell into the water, while gulls circled and squawked with disappointment that it wasn’t something edible.

You’d think that the warmth and the sun that shines almost all night in summer would make everything lighter, warmer, milder. But no. This cold summer night’s light over Skeppsbron’s old façades and down between the alleys in Old Town makes nothing better. It only makes the shadows denser and the secrets of the alleys deeper. It’s probably meaningless to say, but I wanted to do a good deed. I wanted to help. Maybe I did? Maybe the truth is that there’s no difference between good and evil, help and harm; in a cold cosmos it makes no difference what we do to one another. Against one another. Yet it does. Still. It must. Allow me, in peace and quiet, to tell you how I experienced it all from the beginning.

For me, Old Town is a part of the city which, with every passing year, loses a bit more of its magic. More and more Västerlånggatan is becoming a tourist trap that could just as well be some random street in Mallorca. The old shops, the musty bookstores, and the shabby little cafés have all been replaced by big clean places, where hardly any Stockholmers sit, not least because of the prices. But you can still manage to find alleyways where time has stood still, and the magic from earlier times lingers.

Just a feeling, the impression that she was not alone in the house. The grandfather clock chimed twenty past eleven. She intended to go to bed.

Just as she was entering the bathroom, a short, loud bang came from the basement. Maj Lindberg knew her home, she’d lived in it her entire adult life. She was intimately familiar with all the creaks, groans, and sighs of her old house built of wood and brick.

But this was entirely different.

She switched on the hallway light and walked to the stairs leading to the bottom floor.

“Hello?” she called out. “Is anyone down there?”

Of course there was no reply. Her fingers gripped the railing tightly as she started to make her way down. Step by step. Once she reached the bottom, she turned on the light. The laundry room, the guest room, the hallway — all appeared normal. She lifted her head and sniffed the air like an animal, flaring her nostrils. Was someone there? A scent? Something or someone that didn’t belong?

The front door downstairs was locked. There was another door at the other end of the hall leading to the garage. It was ajar. Strange. She was sure she’d closed it. Every morning she checked the boiler. She knew she’d done so that morning. She switched on the garage light. Empty. The boiler banged away as usual in its corner. The Volvo, the apple of Hasse’s eye, was parked in its normal place. She looked inside the windows. The key was in the ignition. Last week she’d driven to the superstore to shop for groceries.

Nobody was inside the car. Nobody hiding in the backseat.

She hadn’t expected anyone there, really. But what was that noise? Did she imagine it? Anneli had been saying lately: “You’re starting to get forgetful, little Mama. Soon you’ll be forgetting your own name.”

Maj shook herself, closed the door leading to the garage securely, and walked back upstairs to her bedroom. She hadn’t felt frightened while she went on her reconnaissance mission, more bewildered. Now fear swept through her like a wave. She was gripped by a longing to clutch her cats. She wanted them to follow her into the bedroom and jump on the bed, to curl up next to her and warm her.

The cats never joined her on the bed.

She knew they were inside, as she’d enticed them indoors with sardines. They’d slid onto the porch like two thin shadows and crouched in the darkness. She wanted them to stay inside all the time these days. People said cats were being stolen for dog-fighting bait. Just the thought made her dizzy. One evening, she’d tried sealing the cat door shut with masking tape, but they’d gone crazy. The tape hung in bloody strips the next morning and the cats were outside.

For days after that incident, the cats acted in an odd manner. They slid along the walls and refused to be touched. They jumped whenever she stood up and dashed under the sofa. Even Kitten. Kitten was now a grown cat, but she was used to calling her Kitten, so she didn’t bother calling her anything else. How old was Kitten now? Maj tried to remember. It had been after Hasse’s death. A mother cat and a kitten. Somebody had found them on a balcony in Fornhöjden. Three other kittens had died. The owner of the apartment had been away in Thailand for a number of months, abandoning them, or so Maj had been told.

Lovisa had brought the cats in a cardboard box. There was the sound of scratching and mewing. “Here, Grandma, they’re for you! Now you won’t be so lonely!”

Her granddaughter was a true gift from God.

She closed her eyes and tried to fall asleep. It didn’t work. Her entire body was tense. Perhaps she should call Anneli. No, that would make both Anneli and Johnny even more eager to move her into a retirement home.

“You’ll have your own apartment and you’ll get all your meals served. You won’t be so lonely.”

I’m not lonely, she thought. I have the cats. And this is my home.

Johnny usually sat down next to her and laid his heavy arm, pale as death, around her shoulders. “Anneli and I will help you, of course. Little Maj, you understand we’re here for you. We’ll sell the house for you. We’ll fix it up and make sure it’s presentable. We’ll make sure your move goes smoothly. You won’t have to think about anything. You can relax in your new armchair and watch your favorite TV shows, Bingolotto and Så ska det låta. Just enjoy yourself and take it easy.”

Just wait for death, she thought.

She tried to force herself to yawn. Sometimes she could encourage sleep that way. She’d yawn and get a lungful of air. She’d curl her tongue into a bow and let the air be drawn over it.

Then she heard it again. Noise downstairs. Rustling, like shuffled papers and footsteps.

She was suddenly angry. Who dared come into her house and disturb her in the middle of the night? Get the hell out! Now! She flung her bedcover aside and leaped out of bed. Blood rushed hotly to her temples. She grabbed her umbrella with its sharp pointy tip. She started down the stairs, but then the fear caught up with her. How would she, a lone woman, attack a burglar? What if there were more than one?

She heard Johnny’s rant inside her head: “Fucking Turks. They hate us. They think we have it so good... as if we got everything for free. As if we didn’t work our asses off. They want everything for free! Soon they’ll take over the whole town!”

