Copenhagen Noir

Eriksson stood in the stairwell and watched as the aging mother slowly shut the door to her apartment, to “the crypt in which she would mummify herself.” The civilian car she was driving was parked halfway on top of the sidewalk downstairs, and traffic was increasing as the day went on. Exercisgatan functioned as a kind of thoroughfare, connecting various streets of the city, and when Eriksson stood outside the apartment house gate, she could glimpse the square by the Jewish synagogue, surrounded by tall walls.

The morning had slipped through her fingers. Her thoughts came and went, rattling like train cars on a rusty track. She didn’t know what to think, what she believed. Josman was still being processed. Her body, Eriksson had been informed, had been taken to the forensic department in Lund. There was always a rush, even with the dead. She reminded herself to call Hofman and Nordgren later today-always easier to pose the questions directly to them.

On the morning of the fourth of January rain was moving across Öresund, and you could see heavy clouds passing back and forth across the open expanse. Wind tore at the sea, throwing up water along the rock walls protecting walkways and lawns around the swimming area. Nature, yet again victorious. It was not possible to imagine nature’s power. It conquered all obstacles. The sea will still be around when we’re no more than a memory.

Time.

The time to leave, the time to come back.

Time to open one door, time to close another.

The wind increased in strength. There were places in Malmø that were in constant movement, where the wind always got in. The entire town was one big construction error from the beginning. There were no natural breaks, no given boundaries. Everything had been made by man. Time had changed the town, its inhabitants, its language. It was neither good nor bad, it was just the way it was.

Cruelty alongside consideration, life alongside death, love alongside hate. One thing depended on the other. In another part of town, on Fågelvägen, just a few hundred meters from Exercisgatan, was where Nils Forsberg stayed, more or less busy scrutinizing himself-always arriving at the same dreary conclusion.

That it was too late, that he had already lost, that now he had to listen completely to the inner voice telling him that the only thing he needed to do right now was to remain sufficiently drunk around the clock, then everything would take care of itself. If he’d counted right, then this was day sixteen. He had trouble in between rounds, telling where one day ended and the next began-so, for simplicity’s sake, he’d drawn a thick line on the refrigerator door with a black marker. He counted sixteen lines now. And he knew that Mats Granberg had been dead longer than that. Those days, the ones without Granberg when he was still sober, were white, frozen, inhuman. We’re not created to lose, nor for defeat-we’re made to win! he thought, and at that moment it seemed obvious to him that he’d committed his whole life to failures, to losses. He was his own loss, had created his own degradation. He knew that he was beyond human help, that he was like a stone, sinking deeper and deeper down into the water. “Oh, damn it all!” he wailed his mantra, over and over again.

Nils Forsberg had lived very close to his own edges. In one moment everything could be changed. He shifted his inner positions as regularly as the tides. A more psychologically astute staff manager might have demanded an explanation about him from the social insurance office a long time ago. It was not difficult to discover that Nils Forsberg was a bipolar personality type with autistic traits, a diagnosis he could be proud of, by the way, not least because Robert Johnson gave Einstein the same diagnosis in a biography of him.

It was all a question of circumstances and chance. In truth he was really just odd. That’s where his thoughts mostly went, deep down, to a feeling of embarrassment, about who he was-who he’d become. The difference between what played out in his mind and what took place in the real world was enormous. His main purpose, at least that’s how he saw it himself, was to create as much trouble as he possibly could. He’d made a final decision when he first met the personnel consultant, a woman who it appeared didn’t have all her marbles, but who made decisions about the world around her in the way she herself saw fit-if the shoe didn’t fit, then the world around her would just have to change. He’d almost succeeded in driving Annelie Bertilsson out of police headquarters. But in the end he’d had to admit defeat. Bertilsson was the new order and Forsberg was the time that had passed. Like blowing out a candle-right now. And then everything goes quiet and dark.

THE ELEPHANT’S TUSKS BY KRISTINA STOLTZ

Nørrebro