Attack and Decay, page 21
“These deeply moral and religious people took revenge by disembowelling a deacon?”
“Hey, the disembowelled deacon… No, I think we’ll stick with self-published priest. The poor guy. Anyway, Ida says that Bo thinks they’d been planning to take revenge on him for a long time, and this is just the beginning.”
“Just the beginning,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Do you believe that?” said Nevada.
“No, of course not,” said Tinkler.
“Does Ida believe that?”
“No,” said Tinkler. “Nobody in their right mind believes that. And, as I told you, Ida is very strongly promulgating the theory of Röd and Röd being behind everything.”
“But if she’s right,” said Agatha, “then Bo Lugn is about to go to the mattresses with them.”
“Yup,” said Tinkler.
“He’s going to snuggle up with the psycho killers.”
“I couldn’t have put it better myself. I’m going to tell Ida exactly that and steal your turn of phrase and give you no credit. Snuggle up with the psycho killers.”
“There’s something not right with Röd and Röd,” said Nevada, thoughtfully.
“No shit,” said Tinkler.
“No, I’m saying if they’re here for security it’s surprising they didn’t try and frisk us. Which could have turned out badly. For them, I mean,” said Nevada. “But they didn’t even try. And yet they let us come upstairs, where their boss is.”
We all glanced at the closed door of Tinkler’s room, where the boss in question was currently sequestered with Ida. I wondered how Tinkler felt about that.
“Which meant they were running the risk of letting someone into the building with a weapon,” said Nevada. “Someone who could assassinate their boss.”
“If only,” sighed Tinkler, staring at the closed door of the room. Personally, the only thing I could imagine going on on the other side was a strongly worded reprimand from Ida, directed at the man who had stolen her juicer.
“But you said they were militarily trained?” said Nevada.
“Yes,” said Tinkler. “Röd and Röd are allegedly from some elite unit. Essentially, he was boasting about how safe Ida would be with his two bodyguards and therefore with him.”
“Has this guy got a thing about Ida?” said Nevada.
“Who hasn’t?” said Tinkler. “Anyway, he was doing this big sales pitch about the supposed action hero pedigree of the two Röds in lots of detail. Considerable detail. Ample detail. It would have tranquilised an elephant.”
“Well, in any case,” said Nevada, “they must be sufficiently professional to know better than to let someone up here with a weapon.”
I said, “And yet, as you said, they didn’t frisk us.”
“I don’t think they needed to. I think they scanned us.”
“The thing in the yellow case,” I said.
Nevada nodded. “I think it was some kind of scanning device.”
“You mean like they have in airports?” said Tinkler.
“On a smaller scale, yes,” said Nevada.
“Does that mean they saw what you guys look like under your clothes?”
Nevada shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Definitely a mixed blessing,” said Tinkler. This was clearly directed at me.
“Tinkler,” said Nevada. “Don’t underestimate these guys.”
“What, these guys with their very cool beards?”
“They could be dangerous,” said Nevada. “They could be very dangerous.” She didn’t sound overly worried, it has to be said.
“They probably are, if they’re your bodyguard,” said Tinkler. “In that case, your life expectancy is probably approximately that of a fruit fly. With anyone else, I think they’re about as dangerous as a couple of fantasists who have watched a lot of instructional videos can be. I mean, look at those beards. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still scared of them. But I’m scared of everyone.”
At that moment the door of Tinkler’s room opened and Bo Lugn came out, followed by Ida. Bo hardly glanced at us before heading down the stairs. Ida nodded at us but was obviously preoccupied with being angry about something. She addressed Tinkler. “He says he wants Röd and Röd with him at all times. As if he is in danger.”
“But they could be the killers,” said Tinkler. “The two Röds.”
“I know, hilarious, isn’t it? Perhaps not so hilarious for him.” Ida smiled a malicious smile.
Downstairs we heard the voices of the two Röds and Bo Lugn, and then the sound of them leaving the hotel through the front door.
“So you’re not taking Creepy Elvis up on his kind offer?” said Nevada.
“What, staying with him?” said Ida. “Of course not. I’m staying with my man,” she took Tinkler’s arm.
“That’s me, right?” said Tinkler. And Ida giggled.
“Would you like to go back to my place now?” she said, looking up into his eyes.
“Does the pope shit in the woods?” said Tinkler.
“Does the pope…?”
“He means yes,” said Nevada wearily.
As soon as Tinkler and Ida said their farewells and left the hotel, Agatha came out of her room. Indeed, she came out with suspicious promptness, as if she’d watched their departure from her window.
“Okay, what was all that about?” she said.
As we filled her in, Magnus and Emma came back out of the upstairs lounge. Magnus was looking increasingly disagreeable and impatient. Emma, by contrast, was excited as a puppy to see Agatha. “Cuz!” she cried and ran to embrace her.
Agatha suffered the hug good humouredly. We’d all come to be quite fond of Emma, Mockney nutcase though she was. The three women went into Agatha’s room no doubt to discuss clothes, with specific reference to the obtaining cheaply of further high-end specimens locally, while Emma’s husband waved me impatiently into the upstairs lounge. I felt absurdly like I was being summoned into the headmaster’s study.