It was true that Södertälje had taken in a great number of immigrants from Iraq, from Lebanon, from Syria. More than the United States and Canada combined.

She protested: people in a free and peaceful country like Sweden should open their doors and welcome these despairing human beings fleeing poverty and war. She remembered the images she’d seen on TV: mothers with dark circles under their eyes; children filled with sorrow.

Johnny would stare at her, eyes so filled with disgust that it quieted her.

“Yeah, yeah, just fling our doors wide open and let them move in. You could fit a whole herd of them into this big house. So why don’t you?”

His words made her speechless.

There was no one inside her house. Of course not. Her mind was playing tricks on her. She’d searched every nook and cranny, even the space behind the boiler until her nightgown was covered in soot.

She decided to sit up for a while. Perhaps doze in her new armchair. It was a wonderful chair: soft and wide. She’d gotten it as a birthday present last year. She walked past the kitchen and picked up a few pieces of candy from the bowl. Peppermints. Anneli had brought them the other day. They seemed like a bribe. She’d seen through the pretense right away. It didn’t take long before Anneli turned to the subject of the house.

“For my sake, if not for yours!” Anneli leaned forward, grasped her hand, giving it a squeeze, and then with a small smile, she continued, “I’m worried about you, Mama! Don’t you see? Anything can happen.”

Maj had gotten angry. “Listen to me! This is my home. Try to understand that I feel just fine right here. I want to stay.”

“But Mama, it’s so big. It’s hard to manage. You can’t count on me and Johnny coming by to help you cut the lawn and fix things up!”

“And I haven’t asked either of you to do so, have I?” she replied. It was true. She’d been handling the lawn, garden, and house all on her own.

Her home with Hasse — all their lives, they’d lived here. The house was built on a slope. The main floor opened to a wonderful view. The basement level was open to the outside, with a large garage door and a second entrance. Counting the huge attic space, it was three floors, really. And although they had to fight gravity to do the gardening, the view was incredible.

Maj had always loved the house. Anneli was right that a few small problems would become big problems given enough time. But not just yet.

The house was at the top of a hill, and it had been harder for her to get outside these days, especially in the early winter when the snow had been plowed from the road and left on the sidewalk. Or in late winter, when melting snow on the road iced over — black ice, people called it. You thought it was wet asphalt, but it was frozen. At her age, if she fell and broke something, it could all be over.

Maj walked into the living room. As she was sitting down, she spied the keys — the standard one for the front door and the long one for the garage. They were centered on the flower-patterned tablecloth. She stood and stared at them for a moment. She would never toss keys on a table. Never! Leaving keys on a table brings bad luck — everybody knew that.

Her heart beat like tiny, quick feet. Had Lovisa been here? Had her granddaughter borrowed the keys for some reason? No, not for a while. Had Anneli used them? No, not for days. Her hand trembled as she reached for them. They belonged in her purse. She’d recently gotten a large purse, which could be slung on her back like a miniature backpack, and it had a pocket for keys. She always put her keys back into her purse after she’d used them.

She felt a dizzying sense of anxiety as she walked over to the window. She could see the lights from the AstraZeneca building on the other side of the canal. She liked the way they glittered on the water, making her think of Manhattan. Farther up the hill, she could see the apartment buildings in Ronna. They were part of the “million homes” scheme. These days very few people spoke Swedish as their native tongue, and Ronna was a known immigrant area and as infamous as Rosengård in Malmö — neighborhoods with a greater percentage of criminal activity, including shootings and murder. The name sounded harsh to her ears, even though she knew the original meaning was pleasant. Ronna meant running water.

A rhythmic throb made her turn her head — a boat, one of those large container ships, heading between Lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea. The lantern at the prow seemed to her a sharp, glowing eye. The tower of its bridge passed by a bit later. She had a childish desire to wave and call out: Here I am! Can you see me? Hello!

When Lovisa was small, Maj had often taken her in her baby carriage and walked along the side of the canal on the way to the locks. She’d pick up Lovisa and show her to the men in their orange overalls. They’d wave and make faces at her. Boat was one of the first words Maj had taught her. Yes, in fact, boat had been her very first word.

The vessel passed and the water was now as smooth as a pool. Maj felt exhaustion wash over her. She moved away from the window and into the bedroom, turning off the lights as she went. The stairs to the basement level were a huge, gaping maw of black.

Once she’d returned to her bedroom, she realized she’d forgotten to brush her teeth.

“Don’t care,” she muttered to herself, a flutter of defiance in her chest. She took off her dirty nightgown and found a new one. She stood and stared at her naked body in the mirror with a sense of resignation. Thin limbs, a stomach poking out, and breasts that no longer did. Her pubic hair had almost disappeared. She grunted and shut her eyes.

The bed creaked as she settled into it. She pulled her nightgown over her feet to warm them. Her body finally began to feel heavy. She took a few deep breaths and was just about to drift off to sleep when the noise returned. A bang and then scraping sounds, as if someone were moving around the house. She heard it clearly coming from the basement hallway. She opened her eyes and lay fully awake. Anxious. Empty.

Could it be the cats? No. The cats were always silent. Mama and Kitten. The thought rose as a scream, desperate and silent, inside her mind: Mama, Kitten, come here and be with me!

A dog could defend itself. Defend her too. Cats lacked that kind of loyalty.

She hesitated before turning on her bedside lamp.

Had she forgotten to lock the front door after all? She had checked, hadn’t she? Or had she just thought she’d checked? The papers were filled with reports of burglaries in Södertälje. People were supposed to stay alert.

“Hello?” she called out. “Anyone there? Come and show yourself!”

For a moment, she thought it might be Hasse. She slipped back in time and Hasse was returning home after a night out with the guys: a night that lasted into the wee hours of the morning. They’d meet in someone’s garage and work on their cars together. She could see him standing on the hallway rug, wearing his grubby, oil-stained overalls, his large hands hanging at his sides.

