The Winners, page 18
Years ago, her mom used to say that you should never trust anyone who doesn’t have something in their life that they love beyond measure. She can relate to that more and more.
The man opposite leans forward and whispers, as if it was a great secret:
“I’m going to visit my daughter, she lives in Hed, but don’t hold that against me.”
Maya laughs out loud.
“God, I don’t miss THAT when I’m away from home, at any rate. The idea that we have to hate Hed and they have to hate us. So bloody ridiculous.”
“Yes, I’ve understood from my daughter that ice hockey influences a lot of things up there…”
She rolls her eyes.
“No, no, not that much. Only everything.”
“To be honest, I think that people in Hed are a little jealous. Things seem to be going better for Beartown than Hed at the moment, don’t they? And not just in hockey. The factory there has expanded and taken more people on, I read. And businesses are moving there rather than moving away. There aren’t many towns of that size that can make that boast.”
Maya nods in agreement, even though it’s so unusual to hear someone talk about her hometown like that, as a place that’s doing well. “Things turn quickly in hockey,” her dad used to say to her when anything went badly for her when she was little, “things can turn quickly in life as well, you just have to keep moving forward!”
“People in Beartown are industrious, they work hard!” she finds herself telling the man opposite, and is surprised at how proud she sounds.
The man notes that her accent is getting broader. He glances out at the forest that’s growing denser around the windows until it feels like they’re traveling through a tunnel.
“Are you going home because of the storm? My daughter says it was pretty terrible.”
“No… well, yes, in a way. I’m going home for a funeral.”
“My condolences. Someone close?”
The whole of the year she turned sixteen has time to rattle through Maya before she replies. How her dad took her to the police station, how she told them everything and how he was almost fired from Beartown Hockey when Kevin couldn’t play in the most important game of the year because of her. How there was a meeting where all the club’s members had to decide about the future, and how it felt like it was Maya’s family against the whole town. The first person who stood up to speak in their defense was Ramona. She had the Pack behind her, Maya knows how much that rankles for her dad, but neither he nor Maya will ever forget what Ramona did: she believed a fifteen-year-old girl when no one else did. Stood up for her when no one else dared. She smiles sadly at the man in the seat opposite her.
“Dad knew her better. They were… really old friends. She owned a pub, and Dad used to have to collect Grandpa there when he’d had too much to drink.”
The man chuckles.
“Ah, that old story. But you never had to collect your dad?”
“My dad doesn’t drink!”
She says it too quickly, always too eager to defend him. The man raises his hands apologetically.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
She sighs.
“No… no, I understand. It’s just that if you knew my dad… he’s like the most regular man in the world. The sort who never breaks any rules at all.”
“Is he as keen on hockey as everyone else in Beartown?”
She bursts into loud laughter.
“No kidding. He used to be general manager there, actually. But now he works in my mom’s company.”
“Ah, so it’s your mom who’s one of the ‘industrious’ people in Beartown you mentioned,” the man teases.
Maya smiles.
“Her company’s actually based in Hed. Dad’s really mad about that.”
“I can imagine. How did he come to stop being general manager?”
“He loves my mom.”
She says it so instinctively that the man loses his thread for a moment. He smiles sadly and looks down at his hands, Maya can’t see a wedding ring. He reaches for his briefcase and takes out a thick bundle of papers and puts them on his lap.
“Then they’re very lucky, both of them,” he says without looking up from the papers.
Maya nods. He says nothing for so long that she wonders if she’s insulted him, so she asks:
“What are you reading?”
“Annual reports.”
“Wow. That sounds… exciting.”
“It can be, if you just know where to look,” he assures her.
She doesn’t believe him. That’s a mistake.
* * *
There’s an old American car parked in the street outside the Bearskin. Peter stands in the doorway looking at it, he doesn’t know who it belongs to, and he has only a passing interest in cars, but he actually happens to know exactly what year’s model this one is. When he got to the NHL he was driven to his first training sessions by a teammate who had bought one exactly like it. It was brand-new back then, but the one parked in the street now is rusty and ramshackle. Peter feels much the same.
