Ghost Music Read online

  “Låta jag gå! Låta jag gå! De nöd till mord oss!”

  She went running into the shadows and disappeared. Vanished, as if the darkness were an open door. But it was what happened to Elsa that stunned me the most. She ran headlong into the Elsa who was standing in the hallway, and it was like watching somebody run headlong into a mirror. The two Elsas shattered into a thousand glittering fragments of light, and then they were gone.

  I stayed where I was for a few seconds. I could actually hear my heart beating. Then I slowly hunkered down and ran my fingertips across the rug to feel for any broken pieces of glass. Nothing at all. The two Elsas may have looked like mirror images, but they had been nothing more than mirages. No glass, no silver backing. Only reflections.

  I picked up the bronze statuette that had bounced across the floor, and replaced it on its stand. It was a slender woman in a flowing robe, with one breast bare, carrying a spear.

  At that moment Kate came up to me. Her face was very serious. She reached up and adjusted the statuette to straighten it. “Freya,” she said. “Goddess of Love and Beauty. They named Friday after her.”

  “What’s happening, Kate?” I asked her. I thought that my voice sounded oddly muffled. “Is this a dream? It’s not a dream, is it?”

  Kate took hold of my hand. “You should come back to bed.”

  “What the hell happened here, Kate? I saw two Elsas . . . I saw Felicia disappear! She went straight into those shadows and she was gone. I’m not asleep, Kate! I’m not dreaming any of this—this is real!”

  “Come back to bed, Gideon, please.”

  The Westerlunds’ bedroom door suddenly opened and Axel appeared in the corridor, wearing a black silk Japanese-style bathrobe. He tugged the belt tighter as he approached us. His calves were white and hairy, but very muscular, like a cyclist’s.

  “I heard noise! Is everything all right? What are you doing out here?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but it was the girls.”

  “The girls?” He looked around him in bewilderment.

  “They were running along the corridor. They were frightened of something but I couldn’t understand what they were saying.”

  “Running?”

  “Yes . . . both of them. They knocked over this statue.”

  Axel shook his head. “No, Gideon. I think you will find that the girls are both asleep.”

  Tilda came out, wearing pale green pajamas. “Axel? Is anything wrong?”

  “Gideon must have had a nightmare,” said Axel.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, “but I saw what I saw. And Kate saw it, too.”

  “Well . . .” said Kate. “I have to admit that I really didn’t see anything.”

  “Oh, come on, Kate. Even if you didn’t see them, you heard them.”

  “I did hear something, yes. But I’m not really sure what it was.”

  “Kate—”

  “Let us clear up this matter, shall we?” said Axel. He went along the corridor to Elsa’s bedroom and quietly opened the door. He looked inside, and then he beckoned. I hesitated, and then I followed him and looked inside, too. Elsa was in bed, fast asleep, wearing a cotton nightcap with pink ribbons around it.

  Axel closed the door and went along to Felicia’s room.

  “Okay,” I said. “That really won’t be necessary. It seems like I’ve made some kind of mistake, that’s all.”

  Tilda laid a gentle hand on my shoulder and said, “Du drömde, Gideon . . . you were dreaming.”

  “En mardröm,” added Axel, quite angrily. I guessed mardröm meant “nightmare.”

  * * *

  We all returned to our bedrooms. Kate leaned over me and kissed me on the ear and said, “Are you okay?”

  “No, I’m not. I just saw something totally impossible. I don’t know why you didn’t.”

  “I did.”

  “You did? You saw what I saw—Elsa and Felicia, running along the corridor? Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Because I didn’t want to upset Axel and Tilda for no reason. For them, it didn’t happen. Not in the way we saw it, anyhow.”

  “Now I’m really baffled.”

  “I know. But you’re very tired. Let’s talk about it in the morning.”

  I dragged the comforter up to my neck. The central heating was on, but the air in the bedroom still felt chilly. If it hadn’t been so dark, I was sure that I could have seen my breath smoking.

  “These old apartments,” said Kate. “They have so many memories in them. So much resonance.”

