The Blinded Man Read Free Page A

gone. Then it comes back in, along with the sax. All four now, in a veiled promenade. Then the applause. Yeah.
    He presses the remote. A vast silence ensues.
    He gets up cautiously. Stands for a moment in the big room. High over his head dust motes circulate in the non-existent draught around the crystal chandelier. The dull metal on the streamlined shape of the stereo reflects nothing of the faint light: Bang & Olufsen.
    Bang, bang
, he thinks.
Olufsen
, he thinks. Then he stops thinking.
    He runs his gloved hand lightly over the shiny leather surface of the sofa before he allows himself to tread tentatively across the pleasantly creaking parquet floor. He avoids the huge Pakistani carpet, hand-knotted over a month’s time by the slave labour of Pakistani children, and goes out into the corridor. He opens the door and steps out onto the terrace, stopping for a moment, close to the hammock.
    He fills his lungs with the tranquil, chilly air of the spring night, letting his eyes rest on the rows of apple trees: Astrakhans and Åkerös, Ingrid Maries and Lobos, White Transparents and Kanikers. Each tree is labelled with a little sign; he noticed that on his way in. So far the apples can be found only on the signs, showy, brilliantly hued, long before any blossoms have even appeared. Flat, surrogate apples.
    He would like to believe that it’s crickets that he hears; otherwise it’s inside his head.
Sonic bang
, he thinks.
And Olufsen
, he thinks.
    Although it wasn’t a real bang, of course.
    Leaving the terrace, he closes the door behind him, goes back down the long corridor and returns to the enormous living room. Once again he avoids the red-flamed frescos of the hand-knotted carpet, goes over to the stereo and presses the eject button. In a vaguely elliptical trajectory, the cassette tape gently rises out of the tape deck. He plucks it out and puts it in his pocket. He turns off the stereo.
    He looks around the room.
What an atmosphere
, he thinks. Even the dust motes seem custom-made to complement the crystal chandelier, as they elegantly swirl around it.
    In his mind’s eye he sees a list. In his mind he ticks off each item.
    Kuno
, he thinks, laughing.
Isn’t that the name of a party game?
    He leaves the living room by a slightly different route. A teak table and four matching, high-backed chairs stand on another hand-knotted rug; he imagines that it’s Persian. It is predominantly beige, in contrast to the red Pakistani carpet.
    Although right now they’re very similar.
    Close to the table he has to step over what is colouring the Persian rug red. Then he lifts his legs to step over someone else’s.
    Out in the garden a drowsy full moon peeks from behind its fluffy cloud cover, as a veiled fairylike dance skims the bare apple trees.

4
    DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT ERIK Bruun must have pressed a green button somewhere on his desk, because accompanied by a buzzing sound a green light lit up his name-plate on the doorframe out in the hallway. Paul Hjelm, in turn, pressed down on the handle to the perpetually locked door and went in.
    This was the police station, whose peculiar geographic coordinates were something like this: located in Fittja, with mailing address in Norsborg, in Botkyrka municipality, Huddinge police authority. If you wanted to avoid using the name Fittja, because of its obscene and derogatory association with the Swedish word for
pussy
, you could always say Botkyrka, which, in addition to providing the location for the church, encompassed quite lovely areas such as Vårsta and Grödinge; or you could say Norsborg, the hometown of the table-tennis genius J. O. Waldner and the Balrog floorball team; or you could use the name Huddinge, even if it sounded like a bedroom suburb. Hjelm lived in a terraced house in Norsborg, just a few doors from Waldner’s birthplace. But he could never really specify which district he lived in, least of all now.
    The place that God forgot
, he thought fatefully as he