Teemu has emerged from the bathroom and is reading all the messages on his phone down in the bar. Much later Peter will think how odd it is that a man like him doesn’t flare up at bad news. The young man does not, in contrast to what people say about him, have a hot temper. It’s more that what he reads on his phone lowers his body temperature, one degree at a time, he grows colder and more silent as Peter grows more uncomfortable. He’s learned to judge which men he should be afraid of, not from their behavior in his vicinity, but his own in theirs.
“I need to go, can we carry on with this tomorrow?” Teemu asks, still staring at his phone.
Peter nods, not knowing what else he ought to say. As they turn the lights out and lock the door, his eyes fall on a photograph near the exit, a little girl standing on the ice with a green sweater and a dark expression, so small that she isn’t wearing gloves the right size.
“She’s going to be better than you,” Teemu says behind him, and Peter is taken aback by the sudden love in his voice.
Teemu actually looks surprised himself, almost embarrassed. They avoid each other’s gaze, clear their throats and step out onto the street. Peter has heard about the girl, of course. She’s six or seven years old, her name is Alicia, and she spends a lot of time with Sune, an old man now, but once the coach of Beartown’s A-team, where she does her best to fire holes in the wall of his house with pucks. She’s the sort of child who has a terrible life, but not terrible enough to get any help, she’s growing up in a home full of empty kitchen cupboards and clenched fists, but never empty or hard enough for the authorities to remove her. So Sune’s yard is her refuge, her playground, and Ramona got Teemu to do the best they could a couple of years ago: some black-clad men went to Alicia’s home one night when she was asleep, marched into the kitchen and put a hockey bag full of equipment on the table, and explained to the adults there that the girl was under the Pack’s protection now. She’s had considerably fewer black eyes from home since then, and considerably more bruises from the ice rink. And one day she’s going to be the best.
Teemu walks toward the car, Peter follows and it strikes him how bad this would have looked not so very long ago, him getting into a car with the worst hooligan in the district. But now? No one cares what Peter does anymore, not even him. The forest wears down all illusions if it’s given long enough, even his. Because he knows all about Teemu’s violence, but he can also remember, just like everyone else, how the police didn’t have time to show up when there was a spate of burglaries in the district a few years ago, but how the same police had the resources to send an armed response unit and helicopter every time there was so much as a rumor that someone was out hunting wolves illegally. It was the Pack that took care of the burglars, Peter doesn’t want to know how, but at least he recognized where Teemu’s authority came from. It isn’t violence that sets him apart from the police, its dependability. Just ask Alicia.
The American car is still parked in the street when they walk past. Teemu’s phone vibrates with more messages but he doesn’t react, they all say the same thing.
“Popular today?” Peter asks.
“Just people talking,” Teemu replies in a toneless voice.
“My kids also send text messages the whole time. They don’t even write, just send a load of those little pictures. And isn’t there anyone who actually calls anymore?”
Teemu laughs out loud.
“Shit, Peter, are you a hundred years old or what?”
“Sometimes it feels like it.”
They get into Teemu’s Saab and drive a little way in silence, and when it gets uncomfortable Teemu breaks it with hockey, of course:
“Do you think he’ll play this year, then?” he asks.
“Who?” Peter wonders.
“Amat! They say he’s been drinking a lot…”
“Who’s said that?”
Teemu shrugs his shoulders.
“You know. People talk.”
They certainly do, just not to Peter. Time waits for no man, boys become men and talents become has-beens and demons can catch up with anyone at all. Perhaps even the town’s fastest ever skater. Sune once said that Peter’s best characteristic as general manager was that he saw “all the kids in the club as his own kids,” which was meant as a compliment, but when Kira said the same thing a few years later it was an accusation. Back in the spring Peter tried to talk to Amat and give him some advice about the NHL draft, but the boy had become a man by then, and the man an old man.
“I don’t know,” he has to confess.
Teemu sighs.
“He was savage last season. Properly savage. Better than Kevin. Better than… you.”
“You never saw me play,” Peter snorts, to hide his embarrassment, and Teemu splutters like a startled pony.
“Ramona showed me all your games on video! Even the NHL games!”
“There weren’t many of those, so that wouldn’t have taken long,” Peter muttered.
“Shit! Did you think I hadn’t seen them? A hundred times! You think I’m just some stupid hooligan, but I love hockey just as much as you, you bastard. That’s the only reason I never punched you in the face when you were general manager and were doing all that crap like getting rid of the standing area in the stands. I knew you loved hockey the way I love hockey. I respected that. Even when you acted like a clown!”
