Misterioso Read Free

he said calmly. “We need to resolve this situation so nobody gets hurt. If you surrender now, you can still appeal the decision; otherwise it’s going to be prison and then deportation for you. Look, I’m unarmed.” He carefully shrugged out of his jean jacket and dropped it to the floor.
    Dritëro Frakulla was blinking rapidly. He aimed the gun alternately at Hjelm and at the three civil servants on the floor.
    Don’t ask me to turn around
, thought Hjelm.
Keep talking, keep talking. Focus on showing him sympathy. Use words that’ll make him think. Distract his attention
.
    “Think about your family,” he managed. “What will your children do without you to support them? What about your wife—does she work? What kind of job will she be able to get, Frakulla? What sort of qualifications does she have?”
    The shotgun was now aimed at him; that was what he wanted.
    Frakulla suddenly spoke, almost as if he were reciting the words, in clear Swedish: “The worse crimes I commit, the longer we’ll be able to stay in this country. They won’t send my family away without me. I’m sacrificing myself for their sake.”
    “You’re wrong, Frakulla. Your family will be deported immediately, forced to return to the Serbs without any means of defending themselves. What do you think the Serbs will do with a woman and a couple of preschool kids that tried to flee from them? And what do you think will happen to you if you’re charged with murdering a cop, an unarmed cop?”
    For a second the man lowered the shotgun an inch or two, looking utterly confused. That was enough for Hjelm. He reached back to fumble at his waistband, pulled out his service revolver, and fired one shot.
    A voice was silenced inside him:
“Why the hell are you still disgusted by a woman’s bodily functions?”
    For a moment that seemed lifted out of time, everything was absolutely still. Frakulla held the shotgun in a tight grip. His inscrutable eyes bored straight into Hjelm’s. Anything could happen.
    “Ai,” said Dritëro Frakulla, dropped the gun, and toppled forward.
    For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction
, thought Hjelm, and felt sick.
    The male civil servant grabbed the shotgun and pressed the muzzle hard against Frakulla’s head. A patch of blood was growing larger under the man’s right shoulder.
    “Drop the weapon, you fuck!” yelled Hjelm, and vomited.

3
     
    At first it’s only the piano’s bizarre little strolls up and down the keys, accompanied by a high-hat and maybe the faint clash of a cymbal, possibly the sweep of the brushes on the snare drum aswell. Occasionally the fingers digress a bit from the marked path of their climb, into a light, bluesy feeling, but without breaking the choppy rhythm of the strutting two-four beat. Then a slight pause, the saxophone joins the same riff, and everything changes. Now the bass comes in, calmly walking up and down. The sax takes over, and the piano scatters sporadic comping chords in the background, broken by a few ramblings behind the apparently indolent improvisations of the sax.
    He presses the tweezers into the hole, tugging and tugging.
    The saxophone chirps with slight dissonance, then instantly falls back into the melodic theme. The piano goes silent; it’s so quiet that the audience can be heard in the background.
    The tweezers pull out what they’ve been looking for.
    The sax man says “Yeah” a couple of times, in between a couple of rambles. The audience says “Yeah.” Long drawn-out notes. The piano is still absent. Scattered applause.
    Then the piano returns and takes over. It meanders as before, making successive detours, rumbles, ever freer trills. Just the piano, bass, and drums.
    He presses the tweezers into the second hole. This time it’s easier. He drops both lumps into his pocket. He sits down on the sofa.
    The wanderings of the piano have returned to their starting point. Now the bass is gone. Then it comes back in, along with the sax.