Anxious People(68)

He was trying to sound confident, but Jack could hear his doubt. The two men shared a long silence before Jack said, “Tell me the truth. What happened in that last hostage drama you were involved in?”

The negotiator sighed.

“The man released the hostages. But he shot himself before we managed to get in.”



* * *




Those words would follow Jack throughout the day, right next to his skin.



* * *




He had started to walk back down the stairs by the time the negotiator cleared his throat.

“Okay, Jack, can I ask you a question? Why did you turn down that job in Stockholm?”

Jack considered lying, but couldn’t summon up the energy.

“How do you know about that?”

“I talked to one of the bosses before I set off. Asked her who was on the scene locally. She said I should talk to Jack, because he’s bloody good. She said she’d offered you a job several times, but that you keep turning it down.”

“I’ve got a job.”

“Not like the one she’s offering.”

Jack snorted defensively.

“Oh, all you Stockholmers think the world revolves around your bloody city.”

The negotiator laughed.

“Listen, I grew up in a village where you had to drive forty minutes if you wanted to buy milk. Back there we used to think your town was metropolitan. To us, you were the Stockholmers.”

“Everyone is someone else’s Stockholmer, I guess.”

“So what’s your problem, then? Are you worried you wouldn’t be able to cope with the job if you took it?”

Jack rubbed his hands on his pants.

“Are you my psychologist or something?”

“Sounds like you could do with one.”

“Can’t we just focus on the job in hand?”

The negotiator hesitated and took a deep breath before asking: “Does your dad know you’ve been offered another job?”

Jack was about to swear, but the negotiator never got to hear what, because at that moment Jack looked out of the window in the stairwell and saw that his dad was no longer waiting in the street like he’d been told.

“What the hell?!” Jack exclaimed. Then he ended the call and ran.





53


Zara had just stepped out onto the balcony when Jack saw her. That was just after she had told the bank robber out in the hall not to do anything silly, and she needed fresh air, more than ever. If all you saw was the rear view of Zara heading toward the balcony, you’d probably think she was impatient. You needed to see her face to understand that she was feeling fragile. She had surprised herself back there, had lost control, felt things. For anyone else that might perhaps merely have been vaguely uncomfortable, like when you discover you’re starting to share the same taste in music as your parents, or biting into something you think is chocolate but turns out to be liver paté, but for Zara it unleashed a feeling of complete panic. Was she starting to develop a sense of empathy?

She rubbed her hands carefully with sanitizer, counted the windows of the building on the other side of the street over and over again, tried to take deep breaths. She had been in the apartment too long, these people had shrunk her customary distance, and she wasn’t used to that. Out on the balcony she pressed herself up against the wall of the building so no one down in the street could see her over the railing. She clamped the headphones over her ears and turned the volume up until the shrieking noise of the music drowned out the shrieking noise inside her head. Until the bass was thudding harder than her heart.

And just there, perhaps she found it. A truce with herself.



* * *




She could see winter making itself comfortable across the town. She liked the silence of this time of year, but had never appreciated its smugness. When the snow arrives autumn has already done all the work, taking care of all the leaves and carefully sweeping summer away from people’s memories. All winter had to do was roll in with a bit of freezing weather and take all the credit, like a man who’s spent twenty minutes next to a barbecue but has never served a full meal in his life.

She didn’t hear the balcony door open, but she felt a furry ear on her hair as Lennart stepped out and stood beside her. He tapped gently on one of the earphones.

“What?” she snapped.

“Do you smoke?” Lennart asked, because even though he hadn’t managed to remove the rabbit’s head, there was a small hole in the snout that he was fairly certain he’d be able to smoke through.

“Certainly not!” Zara said, putting the headphone back over her ear.

Lennart was surprised, even if that wasn’t visible through the unchanging ambivalence of the rabbit’s head. Zara looked like someone who smoked, not because she liked it so much as to make the air worse for other people. The rabbit tapped on the headphone again and she removed it with the utmost reluctance.

“What are you doing out on the balcony, then?” he wondered.

Zara took a long, hard look at him, starting from his white socks, via his bare legs and his nonelasticated underpants, to his bare torso, where the chest hair had started to go gray.

“Do you really think you’re in any position to question other people’s life choices?” she asked, but didn’t sound anywhere near as annoyed as she had hoped, which was annoying.