As I came into the lounge, Magnus had his back to me, staring out the window—the window that Patrik liked to leave open for his crow—and then he turned around suddenly, as though he was going to surprise me and catch me out with a trick question.
“Who are those guys? Those thugs in the lobby?”
“They’re the strip club owner’s bodyguards,” I said. “They’re gone now.”
Magnus was shaking his head. “Your friend was very ill advised to get involved with these people.”
“There’s only one of these people Tinkler wants to be involved with.”
“You mean that dancer?” said Magnus. “She’s as bad as the others. They’re all cut from the same cloth.” Magnus had stopped shaking his head, but now he started again. There was no love lost between him and Tinkler, and indeed there hadn’t been since our detour for pizza during the drive to Trollesko on that first day.
Magnus might well have been right in this instance, but I felt compelled to stand up for my old friend. “She seems perfectly nice,” I said.
“All of the people who work at that place are very dubious types. They are most of them criminals and on drugs and unstable personalities. And I have no doubt she is just looking for some way to take advantage of your friend.”
Despite the fact that this had been very much my own original assessment, I now bristled at the suggestion. Perhaps he read the anger on my face because Magnus immediately changed the subject. “Anyway, that is not what I came here to discuss with you.”
“What did you come here to discuss with me?”
Magnus gave me a hard look, or what he hoped was a hard look. “What’s going on with my payment?”
“You mean…”
“I mean not paying me for this record. I mean this sudden delay in paying me.”
I resisted the urge to ask if a delay could be considered sudden and said, “You know as much as I do. But Owyn assures me that the money will be here soon.”
“Can you define soon?” said Magnus, rather snottily, I thought.
“No,” I said.
“Well, my patience is wearing thin. I have another buyer for this record.” Magnus tried to maintain a poker face while staring me down, but his eyes flickered in the direction of Patrik Nordenfalk’s room.
I nodded. “You have another buyer, all right, and you also have about another hundred copies of the record.”
Magnus started to deny this, and then changed his mind. “So what if I have? You had no right to spy on me and search my flat.”
“I didn’t spy on you or search your flat,” I said. “I didn’t have to. You left that crate of records right out in the open.”
Magnus dismissed this with a gesture, as if throwing away a handful of invisible waste paper. “In any case, it doesn’t matter how many copies I have. Only I decide when I sell them. And if I conclude that my analysis of this situation is correct and Mr Wynter is indeed wasting my time, then his opportunity to buy this exemplary copy of this very rare record will simply vanish. He will have missed the opportunity.”
“No problem,” I said.
Magnus stared at me. “What do you mean, no problem? Do you know how upset Owyn Wynter will be if he doesn’t get this record?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “He’s better off without it.”
“What are you talking about? Are you suggesting this isn’t the genuine audiophile pressing?”
“Oh no, it’s that,” I said. “It’s that, all right. Which is exactly the problem.”
“How is it a problem?”
“Well, I’ve heard the original.”
“Oh yes,” said Magnus. “You found a copy the other day, didn’t you, at the secondhand-butik? Good for you. Congratulations.” He said this last word tightly and ironically.
“I’ve heard it,” I said. “And, to be frank, it pisses all over the audiophile version.”
“What do you mean?” said Magnus.
“I mean it sounds way better,” I said.
“I know that’s what you mean,” said Magnus. “But how can you say that?”
“It’s easy.”
“You can’t hear the superiority of the audiophile pressing?”
“I can’t hear it because it’s not there,” I said.
“What are you talking about? This is the half-speed mastered, 180-gram—”
“It’s all of those things, and yet it’s not as good as the original.”
“You’re crazy,” he said. And he said it like it was a dangerous kind of craziness. Magnus was starting to get angry, and an angry nerd is never a pretty sight. I was trying not to get angry myself—who needs two angry nerds?—when a bell rang.
“The front door,” said Magnus.
We both went to the window and stared out. The figure ringing the bell was concealed in the doorway below and would have remained so if he hadn’t stepped back impatiently into view and stared up at us. It was Anders, who ran the book and record store in the vattentorn. Or rather, the record and book store. Looking up, he saw us and waved.
We went down and let him in. He seemed a little out of breath, as though he’d run over here. Anders started speaking in Swedish then switched to English. He looked at me. “I think you have met Barbro Bok?”
His polite inclusion of me was all of a piece with his speaking in English. It was typical of the classy behaviour we’d received from everybody since we’d arrived in Sweden.
I nodded, thinking of Barbro running around in a high-vis vest in the farmyard darkness, chasing a luminous canine collar in an anti-defecation quest. I had indeed met her.
“She came into my shop today,” said Anders. “Just now, in fact, to collect some books I’d obtained for her. And… I suppose what happened next was my fault. In a sense it was my fault. But I simply offered my sympathies to her because of the passing of Christer Vingqvist. Simply offered my sympathies. I knew that she knew him, that he was a work colleague.”