It takes a few breaths for Peter to digest being called a “clown” by a guy who once broke into the visiting team’s bus and set fire to thirty plastic bags full of dog shit. The planning and logistics required to get thirty bags of the stuff? Dear God. If that guy had dedicated his mental abilities to something sensible he could have taken over the world.
“You’re wrong,” Peter eventually says with a smile.
“I’m not wrong!”
“I only played four games. And got injured at the start of the fifth. And I don’t think you’re a stupid hooligan.”
“Sure,” Teemu mutters.
Peter laughs quietly.
“Well, I don’t think you’re only a stupid hooligan, anyway…”
Teemu bursts out laughing so hard that he almost drives off the road, and for a moment Peter understands what everyone sees in him. Why they all follow him. When he laughs you laugh along with him. Teemu casts a quick glance at him and says:
“You should have talked to Amat back in the spring, before the NHL draft. I think he had the wrong people giving him advice. He could have done with someone like you.”
Peter looks down, doesn’t want to admit that he tried because Teemu evidently has such a high opinion of him, and it’s been a long time since that happened.
* * *
If people have to guess, they always think Maya is younger than eighteen, it often irritates her, but she isn’t very good at guessing people’s ages either. For instance, she thinks that the man sitting opposite her on the train has been retired for a while, but he’s actually only just past sixty. Some men’s bodies just have a tendency to punish their custodian for sinful living with all the afflictions of age in one go. The checkered shirt strains to cover the stomach, breathing comes in heavy gasps through the nostrils. He’s wearing a brown hat, the hair beneath it has grown thin and his beard has turned gray, the features of his face are soft from too much drink and too little compromise. Pain in his joints forces him to walk with some sort of support, so he takes an umbrella with him regardless of the weather, because he sure as hell isn’t old enough for a cane. But his gaze is steady and his mind still sharp, he’s good at his job, possibly even better now that he looks so wretched. That makes it easier for people to underestimate him and he knows how to exploit that.
They make small talk for the whole of the journey, so casually that Maya never realizes how good at it the man is. One little innocent question leads to another, and soon she’s told him a lot about herself and he’s said very little about himself.
When she gets up to go to the bathroom again she makes a gesture toward taking her guitar case with her.
“I can probably manage to look after that,” the man offers.
She smiles awkwardly, as if it’s so dear to her that it isn’t about it being stolen, but because she doesn’t want to be parted from it. But she relents and sets off, and once she’s out of sight the man immediately opens the guitar case. Inside the lid is taped a photograph of the girl with her family: younger brother, mom, dad. It looks fairly recent, although the dad’s sweater looks old, a washed-out, pale green top with the hockey club’s logo across the stomach. “After everything that happened to this family, they still wear clothes with the bear on them,” the man thinks, and closes the case. He reaches for his briefcase and in a small notebook writes down what the girl said a short while ago: “My dad’s the sort of man who never breaks any rules at all.” Maya has changed in the past two years, new hairstyle, more mature body, taller and stronger. The man hardly recognized her at first, even though he’s gone to a lot of trouble, using favors owed by and promised to an old contact at the train company to find out which train she was taking today. The most recent pictures he has seen of her are from when she was fifteen, almost sixteen years old, then she became harder to research. After that year, after the rape, she stopped posting any pictures of herself on the internet.
The man knows his own daughter will say it was over the top to approach Maya this way. Possibly even unethical. But a whole life as a journalist has taught him that if you’re going to uncover a big scandal, you need to tell a good story, otherwise the readers lose interest long before you get to the point, and a good story is like a set of annual accounts: it can be really boring if you don’t know where to start looking. He’s always tried to teach his daughter that, their relationship has been turbulent, but he’s fairly sure he did a good job of teaching her journalism, otherwise she wouldn’t have moved to Hed and become editor in chief of the local paper last year.
So when she called him recently and told him about the stories she’d uncovered about the hockey club, and asked for his help, he asked why she couldn’t use her own reporters. “Please Dad, these aren’t just any two towns, I’ve got reporters whose kids go to school in Beartown, the same school as the kids of the men who could end up in prison if we publish this. How are my reporters supposed to have the guts to write anything then?”
