The Blood Spilt

23

Rebecka Martinsson’s boss M?ns Wenngren was sitting on his office chair, creaking. He hadn’t noticed it before, but it made a really irritating grating noise when you raised or lowered it. He thought about Rebecka Martinsson. Then he stopped thinking about her.
He actually had loads to do. Calls to make, e-mails to answer. Customers and clients to entertain. His junior associates had begun placing papers and yellow Post-it notes on his chair so that he’d see them. But it was only an hour until lunch, so he might as well put everything off for a bit longer.
He always said he was a restless soul. He could almost hear his ex-wife Madelene saying: “Well, it sounds better than moody, unfaithful and running away from yourself.” But restless was true as well. A sense of unease had already got its claws into him in the cradle. His mother used to tell people how he’d screamed all night for the first year. “He calmed down a bit when he learned to walk. For a while.”
His brother, three years older than M?ns, never tired of telling the story of how they’d sold Christmas trees one year. One of the family’s tenants had offered M?ns and his brother a part-time job selling the trees. They were only kids, M?ns had only just started school. But he could already count and add up, his brother said. Especially when it came to money.
And so they’d sold trees. Two little lads, seven and ten. “And M?ns earned loads more money than the rest of us,” his brother would say. “We just couldn’t understand it, he was only getting four kronor per tree in commission, the same as everybody else. But while the rest of us were just standing around shivering and waiting for five o’clock to come, M?ns was running about chatting to everybody as they looked at the trees. And if somebody thought a tree was too tall, he offered to chop the top off then and there. Nobody could resist, a nipper with a saw nearly as tall as he was. And this is the best bit: he took the top part that he’d sawed off, chopped off the branches and bound them together into big bundles, then sold them for five kronor apiece! And those five kronor went straight into his own pocket. The tenant—what the hell was his name, was it M?rtensson—was absolutely livid. But what could he do?”
His brother would pause at this point in the story and raise his eyebrows in a gesture that said all there was to say about the tenant’s powerlessness in the face of the landowner’s crafty son. “A businessman,” he would conclude, “always a businessman.”
Even when he was middle-aged, M?ns was still defending himself against the label. “The law isn’t the same thing as business,” he said.
“Of course it bloody is,” his brother used to reply. “Of course it is.”
His brother had spent his early adult life abroad doing God knows what, and in the end he’d come back to Sweden, done a degree in social sciences, and was now in charge of the benefits office in Kalmar.
Anyway, M?ns had gradually stopped defending himself. And why did you always have to apologize for success?
“That’s right,” he’d reply nowadays, “business and money in the bank.” And then he’d tell him about the latest car he’d bought, or some smart deal on the stock market, or just about his new cell phone.
M?ns could read all about his brother’s hatred in his sister-in-law’s eyes.
M?ns just didn’t get it. His brother had kept his marriage together. The children came to visit.
No, he thought, getting up from the creaky chair, I’m going to do it now.
* * *

Maria Taube chirruped a “bye then” into the telephone and hung up. Bloody clients, ringing up and churning out questions that were so vague and general it was impossible to answer them. It took half an hour just to try and work out what they wanted.
There was a knock on her door, and before she had time to answer M?ns appeared.
Didn’t you learn anything at Lundsberg? she thought crossly. Like waiting for “come in,” for example?
As if he’d read the thought behind her smile, he said:
“Have you got a minute?”
When did anybody last say no to that question? thought Maria, waving at the chair and switching off her incoming calls.
He closed the door behind him. A bad sign. She tried desperately to think of something she’d overlooked or forgotten, some client who had a reason to be dissatisfied. She couldn’t come up with anything. That was the worst thing about this job. She could cope with the stress and the hierarchy and the overtime, but there was that black abyss that sometimes opened up right beneath your feet. Like the mistake Rebecka had made. So damned easy, to lose a few million.
M?ns sat down and looked around, his fingers beating a tattoo on his thigh.
“Nice view,” he said with a grin.
Outside the window loomed the grubby brown facade of the building next door. Maria laughed politely, but didn’t speak.
Come on, out with it, she thought.
“How’s…”
M?ns finished off the question with a vague gesture in the direction of the piles of paper on her desk.
“Fine,” she replied, and stopped herself from launching into details of something she was working on.
He doesn’t want to know, she told herself.
“So… have you heard anything from Rebecka?”
Maria Taube’s shoulders dropped a centimeter.
“Yes.”
“I heard from Torsten that she was staying up there for a bit.”
“Yes.”
“What’s she doing?”
Maria hesitated.
“I don’t really know.”
“Don’t be so bloody difficult, Taube. I know it was your idea for her to go up there. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think it was such a brilliant idea. And now I want to know how she’s doing.”
He paused.
“She does work here after all,” he said in the end.
“You ask her then,” said Maria.
“It’s not that easy. The last time I tried she made a hell of a scene, if you remember.”
Maria thought about Rebecka, rowing away from the firm’s party. She was crazy.
“I can’t talk to you about Rebecka, you know that. She’d be bloody livid.”
“And what about me?” asked M?ns.
Maria Taube smiled sweetly.
“You’re always bloody livid anyway,” she said.
M?ns grinned, perked up by the insult.
“I remember when you started working for me,” he said. “Nice and sweet. Did as you were told.”
“I know,” she said. “What this place does to people…”