After his death, she’d seen him a number of times. Not imagined him — she’d seen him. Once he was sitting on the side of the bed with his face, filled with love for her, turned in her direction. She hadn’t been the least afraid. Another time, he was on the stairs to the basement. He’d stood and watched her without saying a word.

“Hans? Hasse?” she’d whispered, and it felt as if all the blood had drained from her head so quickly that she became dizzy. “Hans? Is it really you? Are you here?”

She’d grabbed the railing and begun to walk down. “Wait for me! I’m coming!” Then a bolt of lightning had seemed to go through her skull — sharp, fire-red flames. She didn’t dare mention the visions to anyone. One day, she read about the phenomenon in a magazine. It was called änkesyn — widow’s vision — and it was fairly common. Nothing to worry about.

Her feet felt like blocks of ice. Where were her slippers? She usually put them beneath the chair where she hung her clothes. She couldn’t find them. Strange. She always put them there, side by side, beneath the chair. In bare feet, she snuck into the hallway. The floor had loose gravel on it, small grains that pressed into the soles of her feet.

“Kitties? Mama Cat? Kitten?” her voice cawed like a crow.

She almost reached the bottom of the stairs.

“You’re imagining things!” she said aloud to herself. “Pull yourself together! Otherwise you’ll find yourself in a home whether you like it or not!”

She walked back up to the main level for the third time that night. At least I’m getting my exercise!

As soon as she reentered her bedroom, she understood something was wrong. Hasse’s bed. She always kept his bed made. His cover was thrown back as if he’d just gotten up to pee. She caught her breath and then let out a dry, rattling cough. She was truly frightened now. Her entire body was shaking.

Is Hasse here? Is my dead husband here in the house? She moaned and her hand went to her throat. What does he want? Does he want to hurt me?

I have to call someone, she thought. Anneli, I have to call Anneli.

She stared at Hasse’s bedcover as she headed to her nightstand. Her red cell phone had extra-large buttons so she could easily make out the numbers. Anneli had gotten it for her. Normal phones were too difficult to use.

She picked it up, but her shaky hand dropped it immediately. It hit the wooden floor with a bang.

She knelt down to look for it, quickly realizing it was unusable as it had broken into two pieces. She pushed the two halves together and put it back on the nightstand. Tomorrow she would see about getting a new one.

For now, she had to pull herself together. She glanced over at Hasse’s bed. There had to be a logical explanation. There always was. Perhaps she had moved the bedcover herself without noticing it. She might have gone into Hasse’s bed instead of her own. She missed him, she was freezing, she longed to be with him. It must be that simple.

She moved his pillow to her bed and propped it up behind her back. In this half-sitting position, she eventually fell into a fretful, dreamless slumber.

Those nights on Drottninggatan! The building was an island in a sea of ruins; soon they’d be erecting Celsing’s bombastic Culture House, including an artificial pond with a huge phallic sculpture made of glass, surrounded by spraying water. Though at that time, there was nothing but a huge hole left by demolition, noisy by day and gloomy by night.

Drottninggatan 37 is in the center of Stockholm, now mostly known for a shoe store called Jerns. The original building was from the eighteenth century, but it had been rebuilt many times. In 1964, I had access to rooms there on the top floor, previously an old photography studio once used by the legendary photographer Arne Wahlberg. An enormous sloped glass roof over the main room let in plenty of light. Several smaller rooms had been used as storage space and an office.

I wasn’t actually renting the rooms. I’d run across an old friend and colleague, a fashion photographer, who’d rented the place with what in those days was called a “demolition contract.” He’d just moved out, relocating his studio to a more permanent address. We were having a beer at Löwenbräu, at the time still located on Jakobsgatan, just a block from Drottninggatan.

“Take them,” he said, tossing a key ring onto the table. “The building is completely abandoned. They’ll start tearing it down pretty soon. You can hang out there for now. The light is good. You’ll have to figure out the keys on your own.”

The building had been designated as a historical landmark by the Stockholm City Museum, which gave it some protection — at least, as far as the façade went. When I walked in, the abandoned shoe store seemed spooky. I had to go through it to get to the stairs. Shards of glass and unswept gravel covered the floor. In the evenings, the atmosphere was desolate and the crunching noise my shoes made echoed in a creepy way.

If you want to see what it was like, you can go to the library and look at page 49 in my photography book The Camera as Consolation: Part One (published in 1980). In Wahlberg’s former studio, my closest friends and I set up a ping-pong table. We met every Thursday at three o’clock in the afternoon. Håkan, Pierre, Staffan, Jackie, and me. We’d have little tournaments, and Staffan always won. When he was a teenager, he’d played for the team Engelbrektspojkarna. We should have realized that it was a bad omen: that our previous meeting place for ping-pong, the Co-op Union’s abandoned slaughterhouse and sausage factory, had burned to the ground one year before. The flames had eaten up our ping-pong table, complete with its net, paddles, and balls. We had no way of knowing that the same thing would happen again.

So I ended up spending lots of my time at Drottninggatan 37, high up on the sixth floor, working on my barely existent photography career during an extremely unhappy period in my life. I often had to stay in the building overnight. It wasn’t always easy. I realized right away that candles would be too much of a fire hazard. And flashlight batteries were expensive. Sometimes I’d have to choose between a Spartan dinner or a working flashlight at night. Earlier in the fall, things were more or less fine, since there was still running water and electricity, but as winter approached, the utilities were cut off. Soon I’d have to abandon the place.