Her dad understood, of course, so now he’s sitting on a train. For his daughter’s sake, but also for his own. He drank away the whole of her childhood, yet she still wanted to do the same job as him. Never underestimate a dad who’s trying to be forgiven, he’s capable of anything.
The pile of papers in his lap are the annual accounts of Beartown Hockey from the past ten years. His daughter’s instincts were right: the whole existence of the club is based upon financial criminality. The graft has been so systemic that it couldn’t possibly have taken place without the knowledge of the committee, the sponsors, and the politicians. They’ve done their best to cover their tracks, the man notes, most journalists with less experience probably wouldn’t have known where to start looking. “No one digs like you, Dad, you lunatic,” his daughter said over the phone, and he could hear her smiling. So he’s been digging. Beneath the annual accounts are contracts and bank transfers and documents, little pieces of the puzzle of a thoroughly corrupt sporting association. Many of the guilty men have obviously been too smart to put their names to anything, but one name keeps recurring, the same signature at the bottom of document after document: Peter Andersson.
In his notebook the man writes: “Maya’s hat is green, with a bear on it. It’s a little too big for her.”
28 Men of God
Matteo won’t remember how he found out that the old woman who owned the pub had died. He doesn’t talk to anyone, but maybe he reads about it somewhere online when the electricity comes back on, maybe he just hears the old couple talking about it upstairs while he lies curled up on the floor of their basement the morning after the storm. He wakes from a dream about his sister and for a few moments his heart feels like frozen hands when you hold them in front of a fire. At first you’re numb, then it hurts a bit because you’re so cold, then comes the real pain: when you start to get warm. It’s only when the numbness of cold and sleep let go and your body knows it’s safe and secure that it lets you feel just how bloody awful things are. Matteo finds a small bottle of moonshine in a basket next to the gun cabinet, possibly hidden there after the old man of the house went hunting, or possibly just hidden from his wife. Matteo drinks some slowly with his eyes closed, his head starts to feel warm and his heart cold again.
Matteo crawls out through the basement window and sneaks home. The house is empty. His parents haven’t gotten back to Beartown with his sister yet, he assumes his mother has had to stop at every single church along the way. His big sister always used to argue with their mom about God, but Matteo never does. He has just as little faith in God as his sister, but he never wanted to hurt his mom, she was too brittle.
The man opposite leans forward and whispers, as if it was a great secret:
“I’m going to visit my daughter, she lives in Hed, but don’t hold that against me.”
Maya laughs out loud.
“God, I don’t miss THAT when I’m away from home, at any rate. The idea that we have to hate Hed and they have to hate us. So bloody ridiculous.”
“Yes, I’ve understood from my daughter that ice hockey influences a lot of things up there…”
She rolls her eyes.
“No, no, not that much. Only everything.”
“To be honest, I think that people in Hed are a little jealous. Things seem to be going better for Beartown than Hed at the moment, don’t they? And not just in hockey. The factory there has expanded and taken more people on, I read. And businesses are moving there rather than moving away. There aren’t many towns of that size that can make that boast.”
Maya nods in agreement, even though it’s so unusual to hear someone talk about her hometown like that, as a place that’s doing well. “Things turn quickly in hockey,” her dad used to say to her when anything went badly for her when she was little, “things can turn quickly in life as well, you just have to keep moving forward!”
“People in Beartown are industrious, they work hard!” she finds herself telling the man opposite, and is surprised at how proud she sounds.
The man notes that her accent is getting broader. He glances out at the forest that’s growing denser around the windows until it feels like they’re traveling through a tunnel.
“Are you going home because of the storm? My daughter says it was pretty terrible.”
“No… well, yes, in a way. I’m going home for a funeral.”
“My condolences. Someone close?”
The whole of the year she turned sixteen has time to rattle through Maya before she replies. How her dad took her to the police station, how she told them everything and how he was almost fired from Beartown Hockey when Kevin couldn’t play in the most important game of the year because of her. How there was a meeting where all the club’s members had to decide about the future, and how it felt like it was Maya’s family against the whole town. The first person who stood up to speak in their defense was Ramona. She had the Pack behind her, Maya knows how much that rankles for her dad, but neither he nor Maya will ever forget what Ramona did: she believed a fifteen-year-old girl when no one else did. Stood up for her when no one else dared. She smiles sadly at the man in the seat opposite her.