They were closer than that, I thought. It was heart-breaking to remember Barbro’s primitive, pure joy when she saw him that night—the night of the dog poo glow sticks—after he’d survived his burning car. And then to think how cruel it must be for her to have had him snatched from her, after all…
“Anyway,” said Anders, “maybe I shouldn’t even have brought up the matter. Because now Barbro has become very upset indeed.” He sounded genuinely worried.
I said, “You left her back at your store?”
He nodded, his head going up and down quickly, like a nervous bird. “I had to. I had to come here to ask for your assistance.” This was directed at Magnus, rather than me.
Magnus was unmoved. Indeed, he seemed quite irritated. Christer Vingqvist had never been a close friend of his while alive, and now in death he was proving to still be something of a nuisance. He said, “What do you want me to do about it?” This was less a request for specifics than a petulant remonstration.
“You’re Emma’s husband,” said Anders.
“Yes,” said Magnus. “And Emma is upstairs somewhere. So why don’t you locate her and ask her to go to over to your store to help you with her sister?”
“She isn’t upstairs,” said Anders.
“What?”
“She’s over at my store.”
“I thought she was upstairs,” said Magnus, thoroughly taken off guard now.
“She is over at my store. She is currently there, with her sister. That is the problem. That is exactly the problem.”
“She is with her sister?”
“Yes,” said Anders.
“Are they…?”
“Yes. They are having one hell of an argument,” said Anders. “Please come over and see if you can stop them.”
Magnus sighed. He wasn’t going to be able to get out of this one.
I said, “So, I will be up in my room…”
“Oh, I almost forgot,” said Anders, turning to me. “I have obtained a new batch of records. Old records, you understand. Originals. I wondered if you would like to look through them before I put them out in the shop?”
“Okay,” I said. “So, I won’t be up in my room.”
* * *
We walked over to the vattentorn, Nevada and Agatha accompanying us. We were walking briskly but we all slowed down as we walked past a slightly eccentric vehicle parked in the street near the building. It was a jaunty little pink van. On the side of it in big happy dark purple lettering was printed Jesus vill vara din BFF! The dot on the exclamation mark was a smiling cartoon fish.
“Does that mean Jesus is your best friend?” said Nevada.
“Wants to be,” said Anders helpfully. “Wants to be your BFF. ‘Is your BFF’ would be Är din BFF.”
“Är din,” repeated Nevada.
“Yes.”
“It’s Barbro Bok’s van,” said Anders.
“So we surmised,” said Agatha. She and Nevada were tagging along with us frankly out of car-crash curiosity. I had gone up to our room to let Nevada know what was happening and the women had immediately grabbed their coats and come with.
If this was just a simple human hunger for shoddy soap-opera spectacle, it was one certainly shared by Tinkler and Ida, who had come hurrying down from her fairytale redoubt at the top of the tower to witness proceedings.
Now the gang was all here in the front room of Anders’s little shop. Personally, I was only passing through on my way to the back room where the batch of mystery vinyl awaited my close and eager scrutiny, but even I was here long enough to receive the full brunt.
There is nothing quite as ugly as family ugliness.
Barbro was standing beside the till, her right hand on a stack of books, as though they were Bibles she was about to swear on. In fact, they later proved to be religious texts of various sorts: theological history, theology and philosophy. And not, as Tinkler had theorised, pornography.
So perhaps there was indeed a Bible among them.
Behind the big lenses of her glasses, Barbro Bok’s eyes were hot with anger. She turned those hot eyes on Magnus as we came in. Magnus almost did a U-turn and went right back out again, and I didn’t blame him. But, to his credit, he didn’t flee and instead slowly edged into the room, trying to move towards his wife and more-or-less avoid Barbro, but while looking in her direction occasionally and even trying to smile. Not at her, but just generally smile.
“And Magnus would agree with me,” she said.
“Would I, Barbro? Hello, by the way. How are you?”
“I am fine, Magnus.”
“Good, good.”
“And I am very glad to see you, Magnus, because I was just saying I am sure you will agree with me.”
“Were you? I see. About what?”
“Well, a little while ago Emma joined me here and the talk turned to Christer—”
“That was my fault,” said Anders, eager to do a mea culpa. “Entirely my fault. I just wished to extend my sympathies.”
“Which you did very simply and with real sincerity and which I appreciated very deeply, Anders. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“What I did not appreciate very much was when Emma—when my sister continued speaking in that ridiculous affected way she has adopted of late. Continuing to speak in that absurd patois. While I was talking about my dead friend.” Barbro’s angry gaze swept across all of us. “While we were talking about my dead friend.”
“It’s my fault,” said Anders. “I brought it up.”
“And I said,” said Barbro, ignoring him, “‘Why are you talking in that stupid voice, Emma? Why are you pretending to be someone you’re not?’”
Magnus abruptly stopped edging across the room. He’d been making a beeline for Emma and trying not to even make eye contact with Barbro. But now he relaxed visibly and smiled at her and said, “Exactly.”
He said it with a note of happy triumph.
“You see,” said Barbro. “Your husband and I both agree. It’s time to drop this ridiculous pretentious façade.”
“It is very much time,” said Magnus.
“Emma,” said Barbro, “your problem is that you don’t have any true personality of your own.”
“Exactly,” said Magnus.