  “So I’m not going bananas? I feel like I’m going bananas.”

  She snuggled up very close to me. “Of course not. And anyhow, what if you are? I like bananas. Especially yours.”

  I lay in the darkness for a while, stroking the nape of her neck. “Do you know much Swedish?” I asked her.

  “Only a little. Why?”

  “Do you know what drunkna means?”

  “Yes. It means ‘drown’ or ‘drowning.’ Why? Where did you hear that?”

  “Elsa said it, out in the corridor.”

  Kate kissed me again. “You really need to get some sleep. Do you want me to sing you a lullaby? I know a lovely one, called ‘The Pointing Tree.’”

  “Don’t make fun of me, Kate,” I told her. “My head’s going round like a goddamned Mixmaster.” But she was right. I was totally bushed. I closed my eyes and fell asleep almost at once. I didn’t dream, even if I had been dreaming before. Or—if I did have any dreams—I don’t remember them.

  The next thing I knew, Kate was dragging the drapes open, and the sun was sparkling over the harbor, so that the water looked like shattered glass.

  Fourteen

  Axel and Tilda had already left for work by the time I had showered and dressed. It was the Friday before Alla Helgons Dag, so the girls had a day off school, and they had gone out shopping with some of their friends. Kate and I had breakfast at the kitchen table, cold meats and St. Olof cheese and slices of chilled melon. We tried watching television while we ate, but SVT doesn’t have a whole lot to recommend it, unless you have a keen interest in pine forestry in Lapland or how to make a hat stand out of elk antlers.

  “Do you feel better now?” Kate asked me.

  I poured myself some more black coffee. “I still can’t work out what happened last night.”

  “Like I said, darling, you should wait and see.” Darling, she called me, as if we were married.

  “Wait to see what? You’re being so darned mysterious.”

  “Don’t you like mysterious women?”

  “Of course I like mysterious women. It’s mysterious children that worry me. Children who can appear in two places at once.”

  Kate smiled, but didn’t say anything more. Her floral cotton robe was open, and I could see her bare right breast, like the statuette of Freya in the corridor. I had never known a woman so alluring—nor a woman who had inspired me so much. She had made me feel really strong, for the first time in my life, as if there was nothing that I couldn’t do. The thought of her going back to New York and climbing into bed with Victor made me feel as if my skin were shrinking, like Saran wrap.

  “Today I thought we could go to the Wasa Museum,” she suggested.

  “Oh, yes? What’s a Wasa when it’s at home?”

  “The Wasa was a fabulous Swedish galleon, which sank on its maiden voyage. They brought it up to the surface and restored it. It’s really awesome. You’ll love it.”

  “I don’t know. It looks pretty darn chilly out there. Maybe we could just stay in bed.”

  “Oh, come on. We’ll have plenty of time for that later. You can’t come all the way to Stockholm and not see the sights.”

  “I can see all the sights I want to see, just sitting here.”

  Kate took hold of my hand. “You mustn’t be jealous, Gideon.”

  “Why not? Every time I think of you and that husband of yours being together, I work out a new way of offing him. How about I wedge the doo
r shut when he’s taking a shower, and then tip a whole bucketful of fire ants into it? Maybe I should just strangle him with my bare hands. That would be easier.”

  “You wouldn’t do anything like that. It’s not in your nature.”

  “You want to bet?”

  She leaned across the kitchen table and kissed me. Her nipple brushed the back of my hand. I can still feel it now, as if it happened only a few seconds ago.

  * * *

  It was a brilliant morning, sharp as a craft knife. The sky was intensely blue, with only a low bank of white cloud behind the city skyline, like a distant range of snow-covered mountains that can never be reached, no matter how far you travel.

  We took a taxi to Djügarden Park, on the opposite side of the harbor from Axel and Tilda’s apartment. The Wasa Museum was right on the waterfront—a huge boxlike building with a tarnished copper roof and three stylized metal masts to represent the original masts of the galleon when she was fully rigged.