As I said, it really wasn’t easy sleeping there. I would lie down on a lump of old clothes that smelled bad. I heard strange sounds in the supposedly empty building. I knew some homeless men lived here and they were restless at night. They had it rougher than I did; they slept right on the broken glass and trash. It was a real hell. They’d light fires in old tin cans, which made me nervous. They also snored. The most alarming sounds, however, were the determined footsteps coming up the stairs — and the knocking on my door. Then I’d grab my bag containing my ten-year-old Hasselblad 1000F. I’d gotten it cheap when Hasselblad released the 50 °C and all the professional photographers dumped their old 1000Fs — their shutters were loud and unreliable.

The sound is easy to imitate: cla-DUM-hiss. If that last hiss did not come, the shutter had frozen, which meant the shoot was over. I also had two magazines for 120 film, a Linhof tripod, and a Lunasix light meter. My camera bag was always packed so I could take off whenever I wanted. My only other possessions were a thermos and the clothes on my back.

The neighborhood around my building, with all its condemned and half-demolished buildings, did not invite strolls at night. I’d read that slums incited people to crime — a belief the psychologists and doctors of Sweden had held for a long time. According to them, this is how it worked: in these slum quarters, children and young people ran around without control, they’d shoplift, fight, and vandalize. A certain doctor by the name of Beijerot kept trumpeting this on television debates and in newspaper articles. Slums are vectors of criminality, he believed. The obvious cure was to tear them all down. I think he confused cause and effect; a rather common problem then, just like today.

Then a new concept came along to replace the old one: modernity. The city politicians, listening to the doctors, got caught up in the spirit of the times. Old buildings needed to be torn down because they were in the way. Highways were to be built through the city, opening it up to light and fresh air.

One night, smoke came in from under my door. I have never woken so fast in my life. I rushed down the stairs to locate the source. Broken furniture and heaps of old newspapers were burning in the stairwells of the fourth and fifth floors. I grabbed some fire buckets filled with sand (complete with small spades), part of the obligatory equipment of any office in those days. It was possible to put out small fires with them, which is what I did. I was coughing and sweating, my face and arms covered in soot, my clothes torn ragged by the time I got back up to the sixth floor. I opened all the windows I could and stood there for a long time, breathing in the city’s cool night air. I still had hot water left in my thermos, so I went to make coffee in another room. I used freeze-dried coffee, which I liked a lot back then. I also wanted to appear to be modern.

In those days, the old patriarchal society was falling apart. Changes in trade and manufacturing during the end of the fifties meant that many men (and it was mostly men who worked outside the home then) were losing their jobs. They comforted themselves with alcohol and, in their frustration, sometimes they beat their wives and kids. However, a new social structure was coming into being. Women started to demand, and get, divorces. If there were children, the women had the right to keep the apartment, so their former spouses were out on the street. Some of those became alcoholics with no other place to live but the street and they often met an early death. Perhaps it was a just punishment for treating their wives and kids so brutally.

When I was young, I loved cars. I had a Ford Prefect, one of the worst vehicles ever made, which was a somewhat larger version of the Ford Anglia, also just as bad. The Prefect was a four-door and I’d bought it one day when I’d managed to scrape together eighty kronor. It didn’t last long. It wasn’t Mr. Frost’s fault. This homeless guy had chosen to sleep in its backseat one chilly night. This car was so tall and narrow it had gotten the nickname “Hot Dog Stand.” The reason Mr. Frost (yes, that was really his name) could sleep there at all was because he was constantly exhausted. Whenever I’d go on an errand, he would be there in the backseat.

We didn’t talk much. I’d try to give him food, sandwiches, but he’d refuse them. He would just vomit up all real food. His alcoholism was so far advanced that the only calories he got were from sweet strong wine. He found it himself. I did not want to go to the State Liquor Store and get it for him. I looked young, so I had trouble buying alcohol. The cashiers mistakenly believed I was just sixteen with a fake driver’s license. I was, in fact, ten years older. Anyway. Once I was driving up the Western Bridge heading south when Mr. Frost got scared and started screaming. Smoke had begun to fill the inside of the vehicle, and I quickly opened the retractable front windshield, a feature not found on later models. (This one was from 1953.) Air streamed in but it made no difference. Cutting off the engine while still going up the bridge would be a mistake, I thought, but as soon as we crested the top, I let the car roll down to the Långholmen exit. Thanks to the fact that we still drove on the left in those days, I was able to pull off immediately and I parked the still smoking car on a piece of lawn. (Right-hand traffic was introduced three years later, even though a large majority of the Swedish population had voted against it.) When I opened the hood, I saw that a bit of rusty metal had fallen on the battery and shorted it out.

I abandoned the car where it was, and Mr. Frost and I hoofed it, somewhat unsteadily, through the city (images of destruction beneath white powdered snow) back to Drottninggatan 37. I let him in, and he disappeared immediately into the office of the former shoe store. Afterward, I stopped locking the front door. I was never sure how many individuals this saved from freezing to death on the streets; at least they could have a roof over their heads.

In the forties, Arne Wahlberg started getting migraines whenever he had to focus his camera. When I found that out, I began to call it the Wahlberg Disease. There was just one way to focus a camera in those days: you had to slowly turn the lens. On larger cameras, you’d expand or contract the bellows using a rack-and-pinion system until the image appeared in focus on the ground-glass screen.

As a photographer myself, with the same tendency to get migraines, this wasn’t surprising. Straining the eye to focus the camera could set them off. You never get used to migraines. My siblings had them and so did my mother. Still, you got used to one thing: the nervous anticipation that, all of a sudden, it could go bang inside your brain. So I felt fine with the idea that the man who’d been here before me had suffered from the same illness. In the end, Wahlberg’s migraines forced him to give up photography. I hoped I would not be stricken by the same fate.