“Dad knew her better. They were… really old friends. She owned a pub, and Dad used to have to collect Grandpa there when he’d had too much to drink.”
The man chuckles.
“Ah, that old story. But you never had to collect your dad?”
“My dad doesn’t drink!”
She says it too quickly, always too eager to defend him. The man raises his hands apologetically.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
She sighs.
“No… no, I understand. It’s just that if you knew my dad… he’s like the most regular man in the world. The sort who never breaks any rules at all.”
“Is he as keen on hockey as everyone else in Beartown?”
She bursts into loud laughter.
“No kidding. He used to be general manager there, actually. But now he works in my mom’s company.”
“Ah, so it’s your mom who’s one of the ‘industrious’ people in Beartown you mentioned,” the man teases.
Maya smiles.
“Her company’s actually based in Hed. Dad’s really mad about that.”
“I can imagine. How did he come to stop being general manager?”
“He loves my mom.”
She says it so instinctively that the man loses his thread for a moment. He smiles sadly and looks down at his hands, Maya can’t see a wedding ring. He reaches for his briefcase and takes out a thick bundle of papers and puts them on his lap.
“Then they’re very lucky, both of them,” he says without looking up from the papers.
Maya nods. He says nothing for so long that she wonders if she’s insulted him, so she asks:
“What are you reading?”
“Annual reports.”
“Wow. That sounds… exciting.”
“It can be, if you just know where to look,” he assures her.
She doesn’t believe him. That’s a mistake.
* * *
There’s an old American car parked in the street outside the Bearskin. Peter stands in the doorway looking at it, he doesn’t know who it belongs to, and he has only a passing interest in cars, but he actually happens to know exactly what year’s model this one is. When he got to the NHL he was driven to his first training sessions by a teammate who had bought one exactly like it. It was brand-new back then, but the one parked in the street now is rusty and ramshackle. Peter feels much the same.
Teemu has emerged from the bathroom and is reading all the messages on his phone down in the bar. Much later Peter will think how odd it is that a man like him doesn’t flare up at bad news. The young man does not, in contrast to what people say about him, have a hot temper. It’s more that what he reads on his phone lowers his body temperature, one degree at a time, he grows colder and more silent as Peter grows more uncomfortable. He’s learned to judge which men he should be afraid of, not from their behavior in his vicinity, but his own in theirs.
“I need to go, can we carry on with this tomorrow?” Teemu asks, still staring at his phone.
Peter nods, not knowing what else he ought to say. As they turn the lights out and lock the door, his eyes fall on a photograph near the exit, a little girl standing on the ice with a green sweater and a dark expression, so small that she isn’t wearing gloves the right size.
“She’s going to be better than you,” Teemu says behind him, and Peter is taken aback by the sudden love in his voice.
Teemu actually looks surprised himself, almost embarrassed. They avoid each other’s gaze, clear their throats and step out onto the street. Peter has heard about the girl, of course. She’s six or seven years old, her name is Alicia, and she spends a lot of time with Sune, an old man now, but once the coach of Beartown’s A-team, where she does her best to fire holes in the wall of his house with pucks. She’s the sort of child who has a terrible life, but not terrible enough to get any help, she’s growing up in a home full of empty kitchen cupboards and clenched fists, but never empty or hard enough for the authorities to remove her. So Sune’s yard is her refuge, her playground, and Ramona got Teemu to do the best they could a couple of years ago: some black-clad men went to Alicia’s home one night when she was asleep, marched into the kitchen and put a hockey bag full of equipment on the table, and explained to the adults there that the girl was under the Pack’s protection now. She’s had considerably fewer black eyes from home since then, and considerably more bruises from the ice rink. And one day she’s going to be the best.
Teemu walks toward the car, Peter follows and it strikes him how bad this would have looked not so very long ago, him getting into a car with the worst hooligan in the district. But now? No one cares what Peter does anymore, not even him. The forest wears down all illusions if it’s given long enough, even his. Because he knows all about Teemu’s violence, but he can also remember, just like everyone else, how the police didn’t have time to show up when there was a spate of burglaries in the district a few years ago, but how the same police had the resources to send an armed response unit and helicopter every time there was so much as a rumor that someone was out hunting wolves illegally. It was the Pack that took care of the burglars, Peter doesn’t want to know how, but at least he recognized where Teemu’s authority came from. It isn’t violence that sets him apart from the police, its dependability. Just ask Alicia.
