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:
“Could you please tell me where I am?”
Langaas had realized he was senile rather than drunk.
“At a café in Nyhavn.”
The old man had lowered himself onto a chair across from him, and after a long silence asked:
“Where is that exactly?”
“Nyhavn? In Copenhagen.”
“I can’t seem to remember where I live.”
They found the address on a piece of paper in Vigsten’s wallet. Nedergade.
“My memory comes and goes,” he said. “But this may be where I live, where my piano is, and where I receive my students.”
Langaas had helped him into a cab, and then accompanied him to Nedergade. Vigsten’s name appeared on the list of residents in the entryway. Langaas followed him up into the apartment. Vigsten recognized the smell of stale air.
“This is where I live,” he said. “This is what it smells like.”
Then he had wandered off into the recesses of the large apartment and appeared to completely forget about the man who had helped him home. Langaas found and pocketed a spare set of keys before he left. A few days later he returned and made the maid’s room into another of his temporary residences. Vigsten had still not realized that he served as a host to a man who was waiting to be transported to a higher state. He could tell Vigsten had long since forgotten about their meeting in Nyhavn. Vigsten assumed he was a pupil. When Langaas said he had in fact come to service the radiators, Vigsten had simply turned his back and forgotten about him in that instant.
Langaas looked down at his hands. They were large and strong, and they no longer shook. It had been many years since he had been lifted from the gutter, and he had not had a drop of alcohol or any drugs since then. Erik had always been there, supporting him. Torgeir knew he could never have done it without him. It was through Erik that he had his faith, the strength he needed to continue living.
I am strong, he thought. I wait in my hiding places for my instructions. I follow them to the letter and return into hiding. Erik never knows exactly where I am, but I can always sense when he needs me.
I have received this strength from Erik, he thought. And I have only one small weakness left that I have not been able to shake off. The fact that he kept a secret from Erik was a source of great shame. The prophet had always spoken openly to him, the man from the gutter. He had not concealed any part of himself, and he had demanded the same from the man who would be his disciple. When Erik had asked him if he was free of all secrets and weaknesses, he had answered yes. But it had been a lie. There was one link to his old existence. For the longest time he had resisted the task that awaited him. But when he woke up this morning, he knew he could no longer put it off. Setting fire to the pet store last night had been the final step before he was lifted to the next level. He could wait no longer. If Erik did not discover his weakness, then surely God would turn his anger on him. This fury would also strike Erik, and that was an unbearable thought.
He got up and dressed. Through the window he saw that it was overcast and windy. He hesitated between the leather jacket and his long coat, then decided on the jacket. He fingered the pigeon and swan feathers that he picked up from the streets when he walked. Perhaps this collecting is also a form of weakness, he thought. But it is a weakness for which God forgives me. He got off the bus at City Hall, walked over to the train station, and bought the morning paper. News about the Ystad pet store that had burned down was on the front page. A police officer from Ystad had commented, “Only a sick person could do something like this; a sick person with sadistic tendencies.”
Erik had taught him to keep his cool, whatever happened. But reading that his actions were regarded as a kind of twisted sadism outraged him. He crumpled up the newspaper and threw it into the trash. As penance for this weakness he gave fifty kronor to a drunk who was asking for spare change. The man stared after him, slack-jawed. One day I’ll come back and beat you to a pulp, Langaas thought savagely. I’ll crush your face with a single blow, in the name of the Lord, in the name of the Christian uprising. Your blood will be spilled and join the river that will one day lead us to the promised land.
It was ten o’clock. He went to a café and ate breakfast. Erik had ordered him to lie low this day. His instructions were simply to seek out one of his hiding places and wait. Maybe Erik knows I still have a weakness, he thought. Maybe he’s known all along but wants to see if I have the strength to deliver myself of it on my own?
God makes his plans well, he thought. God and Erik, his servant, are no dreamers. Erik has explained how God organizes everything down to the very last details of a person’s life. This is why this day has been granted to me, in order that I should rid myself of my one remaining weakness, and stand prepared at last.
Sylvi Rasmussen had come to Denmark in the early 1990s, along with a boatload of other illegal immigrants in a ship that had landed off the west coast of Jutland. At that point she had already undertaken a long and at times terrifying journey from her home in Bulgaria. She had traveled in trucks and in trailers hitched up to tractors, and she had even spent two terrible days sealed in an increasingly airless container. Her name back then wasn’t Sylvi Rasmussen, it was Nina Barovska. She borrowed the money for her trip, and when she arrived on that deserted beach in Jutland, two men were waiting for her. They took her to an apartment in Aarhus, where they raped and beat her again and again for a week and then — when they had broken her will — took her to an apartment in Copenhagen where they forced her to work as a prostitute. She had tried to escape after a month, but the two men cut off her little finger from each hand and threatened to do something worse if she ever tried to escape again. She didn’t. To make her existence more bearable, she started using drugs and hoped she would not have to live too long.
One day a client whose name was Torgeir Langaas had come in to see her. He became a regular and she would try to talk to him, desperately trying to make the time they spent together more human, less cold. But he always shook his head and mumbled unintelligible responses. Although he was gentle, she would sometimes break into uncontrollable shivers after one of his visits. There was something vaguely threatening about him, something uncanny, even though he was her most loyal and generous client. His large hands always touched her gently, but he still frightened her.
He rang her doorbell at eleven o’clock. He invariably came to see her in the mornings. Since he wanted to spare her the moment of realization that she was to die this day in the beginning of September, he grabbed her from behind as they were on their way into the bedroom. His large hands reached for her forehead and neck and snapped her spine. He put her body on the bed, pulled off her clothes, and tried to make it look like a sex crime. When he was done, he looked around and thought that Sylvi had deserved a better fate. If circumstances had been different, he would have wanted to bring her along to the promised land. But Erik set the rules, and he demanded that his disciples be free of all worldly weakness. And now he had achieved this state. Woman, desire, was finally gone from his life.
He left the apartment. He was ready. Erik was waiting for him. God was waiting.