I slept so uneasily on Drottninggatan, I would wake to make nightly rounds. I soon became familiar with each and every corner of the building so that darkness was never a problem. The shoe store and its offices on the ground floor. The import firm on the second floor. The former lawyer’s offices on the third floor. The strange firm on the fourth floor — I never figured out what it had been. And “mine” on the sixth floor. All of it a labyrinth. Each room had its own smell.

Everywhere, except on my floor, were sleeping men. The rumor of an unlocked building spread and so the number of homeless men was growing. Bundles of men wrapped in blankets and rags. Some of them talked nervously in their sleep. Others seemed to plunge straight into unconsciousness. Mr. Frost was one of the latter. I felt I was being a good person. By leaving the front door unlocked, these individuals were saved from sleeping outdoors. One night, I even counted them: there were thirty-seven.

My own living arrangements were a bit marginal for some time. I had moved from one temporary address to another. It’s funny how memory can trip you up when it comes to years gone by. I remember 1964 to 1967 as three years of loneliness, filled with paranoia and masturbation. But if I check the facts, I was actually married during those years — in fact, I got married twice. And I remember relationships on the side as well. I remember one woman, also married, who would sneak off from her job as an office manager to meet me at number 37. Perhaps you’re wondering why I wasn’t living with my wife if I was, indeed, married. But I couldn’t live with her, even though we were friends, because she, too, was homeless. In those days she was living temporarily at the apartment of a writer on Västerlånggatan in Old Town.

By the age of twenty-six, I was riding a career roller coaster. I was part of the cultural life of the capital city. The marriage, if you’re still wondering about that, was not exactly burning brightly. Although we weren’t living together, my wife and I, we’d get together for work. She was in the theater and was an excellent fashion model. The fashion house Mah-Jong bought our photographs. We hadn’t gotten around to getting a divorce, because in the late sixties people didn’t bother with empty conventions like that.

I had built a somewhat precarious living as a photographer by visiting the editorial offices of all the magazines in Stockholm, showing them my photos. And on those occasions, I would make an effort to seem like a congenial coworker. Some editors gave me small assignments; they would test me and then try someone else. In those days, everyday transactions were done on a cash basis. Whenever I’d been given a job and delivered my pictures, I’d go to the cashier and pick up an envelope with bills. I usually thought the amount was too small. My ability to use a camera was greater than my ability to fit in with the job and its jargon.

This jargon had no words for the ideas I turned over in my mind — for example, the words to seriously define the problems with/of photography. The most important of these was the one most often ignored: the psychic energy needed for each photograph. They say when photography was invented, around 1840, many people refused to be photographed as they believed the camera would steal their living souls and leave them as empty shells. In a way, that is true. But it’s not the subject who becomes an empty shell, it’s the photographer. Every exposure demands concentration. I did not use a flash (my technique was based on natural light and the steadiness of the tripod), but the inside of my own head flashed each time I hit the cable release. Migraines lie in wait for every photographer.

Another issue in photography: the subject is flattened and always smaller than reality. Larger prints don’t help; the real landscape or cityscape is at all times larger than the print.

Theoretically, a portrait could be different. August Strindberg, when he contemplated opening a portrait studio in Berlin, had the theory that the human soul could be captured only if the negative was the same size as the subject’s face. He had written a short story he would read while the picture was being taken. The person sitting for the photograph had to remain perfectly still while the photographer (in this case, also the writer) would remove the cap from the lens and then put it back on it after the last line was read. The story, therefore, became a timer replacing the mechanical one. The story lasted twenty-five seconds. Strindberg’s homemade lens was as slow as the glass plates of the 1880s. The negative format was probably 24 x 36 cm and the glass plates had to be specially made. Not impossible, this required painting light-sensitive emulsion onto glass plates in a darkroom. On the other hand, he could never get his homemade camera — with a simple lens from a kerosene lamp — to work. You can have many plans — but not all of them will be realized. Just ask me.

Capturing the range of exposure is another problematic factor. Think of a room right before twilight — outside the window a street is lit by the setting sun. For the person inside, it is easy to differentiate both the light outside and the darkness inside, thanks to the human eye’s exceptional optical range. Now think of a photograph. It’s necessary to choose an exact exposure. If the outside is clear, the inside is black. If the room is clear, the outside is completely white, or washed out as we professionals say.

But I had my subjects — not portraits of people, as I was much too inhibited for that. Strindberg’s excellent ideas about a portrait studio were not possible for me considering my own level of expertise. But cityscapes, where people appeared at a distance, that was my specialty. I saw them, but they didn’t see me. I liked to study their movements in an almost scientific way.

The movements of people. Yes. Very interesting. Perhaps you remember the old theory that cars about to turn didn’t really need their turn signals? The beginning of the turn, that subtle initial indication, the slight deflection of the front wheels as they turn to the left or to the right, should be enough for other drivers to know what would happen. People’s walking movements can be interpreted in the same way. That man there will soon turn — or stop; that woman with him — or not — are they walking beside each other because they are friends or colleagues, or are they strangers who just happened to be walking near each other at the same moment and will soon head in different directions? All of this is endlessly fascinating. You could draw them as figures on a graph.

One November day, the snow-covered but sunny Drottninggatan outside my window felt like the right choice as my photographic subject. An f-stop of 16 and five hundredths of a second. In spite of the strong light, mysterious figures seemed to sneak about trying not to be seen. I wanted to capture them, list them, make it clear to myself what was about to happen. But in the photographs, they were always turned away. Then I decided to take pictures of the room instead. The window became a rectangle without detail. The floor covered in glass shards and dirt. The furniture smashed. Artistic pictures, perhaps, but to what end?

