Before the Frost Read online

  He walked down the stairs and Linda returned to bed.

  Cancer of the tongue. She shuddered at the thought. Her fear of death came and went, though right now her life force was strong. But she had never forgotten what had gone through her mind while she was balancing on the edge of the bridge. Life wasn’t just something that took care of itself. There were big black holes you could fall into with long sharp spikes at the bottom, monstrous traps.

  She turned over on her side and tried to sleep. Right now she didn’t have the energy to think about black holes. Then she was startled out of her half-awake state. It was something to do with Lindman. She sat up. She had finally caught hold of the thought that had been bugging her. She dialed a number on her cell phone. Busy. On the third try her father finally picked up.

  “It’s me.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Better. There was something I wanted to ask about the man who was at Henrietta’s house last night. The one who was said to be commissioning a composition. Did she say what he looked like?”

  “Why would I have asked her that? She only gave me his name. I made a note of the address. Why?”

  “Do me a favor. Call her and ask about his hair.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because that’s what I saw.”

  “I will, but I really don’t have the time for this. We’re drowning in rain over here.”

  “Will you call back?”

  “If I get ahold of her.”

  He called her back nineteen minutes later.

  “Peter Stigström—the man who wants Henrietta to set his verse to music—has shoulder-length dark hair with a few gray streaks. Will that do?”

  “That will do just fine.”

  “Are you going to explain yourself now or when I get home?”

  “That depends on when you were planning to come home.”

  “Pretty soon. I have to get out of these clothes.”

  “Do you want something to eat?”

  “No, we’ve been taken care of, in fact. There are some enterprising Kosovo immigrants out here who make a living out of putting up food stands around crime scenes and fires. I have no idea how they hear about our work, but there’s probably a leak at the station who gets a commission. I’ll be home in an hour.”

  When the conversation was over, Linda sat staring down at the phone for a few minutes. The man she had seen through the window, the back of the head that had been turned toward her, had not had shoulder-length dark hair with a few gray streaks. His hair had been short and neatly trimmed.

  20

  Wallander came bounding in, his clothes soaked, his boots covered in mud, but with the happy news that the weather was about to clear up. Nyberg had called the air-control tower at Sturup, he said, and had received the report that the next forty-eight hours would be free of rain. Wallander changed his clothes, declined Linda’s offers of food, and fixed himself an omelet.

  Linda waited for the right moment to tell him about the conflicting descriptions of Henrietta’s visitor. She didn’t know exactly why she was waiting. Was it a lingering childhood fear of his temper? She didn’t know, she just waited. And then, when he pushed away his plate and she plopped into the chair across from him and was about to launch into her story, he started talking.

  “I’ve been thinking about your grandfather,” he said.

  “What about?”

  “What he was like, what he wasn’t like. I think you and I knew him in different ways. That’s as it should be. I was always looking for bits of myself in him, worried about what I would find. I’ve grown more and more like him the older I get. If I live as long as he did maybe I’ll find myself a ramshackle, leaky house and start painting pictures of wood grouse and sunsets.”

  “It’ll never happen.”

  “Don’t be too sure.”

  Linda broke in at this point and told him about the man she had seen whose close-cropped head didn’t match Henrietta’s description. He listened attentively, and when she stopped he didn’t ask her if she was sure of what she had seen. He reached for the phone and dialed a number from memory—first incorrectly, then getting it right. Lindman picked up. Wallander told him succinctly that in light of what Linda had observed they had to make another visit to Henrietta Westin.

  “We have no time for lies,” he said. “No lies, half-truths, or incomplete answers.”

  Then he put the phone down and looked at her.

  “This is unorthodox at best,” he said. “Not even necessary, strictly speaking, but I’m still going to ask you to come along. If you feel up to it, that is.”

  Linda felt a surge of pleasure.

  “I’ll do it.”

  “How’s the leg?’

  “Fine.”

  She saw that he didn’t believe her.

  “Does Henrietta know why I was there last night?” she asked. “She can hardly have believed what Stefan told her.”

  “All we want to know is who was there with her last night. We have a witness; we don’t have to tell her it’s you.”

  They walked down to the street and waited for Lindman. The air-traffic controllers had been right; the weather was changing. Drier winds were blowing in from the south.

  “When will it snow?” Linda asked.

  He looked at her in amusement.

  “Not for a while, I hope. Why do you ask?”

  “I can’t remember when it comes, even though I was born and raised here. I don’t remember the snow.”

  Stefan Lindman pulled up in his car. Linda climbed into the back seat, her father sat in the front. His seat belt was caught on something and he had trouble getting it on.

  They drove toward Malmö and Linda saw the sea shimmering to her left. I don’t want to die here, she thought. The thought came out of nowhere. I don’t only want to exist. Not like Zeba. And not be a single mother like her, or thousands of others whose lives become one long damned struggle to pay the rent and the babysitters and getting someplace on time. I don’t want to be like Dad, who can never find the right house and the right dog and the wife he needs.