  We shuffled inside, along with a party of chattering Swedish children and a contingent of bewildered Chinese nuns, and there was the galleon herself, lavishly carved and decorated with hundreds of sculptures—lions and cherubs and mermaids and Roman emperors.

  Kate said, “Do you know what I think of, when I look at this ship? I think of Victor. Vain, bombastic, overblown, and full of himself.”

  “Can we forget about Victor?” I asked her. I was trying to read an information board that described how the Wasa had sunk. She had capsized on a calm spring day in 1628, without ever leaving Stockholm harbor, and she had rested on the seabed for over three hundred years before a salvage team had located her, and brought her back up. “I thought this trip was just about you and me and the two of us spending some nonfurtive time together.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re right. Look at these amazing sea monsters! And look at all of these cannons!”

  “Wow,” I said.

  We wandered around the exhibition hall for twenty minutes or so, but when it comes to history, I have to admit that my span of attention is shamefully short. I always agreed with my dad. “History? Why worry about history? History’s over, by definition.”

  We went outside and strolled along the waterfront, where four other historic ships were moored, including Sweden’s first icebreaker, Sankt Erik, and a lightship. The wind was so clean you felt you could have washed your face with it. On the other side of the harbor I could see Skeppsbron, and the Westerlunds’ apartment, with the sun sending us heliograph messages from their living room window.

  “How about some lunch?” asked Kate. “I’m dying for some smoked salmon blinis.”

  “Sure. And then we could have a siesta, yes? Before the Westerlunds get home.”

  We turned around and walked back toward the taxi rank. But it was then that I heard somebody shout out, in heavily accented English, “Here! Here! Get some help! There’s somebody in the water!”

  A small crowd of people had gathered on the jetty where the icebreaker was moored. Two young men were climbing down a wooden ladder, while another bearded man was throwing a red and white life belt into the water.

  “Hey, come on!” I told Kate. “Maybe I can help.”

  Together we hurried along the jetty. I pushed my way to the front of the crowd and looked down into the water. One of the young men had reached the bottom of the ladder, and was stretching out his hand to reach a body that was floating facedown, close to one of the piers.

  The body looked like a young girl, in a dark green sweater and a tan-colored corduroy skirt. Her hair was floating like yellowish seaweed. She was wearing long green socks and only one shoe.

  “Do you need any help?” I shouted. “I’m a good swimmer if you need me!”

  But the young man had managed to catch hold of the girl’s right ankle, and was pulling her in. In the distance, I could already hear the whip-whip-whip of an ambulance siren.

  Together, the two young men lifted the girl out of the water and heaved her up the ladder. Her head lolled back and her arms swung loosely.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” said Kate, with her hand held over her mouth.

  An old man standing next to her turned and nodded. The water in Stockholm harbor was so cold that nobody could survive in it for very long, especially a young girl weighed down by a heavy-knit sweater and a corduroy skirt.

  They brought the girl up to the top of the ladder and laid her on the jetty. Her face was gray and her hair half covered it like wet string. A gray-haired woman knelt down beside her and put her into the recovery position, and started to give her CPR. But although dirty water came gushing out of the young girl’s mouth and nose, she showed no signs of life at all.

  An elderly woman beside me crossed herself and said, “Gud vila henne ung själ,” and I didn’t need a translator to tell me what that meant. God rest her young soul.

  An ambulance arrived in the museum parking lot and two orange-jacketed paramedics came running out to the jetty. Then two police cars turned up, and four officers climbed out. They ushered all of us onlookers away from the waterfront and back toward the museum gardens. Everybody was subdued. The only sound was the crunch of our feet on the shingle pathway, and the keening of seagulls overhead, like lost children looking for their parents.

  “That poor young girl,” said Kate. “I wonder how she fell into the water.”

  “Maybe she jumped in. Sweden has a pretty high suicide rate, doesn’t it?”

  Kate put her arm around my waist and held me very tight. “I don’t feel like lunch anymore. Let’s just go back to the Westerlunds’, shall we?”

  “Sure.”