The spirit of the times: the realization that injustice was exploding in countries all over the world demanded that stenciled pamphlets must be written and distributed. The subjects included Vietnam being bombed by the United States and France, with an independence movement in the North. Spain, Greece, and Portugal — dictatorships all, with Portugal fighting a gruesome war against the independence movement in their colony of Angola. Latin America, where many regimes relied on torture. South Africa, with its unsustainable apartheid system. Just a few examples. We young people were outraged by all the neglect and oppression going on in the world. Perhaps we were less observant when it came to the disparity on our own streets.

During the evening, I would observe the movements of the people outside my window and develop my own theories. On the other side of Drottninggatan, all the buildings had already been torn down. A large construction site was extending in all directions around a gaping pit in the center to form a so-called super-ellipse. The remaining residents had to use temporary stairs and wooden walkways. These were rebuilt every week and were not easy to navigate.

The patterns that people made, evening after evening, interested me very much. Three men were different from all the others. They seemed together and yet were not. They moved stealthily as if they did not want to be seen. They spied and wrote down secret things in their black notebooks. I would sketch them and their movements. My sketchbook was filled with page after page of identical labyrinths. I called them the Three Wise Men. Agent Caspar, Agent Melchior, and Agent Balthazar. The patterns they made would form the letter Z or the number 8. What did they want? Sometimes a fourth person would appear, a woman in a brown dress and a small hat. She seemed to be their boss. In my notes, I called her Maria. She’d use slight tilts of her head to indicate to the other three where they should go.

The late fifties and early sixties were an odd time in the history of Stockholm. Huge swaths of downtown were demolished. It was the largest rearrangement of an inner city in Europe, especially for a country that had not been bombed during the war. That area we now call “city” looked so much like a war zone then that my pal from art school, Håkan Alexandersson, and I made a short war film there in 1960. In those days, every household in Sweden had received a brochure called If the War Comes about the dangers of falling atomic bombs. We titled our film Until the Fire Is Out due to the ridiculous advice in that brochure which in our minds minimized the danger. If your clothes start to burn, roll on the ground until the fire is out.

One afternoon, I had a desire to search for any of Wahlberg’s leftover negatives and — with the help of a crowbar — I broke open a Masonite wall to find a closet-sized space of about two square meters. Both walls had cracks. The space itself was empty. Of course, it felt only natural to test one of the cracks with my crowbar. A layer of broken bits fell to the floor. Dust flew up and I couldn’t see much for a moment, but when it settled, I found a very old door. Crack! The crowbar did its work; the door fell toward me and I jumped out of the way. The dust had to settle once more before I realized I’d found an old passage to the building next door, Drottninggatan 35.

There were a number of conspiracy theories in those days. One of the basic theories speculated that the owners of Stockholm’s old buildings let them decay until tearing them down would become inevitable. Repairs and renovations were held off until it was too late to do anything. Over eight hundred buildings were torn down in Stockholm from the midfifties to the midseventies. Most of these had been constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Very few were considered part of our cultural inheritance. One exception was my building, Drottninggatan 37, which, of course, was irritating for the developers. All they saw was space to exploit with a protected building in their way. That they would go so far as to set fires to the buildings themselves — that was a theory that even I, a diehard Communist, found hard to believe.

All that time, I had to force myself to believe that there had to be a reason for the social heartlessness in Sweden, the architectural helplessness in Stockholm, and my own situation.

Actually, I have to say that my paranoia was proven justified, because I came to be interrogated by two policemen who wanted me to confess that foreign powers had employed me to bring anarchy to the streets. They had three possible employers in mind: Albania, Cuba, or China. I was brought to the police station on Kungsholmen and I would probably have laughed in their faces about the absurdity of the accusation (these poverty-stricken countries couldn’t afford anything like this) if the policemen hadn’t been so intimidating. They placed me on a small chair in the middle of the room — well, I’ve described this matter in detail before. It had to do with an art installation I’d had at Galleri Karlsson, a little space near Odenplan. And I was declared guilty by the judge, but not for spying, as the police had hoped. Just for desecration of a state symbol and for agitation. The latter stemmed from a lithography where I’d written, Betray your country, don’t be nationalistic.

I was prepared to be followed after I left the police station. I kept my eye out for agents, peering from a window on the second floor, a window in the same abandoned office where I’d met my married friend. Agents in American films have black suits, ties, and dark sunglasses. Not in Sweden. Here they sport what we call leisure wear in English. Light gray jackets, brown pants, black shoes with rubber soles. Perhaps a water-repellant hunter’s cap with a small brim — you know, those hats you can fold up and put in your pocket in case you need to slightly change your appearance. For the same reason, the jackets could be worn inside out. Their clumsy shoes, for larger-than-average feet, always gave away who they were. At Galleri Karlsson, we had called them “Säpo’s Art Club.”

At first they didn’t scare me. But one evening at twilight, as I went through the floors of my building, I found about ten kerosene cans behind a stack of empty cardboard boxes. I’d lived in other places that had kerosene heat, but kerosene was not used in Drottninggatan 37. This very building, where I stood with my flashlight, had no kerosene furnaces. It had had water circulating in a central heating system before it was all cut off. No utilities in the building were functional. I had a moment of clarity. The Three Wise Men! The increase of arson! That’s how the final destruction of historic buildings would be handled.

A bad night. I tossed and turned constantly. My broken sleep was then interrupted by a thundering sound. I got up, fully dressed as always because of the chill. Smoke was seeping into Wahlberg’s studio, the second time this week. Definitely not a coincidence. I was coughing as I ran to my emergency exit — the door I’d found hidden in the closet, the one leading to the building next door. I could hear screaming from the floors below. I stumbled in the darkness, tripping over all kinds of garbage. I found myself in the decaying attic of Drottninggatan 35 before I had any time to think. I’d left my camera case behind. My Hasselblad, the ping-pong table — all gone. Like the paddles and ping-pong balls. Just like before.

