The Princess of Burundi - Kjell Eriksson [50]
He decided to stop by and see Micke. They hadn’t talked since it had happened. He knew the police had been talking to him and maybe he had picked something up.
When Lennart arrived, Micke was about to go to bed. The last few days had wiped him out but he had found it hard to sleep.
“Oh, it’s you, is it?”
He didn’t like Lennart, but he was John’s brother.
“I’m sorry about John,” he added.
Lennart walked into the apartment without saying a word, in that presumptuous way that drove Micke crazy.
“Do you have any beer?”
Micke was surprised that he even asked. Usually he just walked over to the fridge and helped himself.
“I hear the pigs have been talking to you,” Lennart said and popped open the can that Micke handed him.
Micke nodded and sat down at the kitchen table.
“What did they say?”
“They asked me about John. He came by here on the day he died, you know.”
“He did? No one’s said anything about that to me.”
“He stopped in the late afternoon.”
“Why did he do that?”
“For Chrissakes, Lennart.”
The fatigue made Micke irritable.
“What did he say?”
“We just talked about normal stuff.”
“Like what?”
He knew what Lennart was after, and tried to re-create an image of a living John, not trouble-free exactly, but happy, with bottles of wine and spirits and a family he was eager to get home to.
“He didn’t say anything?”
“About what?”
“About some shit going on, you know what I’m talking about.”
Micke got up and helped himself to a beer as well.
“He didn’t say anything out of the ordinary.”
“Think hard now.”
“Don’t you think I’ve thought about it? Every damn second since it happened.”
Lennart looked at him searchingly, as if weighing his words, and took a drink from the can while continuing to gaze at him.
“Stop staring,” Micke said.
“Did you two cook something up?”
“Shut up!”
“Horses and shit,” said Lennart, who almost never got involved in the gambling parties that were formed and dissolved on a regular basis—mostly because his ability to pay up was generally doubted.
“Nothing like that,” Micke said in a voice steady and assured but in which Lennart sensed a moment’s hesitation, a look that flickered unsteadily for a tenth of a second.
“Are you sure? We’re talking about my only goddamn brother here.”
“My best friend,” said Micke.
“Fuck you if you’re not telling me the truth.”
“Was there anything else? I’d like to turn in.”
Lennart changed the subject.
“You coming to the funeral?”
“Of course.”
“Do you understand it?”
Lennart’s eyes and the gaze he directed straight down into the table—as if the worn Formica surface could offer any explanation for the murder of his brother—revealed the depth of his despair.
Micke stretched out a hand and put it gently on Lennart’s arm. Lennart looked up, and where Micke had only ever seen alcohol-induced weepiness he now saw the glimmer of real tears.
“No,” Micke said hoarsely. “I don’t get it. Not John of all people.”
“John of all people,” Lennart echoed. “That’s what I’ve been thinking too. When there’s so much scum.”
“Go home and try to get some sleep. You look like shit.”
“I won’t stop until I get ’im.”
Micke felt torn. He didn’t want to hear Lennart’s thoughts of revenge, but he also didn’t want to be left alone. The fatigue was starting to wear off and he knew it would be a long night. He recognized the symptoms. He had suffered from insomnia for many years. From time to time it got better and he sank into a deep, dreamless sleep that bordered on an unconsciousness that felt like a gift. But then the wakeful nights returned, the open wounds. That’s how it felt. Burning sores that ravaged him on the inside.
“What does Aina say?”
“I don’t think she really understands,” Lennart said. “She’s confused as it is and this will break her. John was her favorite ever since Margareta died.”
John and Lennart’s little sister, Margareta, had died in 1968 when she was run over by a delivery van outside the grocery store on Väderkvarnsgatan. It was a subject that the brothers had never touched on, and her name was never mentioned. Photographs