Anxious People(59)

* * *




Jack is looking around the apartment.

“Dad, did you make sure the ringtone on that phone was switched on when we sent it in?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes, of course,” Jim replies.

“So… no, then?”

“I might have forgotten that. Maybe.”

Jack rubs his whole face with his palms in frustration.

“Could it have been on vibrate?”

“It could have been, yes.”

Jack reaches out and touches the little table where the phone had been lying when they stormed the apartment. It’s barely standing up on three legs, a definite challenge to gravity. He looks at the place on the floor where they found the pistol. Then he follows something invisible with his gaze and goes over to the green curtain. The bullet is in the wall.

“The perpetrator didn’t shoot himself,” Jack says in a low voice.

Then it dawns on him that the perpetrator wasn’t even in the apartment when the shot was fired.

“I don’t get it,” Jim says behind him, not angrily like some dads would, but proudly, like only a few dads can. Jim likes hearing his son explain the reasoning behind his conclusions, but there’s no satisfaction in Jack’s voice when he does so now. “The phone was on that wobbly table, Dad. The pistol must have been lying next to it. When we called the phone after all the hostages had been released, it started to vibrate, the table shook, and the pistol fell to the floor and fired. We thought the perpetrator shot himself, but he wasn’t even here. He was already gone. The blood… the stage blood or whatever the hell it is… must have been poured out in advance.”

Jim looks at his son for a long time. Then scratches his stubble.

“Do you know something? On the one hand this seems like the smartest crime in the world…”

Jack nods, stroking the large lump on his forehead, and finishes his dad’s thought for him: “… but on the other, it seems to have been carried out by a complete idiot.”

At least one of them is right.



* * *




Jack sinks down onto the sofa, and Jim collapses on it as if he’s been pushed. Jack picks up his bag, takes out all the notes from the witness interviews, and spreads them out around him without explaining what he’s doing. He reads through everything one more time. When he puts the last page down, he bites his way methodically along his tongue, because that’s where Jack’s stress lives.

“I’m an idiot,” he says.

“Why?” Jim wonders.

“Bloody hell! Bloody, bloody… I’m an idiot! How many people were in the apartment, Dad?”

“You mean how many prospective buyers?”

“No, I mean in total, how many people were there in total in the apartment?”

Jim starts waffling, in the hope that it will make him sound like he understands anything of all this: “Let’s see… seven prospective buyers. Or, well… there were really only those two, Ro and Jules, and Roger and Anna-Lena, and Estelle, who wasn’t really interested in buying the apartment…”

“That’s five,” Jack nods impatiently.

“Five, yes. That’s it, yes. And then there’s Zara, we don’t really know why she was there. And then there’s Lennart, who was there because Anna-Lena had hired him. So that makes… one, two, three, four, five…”

“Seven people in total!” Jack nods.

“Plus the perpetrator,” Jim adds.

“Exactly. But also… plus the real estate agent.”

“Plus the real estate agent, yes, so that makes nine, then!” Jim says, immediately cheered by his own mathematical prowess.

“Are you sure, Dad?” Jack sighs.

He looks at his dad for a long time, waiting for him to realize, but gets no response. Absolutely none at all. Just two eyes staring at him the way they did many years ago after they’d watched a film together, and Jack had to explain at the end: “But, Dad, the bald guy was dead, that’s why only the little kid could see him!” And his dad exclaimed: “What? Was he a ghost? No, he couldn’t have been, because we could see him!”

She laughed at that, Jim’s wife and Jack’s mom, God, how she laughed. God, how they miss her. She’s still the one who makes them more understanding toward each other, even though she’s no longer here.



* * *




Jim aged badly after she died, became a lesser man, never quite able to breathe back in all the air that had gone out of him. When he sat in the hospital that night, life felt like an icy crevice, and when he lost his grip on the edge and slipped down into the darkness inside him, he whispered angrily to Jack: “I’ve tried talking to God, I really have tried, but what sort of God makes a priest this sick? She’s never done anything but good for other people, so what sort of God gives an illness like this to her?!”

Jack had no answer then, and he has no answer now. He just sat quietly in the waiting room and held his dad until it was impossible to tell whose tears were running down his neck. The following morning they were angry at the sun for rising, and couldn’t forgive the world for living on without her.

But when it was time, Jack got to his feet, grown-up and straight-backed, walked through a series of doors, and stopped outside her room. He was a proud young man, certain in his beliefs, he wasn’t religious and his mom had never said a single stern word to him about that. She was the sort of priest who got shouted at by everyone, by religious people for not being religious enough, and by everyone else because she was religious at all. She had been to sea with sailors, in the desert with soldiers, in prison with inmates, and in hospitals with sinners and atheists. She liked a drink and could tell dirty jokes, no matter who she was with. If anyone even asked what God would think about that, she always replied: “I don’t think we agree about everything, but I have a feeling He knows I’m doing the best I can. And I think maybe He knows I work for Him, because I try to help people.” If anyone asked her to sum up her view of the world, she always quoted Martin Luther: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” Her son loved her, but she never managed to get him to believe in God, because although you might be able to drum religion into people, you can’t teach faith. But that night, all alone at the end of a dimly lit corridor in a hospital where she had held so many dying people by the hand, Jack sank to his knees and asked God not to take his mom away from him.