  As we made our way around the back of the museum, however, I caught sight of a man and a young girl, hurrying along one of the pathways toward the exit gate. What caught my attention was the way that the man was pulling the young girl along, in repeated jerks, as if she was dragging her feet. They were too far away for me to be able to hear him clearly, but every now and then he shouted something that sounded like “skinder!” and gave her another jerk.

  I stopped and shaded my eyes with my hand so that I could see them better. They gave me a really disturbing feeling, those two. Even from such a distance, I could tell that something was badly wrong. If I had thought that it was possible, I would have said that the man was Victor’s pal Jack, the falcon-nosed guy in black that I had met in Victor’s apartment on Saturday morning, or at least Jack’s twin brother. But the young girl unsettled me even more. I couldn’t see her face at first, because she kept tossing her head from side to side. But as the man pulled her around the corner of the museum building, she twisted her head around and stared in my direction, as if she were making a last appeal for someone to help her break free.

  And I swear to God it was Felicia.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Do you see who that was?”

  “Who?”

  “That young girl!” I started to run along the path after her.

  “Gideon!” called Kate. “Gideon, what is it?”

  “Felicia! That guy has gotten hold of Felicia!”

  Several tourists turned around and stared at me as I pelted along the path. I almost collided with three of the Chinese nuns, and had to double-skip over the flower bed to avoid them.

  I reached the corner of the museum, panting, but there was no sign of Felicia anywhere, nor the man who had looked like Jack. Only a coachload of Japanese tourists, gathered around their bus, and a line of schoolchildren in red and blue windbreakers, following a teacher who was holding up a red and blue umbrella.

  I jogged toward the parking lot to see if the man had managed to pull the young girl into a doorway, or if they had been obscured from view by one of the signs saying wasamuseet. But they had completely vanished, as if they had never existed.

  “Gideon! Gideon—wait up!” Kate caught up with me and took hold of my hand. “You’re sure you didn’t make a mistake?”

  “No way. I’m sure it was Felicia. She was even wearing the sam
e coat that Felicia was wearing when she came home yesterday. And the guy who was pulling her along—he looked so much like Victor’s friend Jack.”

  “Jack? You’re serious?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Kate! I saw them!”

  “Okay, okay, you saw them,” said Kate, trying to calm me down. She looked around the parking lot. “So where are they?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the guy had a getaway car waiting for him. Maybe they went back inside the museum.”

  She squeezed my hand tightly. “It’s all right, Gideon. I believe you.”

  I looked at her. “Is this the same kind of thing that happened last night? I mean, is this real, or isn’t it?”

  “If you saw it, my darling, then it is real. Or it was real, once.”

  * * *

  We walked slowly back across the parking lot, and as we did so I kept turning round and around to see if the man and the young girl would reappear from behind a bus, or suddenly drive past us in the back of a taxi.

  “They’re gone,” Kate insisted. “Why don’t we leave it?”

  I heard the deep, mournful hooting of a Viking Line car ferry, heading out to Helsinki. Then, from the waterfront, a small cortège came into view—the two paramedics and two of the police officers, carrying between them a stretcher with the body of the young drowned girl on it, covered in a blue blanket. As they passed, people bowed their heads or took off their hats, and the Chinese nuns all crossed themselves three times over.

  The paramedics reached the ambulance just as Kate and I were passing close to it, and we stopped and waited while they opened the rear doors and lifted the stretcher inside. As they lifted it up, the blanket slid to one side and for the first time I was able to see the young girl’s face clearly, without her wet hair straggled across it.

  I stared at her in disbelief, and then I laid my hand on Kate’s shoulders and said, “Look. Tell me that’s not Elsa.”

  Almost immediately, the ambulance doors were slammed shut, and the ambulance started up.

  “Kate—didn’t you see her? I swear that’s Elsa!”

  “I don’t know, Gideon! I didn’t get a good enough look at her!”

  I approached one of the police officers, a young man with bulging blue eyes and a blond mustache. I pointed to the ambulance and said, very slowly, “Can you stop them from leaving, please? That girl who drowned, I believe I know who she is.”