The American car is still parked in the street when they walk past. Teemu’s phone vibrates with more messages but he doesn’t react, they all say the same thing.
“Popular today?” Peter asks.
“Just people talking,” Teemu replies in a toneless voice.
“My kids also send text messages the whole time. They don’t even write, just send a load of those little pictures. And isn’t there anyone who actually calls anymore?”
Teemu laughs out loud.
“Shit, Peter, are you a hundred years old or what?”
“Sometimes it feels like it.”
They get into Teemu’s Saab and drive a little way in silence, and when it gets uncomfortable Teemu breaks it with hockey, of course:
“Do you think he’ll play this year, then?” he asks.
“Who?” Peter wonders.
“Amat! They say he’s been drinking a lot…”
“Who’s said that?”
Teemu shrugs his shoulders.
“You know. People talk.”
They certainly do, just not to Peter. Time waits for no man, boys become men and talents become has-beens and demons can catch up with anyone at all. Perhaps even the town’s fastest ever skater. Sune once said that Peter’s best characteristic as general manager was that he saw “all the kids in the club as his own kids,” which was meant as a compliment, but when Kira said the same thing a few years later it was an accusation. Back in the spring Peter tried to talk to Amat and give him some advice about the NHL draft, but the boy had become a man by then, and the man an old man.
“I don’t know,” he has to confess.
Teemu sighs.
“He was savage last season. Properly savage. Better than Kevin. Better than… you.”
“You never saw me play,” Peter snorts, to hide his embarrassment, and Teemu splutters like a startled pony.
“Ramona showed me all your games on video! Even the NHL games!”
“There weren’t many of those, so that wouldn’t have taken long,” Peter muttered.
“Shit! Did you think I hadn’t seen them? A hundred times! You think I’m just some stupid hooligan, but I love hockey just as much as you, you bastard. That’s the only reason I never punched you in the face when you were general manager and were doing all that crap like getting rid of the standing area in the stands. I knew you loved hockey the way I love hockey. I respected that. Even when you acted like a clown!”
It takes a few breaths for Peter to digest being called a “clown” by a guy who once broke into the visiting team’s bus and set fire to thirty plastic bags full of dog shit. The planning and logistics required to get thirty bags of the stuff? Dear God. If that guy had dedicated his mental abilities to something sensible he could have taken over the world.
“You’re wrong,” Peter eventually says with a smile.
“I’m not wrong!”
“I only played four games. And got injured at the start of the fifth. And I don’t think you’re a stupid hooligan.”
“Sure,” Teemu mutters.
Peter laughs quietly.
“Well, I don’t think you’re only a stupid hooligan, anyway…”
Teemu bursts out laughing so hard that he almost drives off the road, and for a moment Peter understands what everyone sees in him. Why they all follow him. When he laughs you laugh along with him. Teemu casts a quick glance at him and says:
“You should have talked to Amat back in the spring, before the NHL draft. I think he had the wrong people giving him advice. He could have done with someone like you.”
Peter looks down, doesn’t want to admit that he tried because Teemu evidently has such a high opinion of him, and it’s been a long time since that happened.
* * *
If people have to guess, they always think Maya is younger than eighteen, it often irritates her, but she isn’t very good at guessing people’s ages either. For instance, she thinks that the man sitting opposite her on the train has been retired for a while, but he’s actually only just past sixty. Some men’s bodies just have a tendency to punish their custodian for sinful living with all the afflictions of age in one go. The checkered shirt strains to cover the stomach, breathing comes in heavy gasps through the nostrils. He’s wearing a brown hat, the hair beneath it has grown thin and his beard has turned gray, the features of his face are soft from too much drink and too little compromise. Pain in his joints forces him to walk with some sort of support, so he takes an umbrella with him regardless of the weather, because he sure as hell isn’t old enough for a cane. But his gaze is steady and his mind still sharp, he’s good at his job, possibly even better now that he looks so wretched. That makes it easier for people to underestimate him and he knows how to exploit that.
They make small talk for the whole of the journey, so casually that Maya never realizes how good at it the man is. One little innocent question leads to another, and soon she’s told him a lot about herself and he’s said very little about himself.
When she gets up to go to the bathroom again she makes a gesture toward taking her guitar case with her.