  “What was that?” Wallander asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s funny. It sounded like you were swearing.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “I have a strange daughter,” Wallander said to Lindman. “She curses without even knowing it.”

  They turned onto the road that led to Henrietta’s house. The memory of being caught in the steel trap made Linda’s leg throb. She asked what would happen to the man who had set the trap.

  “He went a little pale in the face when I told him he had snared a police cadet. I’m assuming he’ll have to pay a hefty fine.”

  “I have a good friend in Östersund,” Stefan Lindman said. “A policeman. Giuseppe Larsson is his name.”

  “He sounds Italian.”

  “No, he’s from Östersund. But he has a connection of sorts with an Italian lounge singer.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Linda leaned forward between the seats. She had a sudden urge to touch Lindman’s face.

  “His mother had a dream that his father was not her husband but an Italian singer she had heard perform at an outdoor concert. It’s not just us men who have these fantasies.”

  “I wonder if Mona has ever had the same thoughts,” Wallander said. “In your case it would be a black dream father, Linda, since she worshipped Hosh White.”

  “Josh,” Lindman said. “Not Hosh.”

  Linda wondered vaguely what it would have been like to have a black father.

  “Anyway,” Lindman said. “My friend has an old bear trap on the wall at his place. It looks like an instrument of torture from the Middle Ages. He always said that if a person ever got caught in one, the steel teeth would cut all the way through the bone. The animals that get trapped in them have been known to gnaw their own legs off in desperation.”

  Lindman stopped the car and they climbed out. The wind w
as gusty. They walked up to the house, in which several of the windows were lit up. When they entered the front yard, all three of them wondered why the dog hadn’t started to bark. Lindman knocked on the door, but no one answered. Wallander peeked in through a window. Lindman felt the door. It was unlocked.

  “We can say we thought we heard someone call ‘Come in!’” he said tentatively.

  They walked in. Linda’s view was blocked by the broad backs of the two men. She tried standing on tiptoe to see past them but winced with pain.

  “Anybody home?” Wallander called out.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Lindman said.

  They proceeded through the house. It looked much as it had when Linda was there last. Papers, sheet music, newspapers, and coffee cups were scattered all over. But she recognized that this superficial impression of disarray only disguised a home comfortably arranged to meet Henrietta’s every need.

  “The door was unlocked,” Lindman said, “and her dog is gone. She must be out on an evening walk. Let’s give her a quarter of an hour. If we leave the door open she’ll know someone’s inside.”

  “She may call the police if she thinks the house is being burgled,” Linda said.

  “Burglars don’t leave the front door wide open for everyone to see,” her father said.

  He sat down in the most comfortable armchair, folded his hands over his chest, and closed his eyes. Lindman put his boot in the front door to keep it open. Linda picked up a photo album that Henrietta had left lying on the piano. The first pictures were from the early 1970s. The colors were starting to fade. Anna sat on the ground surrounded by chickens and a yawning cat. Anna had told Linda about the commune outside Markaryd where she had spent the first years of her life. Henrietta was holding her in another picture from that time, in baggy clothes, clogs, and a Palestinian shawl around her neck. Who is holding the camera? Linda wondered. Probably Eric Westin, the man who was about to disappear without a trace.

  Lindman walked over to her and she pointed to the pictures, explaining what she knew about them: the commune, the green wave, the sandal maker who vanished into thin air.

  “It sounds like something out of a story,” he said. “Like A Thousand and One Nights. I mean the part about the Sandal Maker Who Vanished into Thin Air.”

  They kept turning the pages.

  “Is there a picture of him?”

  “I’ve seen a few at Anna’s place, but that was a long time ago. I have no idea where they would be.”

  Pictures of life in the commune gave way to images of an Ystad apartment. Gray concrete, a wintry playground. Anna was a few years older.

  “By this time he had been gone for several years,” Linda said. “The person taking the pictures is closer to Anna than before. Pictures in the commune are always taken from a greater distance.”

  “Her father took those pictures and now Henrietta is the one taking them. Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  They flipped through to the end of the album, but there was no picture of Westin. One of the last pictures was of Anna’s high school graduation. Zeba was included at the edge of the frame. Linda had been there too, but she wasn’t shown.

  Linda was about to turn the page when the lights flickered and went out. The house was plunged into darkness and Wallander woke up with a start. They heard a dog barking outside. Linda sensed the presence of people out there in the night, people who did not intend to show their faces, but rather shied away from the light and were retreating even farther into the world of shadows.

  21

  He only felt secure in total darkness. He had never understood why there was always this talk of light in connection with mercy, eternity, images of God. Why couldn’t a miracle take place in total darkness? Wasn’t it harder for the Devil and his demons to find you in the shadows than on a bright expanse where white figures moved as slowly as froth on the crest of a wave? For him God had always manifested Himself as an enveloping, deeply comforting darkness.