Perhaps those skulking men committed murder. Perhaps not. In extreme situations, certain emotions, like empathy and indignation, disappear. Those screams from below, they came back to me afterward, much later, as an extra-horrible detail in my memory. I should have acted differently. I should have opened the door to the stairway and found the others, shown them the way out. Mr. Frost, with his weatherworn face and his silence, comes to me sometimes at night. I’d heard his screams before, in my car. Did I hear them then? A few minutes have been erased from my memory. In a smoking world, a person can become a robot on autopilot.

The building was later rebuilt with a poured-cement façade to imitate its original wooden one. Behind this façade, there’s a modern office building. On the ground floor, there’s an elegant shoe store.

I still feel, even after such a long time, that nobody takes me seriously.

Back then, gentrification hadn’t yet managed to destroy the aggregate of small-scale industries, warehouses, workshops, hovels, and shacks which characterized the area along the polluted Hammarby Canal. Nonetheless, a doomsday atmosphere pervaded the district, partly because the city was ready to level it to the ground, partly because executions regularly took place there. It was easy to dump bodies in the algae-green stream.

It wasn’t the thought of bloated corpses amidst scrap iron and timber down at the swampy bottom that lured Berit Hård to take her daily walk along the water at dusk. Rather, it was a diffuse yet deep sense of solidarity with South Hammarby Harbor’s maladjusted elements. She found a certain beauty in this dilapidated marginal area that was teeming with life, where rats scurried through chemical spills, where she had to zigzag between mossy stacks of boards and rust-eaten machine parts, where filthy old men sat under moldy tarps and burned garbage, over which they would warm themselves or grill sausages.

The smoke didn’t bother Berit; she was a smoker too and could easily find black-market cigarettes in the stalls near the approach to the main road. She could even get cheap bootleg liquor there.

Her great love for these doomed surroundings, despite everything, had roots in a love of a more carnal sort: Rafel. The first time she’d seen him standing and welding sheet metal in a building that resembled a hangar, where the canal widened into a pool, her heart skipped a beat. When he took off the mask, his intense gaze hit her like sparks from the welding gun. Every late afternoon when Berit found her way to this place, she relished the opportunity to look into the mystical depth of Rafel’s eyes.

She moved constantly in the daydream called “hope for the future,” for she was only twenty years old and had seen more life than death.

But that evening in October, Hammarby Harbor’s silhouettes rose up above the fog banks like ghastly skeletons. Or maybe this was only how she remembered things afterward. For this was when she saw a young person lose her life.

She’d witnessed this from a distance just as she was nearing a decommissioned lightbulb factory. The building’s functional architecture appeared like a cluster of wooden blocks, one of which stood on its end, crowned with something that resembled a glass booth on columns. As Berit examines the smashed windowpanes, a body came floating down from a high ledge and disappeared behind a clump of trees. Berit expected to hear something when the body hit the ground, but there wasn’t a sound. She rushed up the grassy embankment, layers of thick fog drifting in front of her as she desperately searched for the body. The mangled form on the ground wasn’t visible until she reached the building.

A slender girl with dark hair, scarcely older than eighteen, lay racked on a big chunk of concrete with protruding iron rods. Her eyes, framed with kohl, were open and her lips, painted black, vaguely stirred. Berit walked toward her and bent down over her body.

— Cos... the girl panted. Cos... mo...

— Cosmos? Berit repeated, as a nasty rattle came from the girl’s throat and she went silent.

The girl’s pulse faded away under Berit’s thumb. Berit set off for the road just behind the factory. After staggering breathlessly for a few seconds, she pulled up her tight skirt above her hips, and once she reached the road, she tried to flag down the first oncoming car. When it emerged from the fog and slowed down, Rafel sat behind the steering wheel in a small olive-green Renault with a disproportionately big rear end he’d built himself, presumably to make room for all the junk he liked to tinker with. Rafel stopped the car and asked Berit what happened. She told him what she’d just witnessed.

— Is she alive? Rafel asked in his deep bass while Berit plunked down into the seat beside him.

— No, she died as I got there.

— Did you see anything else? Rafel grumbled, as he crossed over toward a gas station near the bigger intersection, a frown on his face. His voice sounded harsh and hollow, as if he spoke through a pipe. And despite the seriousness of the moment, Berit felt a shockwave of desire when he turned his dark, inscrutable gaze toward her. Only then did she realize how obscene she must look with her skirt rolled up, revealing her lace panties and garter belt. She clumsily pulled her skirt down while she answered that she couldn’t see so clearly in the fog, but she repeated the word the girl’s lips had tried to utter: Cosmos.

Rafel turned into the gas station and dropped her off. He’d been forbidden to drive and didn’t want the cops to find out, he explained sullenly before clattering away.

Fifteen minutes later, in the din of shrieking sirens and the crackling of a police radio, Berit gave her minimal testimony at the gas station. A cop asked how she felt, would she need “crisis counseling”? But Berit was content to be dropped off on a side street that led down to a group of protected houses where she rented a room. It was a paradoxical idyll, wedged between the water and a forested hill, just below the constant stream of traffic on a nearby road that connected the southern part of the city and the many suburbs along the subway’s southbound Green Line. It was green too in Brovattnet — a lush garden of fruit trees and berry bushes, all well-maintained and yielding huge harvests.

To forget the sight of the young woman whose eyes were numb with pain as rebar pierced her body was, however, impossible. Being impaled must have been excruciating. After a couple of hours in a cold sweat, making fruitless attempts at falling asleep, Berit got out of bed and carefully walked down the creaky stairs. She didn’t want to wake Thea. Thea was a writer and so easily disturbed that she really shouldn’t have had tenants. Thus Berit and Thea scarcely talked to each other, which was fine with Berit; she was a recluse herself. In any event, the blinking blue lights from the bridge abutment must have troubled Thea’s sacred nocturnal slumber, for there was light coming from the kitchen.