“I can probably manage to look after that,” the man offers.
She smiles awkwardly, as if it’s so dear to her that it isn’t about it being stolen, but because she doesn’t want to be parted from it. But she relents and sets off, and once she’s out of sight the man immediately opens the guitar case. Inside the lid is taped a photograph of the girl with her family: younger brother, mom, dad. It looks fairly recent, although the dad’s sweater looks old, a washed-out, pale green top with the hockey club’s logo across the stomach. “After everything that happened to this family, they still wear clothes with the bear on them,” the man thinks, and closes the case. He reaches for his briefcase and in a small notebook writes down what the girl said a short while ago: “My dad’s the sort of man who never breaks any rules at all.” Maya has changed in the past two years, new hairstyle, more mature body, taller and stronger. The man hardly recognized her at first, even though he’s gone to a lot of trouble, using favors owed by and promised to an old contact at the train company to find out which train she was taking today. The most recent pictures he has seen of her are from when she was fifteen, almost sixteen years old, then she became harder to research. After that year, after the rape, she stopped posting any pictures of herself on the internet.
The man knows his own daughter will say it was over the top to approach Maya this way. Possibly even unethical. But a whole life as a journalist has taught him that if you’re going to uncover a big scandal, you need to tell a good story, otherwise the readers lose interest long before you get to the point, and a good story is like a set of annual accounts: it can be really boring if you don’t know where to start looking. He’s always tried to teach his daughter that, their relationship has been turbulent, but he’s fairly sure he did a good job of teaching her journalism, otherwise she wouldn’t have moved to Hed and become editor in chief of the local paper last year.
So when she called him recently and told him about the stories she’d uncovered about the hockey club, and asked for his help, he asked why she couldn’t use her own reporters. “Please Dad, these aren’t just any two towns, I’ve got reporters whose kids go to school in Beartown, the same school as the kids of the men who could end up in prison if we publish this. How are my reporters supposed to have the guts to write anything then?”
Her dad understood, of course, so now he’s sitting on a train. For his daughter’s sake, but also for his own. He drank away the whole of her childhood, yet she still wanted to do the same job as him. Never underestimate a dad who’s trying to be forgiven, he’s capable of anything.
The pile of papers in his lap are the annual accounts of Beartown Hockey from the past ten years. His daughter’s instincts were right: the whole existence of the club is based upon financial criminality. The graft has been so systemic that it couldn’t possibly have taken place without the knowledge of the committee, the sponsors, and the politicians. They’ve done their best to cover their tracks, the man notes, most journalists with less experience probably wouldn’t have known where to start looking. “No one digs like you, Dad, you lunatic,” his daughter said over the phone, and he could hear her smiling. So he’s been digging. Beneath the annual accounts are contracts and bank transfers and documents, little pieces of the puzzle of a thoroughly corrupt sporting association. Many of the guilty men have obviously been too smart to put their names to anything, but one name keeps recurring, the same signature at the bottom of document after document: Peter Andersson.
In his notebook the man writes: “Maya’s hat is green, with a bear on it. It’s a little too big for her.”
28 Men of God
Matteo won’t remember how he found out that the old woman who owned the pub had died. He doesn’t talk to anyone, but maybe he reads about it somewhere online when the electricity comes back on, maybe he just hears the old couple talking about it upstairs while he lies curled up on the floor of their basement the morning after the storm. He wakes from a dream about his sister and for a few moments his heart feels like frozen hands when you hold them in front of a fire. At first you’re numb, then it hurts a bit because you’re so cold, then comes the real pain: when you start to get warm. It’s only when the numbness of cold and sleep let go and your body knows it’s safe and secure that it lets you feel just how bloody awful things are. Matteo finds a small bottle of moonshine in a basket next to the gun cabinet, possibly hidden there after the old man of the house went hunting, or possibly just hidden from his wife. Matteo drinks some slowly with his eyes closed, his head starts to feel warm and his heart cold again.
Matteo crawls out through the basement window and sneaks home. The house is empty. His parents haven’t gotten back to Beartown with his sister yet, he assumes his mother has had to stop at every single church along the way. His big sister always used to argue with their mom about God, but Matteo never does. He has just as little faith in God as his sister, but he never wanted to hurt his mom, she was too brittle.