  He felt the same way now as he stood outside the house with the brightly lit windows. He saw people moving around inside. When all the lights suddenly went out and the last door of darkness was sealed he took it as a sign from God. I am his servant in the darkness, he thought. No light escapes from here but I shall send out holy shadows to fill the void in the souls of the lost. I shall open their eyes and teach them the truth of the images that reside in the shadow-world. He thought about the lines in John’s second epistle: “For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.” It was the holiest key to his understanding of God’s Word.

  After the terrible events in the jungles of Guyana he could recognize a false prophet: a man with smooth black hair and even white teeth, who surrounded himself with light. Jim Jones had feared the dark. He had cursed himself countless times for not seeing through the guise of this false prophet who would lead them so astray—to their deaths. All of them except himself. This had been the first task God had assigned him: to survive in order to tell the world about the false prophet. He was to preach about the kingdom of darkness, which would become the fifth gospel that he would write to complete the holy writings of the Bible. This too was foretold at the end of John’s letter: “Having many things to write unto you, I would not write with paper and ink: but I trust to come unto you, and speak face to face, that our joy may be complete.”

  This particular evening he had been thinking about all the years that had gone by since he was last here. Twenty-four years, a large part of his life. When he left he was still a young man. Now age had started to claim his body. He took care of himself, ate sensibly, kept himself in constant motion, but the process of growing old had begun. No one could escape it. God lets us age in order for us to understand that we are completely in his hands. He gives us this remarkable life, but as a tragedy so that we will understand that only he has the power to grant us mercy.

  He stood in the darkness and thought back to all that had happened. Everything had been what he had dreamed of until he followed Jim Jones to Guyana. Even though he missed those he had left behind, in the end he had been convinced by Jim that this loss was necessary to prepare him for the higher purpose God held in store for him. He had listened to Jim, and sometimes he had not thought about his wife and his child for weeks at a time. It was only after the massacre, when the whole community lay rotting on the fields, that they returned to his consciousness. But by then it was too late. The void created by the God that Jim had killed in him was so devastating that he could not think of anyone but himself.

  He had retrieved the money and papers he had stored in Caracas, then took the bus to Colombia, to the city of Barranquilla. He remembered the long night he spent in the border station between Venezuela and Colombia, the city of Puerto Paez, where armed guards watched over the travelers like hawks. Somehow he had managed to convince these guards that he was John Clifton, as his documents stated, and he even managed to convince them that he didn’t have any money left. He had slept with his head on the shoulder of an old Native woman who carried a small cage with two chickens on her lap. They had not exchanged any words, just a look, and she had seen his exhaustion and suffering and offered him her shoulder and wrinkled neck to rest his head. That night he dreamed about those he had left behind. He woke up drenched in sweat. The old woman was awake. She looked at him and he dropped back against her shoulder. When he woke up in the morning she was gone. He felt inside his shirt and touched the thick wad of dollar bills. It was still there. He wanted her back again, the old woman who had let him sleep. He wanted to lean his head against her shoulder and neck and stay there for the rest of his life.

  From Barranquilla he took a plane to Mexico City. He washed off the worst of his filth in a public restroom. He bought a new shirt and a small Bible. It had been confusing to see the rushing crowds again, this life that he had left behind when he followed Jim. He walked past the newssta
nds and saw that what had happened had made the front-page headlines. Everyone was dead, he read. No one was thought to have survived. That meant they must think he was dead too. He existed but he had stopped living, since he was presumed to be one of the bloated bodies found in the jungle.

  He still didn’t have a clear plan. He had $3,000 left after paying for the fare to Mexico City, and if he was frugal he could get by on that for quite a while. But where should he go? Where could he find the first step back to God, out of this unbearable emptiness? He didn’t know. He stayed in Mexico City, in a small hostel, and spent his days attending various churches. He deliberately avoided the large cathedrals as well as the neon-lit tabernacles run by greedy and power-hungry clergy. Instead he sought out the small congregations where the love and the passion were palpable, where the ministers were hard to tell apart from those who came to listen to their sermons. That was the way he had to find for himself. Jim hid himself in the light, he thought. Now I want to find the God who can lead me to the holy darkness.

  One day he woke up with the overwhelming feeling that he had to leave. He took a bus going north the same day. To make the journey as cheap as possible, he took local buses. On certain stretches he hitched rides with truck drivers. He crossed the border into Texas at Laredo, where he checked into the cheapest motel he could find. He spent a week at the public library catching up on everything he could find that had been written about the catastrophe. To his consternation he found that there were former members of the People’s Temple who were accusing the FBI and CIA and the American government of fostering hostility toward Jim Jones and his movement, thereby inciting the mass suicide. He started to sweat. How could they defend the false prophet?

  During the long sleepless nights it occurred to him that he should write about what had happened. He was the only living witness. He bought a notebook and started to write, but he was overcome with doubt. If he were going to tell the real story he would have to reveal his true identity: not John Clifton, as his documents claimed, but another man with another nationality and name altogether. Did he want that? He hesitated.