As Berit stood in the kitchen doorway she heard a gruff voice. A moment later she met his piercing gaze. She couldn’t stop the feeling throbbing through her genitals nor the glow that rushed up, making her face flush. She suffered a “little death” and had to hold onto the doorframe. Rafel stared straight into her innermost self. Berit excused herself and poured a glass of water before shamefacedly padding back up to her room in her nightgown. Maybe it wasn’t so strange that Rafel sat in Thea’s kitchen. He and Thea had been childhood friends in the red-hot seventies, she’d mentioned it once when he’d come by to borrow some tools from the shed. But running into him twice that day still seemed odd.

The dying girl’s gaze and Rafel’s expression in Thea’s kitchen revolved over and over in her mind, and for some peculiar reason she felt guilty, though it was unclear of what. Certainly it was irritating that Rafel brought her to orgasm simply with his eyes, but he probably hadn’t noticed anything.

She didn’t manage to fall asleep until after the early-morning trains had started rumbling over the nearby bridge, and only slept for a short time. She woke abruptly to the shrill sound of a crow cawing while it peered through her window. The day was cloudy, fog still thick over the little yard outside the house. Rafel’s car was nowhere to be seen.

The walls of the room seemed to be closing in on her, as if wanting to push her out. After a quick shower, she got dressed, hoping that the hectic pace of her job at the hospital would make her feel normal again.

On the way to work she kept looking over her shoulder. She felt persecuted, which in a way she was, persecuted by the images in her brain. The obsessive thought of putting herself in the impaled girl’s place wouldn’t leave her. Had it been deliberate? Had the girl seen the iron rods hidden in the fog? If she’d chosen to die, wouldn’t there have been easier ways? Berit stopped on Skanstull Bridge and scouted the accident scene. Dying should be simple, like walking over a bridge. Dying ought to be a slip out of the material world, not something to get stuck in, not being racked by rusty iron spikes, as if life and matter wanted to leave a last reminder of their harshness.

Here’s the situation.

The target is a female, middle-aged.

The target is with a friend, a female civilian, also middle-aged and quite well off.

They’re having a lovely day, two cows getting older, shopping, Fika, etc.

Over the last several months we have observed three other such jaunts, and they generally follow the same pattern — the ladies meet up, work their way to Stureplan by taxi or car, and if the hour is right they lunch at the Oyster Bar.

After this the pair tends to stroll down Biblioteksgatan to Norrmalmstorg (where I am currently situated), where they will visit the Acne, Marimekko, Filippa K, and the Noa Noa stores before proceeding east down Hamngatan to the NK.

And this is where we will take her.

The hope is that they will not go to the outsized Åhlens, which they have been noted to do on one occasion, as the operation would prove much more difficult in that environment. Too many people, very close quarters, less space to work.

The significance of the date, September 10... it’s the most ridiculous thing, but if you can believe it, the client is convinced this will somehow act as a misdirect and point toward Islamists. Incredibly sophomoric, like an unimaginative spy novel, but nonetheless. The client gets what the client wants, within reason, and any day is as good as the next.

More to the point is that this evening, apparently, there is some sort of debate regarding the adoption of the euro, which the bitch supports of course, so eager to join the “Union” is she that all other concerns are swept aside.

Not a political animal, no way. But Swedish money should stay in Sweden. Not to support these fucking aliens (another matter entirely) with their babushkas and hordes of filthy children, but just on principle.

The Norwegians have the right idea with all that oil money. Keep it close. Spend it to make your country great. How can anyone refute this logic?

The client: politician too. Boringly. Perhaps the most unengaging, least charismatic man one can imagine. From our one brief, furtive meeting I can recall his stale breath, his dandruff, cheap suit, his compulsive jiggling of the knee. His stiff, high-pitched speech. Just useless. Muttering about deniability, this being most important did I understand that there must be no direct communication, that discretion is paramount, that he knows no details, droning on and on, as if this were my first rodeo. I had to bite my tongue. The very fucking nerve. Talking to me like I’m new to this.

Somehow this man, I’ll call him Johan, believes he is the true successor to the throne. Old friend of fat-fuck Goran. Been waiting in the wings for a decade and figures it’s his turn, and the only barrier between prime ministership and yet more years on the periphery is this bitch who has inexplicably and rather swiftly positioned herself as the next choice for the goddamn Social Democrats... It’s become, apparently, an obsession. His drug problem certainly hasn’t helped him think straight. And his taste for underage hookers (which I am not ashamed to say I helped provide, it’s sort of something we do on the side, so many eager boys and girls from Latvia, Estonia... what they’ll do for a passport and the promise of a shit job, say, in this shit café I now find myself in, who am I to deny them this life?), well, this information gives me leverage and a bit of control, and the client knows it.

The rub, and I chuckle now thinking about it as I grind out my smoke, the upshot though... there’s not a chance in hell the client could win any election. Not a chance in hell. He’s like a flat cardboard cutout, stiff, awkward, and barely there. He doesn’t have the stuff.

If he had the stuff, he’d do it himself. I’d walk him through it. Throttle the bitch on the floor of Parliament.

But his lack of political future is beautiful. Cos it opens up the field for the true Swedes, friends in the Christian Democrats and the Farmers Party... citizens with the correct ideas, those who will carry us into the future and away from the failure that is Europe. The dirge that has been the Social Democrat era, seemingly endless, will come to an abrupt (and most welcome) halt. The time is now, you can smell it, you can taste it, ripe fruit.