A Death in Sweden(42)

It was obvious she’d been preoccupied with the thought since hearing about the location of the party.

“I think he’s sixty now. So he would have been around forty-five or forty-six at the time, height of his powers, supremely confident.” By way of clarification, he added, “I don’t know the guy at all, but boy do I know the type, and yes, to answer your question, it’s entirely feasible someone like that might assume a friendly young sculptor at a party was genuinely interested in him.”

She took in what he was saying, sighed heavily and said, “We need proof.”

He didn’t respond directly, but said, “By the way, we’re being followed, two of Brabham’s guys.”

“But . . .”

“My fault. We were careless. They knew we were in Limoges, probably had a good idea we’d be coming back into Montparnasse. With the resources this guy has available to him, we would have been easy enough to track.”

“But they’re only following us?”

“For now. Obviously, I don’t have a very high opinion of Bill Brabham, but I guess he’s still smart enough to know his superiors wouldn’t appreciate his guys shooting me in a busy Paris street in the middle of the day, and they’d appreciate it even less if a member of the Swedish Security Service got hit in the crossfire.”

“So I saved you again?”

He laughed and said, “You could say that. If I’m reading him right, his guys will keep track of us, but if he’s still got some freelancers in reserve, he’ll use them for the hit.”

She seemed genuinely shocked by his relaxed tone and said, “Aren’t you worried?”

“Not really. You know, I’m not James Bond. I let a guy sneak up on me this morning, I let Brabham track me from Sweden to Limoges to here. But I’ve been doing pretty risky stuff for a long time and I am still here. I’m not infallible, but nor are they.”

She looked reassured, and leaned over and kissed him quickly, and said, “They can report that.”

Yousef’s studio was an old factory of some sort, dark soot-stained bricks on the outside, but light and white and modern inside. He wasn’t alone in there either. There was a woman behind a desk fielding calls, a couple of young women and a guy working on frames and priming canvases.

Yousef was also in his mid-thirties, but he had a shock of white hair, his eyebrows alone showing how dark it had once been. He greeted them warmly and looked immediately fixated by Inger, a look that simultaneously pleased Dan and made him uncomfortable.

Yousef asked the woman behind the desk for some coffees and then showed them down to an area at the far end of the room where mismatched sofas and easy chairs formed a small lounge area. He pointed out the works in progress and explained things about the building as they walked, as if he was used to being visited by journalists.

“I’m glad you came,” he said, as they all finally sat down. “It’s been too long that I spoke to Sylvie, a year at least, but we’ll have dinner next week.”

Inger said, “She showed us your painting—it was really beautiful.”

He seemed to thank her, though without words and hardly any facial movement, and said, “You’re from Sweden?”

She nodded, on the edge of being uneasy under his gaze. If he’d always been like this, Dan could begin to understand why the police had talked to him. He had to hand it to him, though, he had taste, because Inger was ridiculously beautiful, a quality Dan couldn’t even quite narrow down—he just felt good being with her, looking at her, and he could understand Yousef feeling the same way.

“Yousef, do you mind if we ask you a couple of things about Sabine?”

He turned to Dan and said, “Coffee.” The woman had arrived and put the tray down, the next minute or two taken up with arranging the drinks. They settled again and Yousef picked up as if there’d been no pause, saying, “Of course not, but I know very little, certainly much less than the police thought I knew at the time.”

Even after all these years, it clearly still rankled with him, and understandably so.

“You were in the studio with her that night?”

He smiled, to himself, as if the question had taken him back to some golden age in his youth, and said, “Those two weeks before, nearly every night, just Sabine and me, we were always the last to leave. We had so much to do, but it was fun because we both liked to be there together. Crazy. Maybe I wouldn’t have remembered those two weeks if she’d lived, but now, I think about them so often.”

Inger said, “Was there a relationship between you, or just friendship?”

“She was so beautiful, just like you, but a different kind of beauty.”

Inger looked embarrassed or uncomfortable, but Yousef didn’t seem to notice.

“Yes, beautiful, but it was never like that between us. I had a lot of girlfriends then, and I think Sabine was popular with the boys, but with each other, we were more like brother and sister. It was fun.”

“Did she seem okay the night she died?”

“Hmm, maybe, maybe not. She was okay, but she had a couple of messages on her cell, and it made her mad. She didn’t tell me what they were about. I guessed it was guy trouble. And I couldn’t be sure—the police, they kept asking me again and again, ‘this man you claim you saw,’ like I’m lying—no, I couldn’t be sure, but when she left I thought I saw a man waiting for her along the street, and . . .” He stopped, this thought playing out across his face, and as if concluding some internal argument, he said, “It was dark, and I couldn’t have known. How could I?”