Before the Frost
- Автор: Манкелль Хеннинг
- Серия: Linda Wallander #1
- Год: 2004
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Harvill Press
- ISBN: 978-1-84343-113-8
- Переводчик: Ebba Segerberg
- Жанр: Полицейские детективы
Электронная книга - «Before the Frost». Краткое содержание книги:
During the long sleepless nights it occurred to him that he should write about what had happened. He was the only living witness. He bought a notebook and started to write, but he was overcome with doubt. If he were going to tell the real story he would have to reveal his true identity: not John Clifton, as his documents claimed, but another man with another nationality and name altogether. Did he want that? He hesitated.
Then he read an interview with a woman named Mary-Sue Legrande in the Houston Chronicle. There was a photo of her: a woman in her forties with dark hair and a thin, almost pointed face. She talked about Jim Jones and claimed to know his secrets. In the interview she presented herself as a distant spiritual relative of Jim. She had known him at the time he had the series of visions that would later lead him to found his church, the People’s Temple.
I know Jim’s secrets, said Mary-Sue Legrande. But what were they? She didn’t say. He stared at the photograph. Mary-Sue seemed to be looking right back at him. She was divorced with a grown son and now owned a small mail-order company in Cleveland. Her company sold something called “manuals for self-actualization.”
He put the newspaper back on the shelf, nodding to the friendly librarian before walking out onto the street. It was an unusually mild day in December, shortly before Christmas. He stopped in the shade of a tree. If Mary-Sue Legrande can tell me Jim Jones’s secrets I will understand why I was taken in by him. Then I will never suffer this same weakness again.
He stepped off the train in Cleveland on Christmas Eve. His trip had taken more than thirty hours. He found a cheap hotel close to the railway station and ate some dinner at a Chinese restaurant before he went back to his room. There was a green plastic Christmas tree with flashing lights in the lobby of the hotel. He lay down on the bed in the dark hotel room. Right now I’m nothing more than the person who is registered for this hotel room, he thought. If I were to die now, or disappear, no one would miss me. They would find enough money in my sock to cover the costs of this room and a funeral — that is, unless someone stole the money and they had to dump me in a pauper’s grave. Perhaps someone would discover that I was not John Clifton. But the case would probably be put on the back burner, like a piece of paper you save without knowing why. That would be the extent of it. Right now I’m nothing more than a guest in a hotel room, and I can’t even remember the name of the hotel.
Snow fell over the city of Cleveland on Christmas Day. He ate warm noodles, fried vegetables, and rice at the Chinese restaurant and then returned to lie motionless on his bed. The following day, December 26, the snowy weather had passed. A thin white powder had dusted the streets and sidewalks and it was three degrees below zero Celsius. There was no wind, and the water on Lake Erie was calm. He had located Mary-Sue Legrande with the help of a phone book and a map. She lived in a neighborhood in southwestern Cleveland. He thought it was God’s intention that he meet her this day. He washed carefully, shaved, and put on the clothes he had bought in a secondhand store in Laredo. What will she see when she opens her door and sees my face? he thought. A man who hasn’t given up, a man who has suffered greatly. He shook his head at his reflection in the mirror. I don’t inspire fear, he thought. Perhaps pity.
He left his hotel and took a bus along the lakeshore. Mary-Sue Legrande lived on 1024 Madison, in a stone house partially hidden behind tall trees. He hesitated before he walked up the path and rang the doorbell. Mary-Sue Legrande looked exactly like her photograph in the Houston Chronicle, except that she was even thinner. She looked suspiciously at him, ready to slam the door in his face.
“I survived,” he said. “Not everyone died in Guyana. I survived. I’ve come because I want to know Jim Jones’s secrets. I want to know why he betrayed us.”
She looked at him for a long time before answering. When she did, she didn’t show any sign of surprise, or of any emotion whatsoever.
“I knew it,” she said finally. “I knew someone would come.”
She opened the door wide and stepped aside. He followed her in and stayed in her house for almost twenty years. It was with her help that he got to know the real Jim Jones, the man he had not been able to see through. Mary-Sue told him in her mild voice about Jim Jones’s dark secret. He was not the messenger of God he had given himself out to be; he had taken God’s place. Mary-Sue claimed that Jim Jones knew deep down that his vanity would one day be the destruction of everything he had built. But he had never been able to overcome his flaw and change course.
“Was he insane?” he had asked.
No, Mary-Sue insisted, far from it. Jim Jones had meant well; he had genuinely wanted to start a Christian awakening around the world. It was his vanity and pride that had prevented him from succeeding, that had turned his love into hate. But someone needed to take up where he left off, she told him. Someone who was strong enough to resist the pitfall of pride but could also be merciless when needed. The Christian awakening would only come to pass through bloodshed.
He stayed and helped her run the mail-order business she called God’s Keys. She had written all the self-help manuals herself, with their blend of vague suggestions and inaccurate Bible quotations, and he soon realized that she understood Jim Jones so well because she was a kind of charlatan herself. But he stayed with her, since she let him. He needed time to plan what would become his life’s mission. He was going to be the one to take over where Jim Jones had gone astray. He would sidestep the pitfalls of pride and vanity but never forget that the Christian rebirth would demand sacrifice and blood.
The mail-order company did well, especially with a product she called “The Aching Heart Package” priced at forty-nine dollars without tax and shipping. They started to get rich, and left the house on Madison for a large house in Middleburg Heights. Mary-Sue’s son Richard returned after completing his studies in Minneapolis and settled in a house nearby. He was a loner but always friendly when they saw each other. It was as if he was relieved not to have to take on his mother’s loneliness.
The end arrived quickly and unexpectedly. One day Mary-Sue came back from a trip into Cleveland and sat down across from him at his desk. He thought she had been running errands.
“I have cancer and I’m going to die,” she announced. She said the words with a strange air of relief, as if telling the truth lifted a great burden from her shoulders.
She died on the eighty-seventh day after she came back from the doctor with the news. It was in the spring of 1999. Richard inherited all her assets, since she had never remarried. They drove out to Lake Erie for a walk the evening after the funeral. Richard wanted him to stay. He suggested that they continue running the mail-order business and share the profits. But he had already made up his mind. The void in him had been assuaged by living with Mary-Sue, but he had a mission to complete. His thinking and his plans had matured over the years. He didn’t say any of this to Richard. He simply asked him for some money — only as much as Richard could comfortably part with. Then he would make his preparations. Richard asked no questions.